Men achieved their political power by representing themselves as disem­bodied and casting women as disordered, irrational bodies (Bordo, 1987; Pateman, 1989). However, this denial of the importance of the body remains a privilege available only to powerful men, usually middle and upper class, who conform to particular dominant ideas about how to be a man. […]

Germaine Greer (1970) contests the disembodied liberal notion of the individual and in fact regards it as responsible for dubious ideas about femaleness as ‘naturally’ inferior. Her highly constructionist view of bodies draws on what evidence was available to her thirty-five years ago to make many of the points we covered in Chapter 2. She […]

The language of oppression may seem outdated but second-wave femi­nists presented powerful accounts of some of the ways in which male dominance can constrain and (mis)shape women’s bodies. In Friedan’s (1965) iconic call to arms for feminism, The Feminine Mystique, first published in 1963, she bears testimony to the embodiment of ‘the problem with no […]

Key feminist books published around 1970, by Betty Friedan, Kate Millet, Germaine Greer and Shulamith Firestone contained theorizing about bodies as socially constructed, not naturally given. Eva Figes’ (1978/1970) book Patriarchal Attitudes could also be included in this list, but has little to say about bodies, determinedly focusing on such social factors as constructing gender. […]

Constructionist arguments oppose essentialism by proposing that gender is about conforming to social expectations. Goffman is a pioneer in con­sidering the social construction of the body, especially in his work on stigma (Goffman, 1968), but his contribution to thinking about gen­dered bodies (Goffman, 1979) is sometimes overlooked (see Chapter 2). Goffman’s work shows how distinctions […]

Essentialism is the idea that there are identifiable necessary properties which define objects, for example it supposes that there is some essence (usually with a bodily basis) which is what makes a woman a woman. This might be the potential to bear children, a more caring attitude, or having a female body. Things like a […]

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 […]

Even in the most simple body orientations of men and women as they sit, stand, and walk, one can observe a typical difference in body style and extension. Women are generally not as open with their bodies as men are in their gait and stride. Typically, the masculine stride is longer proportional to a man’s […]

Advantages of the post-structuralist position for thinking about gender are that it allows some consideration of to what extent we have freedom to choose, rather than implying that our lives are determined by our social surroundings. This might be especially beneficial for women, because they have historically been denied agency but have found ways to […]

Queer theories further the disconnection of gender from sex and radically repudiate binary classifications of gender as identity. In queer theory social expectations that cast heterosexuality as the ‘natural’ and ‘normal’ form of sexuality are criticized. These forms of theory emerged from gay politics and therefore the dominance of heterosexuality rather than gender inequalities is […]