Cultural Geography

complexities arise out of empirical issues, such

as understanding the body in the context of

labour, and theoretical ones, such as explaining

how difference comes to be constituted through

specific social practices. As a way to introduce

some of the complexities geographers deal with,

we now look at two specific ‘bodies’ that assist

in showing how the intellectual passages show

up in ‘body work’. Like our previous categoriza-

tion, we offer these two types of ‘bodies’ heuris-

tically, as a way to sort the works about the body

in geography, and refuse to claim that they or the

works within them are exhaustive of the ‘body

work’ in geography.

Economic bodies

Given long-standing interests in social relations

of labour, it comes as no surprise that geograp-

hers are exploring economic bodies. It is, how-

ever, unexpected that this bodily interest was

relatively late in coming into print, waiting until

the late 1990s to appear. In what can be seen as a

recovery of the body in classical analysis, David

Harvey (1998) argues that the body is at once a

site of political-economic contestation and of the

very forces that construct it. Bodily practices that

arise out of engaged labour (which sometimes

create unhealthy bodies contradicting capital’s

needs for healthy bodies) and the circulation of

variable capital are a means to transform relations

of production and to create an emancipatory

politics. Although cast as sensual, the body

remains an entity unto itself, without specifying

how the body is constituted through labour.

In a sympathetic critique, Felicity Callard

(1998) situates her arguments at the juncture of

Marxist and queer theory and suggests rethinking

the connections between the labouring body and

the corporeal configurations that give rise to

particular meaningsof the body. This refocus on

the meaning andmateriality of bodies shows how

analysts can move through dichotomies organi-

zing our thinking about labouring bodies. Deborah

Leslie and David Butz (1998) problematize

injured bodies by linking the spatial organization

of a specific cybernetic labour process with a

critique of neoliberal economic discourse. They

argue that restructuring occurs at multiple

geographical scales, including the body, setting

up bodies, made vulnerable through an imposi-

tion of an unfamiliar set of material and discur-

sive practices on existing bodies, at high risk for

repetitive injuries. These injuries then take on

specific meanings depending on the context within

which the body with the injury appears – on the

assembly line, in union meetings or in non-working

places like ski resorts – thus inscribing the body

with the contradictions of the labour process.

These inscriptions, read off these injured bodies

in ways that seek to discipline, control and

manage their bodies, can be points of departure

for resistance and struggle in the workplace.

Bodies in consumption, both as consumers

and as consumable, bring forward issues involv-

ing measurements against some idealized form

of the body, resistance to hegemonic construc-

tions of identities, and senses of subversion and

conformity to hegemonic ideals of the body.

Examining the body as a consumable good

discursively bleeds into the materiality of the

body and bodily activities. For example, with

regard to body building and consumption, Derek

McCormack (1999) intertwines the notions of

consumer and consumed and explores the ‘fitness’

geographies produced by the fitness manufac-

turer, NordicTrack. He perceptively sorts through

the complex co-configurations of body and

machine in discourses of fitness. Through an

exploration of the meaning and materiality of

body fitness, he muddies the binaries of human/

non-human, male/female and nature/culture.

Exploring the boundaries of bodies and spaces,

Joyce Davidson (2001) also addresses the notions

of consumer and consumed in her study of women

with agoraphobia. She makes the case that ‘going

shopping’, based on sensory stimulation with

colourful displays, background music and scents,

is often too intense for women fearing public con-

sumption places like malls and supermarkets. But

this is not just a matter of sensory overload; rather,

she argues that consuming is based on a recogni-

tion of differentiating one’s own self from the

selves presented as part of the experience of

consumption. Yet experiences of women with

agoraphobia are disconcerting because their

senses of themselves are disparate, fragmented

and unwieldy in specific spaces of consumption,

such as shopping malls, which locate women in a

contradictory subject position as both consumer

and one to be consumed by and for others.

These examples of economic bodies demon-

strate how rooting an analysis in a binary – in

these cases that of discourse and materiality –

assists in unsettling other dichotomous cate-

gories. These types of work build an embodied

geography by interrogating how specific social

and cultural practices constitute subjectivities

through bodily acts and their meanings.

Bodies as the intersection of oppressions

As part of the wider trend in body studies, social

and cultural geographers have engaged the body

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