Interpreting The Body - Between Meaning and Matter (2023)

INTERPRETIVE
LENSES
IN
SOCIOLOGY
Interpreting
the Body
Between Meaning
and Matter
Edited by
Anne Marie Champagne
and Asia Friedman
Interpretive Lenses in Sociology
Series editors: Thomas DeGloma, Hunter College,
City University of New York, and Julie B. Wiest,
West Chester University of Pennsylvania
The Interpretive Lenses in Sociology series provides a unique forum for

scholars using a wide range of interpretive perspectives to explore their
approaches to uncovering the deep meanings underlying human actions,
events, and experiences.
Forthcoming in the series:

Interpretive Sociology and the Semiotic Imagination
Editors Andrea Cossu and Jorge Fontdevila
Interpreting Contentious Memory

Countermemories and Conflicts over the Past
Editors Thomas DeGloma and Janet L. Jacobs
Interpreting Subcultures
Sense-Making From Insider and Outsider Perspectives
Editor J. Patrick Williams
Out now in the series:

Interpreting Religion
Making Sense of Religious Lives
Editors Erin Johnston and Vikash Singh
Find out more at

bristoluniversitypress.co.uk/interpretive-lenses-in-sociology
International advisory board:
Jeffrey C. Alexander, Yale University, US
Marni A. Brown, Georgia Gwinnett College, US
Giuseppina Cersosimo, University of Salerno, Italy
Lynn S. Chancer, Hunter College, City University of New York, US
Erica Chito-Childs, Hunter College, City University of New York, US
Manase Kudzai Chiweshe, University of Zimbabwe, Zimbabwe
Jean-François Côté, University of Montreal, Canada
Emma Engdahl, University of Gothenburg, Sweden
Veikko Eranti, University of Helsinki, Finland
Emily Fairchild, New College of Florida, US
Gary Alan Fine, Northwestern University, US
Stacey Hannem, Wilfrid Laurier University, Canada
Titus Hjelm, University of Helsinki, Finland
Annemarie Jutel, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand
Carol Kidron, University of Haifa, Israel
Krzysztof T. Konecki, University of Lodz, Poland
Joseph A. Kotarba, Texas State University, US
Donileen Loseke, University of South Florida, US
Eeva Luhtakallio, University of Helsinki, Finland
Lisa McCormick, The University of Edinburgh, Scotland
Neil McLaughlin, McMaster University, Canada
Beth Montemurro, Pennsylvania State University, Abington, US
Kylie Parrotta, California Polytechnic State University, US
Laura Robinson, Santa Clara University, US
Andrea Salvini, University of Pisa, Italy
Susie Scott, University of Sussex, UK
Cristine G. Severo, Federal University of Santa Catarina, Brazil
Xiaoli Tian, University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong
Vilna Bashi Treitler, Northwestern University, US
Hector Vera, National Autonomous University of Mexico, Mexico
Gad Yair, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel
J. Patrick Williams, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
Eviatar Zerubavel, Rutgers University, US
Find out more at

bristoluniversitypress.co.uk/interpretive-lenses-in-sociology
INTERPRETING
THE BODY
Between Meaning and Matter
Edited by
and Asia Friedman
First published in Great Britain in 2023 by
Bristol University Press

University of Bristol
1–9 Old Park Hill
Bristol
BS2 8BB
UK
t: +44 (0)117 374 6645
e: bup-info@bristol.ac.uk
Details of international sales and distribution partners are available at bristoluniversitypress.co.uk
© Bristol University Press 2023
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978-1-5292-1156-6 hardcover

ISBN 978-1-5292-1159-7 ePub
ISBN 978-1-5292-1158-0 ePdf
The right of Anne Marie Champagne and Asia Friedman to be identified as editors of this work has
been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved: no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or
transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or
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however, anyone knows of an oversight, please contact the publisher.
The statements and opinions contained within this publication are solely those of the editors and
contributors and not of the University of Bristol or Bristol University Press. The University of
Bristol and Bristol University Press disclaim responsibility for any injury to persons or property
resulting from any material published in this publication.
Bristol University Press works to counter discrimination on grounds of gender,

race, disability, age and sexuality.
Cover design: blu inc

Front cover image: Abstract Figure by Juana Almaguer, 2021
(www.juanaalmaguer.com)
Bristol University Press use environmentally responsible print partners.
Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY
To our children and students,
who inspire us to interpret the world anew.
Contents
Series Editors’ Preface: Interpretive Lenses in Sociology— ix

On the Multidimensional Foundations of Meaning in Social Life
Notes on Contributors xiv
Preface and Acknowledgments xviii
Introduction: Between Meaning and Matter 1

Anne Marie Champagne and Asia Friedman
1 Toward a Strong Cultural Sociology of the Body 19

and Embodiment
2 Thinking the Molecular 44
Ben Spatz
3 Interpreting Africa’s Seselelãme: Bodily Ways of Knowing 66
in a Globalized World
Kathryn Linn Geurts and Sefakor Komabu-Pomeyie
4 Gender on the Post-Colony: Phenomenology, Race, 88
and the Body in Nervous Conditions
Sweta Rajan-Rankin and Mrinalini Greedharry
5 Reinterpreting Male Bodies and Health in Crisis Times: 109
From “Obesity” to Bigger Matters
Lee F. Monaghan
6 Beauty, Breasts, and Meaning after Mastectomy 133
Piper Sledge
7 “You Are Not the Body”: (Re)Interpreting the Body 155
in and through Integral Yoga
Erin F. Johnston
vii
Interpreting the Body
8 Black Girls’ Bodies and Belonging in the Classroom 178

Brittney Miles
9 Embodied Vulnerability and Sensemaking with Solidarity 202
Activists
Chandra Russo
10 Our Bodies, Our Disciplines, Our Selves 223
Annemarie Jutel
Index 238
viii
Series Editors’ Preface:
Interpretive Lenses in Sociology—
On the Multidimensional
Foundations of Meaning
in Social Life
Sociology is an interpretive endeavor.1 Whatever the approach taken to study
and explain an aspect of social life—qualitative or quantitative, micro or
macro—sociologists work to interpret their data to reveal previously unseen, or
to clarify previously misunderstood, social forces. However, within the broad
field of sociology, and under the purview of its kindred disciplines, there are
many scholars who work to unpack the deep structures and processes that
underlie the meanings of social life. These interpretive scholars focus on the
ways in which social meanings constitute the core structures of self and identity,
the ways that individuals negotiate meanings to define their shared situations,
and the collective meanings that bind people together into communities
while also setting any given group or context apart from others. From this
perspective, meaning underscores social mindsets and personal orientations in
the world, as well as the solidarities and divisions that define the dynamics and
mark the boundaries of our social standpoints and relationships. Furthermore,
such scholars are concerned not only with how the individuals and groups
they study actively make and remake the definitions that are central to their
lives, as well as how those understandings influence their behaviors, but also
how they seek to impact the world with their meaning-making processes. In
this regard, meaning is of paramount significance to both the extraordinary
moments and the routine circumstances of our lives.2
In their efforts to illuminate the deep social foundations of meaning, and
to detail the very real social, political, and moral consequences that stem
from the ways people define and know the world around them, interpretive
scholars explore the semiotic significance of social actions and interactions,
narratives and discourses, experiences and events. In contrast to those who
take a positivist or realist perspective and see the world—or, more precisely,
argue that the world can be known—in a more direct or literal light,3 they
ix
use various approaches and draw on different interpretive traditions to

