Cultural Geography

EMBODYING SOCIAL GEOGRAPHY 59

and eldercare have replaced traditional kinship,

familial and community ties. Commodification

of conventional household tasks, as for example

cleaning, shopping, dog walking, gardening and

plant watering, through small and franchised

firms and accessible internet access have

changed the running of households. Together

these shifts have opened up leisure time as never

before, permitting many people to pursue ideal-

ized forms of the body, or ‘the body beautiful,’

through exercise regimes, fitness machines, diets

and surgery.

Links between the materiality of bodies and

their cultural representations through varied

media are nowhere clearer than in reports about

the emergence of new diseases and ‘scientific

breakthroughs’ in biomedicine. Extensive cover-

age in popular media about deadly viruses over

which ‘science’ has little (as in HIV) or no (as in

the Ebola virus) control heightens apprehension

over ways in which bodies can, do and should

relate. Intense publicity about diseases and

syndromes affecting immune, neurological and

endocrine systems, as for example Creuzfeldt-

Jacob disease, incite disquiet among those who

try to control outbreaks, such as public health

officials or international customs agencies, dis-

dain of those people developing the disease or

syndrome, and dread among the rest who can

only hope they do not have to deal directly with

such horrific bodily conditions. The social impli-

cations of the complete mapping of the human

genome, narrowing the gap between science

fiction and reality, have yet to be fully drawn out,

but certainly such a mapping forces a reconsider-

ation of the relationship between capital and

bodies. Take for instance the full-scale purchase

of Iceland’s gene pool by DeCODE Genetics, or

the recent relaxation of human cloning laws in

Britain for medical research: both stretch the

notion of what denotes individual and collective

ownership of bodies and body parts and what

aspects of the body are consumable.

In conjunction with social and economic

change and the increased presence of biomedi-

cine for public consumption, shifts in intellectual

movements have been a factor in boosting the

appeal of investigating body as a site for creat-

ing, building and expressing theory. The post-

modern challenge to take a sceptical view of the

grand narratives of modernist thinking spawned

numerous critiques of objectivity, identity, truth

and reason. The notion that the body is separate

from the mind has permeated western thinking

about the body since René Descartes published

his famous utterance, cogito, ergo sum. Chal-

lenges to this particular dualism of valuing mind

over body, as well as other manifestations of

binary thinking such as binaries set up to value

males over females, masculinity over femininity,

and culture over nature, are now well ensconced

in academic literature on the body. Theories of

the body that emphasize the multiplicity of bodily

shapes, functions, inscriptions and meanings fit

quite nicely with postmodernist claims of the

world as partial, fragmented, contingent, unstable

and diverse, while critically challenging sub-

merged voices located within bodily being, expe-

rience and activity.

Within this milieu of ever more complex rela-

tionships among bodies and social change,

biomedicine and intellectual movements, we can

place the surfacing and substantiation of body and

embodiment in social geography. In this chapter,

we chart the course of body and embodiment in

geography, not chronologically, but through a

combination of intellectual passages and spatial-

ized embodiments, or particular ‘types’of bodies

depicted in the literature. In what follows, we first

differentiate between theorizing body and pursu-

ing embodiment as two key problematics framing

the positioning of the body within social and

cultural geography. We then delineate three intel-

lectual passages, or enactments, of social and

cultural geographical concerns involving power,

identity and difference by considering bodies and

spaces. By sorting through geographical works

about body and embodiment, we show what geo-

graphers have been interested in pursuing, mostly

in the 1990s. Next we provide a critical take on

embodiment and demonstrate how we have taken

up some of these concerns in our own work on

women with chronic illness. We close with com-

ments on the contributions and contestations

geographers have been able to make about social

geography because of their engagement with the

body as well as what they could possibly say in

the future.

SOCIAL GEOGRAPHIES OF

BODIES AND EMBODYING

SOCIAL GEOGRAPHY

Not all geographical studies of the body are

studies about embodiment, nor do they necessarily

invoke embodiment as an analytical category. In

order to understand how the body expressly mani-

fests in geography, we need to distinguish

between a social geography of the body and an

embodied social geography, paralleling concerns

in sociology about the disembodied nature of

knowledge that is not grounded in lived experi-

ence (Williams and Bendelow, 1998). Social

geographies of bodies can, among other things,

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