Cultural Geography

Many studies are located at the nexus of body

politics, knowledge/power in biomedicine and

the instability of categories used in analysis

and description. Disability studies in social and

cultural geography focus on conceptualizing dis-

ability as a social construct, one that moves away

from individualized definitions of ability that lay

blame on the deficiencies of the individual

toward explaining disability in terms of the

social organization of society, place and access

to resources and their allocation (see Gleeson,

1999). Explicit theorizations of the body accom-

panied this increased interest in disability studies

as endeavours to understand difference, identity

and the deployment of power (see, for example,

Butler and Bowlby, 1997; Butler and Parr, 1999;

Chouinard, 1999; Dorn, 1998; Moss and Dyck,

1996). Ruth Butler (1999) illustrates this point in

her examination of the political connections

between sexuality, space and disability. She

points out that lesbian, gay men and bisexual indi-

viduals are marginalized within the disabilities

movement just as disabled people are marginali-

zed within the gay movement. For Butler,

recognition of difference within communities of

oppressed and marginalized persons is important

in effecting political change for any one group.

Spatialized configurations of gendered, ‘raced,’

sexualized and disabled bodies may further the

understanding of the intersection of regulation,

oppression and control of bodies because, in all

these examples, theorizing the body stems from

experiences of embodiedsubjectivities.

CRITICALLY RETEXTURING BODIES

Having worked through various geographical

approaches to theorizing body and embodiment

in different topical areas, it is clear that subdisci-

plinary borders are crossed and recrossed. The

influence of feminism and poststructural thought

in particular bring common theoretical problem-

atics to queries and concerns in subfields of

social and cultural geography, whether they be

about economy, nationhood, sexuality or dis-

ability. As these works show, these crossings can

usefully challenge binary thinking by opening up

categories for analysing embodied subjectivity, a

concern that must be central in understanding the

constitution of social divisions, their intersec-

tions in carving out social experience, and the

ways in which powerful discourses frame both

subject positions and forms of resistance. As we

would expect, the strength of geography’s con-

tribution to theorizing body as well as to embod-

ied knowledge is through attention to the

spatiality of embodiment and its materiality. Pile

and Thrift’s (1995) metaphor of the body as a

‘spatial home’ of the subject emphasizes the

body’s movement in time and across space in

particular configurations of relations and

distributions of power as they coalesce in (and

through the continuous process of creating)

‘place’ (see Massey, 1993).

Places also are encoded with meanings that

signal ‘out of placeness’ (after Cresswell, 1996)

or inclusiveness, which are embodied through,

for example, classed, ‘raced’ and gendered per-

formances which reconstitute, or alternatively

transgress, such place meanings. Transgression

may be contested, as in the use of threat and vio-

lence, or alternatively through self-surveillance

in fear or acceptance of dominant norms. If ‘suc-

cessful’, transgression acts as a transformative

politics adding to the multiplicity of meanings of

a particular place. As McDowell emphasizes,

‘Social, economic and political structures are

crucial in defining and maintaining not only a

particular urban form but also particular versions

of acceptable bodies’ (1999: 66). Engaging

feminism and poststructural thought, especially

queer theory, opens up space for alternative

voices to the heterosexual male, white, able-

bodied, middle-class norm predominant in ‘writ-

ing’ the landscape and social organization of the

greater part of twentieth-century society and, in

association, its scholarship. In geography these

approaches also firmly ground the subject/body

in the concrete spatiality of everyday life. Work

pointing to the fluidity of bodies and identities,

the multiple performances of identity in the

specificities of place, and the conceptualization

of a ‘third space’ through which identities may

be reformulated, provide an intellectual space

from which to challenge binary and ‘fixed’

social categories.

Thinking of the body as simultaneously and

mutually constituted as corporeal and discursive

is crucial to effecting this challenge of unsettling

binaries while expanding the materiality of

spatialities. Despite health geography’s relatively

late takeup of theoretical concerns about body

and embodiment, it is perhaps these nascent

works that can be particularly useful in demon-

strating how the reassertion of the body as

non-essentialist generates space for a body poli-

tics that recognizes the mutability of bodies and

the intersectionality of multiple differences. In

an approach we broadly term a feminist materi-

alist perspective, we, like other social and

cultural geographers, have drawn upon ideas of a

discursively produced body which is constantly

lived through both its materiality and its

representations in particular environments (after

EMBODYING SOCIAL GEOGRAPHY 67

3029-ch02.qxd 03-10-02 11:39 AM Page 67