decipher their cases in order to better understand the deep social, cultural,
and psychic foundations of the phenomena they study. From such interpretive
perspectives, a fundamental part of any social phenomenon is not directly
evident or visible. Rather, the core foundations of meaning underlying the
cases scholars study need to be unpacked, analyzed, and interpreted—and
then rearticulated—to comprehend their deeper essences.4 And they do this
work of interpretation from various angles and perspectives, using different
“lenses.” It is with such interpretive lenses, in sociology and beyond, that
we concern ourselves here. How do the people we study make sense
of the world? How do they cooperate with others to construct shared
understandings, and how do such actors define their situations for various
audiences? Furthermore, how do scholars understand their sense-making
processes and interpret their actions and experiences? How do they get at
the deep social forces, culture structures, and relationships underlying the
topics and themes they study?5 Finally, how do their interpretations allow
scholars to construct new and powerful explanations of social phenomena?
How do they “possess explanatory torque” with regard to various topics
of widespread significance (Reed, 2011, p 11; see also Garland, 2006, pp
437–438)?
This is the perspective from which we organized a unique conference,
The Roots and Branches of Interpretive Sociology: Cultural, Pragmatist, and
Psychosocial Approaches, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in August 2018.
From this endeavor, we learned that many scholars were excited by our
call to bring them to the table to discuss their interpretive lenses with
one another. Many almost intuitively grasped the distinctions we made
among traditions and camps in the field (the cultural, the pragmatist/
interactionist, the psychosocial, and others) that could be gathered under
the umbrella of a broader “interpretive” agenda in sociology. And why not?
We make such distinctions between different camps, with their various
theoretical and methodological traditions, when we teach. This is how
we organize many of our journals, our professional societies and their
sections, and other scholarly institutions. We also often use such categories
to explain our scholarly identities. In line with these distinctions,
qualitative interpretation has developed simultaneously along different
paths and among a field of factional communities, and the proponents of
these different camps make various claims to distinguish their respective
approaches from others.
However, despite the fact that we use such distinctions to delineate our
disciplinary field, they rarely sync neatly with the work scholars actually do
when they interpret the cases, communities, and issues they study. Rather,
in their practices of social research and in their acts of interpretation, scholars
combine and integrate elements of different traditions and programs in
x
various ways that help them to focus on and make sense of their experiences
as scholars. In other words, the process of interpretation comes alive in the
practice of research and, more particularly, in research situations that demand
a range of theoretical and methodological tools to illuminate and articulate
the social foundations of meaning central to the case at hand.6 Thus, over
the course of their work, scholars develop interpretive lenses that help them
find answers to the questions that drive them. While this may not come as
a surprise to many readers, we rarely interrogate or compare the nuances
of these lenses explicitly.
The purpose of this series is to interrogate, explore, and demonstrate the
various interpretive lenses that scholars use when they engage their areas of
interest, their cases, and their research situations. Each volume is centered
on a substantive topic (for example, religion, the body, or contentious
memories) or a particular interpretive-analytic method (for example,
semiotics or narrative analysis). The editors of each volume feature the work
of scholars who approach their central topic using different interpretive
lenses that are particularly relevant to that area of focus. They have asked each
author to explicitly illustrate and reflect on two dimensions of interpretation
in their work, and to explore the connections between them. First, they
asked authors to address how the individuals and communities they study
assign meanings and achieve shared understandings with regard to the core
topic of their volume. In doing so, authors address the social and cultural
forces at play in shaping how people understand their identities, experiences,
and situations, as well as how they frame their accounts, motivations, and
purposes while acting, communicating, and performing in the world.
Second, volume editors asked contributing authors to explicitly reflect
on their interpretive processes and approaches to unpacking the meanings
of the social phenomena they study. Some authors present new material
while others provide a reflexive overview of their research to date, but all
illustrate and discuss the work of interpretation and the central significance
of meaning. Such conscious reflection on our interpretive traditions and
lenses—on how they shape our analytic foci (in terms of what cases we
explore, at what levels of analysis, and with regard to which social actors) and
the ways we find meaning in our cases—can illuminate under-recognized
or unspoken choices we make in our work. Furthermore, it can expose
blind spots and suggest new frameworks for dialogue among scholars. This
reflexive dimension, along with the diversity of lenses featured together in
each volume, is what makes this series unique. In this vein, and to these
ends, we hope the volumes of this series will present arrays of interpretive
lenses that readers can use while working to make sense of their own cases
and to develop new perspectives of their own. In the process, we also
hope to advance the dialogue about interpretation and meaning in the
social sciences.
xi
In this volume, Anne Marie Champagne and Asia Friedman present

a collection of essays that advance the study of bodies and embodiment
in important ways. With an overarching emphasis on the “processes of
interpretation and meaning production,” the collection highlights the
ways in which different theoretical and methodological traditions both
diverge and converge in approaches to interpreting the body. Approaching
a breadth of topics from a range of interpretive perspectives, the chapters
in this book offer numerous insights that are masterfully tied together in
the volume’s introduction, which both explains and contextualizes the
evolution of approaches to studying the body while offering a cogent
discussion of the challenges and possibilities of interpretive scholarship in
this broad area of study.
The scholars featured in this volume apply various combinations of
analytic perspectives (including cultural, materialist, semiotic, discursive,
interactionist, postcolonial, critical, performative, and psychosocial) to
studies of the body within different social contexts while also addressing
a wide variety of important issues and themes including those related
to race, sex and gender, age, emotion and affect, religiosity, health and
medicine, aesthetics, and more. All the while, with Champagne and
Friedman’s guidance, these authors work to illustrate and reflect on their
particular interpretive lenses, considering how they allow us to understand
how bodies take on meaning in various contexts and situations. All of
these authors offer us interpretive tools with which to conduct research
that addresses the social character of bodies and embodiment. Thus,
with this collection, Champagne and Friedman demonstrate that paying
explicit attention to how interpretive processes shape meaning, both at
the level of everyday life and as part of the scholarly process, along with
consideration of how these processes structure our attention within
complex dynamics of power and inequality, raises a number of important
issues that move the social analysis of the body in new and illuminating
directions. The overlapping space between meaning and materiality, these
scholars show in different ways, is where connections are forged between
the body and larger cultural and semiotic systems of interpretation,
which allow for both having and making sense of embodied experiences.
We are thrilled to feature this important book as part of our Interpretive
Lenses in Sociology series.
Thomas DeGloma
Hunter College and the Graduate Center, CUNY
Julie B. Wiest
West Chester University of Pennsylvania
xii
Notes
1
An extended series introduction is available for open access download at: bristoluniversitypress.
co.uk/interpretive-lenses-in-sociology. Shorter and slightly modified versions appear as
prefaces to the different volumes of this series.
2
On the centrality of meaning in interpretive social analysis, see Reed’s (2011) important
work on interpretation and knowledge, especially his discussions of the “interpretive
epistemic mode” (pp 89–121) and the “normative epistemic mode” (pp 67–88).
3
See Reed (2011), especially on the “realist semiotic and the illusion of noninterpretation”
(p 52).
4
Indeed, this is what Clifford Geertz (1973) meant when he called for “thick description”
in ethnographic analysis.
5
Alfred Schütz (1932, pp 205–206; 1970, p 273) recognized the layers of interpretation
we point to here when he argued, “The thought objects constructed by the social
scientist … have to be founded upon the thought objects constructed by the common-
sense thinking of [people], living their daily life within their social world. Thus, the
constructs of the social sciences are, so to speak, constructs of the second degree, namely
constructs of the constructs made by the actors on the social scene.” Geertz (1973, p 9)
made a similar distinction when he argued “that what we call our data are really our
own constructions of other people’s constructions.” Also see Reed (2017, pp 29–31) on
“interpreting interpretations.” Such a distinction also informs the fundamental premises
of psychoanalysis, as the analyst is always in the business of interpreting interpretations
and unpacking layers of symbolism.
6
See also Tavory and Timmermans (2014), who advocate engaging the process of research
and interpretation armed with “multiple theoretical perspectives” (p 35).
References
Garland, D. (2006) ‘Concepts of culture in the sociology of punishment’,
Theoretical Criminology, 10(4): 419–447.
Geertz, C. (1973) The Interpretation of Cultures, New York: Basic Books.
Reed, I.A. (2011) Interpretation and Social Knowledge: On the Use of Theory in
the Human Sciences, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Reed, I.A. (2017) ‘On the very idea of cultural sociology’, in C.E. Benzecry,
M. Krause and I.A. Reed (eds) Social Theory Now, Chicago, IL: University
of Chicago Press, pp 18–41.
Schütz, A. (1932) The Phenomenology of the Social World, Evanston, IL:
Northwestern University Press, 1967.
Schütz, A. (1970) On Phenomenology and Social Relations, Chicago, IL:
University of Chicago Press.
Tavory, I. and Timmermans. S. (2014) Abductive Analysis: Theorizing
Qualitative Research, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
xiii
Notes on Contributors
Anne Marie Champagne is a doctoral candidate in sociology at Yale

