the social sciences more generally (Butler, 1990;
1993; Crossley, 1995; 1997; Featherstone et al.,
1991; Gatens, 1996; Grosz, 1994; Shilling, 1993;
1997; Turner, 1996; though see Witz, 2000), this
work also signals a significant reorientation of
the scale/s through which ‘the social’ is being
understood and interrogated within social and
cultural geography. Indeed, this bodily ‘social’ is
predominantly represented as located within the
‘scales’ inhabited by individual bodies, notably
homes and neighbourhoods. This is very differ-
ent from definitions of ‘the social’ that privilege
other geographical scales, for instance nation-
states or (western) cities, or indeed from readings
of the body that connect to governance, regula-
tion and citizenship. Just how different can be
seen when we think, for example, about the
various ways in which these scales connect to
materiality. Here, we can posit a key distinction
between the materialities of bodies – which con-
cern the flesh, bodily surfaces and boundaries,
fluids, dirt, matter-out-of-place, pollution and so
on – and the materialities of neighbourhoods or
cities, for instance. For with the latter, matter –
the material – is not just ‘fixed’ in space (which
is an important enough distinction from material-
ities of the body) but is woven together and
understood through various social relations – but
particularly of exchange and use – as resources:
that is, as things, goods, services or commodities
which can be used and/or bought/sold.^7 Conse-
quently, materiality at these scales is more likely
to be thought about and articulated in relation to
bricks and mortar, concrete and steel (housing,
schools, health centres, shops, places of work,
etc.) and is more likely too to be connected to
questions of disadvantage and deprivation, to be
discussed in terms of inequality/ies in access/
provision, life chances and so on.^8 Reconfiguring
the scale of ‘the social’ has important effects in
terms of how materiality is understood, and to
what it relates. In short, it has significant ontologi-
cal implications, which need to be recognized.
A second core component in this social
geography follows on from this. As I have shown
above, this bodily social is one which appears to
be being constructed primarily as pertaining to
and defining of the person and of particular
embodiments, be these transitional, temporary or
permanent states of being. Furthermore, the situa-
tion of this bodily social – its key geographies –
is principally within ‘everyday’ landscapes,
places and institutions. Now this is frequently but
a short step, albeit not a necessary one, from a
social that is understood in terms of embodi-
ments as experienced and lived, that is personally
by individuals. Some of the difficulties with such
a position have been well documented, notably inrelation to the unproblematized relation which
this posits between knowledge and experience,
and the ease with which such a position comes to
represent individuals as (the) victim/s. But what
I find particularly intriguing, and to an extent
depressing, here is the way/s in which individu-
als come to represent and be represented as the
effect of ‘the social’. Rather than addressing the
varied sociality/ies of particular embodiments,
particularly the way/s in which collective mobi-
lization, campaigning and activism are seeking to
challenge social exclusion (Chouinard, 1999),
much of this geographical work still tends to
begin and end with the individual’s experience of
exclusion – a comment which is particularly appo-
site to some of the research on disability (Dyck,
1999; Moss, 1999).
This leads me to a third component of this
social geography: an absence. What is missing
from so much of this work is a sense of the social
which goes beyond the individual (or groups of
individuals who are socially defined); which
hinges its imagining of the social to an under-
standing of society and the conditions of its organi-
zationand reproduction. To expand: when we look
at a great deal of current ‘social’ geographical
literature, the understanding of society which it
appears to operate with is one which is grounded
in relatively imprecisely specified notions of
inclusion/exclusion and marginalization, which
frequently retreat – often imperceptibly – to
little more than analyses of ‘the excluded’ and/or
‘marginalized’. Much of the disability literature
provides a case in point: in concentrating on speci-
fic individuals with particular disabilities, this
work defines itself simultaneously against the
able-bodied and in terms of the excluded and/or
marginalized group. Similarly, much the same
comment was made in respect of earlier work on
sexuality, with its focus on gay, lesbian and bisexual
identities, rather than on the processes, structures
and institutions of heterosexism and homophobia,
and it is also a charge which could be levelled at
some work on children and youth. Conceptually,
what this means is that such research ends up rein-
stating the very oppositions which it seeks to chal-
lenge, and that ‘the excluded’are defined by, and
remain trapped within, their representation as
specific instances of exclusion – a situation which
has been explored theoretically elsewhere in con-
nection with poststructuralist feminist thinking
by Gillian Rose (1993). What concerns me more,
however, in this context is the lack of comment
that the inclusion/exclusion opposition all too
frequently appears to merit within much of this
social geography, and particularly the lack of
reflection on what this might presume about how
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