Cultural Geography

unstable and thus open to the possibility of

change, whether it be with styles of architecture,

libidos or cities.

These types of feminist and queer works, in

addition to feminist contributions in the field of

ethics (see Diprose, 1994; Gatens, 1993;

Shildrick, 1997; Weiss, 1999), suggest that the

body as a site for theory development is indeed

abundant. Such is the case for other social

science disciplines. In sociology, bringing the

body ‘back in’ (signalled by key works such as

Frank, 1989, and Zola, 1991) spawned even

more feminist interest in various bodies: the

surgically altered body (Davis, 1995); the body

under surveillance (Howson, 1998); and the body

of gender difference (Lindeman, 1997). Feminist

anthropologists, too, have explored understand-

ings of gender and the body in terms of scientific

knowledge, binary thinking, health and cultural

activities (see, for example, Aalton, 1997;

Martin, 1992a; 1992b; 1994). As well, feminist

anthropologists are providing embodied alter-

natives to traditional ethnographic fieldwork,

though not necessarily explicitly locating the

work within the body literature (see, for example,

Barillas, 1999; Dossa, 1999; Williams, 1996). In

psychology, outside the predominance of a real-

ist, empirically driven perspective, feminists are

pursuing more contextual explanations of the

body. Negotiating the discursive and material

binary, feminist psychologists and psycho-

analysts interested in queer theory are posing

possible alternatives to conventional counselling

and political action (see, for example, chapters in

Ussher, 1997a, especially Squire, 1997; Stoppard,

1997; and Ussher, 1997b; 1997c).

Geography is much like these other social

science disciplines. Geographers have demon-

strated that bodies have a history and a geography

(Nast and Pile, 1998; Teather, 1999). Questions

of body and embodiment are being pursued by

those working in the critical vein of the disci-

pline – feminists, socialists, Marxists, queer

theorists, psychoanalytic theorists and poststruc-

turalists. Social and cultural geographers have

engaged with the body and embodiment histori-

cally, economically, culturally and in health.

Feminist, poststructural and psychoanalytic work

with the influence of cultural studies have been

central in the deconstruction of a unitary body

(as well as subject, subjectivity and identity; see

Section 5 in this volume), bringing to the fore-

front power, gender and sexuality in analyses of

body and embodiment. The materiality of the

body has been counterposed against the body

as a surface of inscription, as a readable text.

Although there has been less engagement with

classed and racialized bodies, the body in

economic production in Marxist analyses and the

role of ‘whiteness’ in the construction of the

other in postcolonial studies are increasing.

These are the types of works we are interested

in reviewing to show how geographers are

embodying social geography. How have geo-

graphers used geographical concepts, such as

space, place and scale, in constructing under-

standings of body and embodiment? The body as

a scaleof investigation, whether in geopolitics,

urban studies or studies of the natural environ-

ment, has implications for methodology in that

studies of articulations of the body with society

may presuppose particular types of research, as

for example, ethnographic methods for under-

standing everyday life or depth interviews for

bodily inscriptions. How do geographers break

the confines of scale? Or do they need to? A

focus on lived experience through spatiality

grounds investigations of the body in the every-

day, bringing abstract subjects/bodies into the

materiality of life in specific spaces and loca-

tions. Holding theorizing body in tension with an

embodied knowledge poses additional questions

not only in the sense of how these works have

contributed to an embodiedgeographical knowl-

edge, but also in how working with embodied

knowledge contributes to understanding and

explaining how bodies exist in various contexts.

INTELLECTUAL PASSAGES

Emerging through this tension between creating

theory about the body and working from embodied

knowledge are three key intellectual passages,

around which we group our review of work

about the body in social and cultural geography:

examining the body as a site of regulation,

oppression and control; delving into embodied

subjectivity and spatiality; and challenging

binary categories through problematizing the

body. Much like Eleonore Kofman’s (1994)

assertion that research agendas brought forward

in the 1980s remain unfinished, we propose a

similar heuristic device referring to an unfinished

grouping of body works as intellectual passages.

The body as a site of regulation, oppression

and control

Many works in social and cultural geography

draw on the notion that categories like gender,

race, sexuality and disability are not to be taken

for granted, but instead are to be thought of as

constructed through social relations of power, via

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