University and a junior fellow at the Yale Center for Cultural Sociology.
In addition to serving on the advisory council of Not Putting on a Shirt
(NPOAS), a nonprofit advocating for satisfactory aesthetic outcomes for
mastectomy patients, she is a member of the Civil Sphere Working Group,
an international forum of theorists and empirical social scientists engaging
with and developing civil sphere theory. Her research interests include
aesthetic power in social life, materiality and culture, and issues of body and
embodiment. Her dissertation looks at how aesthetics and materiality inform
legal, medical, and individual approaches to mastectomy and constructions
of identity in transmen and female-identified breast cancer survivors.
Asia Friedman is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of

Delaware. Her research has primarily focused on developing a body of
research in cognitive sociology unified around her interest in the mental and
sensory mechanisms of the social construction process. This has included
efforts to expand the vocabulary of the field by theorizing concepts such as
perceptual construction, filter analysis, and cultural blind spots, as well as to
apply analytic frameworks rooted in the sociology of attention and perception
to other substantive areas, specifically, gender, race, the body, medicine, and
sociological theory. Her first book, Blind to Sameness: Sexpectations and the
Social Construction of Male and Female Bodies (University of Chicago Press,
2013), won the Distinguished Book Award from the Sex and Gender section
of the American Sociological Association in 2016. A second monograph,
Mammography Wars: Analyzing Attention in Cultural and Medical Disputes, is
forthcoming in 2023 from Rutgers University Press.
Kathryn Linn Geurts is Professor of Anthropology and Chair of the

Global and Area Studies Department at Hamline University in Saint Paul,
Minnesota. Her research focuses on investigating bodily experience—not
through a Western lens but through a West African perspective. She is
the author of Culture and the Senses: Bodily Ways of Knowing in an African
Community (University of California Press, 2003) as well as numerous
xiv
articles and book chapters. She has been the recipient of fellowships from
Fulbright-Hays, NIMH, the School for Advanced Research on the Human
Experience in Santa Fe, New Mexico, as well as the Guggenheim and
Rockefeller Foundations.
Mrinalini Greedharry is an associate professor in the English Literature,

Media, and Writing program at Laurentian University, Canada. Her
research focuses on how the practices, organization, and theory of studying
English literature engender postcolonial subjects, which builds on her
longstanding interest in the ways that postcolonial theory can generate new
ways of thinking about subject formation in general. She is the author of
Postcolonial Theory and Psychoanalysis (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), chapters
in collections such as What Postcolonial Theory Doesn’t Say (Routledge,
2018), The Oxford Handbook of Identities in Organizations (Oxford University
Press, 2020), Towards Organization 2666: Literary Troubling, Undoing and
Refusal (Springer, 2020), and Racial Dimensions of Life Writing in Education
(IAP, 2022).
Erin F. Johnston is a senior research associate in the Department of

Sociology at Duke University, where she leads qualitative data collection and
analysis for the Clergy Health Initiative’s “Seminary to Early Ministry” study,
the first longitudinal study of divinity school students. Johnston’s research
interests lie at the intersection of cultural sociology, social psychology, and
the study of religion and education in the US context. She has written
about conversion narratives among contemporary Pagans (Sociological Forum,
2013), the aspirational nature of identity in spiritual communities (Religions,
2016), the social dynamics of failure and persistence in spiritual disciplines
(Qualitative Sociology, 2017), and emotion management through yoga and
prayer (Symbolic Interaction, 2021).
Annemarie Jutel is Professor of Health at Te Herenga Waka—Victoria

University of Wellington and a sociologist of diagnosis. Her research interests
focus on how diagnosis, as a category and as a process, influences how health,
illness, and disease are understood at an individual as well as a sociocultural
level. She is the author of Putting a Name to It: Diagnosis in Contemporary
Society (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011) and Diagnosis: Truths and Tales
(University of Toronto Press, 2019).
Sefakor Komabu-Pomeyie holds a PhD in educational leadership and

policy studies from the University of Vermont, where she currently teaches
their online “Global Disability Studies” course, which serves a national
constituency. Her research focuses on the shortcomings and idiosyncrasies
that underlie contemporary responses to disability-oriented human rights
xv
abuses in schools. She has held a Ford Foundation Fellowship in addition to

winning awards from the Association of University Centers on Disabilities
and the International Alliance of Women. She has coauthored a chapter in
Disability in the Global South: The Critical Handbook (Springer, 2016).
Brittney Miles is a PhD candidate in sociology at the University of

Cincinnati, where she is an Albert C. Yates fellow. She holds a graduate
certificate in women’s gender and sexuality studies and an MA in sociology
from the University of Cincinnati. She also holds an MEd in social and
cultural foundations in education from DePaul University. Her scholarship
centers Black girlhood, specifically in the areas of sexuality, disability, and
embodiment. Within her research she employs a strength-based approach to
critical Black feminist examinations of social problems. She is the coauthor
(with A. Linders et al) of “The Sounds of Executions: Sonic Flaws and
the Transformation of Capital Punishment” (American Journal of Cultural
Sociology, 2022).
Lee F. Monaghan is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of

