Only recently has ‘the body’ come to figure as a specific field within sociology (see Turner, 1984), but it crystallized many of the difficulties sociologists of gender had long grappled with in trying to understand women’s bodies
as something other than a problem to be overcome. First, there has been dissatisfaction with what some feminists have described as the ‘masculiniza — tion of thought’ entailed within the Enlightenment project in the West (Bordo, 1987). This has included dualistic conceptualizations of bodies originating from Rene Descartes’ view of the self as a thinking self (I think therefore I am). Women have been thought problematically close to nature, while men were associated with cultured reason (Bordo, 1987; Lloyd, 1984; Riley, 1988: 20-1). Secondly there have been politically motivated attempts to better account for the social processes of power which define certain bodies (especially white men’s) as ‘normal’ and others, such as women’s, as ‘abnormal’.Thirdly, the sociology of the body responded to recent social changes in which bodily appearance has become increasingly important (Blaikie et al., 2003). In addition, there has been a questioning of scientific and medical models of bodies that have been dominant since the eighteenth century. The ‘two-sex model’ of sexual difference (see Chapter 2) that emerged as part of the new Enlightenment worldview meant that women were totally defined by their bodies in a way they had not been in the past (Laqueur, 1990). The new biomedical models saw bodies as machines that are a collection of parts and doctors are like mechanics, tinkering around and repairing the faulty bits (Freund and Mcguire, 1999). Although this model of bodies may often be useful, such as when I break my leg and want it treated, it may not be such a useful way of diagnosing illnesses or understanding and treating more complex ailments such as chronic fatigue or cancer (Saks, 2001; Sointu, 2006). However, alternative therapies and remedies can also enforce the regulation of gendered bodies, which makes that sphere less challenging to consumerism and medicaliza — tion than it might initially appear (Sharma, 1996). The difficulty with all these ways of thinking about bodies is that women’s bodies have been understood as deviant and problematic. Women have been thought unable to transcend their bodies in order to achieve ‘proper’ humanity. It is this ‘problem’ of woman’s immanence that Simone de Beauvoir (1988/1949) struggles with in The Second Sex. Whether the body is necessarily a ‘problem’ for women has been rethought in the work of later feminists, who have challenged these historical associations of women with the body. I focus on the development of various ways of understanding bodies as socially constructed, all of which can be primarily defined as refutations of essen — tialism. Therefore I begin by explaining essentialism.