Cultural Geography

constellation of bodily sensations, known as

symptoms. From this biomedical inscription, the

worker with the ‘ill body’ regains some sense of

limits on her ‘out of control’ body, interpolates

the cultural representations of illness and disease

with her bodily experiences, resulting in a shift

in bodily activities, including treatment, care and

identity, and begins thinking of herself as ‘chroni-

callyill’. At the same time, the diagnosis legiti-

mates the worker’s bodily sensations to the

employer so that the employer can plan for and

take action either with the worker, the workplace

or both. In negotiating these inscriptions, both

the worker and the employer (re)constitute

working relationships in the workplace and the

workplace itself.

In formulating our ideas about embodying

social geography, we focus on works that assist

in supporting our own notion of embodiment that

contribute to a nuanced understanding of how

bodies are complicit in creating an embodied

knowledge upon which an embodied social

geography can be based. The body isclearly

central in thinking about embodiment, and for us

to think of either without the other dissolves

those textured connections replete with histories

of articulations of identities and power within

their spatialized contexts. However, as we will

discuss throughout the chapter, the distinction

between theorizing body and working with

embodied knowledge needs to be held in tension

because, with this tension, we can identify ways

to understand the body innovatively that chal-

lenge conventional, static bodily conceptions and

poke at the confining borders of binary thinking.

Furthermore, thinking through an embodied

social geography such as the one we propose

includes a concern with political engagement as

integral to, not separate from, methodological,

epistemological and theoretical work.

BODIES IN THE SOCIAL SCIENCES

AND GEOGRAPHY

As with other social sciences, the upsurge of

interest in the body and issues of embodiment in

geography have focused on various lines of

inquiry. A move from modernist to post-

modernist concerns has presented the body as a

central theoretical problematic. Leading post-

modern thinkers used the body distinctively as a

site for extrapolating specific points about

human experience, subjectivity and the relations

of power. Michel Foucault’s work on the body

concentrates on the discipline of the body within

the context of the way power operates in society,

as for example, through prisons, medical clinics

and normative expressions of sexuality (Foucault,

1973; 1977; 1978). Gilles Deleuze and Félix

Guattari (1983; 1987) transfixed theorists across

disciplines with their introduction of ‘the body

without organs’ and reacquainted psychoanalysts

with new, revolutionary ideas about the link

between the body and society. Although they

are wide-ranging in their scope of influence on

body and space, engagement with these

specific works by geographers seems to be

somewhat limited (though not exhaustive, some

examples include Doel, 1995; Driver, 1985;

1993; Environment and Planning D: Society and

Space, 1996; Matless, 1991; Philo, 1992; 2000).

These works, too, tend to focus on how the

representations of mechanisms and technologies

define bodies and on whether there are possibili-

ties of providing a framework for more critical

work about the body in human geography.

However, it is within feminism and queer

studies that the methodological, epistemological

and theoretical project of embodiment has been

the most influential, and probably the most

effective, in challenging binary thinking through

the body, contributing to theory about the body,

and demonstrating the materiality of discourse

on the body – both within and outside geography.

Philosophers such as Jana Sawicki, Elspeth

Probyn and Elizabeth Grosz are prominent

examples of how feminists and queer theorists

have pushed the bounds of binary thinking

beyond static dichotomies. Sawicki (1991)

decentres power and shows how ideas attached

to the binary of masculinity and femininity are

not useful for feminist politics. She argues that

exaltation of the lesser valued dyad prevents the

possibility of new configurations of power and

knowledge, particularly as they relate to repro-

ductive technologies. Probyn (1993) offers an

innovative destabilization of the fragile nature of

the social constructions of sex and gender. Her

analysis promotes a more complex understand-

ing of how gender itself is precariously posi-

tioned within multiple sets of power relations

based on sex, race and sexuality and how then

these intersect with each other to produce identi-

ties and subjectivities, especially with reference

to the cultural forms these identities and subjec-

tivities take. Grosz (1994; 1995) entwines insta-

bility of identity with the unpredictability of

bodily functions and activities in her call for a

more material and less deterministic framework

for a feminist politics. Her work undertakes to

delink stable binary pairs, such as discourse and

materiality, culture and nature, and presence and

absence, and resituate them so that norms, rules

and expectations relating to each are redefined as

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