Limerick, Ireland. He mainly teaches the sociology of health and illness,
classical and contemporary sociological theory, and the sociology of the
body. He has researched and published on topics such as illicit steroid use,
private security work, the war on obesity, childhood asthma, and COVID-19.
Monaghan’s work has been published in numerous international journals. He
has also authored or coauthored four monographs and four edited collections.
His most recent books are Rethinking Obesity: Critical Perspectives in Crisis Times
(Routledge, 2022, with Emma Rich and Andrea Bombak), and Key Concepts
in Medical Sociology, 3rd edn (SAGE, 2022, edited with Jonathan Gabe).
Sweta Rajan-Rankin is Reader (Associate Professor) in Sociology and Social

Work at the University of Kent, UK. Her research investigates embodiment
and racialized belonging in diverse contexts, including transnational service
work in Indian call centers, racialized imaginaries and old age in postcolonial
imaginaries, and most recently material intimacies, touch biographies, and
Black hair practices. An interdisciplinary scholar and radical social worker,
her research brings together postcoloniality and embodiment through a
historically situated understanding of everyday lives of diasporic, migrant,
and marginalized communities. She is a UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship
recipient (Round 6) and is currently exploring texture-based discrimination
and embodied understandings of Black children and young people in social
care and educational settings in the North and South of England. Rajan-
Rankin is a long-serving member of the British Sociological Association
Race and Ethnicity Study Group, and she is currently a general editor for
the Sociological Review, Britain’s oldest sociology journal.
xvi
Chandra Russo is Associate Professor of Sociology at Colgate University,

where she teaches courses in social movements and activism, the body, and
(anti)racism. Her book Solidarity in Practice (Cambridge University Press,
2018) examines how justice-seeking solidarity drives activist communities
contesting US torture, militarism, and immigration policies. Before earning
a PhD from the University of California, Santa Barbara, she spent several
years working on immigrant justice issues in New York State, Central
Mexico, and Colorado. Her research and writing have been published in
such venues as Mobilization, Race and Class, American Quarterly, City, Interface,
and the Denver Post.
Piper Sledge is Associate Professor of Sociology at Bryn Mawr College. Her

research and teaching interests include gender, race, and embodiment. Sledge’s
first book, Bodies Unbound: Gender-Specific Cancer and Biolegitimacy (Rutgers
University Press, 2021), is a comparative study showing how ideologies
of gendered bodies shape medical care and how patients respond to these
ideologies through decisions about their bodies using three cases: transgender
men seeking preventative gynecological care, cisgender men diagnosed
with breast cancer, and cisgender women with breast cancer who elect to
undergo prophylactic mastectomies. Her current book project explores the
relationship between trans* and mixed-race embodied experiences as one
imbued with the radical potential to help us better understand how racial
and gender ideologies are reproduced, resisted, and reimagined.
Ben Spatz is a nonbinary scholar-practitioner working at the intersections

of artistic research and critical race and gender theory. They are a leader
in the development of new audiovisual embodied research methods and
produce scholarly writing, video essays, and video art. Spatz is Reader in
Media and Performance at the University of Huddersfield; the founding
editor of the videographic Journal of Embodied Research and the Advanced
Methods imprint from Punctum Books; and the author of What a Body
Can Do (Routledge, 2015), Blue Sky Body (Routledge, 2020), and Making
a Laboratory (Punctum, 2020). <www.urbanresearchtheater.com>
xvii
Preface and Acknowledgments
The overarching theme of this volume grew out of The Roots and Branches
of Interpretive Sociology: Cultural, Pragmatist, and Psychosocial Approaches,
a conference organized and chaired by Thomas DeGloma and Julie B. Wiest
that took place over the course of two days immediately preceding the 2018
Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association. The conference,
which was sponsored by the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction,
the Psychosocial Scholars Group, and Yale University’s Center for Cultural
Sociology, brought together scholars from across the globe working in
the traditions of American pragmatism, cultural and cognitive sociology,
psychoanalytic sociology, semiotics, symbolic interactionism, and other
schools of thought. The range of interpretive approaches represented in
the conference program offered a unique opportunity for investigating the
conjunctions and disjunctions between each tradition’s respective approach
to grasping the meaning and matter of social life.
Serving as a member of the Conference Programming Committee, Anne
Marie Champagne, a doctoral student and junior fellow at Yale University’s
Center for Cultural Sociology, co-organized (with Piper Sledge) a featured
thematic panel, The Fine Lines of Interpreting Bodies and Identities,
which set out to explore how bodies and embodied identities are presented,
represented, and interpreted in the social sciences. The panel title gave a nod
to Eviatar Zerubavel’s book The Fine Line: Making Distinctions in Everyday
Life (University of Chicago Press, 1991), a study of the sociomental processes
of differentiation, association, and perception that partition reality into
islands of meaning. Alongside panel presentations on auditory perception
and attributions of value (Whitney Johnson) and the embodied aesthetics of
far-r ight extremism (Cynthia Miller-Idriss), Asia Friedman, a former student
of Zerubavel, presented an overview of her research highlighting a cultural
cognitive vision for the social construction of the body. She specifically
emphasized selective attention as a key cultural cognitive process that links
meaning with materiality and plays a significant role in the social construction
of the body. Her cultural cognitive approach is reflected in this volume’s
broader focus on interpretation as a uniquely valuable approach for advancing
the study of the body as a simultaneously material and semiotic entity.
xviii
newgenprepdf
Preface and Acknowledgments
While none of the contributions to this volume specifically originated

in the Fine Lines of Interpreting Bodies and Identities panel, the idea
and proposal for a book on “Interpreting the Body” did, thanks to the
encouragement of the Interpretive Lenses in Sociology book series
editors, Thomas DeGloma and Julie B. Wiest, and Bristol University Press
editorial director Victoria Pittman. We owe the genesis of this book to
their foresight and its completion to the editorial and production teams
at Bristol.
We are especially indebted to the series editors, who empowered us
to seek out and gather together under one cover the critical selection of
chapters published here by notable and up-and-coming social scientists
whose research and writing illuminate the interpretive connections that link
human experiences, meanings, and actions to the body. For this, our utmost
appreciation goes to our contributors—Kathryn Linn Geurts, Mrinalini
Greedharry, Erin F. Johnston, Annemarie Jutel, Sefakor Komabu-Pomeyie,
Brittney Miles, Lee F. Monaghan, Sweta Rajan-Rankin, Chandra Russo,
Piper Sledge, and Ben Spatz—who dared to entrust us with their work and
without whom this volume would not be possible.
Book projects demand patience, extraordinary effort, and collective
will and are tasking even when undertaken in optimal conditions. The
development of Interpreting the Body: Between Meaning and Matter began
mere weeks before the global spread of COVID-19 disrupted every facet of
human life, thoroughly transforming the way we work, educate and learn,
and care for each other. No one was spared. And over the course of the
two years during which this book materialized, editors and members close
to the project lost family, friends, mentors, and colleagues as either a direct
or indirect result of the pandemic. The dear and loved ones who departed
from us much too soon are also a part of this book’s spirit and wider circle
of support. We carry them forward across these pages and remember them
in our everyday lives with gratitude and fondness.
We wish to acknowledge Juana Almaguer (www.juanaalmaguer.com)
for granting permission for the use of the artwork Abstract Figure 50/100,
2021, on the cover.
We also would like to extend a special note of thanks to those whose
ideas and theories have shaped our own and/or who generously offered
comment, including Jeffrey C. Alexander, Philip Smith, Eviatar Zerubavel,
and the book’s reviewers.
Lastly, we thank our families, who buoyed us, and the many colleagues
and friends who cheered us on.

