THE SOCIAL BRAIN AND CORPOREAL POLITICS 9normalizing lens. They see the human body in the first instance as highly
diverse, with regard to how it is lived, experienced, represented, managed,
and produced. For example, feminists address how bodies are imbricated in
intersectional relations of power, including race, sex/gender, sexuality, and
class; sociologists of the body likewise examine how cultures make sense of,
inscribe, manage, or inhabit bodies; disability scholars challenge the ablest
assumptions about the body in culture, philosophy, and medicine. On the
whole, these literatures understand the “body” as multiple; there is not a
body as such, but rather bodies, which are historically situated, socially
stratified, and differentially experienced.
Accounting for this multiplicity has, until recently, depended on a ten-
dency to divide the material body from the social one. Whereas the mate-
rial body has been treated as the purview of the biological sciences, to be
studied empirically, the social body often has been explored through the
analysis of texts and practices that define, manage, discipline, or repre-
sent bodies and imbue them with value. Whereas naturalistic paradigms
have historically treated the biological body as providing a presocial basis
for “the superstructures of the self and society” (Shilling 2003, 37), and
as responsible for determining the capabilities and constraints of human
subjects, in social paradigms the body has been seen not as structuring, but
structured. For example, scholars influenced by poststructuralism argue
that discourses animate the body, allowing it to become meaningful in and
through its discipline or regulation, or to materialize through its repeated
iteration of social norms.^14 This focus on representation, even when it in-
volves the physical body, can have the effect of eliding the material and
biological dimensions of embodiment.
The case for greater physical realism is now being widely articulated. For
example, feminists writing about illness, pain, and cognitive decline argue
for dealing more directly with physical bodies and processes.^15 Feminists
and queer writings on phenomenology and perception, public feelings,
and affect describe how physical bodies are not just marked by, but also
materially participate in, gendered, sexualized, and racialized relations of
p ower.^16 Sociologists following Bourdieu (1984) insist that class and other
differences are not reproduced symbolically but through physical practices
and embodied cognition (Lizardo 2007; Wacquant 2015). Some disability
and transgender scholars argue that purely social or discursive models of