Asia Friedman
May 9, 2022
xix
Introduction:
Between Meaning and Matter
Anne Marie Champagne and Asia Friedman
At minimum, sociological interpretation engages processes of analytical

(cognitive and perceptual) selection and deselection and representational
techniques. Whereas processes of analytical selection mark certain subjects
as worthy or unworthy of study and certain data as more salient than others,
representational techniques offer methods for explaining, visualizing,
reconstructing, and comprehending subjects of study (narratives, network
topologies, and statistical models are all stylized representations of selected
underlying data). In this regard it can be said that the discipline of sociology
has always been an interpretive human science, just not one foundationally
concerned with interpreting the human body. Preoccupied with
understanding the drivers and characteristics of capitalist societies and the
atomizing effects of “modernity,” classical sociologists sought to understand
the collective actions, systems, and events that held humans together in
the face of these disparate social forces (Durkheim, 1893; Weber, 1930;
Parsons, 1948). Although not explicitly theorized, the body was nevertheless
implicated in early sociology: it operated in the background as the taken-for-
granted medium of action external to the decision-making social actor, and it
served as an expedient natural symbol representing “society as an organism”
and/or “the body politic” (Douglas, 1970; Turner, 1991; Shilling, 2012).
The relative absence of the body from early sociological thought is ascribable
to the historical sensibility of the nineteenth century that inflected sociology’s
interpretive lens. The discipline of sociology emerged against the backdrop
of the Industrial Revolution, a period that ushered in widespread rural-to-
urban migration and ostensibly one of the most dramatic transformations
of human social organization since the Middle Ages. The expansion of
industrial capitalism across Europe and the United States coincided with
technological innovations and the rise of modern science (Wallerstein, 1989;
Taylor et al, 2008). During this time, bureaucracy, individualism, realism,
and rationality were not only the hallmarks of the positivist “hard” sciences,
1
which sought to objectively measure and quantify the observable world and
discover its regularities and causal connections, they also were the perceived
attributes of modernity itself (Weber, 1930; Giddens, 1991; Taylor, 1995).
Shaped by this historical milieu, early sociology drew from economics, law,
and even positivism to formulate its disciplinary methods (Durkheim, 1895;
Comte, 1975) as well as its concepts of social “action, choice, and goals”
(Turner, 1991, p 7). At the same time that sociology drew methodological
inspiration from positivism, it also sought to distinguish itself in opposition
to it, as a thoroughly social (contra physical) human science. This rejection
of the physical, Bryan Turner argues, left little interpretive room within
classical sociology for “the biological conditions of action or for the idea of
the ‘lived body’” (1991, p 7).
The durée of the early-to mid-twentieth century witnessed the growth
of sociology departments and programs in higher education, in addition
to professional associations and theoretical texts dedicated to the field. As
sociology developed and evolved in response to shifting historical contexts and
diversifying theoretical perspectives, the scope of its analytic lens expanded.
Branching off from economic models that viewed social action as arising
from rational choice, interpretively oriented perspectives considered the
symbols and values to which social action is keyed. Extending back to social
theorists Max Weber, Emile Durkheim, Georg Simmel, George Herbert
Mead, Talcott Parsons, Erving Goffman, Herbert Blumer, and others, this
interpretive branch of sociology sought to “penetrat[e]‌beyond … external
form” to access the “inner meaning of actions, events, and institutions”
(Alexander, 2003, pp 465–467). Yet this aim did not extend to the so-called
“brute facts” of the natural world. Physical matter, including the body,
continued to be viewed as unsociological—matter strictly “subject to the
empirical rules of biological science,” fixed, inert, and therefore impervious
to “the mutability and flux of cultural change” (Csordas, 1994, p 1).
Amid the ferment of shifting political, economic, cultural, technological,
and philosophical currents in the latter part of the twentieth century, the
naturalness, constancy, and materiality of the body were cast into doubt,
making the body available for new lines of inquiry and action. Among other
changes, the civil rights and women’s movements and the Rehabilitation Act
of 1973, which extended civil rights to persons with disabilities, called into
question what kinds of bodies matter and made the private body political
(Frank, 1990; Turner, 1991; Shilling, 2012). Medical and technological
advances, such as organ transplantation and in vitro fertilization, intensified
the commodification of body parts and increased awareness of the body’s
malleability (Crawford, 1984; Scheper-Hughes, 2001). The converging
forces of late-capitalist consumer culture, the health and beauty industries,
and mass media and marketing transformed the discipline and control of
ascetic attitudes toward the body into the embodied practices of self-care,
2
Introduction
self-expression, and self-actualization (Featherstone, 1982; Foucault, 1988;

Turner, 1992, 2008; Davis, 1997). With the body having been reimagined
as the mutable outer representation of the inner self, “body work” (Gimlin,
2002), or the managing of the aesthetic dimensions of the body, took on
new moral significance and heightened anxiety (Bordo, 1993; Davis, 1997;
Young, 2005), invigorating various “body projects” (Shilling, 2012)—dieting,
fitness routines, fashionwear, antiaging regimens, cosmetic surgery, and body
marking, among others (Turner, 1991, 1992, 2008; Bordo, 1993; Davis,
1997; Pitts-Taylor, 2003)—intended to publicly telegraph one’s identity
(Goffman, 1959; Giddens, 1991).
Philosophical and theoretical reflection on—and contestation of—the
boundaries between meaning and matter spurred new conceptions of
subjectivity and the body. Structural linguistics along with the semiotic
turn in sociology advanced the argument that categories of identity, which
conflate form with essence, “are not determined by the objects of the material
world, but operate, and derive their differentiation, solely in relation to the
system of language” (Olssen, 2003, p 190). From this view, the body is a
material symbol posited through structural relations of oppositional meaning.
Maintaining an interest in the role of language, especially in the form of
narratives, discourses, and performative speech acts, while at the same
time rejecting the formalism of structuralism, post-structuralist scholarship
brought critical attention to the relations of power within which language,
bodies, and identities are constructed. Michel Foucault (1978) foregrounded
how embodied subjects are constituted through the disciplinary powers of
discourse. Seeking to problematize the corporeal essentialism of the binary
sex-gender order, feminist philosophers and sociologists wrote against the
fleshiness of the body (Witz, 2000), exploring instead how social processes
of representation rooted in historically white, patriarchal, heterosexist
institutions are “deployed to legitimate [gendered and racialized] social
relations of domination and subordination” (Davis, 1997, p 8) through
constructed categories of difference.
Judith Butler’s theory of gender performance is influential here. The body
in Butler’s philosophy comes to matter as an epiphenomenon of repeated
enactment that unfolds within normative constraints. For Butler, just as
there is no subject, no “I,” no essence except that which is “manufactured
through a sustained set of acts” (Butler, 1990, p xv), there is no discrete
substance to the body. Bodies, Butler writes, “indicate a world beyond
themselves, [and] this movement beyond their own boundaries, a movement
of boundary itself, … [is] central to what bodies ‘are’” (1993, p 9). There is a
tendency in Butler’s philosophy, as well as in other post-structuralist/feminist
constructions, to eliminate agency—to theorize self and body, meaning and
matter, as nothing more than the effects of power. Yet there is also a kernel
of agency to be derived from Butler’s suggestion that open-ended movement
3
serves as the ontological ground of the body. The notion that the body defies
definition because it is always gesturing beyond itself is evocative of the
current of play, plasticity, and the possibility for resistance that characterizes
deconstructionist and postmodernist perspectives. Emphasizing the highly
mediated, individualized, contradictory, and therefore open and undecidable
nature of social reality, deconstructionism and other postmodern perspectives
prioritize individual agency, experience, interpretation, and knowledge over
suprastructural forces and systems of relations (Rosenau, 2015).
In emphasizing individual agency and the undecidability of meaning,
post-structuralist, deconstructionist, and postmodern perspectives
effectively challenge the naturalization of binary hierarchies underlying
Western philosophy and classical social theory (mind/body, immaterial/
material, masculine/feminine, rational/emotional, civilized/primitive), yet
critics have rightly pointed out the bodily blind spot of such perspectives;
they overwhelmingly focus on language and discourse without applying
constructionist perspectives to the “fleshy” matter of bodies themselves
(Prosser, 1998; Witz, 2000; Epstein, 2002; Barad, 2007; Alaimo and Heckman,
2008; Pitts-Taylor, 2016b). Feminist materialisms (or neomaterialisms), for
example, have offered a particularly powerful critique of dematerialized
understandings of the body in feminist thought, aiming to readdress the
physical body but without totally abandoning the insights offered by cultural
constructionism and postmodernism (Alaimo and Hekman, 2008, pp 1–6).
The “coconstitution of nature and culture” (Pitts-Taylor, 2016a, p 10) is
taken as the starting point of feminist materialism, but materiality is explicitly
understood “not simply in social-structural but also in physical, biological,
and natural terms” (Pitts-Taylor, 2016b, p 10). Additionally, there is an
emphasis on reconceptualizing agency to include material agency, “to find
a way to talk about the body as itself an active, sometimes recalcitrant, force”
(Alaimo and Heckman, 2008, p 4). It is argued that without this ability,
feminism and social-scientific scholarship will fail to meaningfully address
“lived experience, corporeal practice, or biological substance” or effectively
“engage with medicine or science in innovative, productive, or affirmative
ways” (p 4). Attending to material agency means grappling with bodily
differences and how material specificity matters—influencing both how
social representations shape the experience of the body and how the body
is able to determine its social representations (Pitts-Taylor, 2008, pp 25–26).
Materiality, Victoria Pitts-Taylor notes, is always “specifically enacted in
actual and differentiating conditions and contexts” (2016b, p 11) and is thus
inextricable from and mutually constitutive of power and privilege.
Although we are persuaded by these critiques, we also find that most lack
a clear analytic framework for moving beyond the limitations of discursive
perspectives without lapsing into simplistic materialism. Some researchers
borrow theoretical frameworks from other disciplines, such as quantum
4
Introduction
physics (Barad, 2007), to move beyond discourse while also avoiding

material determinism. In this volume, we employ the focal metaphor of
interpretation to return the important questions raised by feminist materialists
and other critics of constructionist accounts of materiality to more explicitly
sociological frameworks and theories. Interpretation as a concept is valuable
for advancing the study of the body as a simultaneously material and semiotic
entity. It directs us to consider how and why some aspects or details of the
body and embodiment emerge as more notable or important than others,
thus revealing how patterns of social, moral, or political salience generate
the attentional topography of the body’s materiality. For example, due to
our cultural investments in gender difference, those aspects of the body that
reflect such differences are imbued with more salience and moral/political
attention than those body parts that reflect no such difference (Epstein, 1988,
p 39; Laqueur, 1990; Lorber, 1994, p 39; Dreger, 1998; Fausto-Sterling,
2000; Lorber and Moore, 2007, p 15; Fine, 2010; Jordan-Young, 2010;
Friedman, 2013). A similar argument can be made about the heightened
concern for and attention to bodily racial differences due to their moral and
political salience (Omi and Winant, 1986; Schwalbe et al, 2000; Brekhus
et al, 2010; Feagin, 2010; Banaji and Greenwald, 2013; Friedman, 2016).
Because interpretation potentially offers ways to account for both matter
and culture without sacrificing either, it avoids the disembodiment of
representation-and discourse-focused approaches while retaining important
insights about the productivity of power and the way bodies are always and
only known within discursive frameworks.
By facilitating reflection on how the body—as structuring and structured
by social configurations of relevance and irrelevance, attention and
inattention—actively participates in the “patterning of selves … actions, and
social systems” (Shilling, 2012, p 33), we aim to bring renewed theoretical
and methodological attention to processes of interpretation and meaning
production, specifically as they are articulated within and across the divergent
yet oftentimes overlapping lenses of different theoretical traditions. In their
introduction to the Interpretive Lenses in Sociology book series, in which
this volume is situated, series editors Thomas DeGloma and Julie B. Wiest
write that “taking the metaphor of the ‘lens’ seriously means considering
how various approaches to interpretive analysis focus our analytic attention,”
making “assumptions about the character of data … and what it can reveal,”
and “tun[ing] our vision differently at different angles of sight” (2022,
pp 4–5). DeGloma and Wiest parse the many interpretive branches that
make up the field of sociology’s arbor into three “root” frameworks:
1) Collective-formative framework: The focal angle of this mode of interpretation

articulates macro–micro links between the collective norms and systems
of meanings that orient social life and individual action. This approach
5
conceives of meaning as inhering in dominant cultural codes that pattern

individuals’ thoughts, feelings, and everyday activities. The socializing,
formative power of meaning may be theorized as functioning in relation
to or as having significant autonomy over and above material and psychic
conditions. Within the scope of this tradition, interpretive analysis focuses
on the shared cultural foundations of symbols, meanings, emotions,
cognitive-perceptual processes, and practices. Erving Goffman’s (1974)
framing theory, Pierre Bourdieu’s (1977) formulations of habitus and field,
Norbert Elias’ (1978) “civilizing process,” Michel Foucault’s (1978) work
on discourse and power, and the Strong Program in cultural sociology
(Alexander and Smith, 2003) are just a few examples of the orientations
one finds under this tent. The collective-formative framework has its
intellectual origins in the classical perspectives of Emile Durkheim (1915)
and Max Weber (1930).
2) Interactive-emergent framework: This interpretive lens focuses analytic
attention on the dynamic emergence of shared meaning in social contexts.
In contrast to the collective-formative framework, which generally
approaches meaning as a collective reservoir from which social actors can
readily draw, the interactive-emergent framework emphasizes the situated,
dialogic, and therefore unpredictable conditions of meaning-making.
From this view, meaning is an ongoing interactive accomplishment,
something that must be made and continually remade. Candace West and
Don H. Zimmerman’s (1987) model of doing gender, actor-network theory
(Latour, 2005) and new materialism perspectives that conceive of objects
as social actors in their own right, and intercorporeal and interaffective
theories of the “looking-glass,” “dramaturgical,” and “socio-semiotic”
body (Goffman, 1959; Waskul and Vannini, 2006; Fuchs, 2017) highlight
the relational contingencies of meaning-making. American pragmatism,
with its focus on observable practical effects, and symbolic interactionism,
as initially developed by George Herbert Mead (1934) and later formalized
by Herbert Blumer (1986), are foundational to this perspective.
3) Psychosocial framework: This interpretive angle concentrates on the interior
processes of mental life, focusing on how cognition is socially patterned and
emanates from and contributes to social identities and group membership.
Drawing from psychoanalytic theory as well as neuroscientific and
cultural cognitive traditions, psychosocial approaches attend to meanings
manifest as psychic structures and their cognitive, perceptual, and
emotional connections to the social world. Exemplars of the psychosocial
framework include Eviatar Zerubavel’s (1991, 1997, 2015) work on “social
mindscapes,” classification, and attention, Asia Friedman’s (2013) concept
of perceptual filters, Arlie Hochschild’s elaboration of “emotional labor”
in her classic text The Managed Heart (1983), and Omar Lizardo et al’s
(2016) Dual Process Framework for understanding individual learning,
6
Introduction
memory, thinking, and acting. Phenomenology is a prominent theoretical

tradition within this framework, as are Lacanian and Freudian feminist
perspectives (see Chodorow, 1989; Goldenberg, 1990).
These three distinct orientations to meaning have at times resulted in

significant differences in emphasis and understanding among different
interpretive schools of thought. Bringing the analytic perspectives of
12 scholars of the body together under one cover, this volume seeks to
illuminate underlying programmatic tensions and connections in approaches
to interpreting the body. Rather than provide a genealogy of common
themes in body and embodiment studies, map the intellectual boundaries of
the field, or attempt to systematically answer metaphysical questions about
what a body is, reflecting the thematic scope of the Interpretive Lenses in
Sociology series, we have sought to draw attention to the processes and
problems of interpreting bodies across different social contexts and analytical
angles of sight. This explicit attention to process is part of what distinguishes
interpretation from prior concepts of the social construction of the body,
which, when centered in systems of language, tend to overlook the structural
or material processes and mechanisms through which the social construction
of the body takes place, or, when rooted in the strong pragmatist perspective
of praxis, emphasize objective actions, performances, and doings over the
more internal processes of meaning-making (cf Prosser, 1998; Epstein, 2002;
Barad, 2007; Alaimo and Heckman, 2008; Pitts-Taylor, 2016b).
Within the established paradigm of the social construction of the body,
directing attention to interpretation can shed new light on the mechanisms
and processes that engender material conditions of inequality, not in the least
by revealing the reciprocal links that exist between meaning and power and,
by extension, the production of symbolic and structural asymmetries—for
instance, of in-g roups versus out-g roups or the pure versus impure—that
underpin forms of institutional power and violence. Furthermore, exploring
interpretation as a framework for thinking about the body allows for a
reengagement with the materiality of the body while at the same time
steering clear of simplistic understandings of biology as somehow accessible
outside of cultural frameworks of meaning, especially gender and race but
also age, ability, and sexuality. Focusing on the processes, problems, and
mechanisms of interpretation presents a critical opportunity to conceptually
bridge gaps of difference by asking ourselves how various interpretive lenses
structure our epistemological understandings of the body and how the
body’s meaning and matter might be construed otherwise. Indeed, these
are questions that thread the corpus of this volume.
In order to realize the potential of the volume’s substantive theme, we
requested that all contributors consider or reveal, implicitly or explicitly,
two dimensions of interpretation and meaning within their work. We
7
asked contributing scholars to explore how the subjects of their studies,

cases, or reflections assign meanings and arrive at convergent or divergent
understandings of the body. We further enjoined them to reflect on the
interpretive lenses that they apply analytically and methodologically from
within their respective research traditions, and in relation to others, that allow
them as researchers and authors to access and identify these understandings.
Motivated by this reflexive engagement with interpretation, the chapters
gathered here stress different dimensions of body/embodiment—its
influence, meaning, and matter. In the description of the volume’s plan
that follows, we introduce each chapter and elaborate these dimensions. In
addition to outlining the interpretive lenses and “root” frameworks each
scholar employs in their research and reflections on the body, we draw
attention to how they marshal these frameworks to support, critique, or
bridge core perspectives and illuminate their various entailments of meaning
and matter.
In Chapter 1, “Toward a Strong Cultural Sociology of the Body and
Embodiment,” Anne Marie Champagne views the body through the
hermeneutic lens of the Strong Program in cultural sociology. From this
vantage, the body comes into being as a phenomenal meeting of horizons, a
fusion between, among other dualities, ideality–materiality and subjectivity–
objectivity. According to Champagne, the horizon of the body and the
symbolic and material elements that comprise it are structured by dominant
cultural codes, which reflect the collective representations that give meaning
to and shape individuals’ perceptions of their and others’ bodies. This
structuration of bodily meaning, she cautions, is not unidirectional. Because
the body entails a fusion of ideal and material matter, it presents a uniquely
mediating, reversible relation between the body and its embodiment in
society. Self and society, Champagne contends, are reciprocally “constituted
through the sensuous and performative workings of [the] physical body.”
For Champagne, culture is what sensitizes and completes the body and
society, bringing each to material life. Hence, just as meaning depends
on interpretation if it is to be comprehensible and shareable, the body is
dependent upon interpretation for “getting itself out into the social world.”
Foregrounding the relative autonomy that the symbolic dimension of
social life exercises over individuals’ lived experiences, the focal perspective
of Champagne’s interpretive lens hews closely but not exclusively to the
collective-formative framework. Applying a strong cultural analysis to three
different scenarios of body modification—turning brown eyes blue with
contact lenses, breast cancer-related mastectomy, and ritualized tooth
extraction—Champagne also draws on the interactive-e mergent and psychosocial
traditions to elucidate the mutually powerful hand that sensuous contact
with the outer world and internal processes of interpretation have in how
individuals make sense of the body in society.
8
Introduction
Looking to what bodies and consequently identities are made of, in

Chapter 2, “Thinking the Molecular,” Ben Spatz emphasizes a similar
mutual relationship between the body’s meaning and its substance. Working
within the traditions of critical race theory, performance studies, and
embodied artistic research, Spatz crafts a material-semiotic perspective on
the body, which is used to show how the molecules that make up human
(and nonhuman) bodies are at once materially and socially constructed
through an iterative interpretive process that loops between technique
(eg, disciplinary, political, and technoscientific practices) and identity (eg,
cultural-identarian forces such as racial imaginaries). Processes of knowledge
production are central to this circular relationship. As Spatz theorizes it,
molecules of technique and identity emerge from repeated enactments of
what one knows. Knowledge forms who we are, and identity is made of
technique in the same way that technique, arising from who we are, is made
of identity. Theorizing the molecular material-semiotic construction of the
body and identity gives Spatz the necessary analytic leverage to contest the
collective-formative hegemony of the natural sciences in determining what
fundamentally constitutes the matter and reality of the body. It also provides
an avenue for critiquing constructionist perspectives that treat the body and
other material objects as passive matter “swept up into social and cultural
discourse.” Bringing theories of technique, identity, and molecularity to bear
upon theories of the body and embodiment opens a space for exploring
the moral heft of the molecular. As Spatz reminds us, the quantification
and qualification of matter is not a neutral enterprise but one that takes
place within asymmetrical relations of power—in racialized, gendered, and
othered contexts. While privileging neither the material nor the symbolic
dimensions of the body, the front-footing of the material in Spatz’ material-
semiotic lens offers a critical theory of the body that accents the ways in which
the molecular asymmetries of racial and other identities substantively matter.
In “Interpreting Africa’s Seselelãme: Bodily Ways of Knowing in a Globalized
World” (Chapter 3), Kathryn Linn Geurts and Sefakor Komabu-Pomeyie
explore recent trends in the Western appropriation, commodification, and
interpretive distortion of the Anlo-Ewe phrase seselelãme, a term that conveys
a particular “sensory-emotional, embodied way of knowing” enjoyed by
West Africans. Comparing what Anlo-Ewe people of southeastern Ghana
say about seselelãme to how yoga centers, fitness gurus, and other commercial
enterprises in the Global North use and individualize the term, Geurts and
Komabu-Pomeyie illuminate, by way of interpretive contrast, the particular
intersubjective, phenomenological ground of seselelãme among the Anlo-
Ewe. As something that emerges sensorily in the shared emotional rhythms
of life, seselelãme expresses a modal phenomenon mediated by local historical
knowledge and the contingencies of lived experience. It is not, therefore,
some kind of universal category of thought, fixed sign, or identity that
9
can be readily exported. Highlighting this, while at the same time being
careful not to essentialize Anlo-Ewe ways of knowing, Geurts and Komabu-
Pomeyie foreground the dynamic interweaving of psychosocial, interactive-
emergent, and collective-formative interpretive frameworks that underpin the
sociophysiological meanings of seselelãme. They also employ and refer to these
frameworks to interrogate the institutional and geopolitical asymmetries in
interpretive authority and communicative power that can have polluting
and far-reaching material-symbolic consequences.
Focusing on interpretations of gendered and raced bodies in the context of
colonialism, in Chapter 4, “Gender on the Post-Colony: Phenomenology,
Race, and the Body in Nervous Conditions,” Sweta Rajan-Rankin and
Mrinalini Greedharry supplement Frantz Fanon’s phenomenal-psychoanalytic
perspective on racism and Black consciousness with postcolonial feminist
and gender theory to present an intersectional close reading of Tsitsi
Dangarembga’s novel Nervous Conditions. Fanon’s phenomenology, which
centers on Black men’s bodies, does not adequately theorize how gender
and race are “a product of colonial ambitions to categorize, tame, discipline,
and shape the colonized body.” Rajan-Rankin and Greedharry thus frame
“the problem of being a colonized woman” as being “constantly under
erasure between gender and race.” The physical body, they argue, “must
disappear in order to resolve the tensions of colonized womanhood.” Using
Dangarembga’s novel as an “organic theory of the native woman’s body,” they
analyze “how African womanhood is negotiated and how girls’ bodies are
made available for, and find ways to resist, colonial architectures of power.”
Their analysis demands attention to the material specificity of bodies. Since
the physical characteristics of bodies are never neutral but always interpreted
through and taken up in social dynamics of power, the material specificity
of the body matters for how one is perceived and for the kinds of social
worlds different materialities make possible and preclude. In addition to their
intersectional phenomenological approach, Rajan-Rankin and Greedharry’s
analysis incorporates an interactive-emergent framework for meaning, as
illustrated, for one, in the way that the characters Tambu and Nyasha both
experience their bodily pleasures as structured by family interactions rooted
in social relations of race, gender, and colonialism.
In Chapter 5, “Reinterpreting Male Bodies and Health in Crisis
Times: From ‘Obesity’ to Bigger Matters,” Lee F. Monaghan takes a
collective-formative approach to the male “obesity crisis,” challenging
medicalized “obesity epidemic” interpretive frameworks and the use of
“health” discourse as a means of controlling socially deviant bodies. These
social discourses of “obesity alarmism” largely focus on individual behavior
change. Yet, as medical sociologists have demonstrated, individual health
behaviors play very little role in health inequalities, which are largely
macrostructural in nature, situated in the nested social-structural and
10
Introduction
symbolic systems of gender, medicalization, and neoliberal capitalism (with

its attendant social inequalities of socioeconomic status and structural racism).
Highlighting the kaleidoscopic complexities of these layered systems of
meaning and structural inequality, Monaghan points out that “hegemonic
narratives are also subject to considerable contestation and reframing.” For
instance, just considering gender and work, he points out that men’s health
is disproportionately impacted by a competitive work-oriented system
and unemployment, yet masculinity can also provide a “status shield” that
allows men symbolic recourse to resist fat-phobic discourse by invoking
masculine norms of “occupying space” and masculine largeness that are
not available to women. In light of this, medical and health policy solutions
at the individual level are inadequate. In order to properly make sense of
weight, health, and the body more broadly, health scholars, professionals,
and policymakers must analytically attend to the complex intersections of
these macrostructural discourses.
Piper Sledge initially applies a collective-formative framework to gender and
mastectomy in Chapter 6, “Beauty, Breasts, and Meaning after Mastectomy,”
engaging macrolevel discourses of normative feminine embodiment and
beauty that are institutionalized in medicine and breast cancer activism
and which define dominant narratives of recovery. While these dominant
discourses structure microlevel interactions and interpretations of the body
after mastectomy, Sledge also finds that her participants are able to complicate
macrostructural frames of gender and beauty and shift their interpretations
of their embodied experience (in this case, of living flat after breast cancer)
through interaction in interpersonal “communities of experience and
supportive daily interactions that create pathways for new interpretations of
beauty.” Particularly when the embodied experiences in question challenge
normative cultural frameworks, new interpretive filters can emerge through
social interactions to make sense of them. Sledge thus identifies interactive-
emergent frameworks that resist and allow for reinterpretation of dominant
conceptual frameworks of gender and beauty.
In “‘You Are Not the Body’: (Re)Interpreting the Body in and through
Integral Yoga” (Chapter 7), Erin F. Johnston, like Sledge, combines collective-
formative and interactive-emergent approaches, demonstrating that the study
of religious life must attend as equally to the linguistic, conceptual, and
symbolic aspects of religious life, particularly forms of talk and discourse
in situ, as it does to the practical, experiential, and embodied dimensions
of religion. This dual focus is especially important given the interplay of
the symbolic and the somatic that occurs in religious practice. In “You Are
Not the Body,” Johnston examines this “symbolic–somatic interplay” in the
context of Integral Yoga, identifying the interpretive frameworks that yoga
practitioners and instructors use to make sense of the body, specifically to
cultivate bodily detachment, which is understood as necessary to become
11
aware of and experience the “True Self.” This “theology of the body,”
Johnston notes, is conveyed through the yoga teachers’ verbal directions. She
describes how, for instance, early in her participant observation as a teacher
trainee, she did not recognize certain embodied experiences as moments
of experiencing her “True Self ” because she was not yet equipped with
the correct language or conceptual framework for interpreting the somatic
experience. Johnston argues that talk, as a form of interaction in situ, links the
body to broader symbolic systems of interpretation, thereby enabling certain
kinds of embodied experiences and the transmission of shared interpretive
frameworks for making sense of them.
With a focus on race and gender in educational settings, in Chapter 8,
“Black Girls’ Bodies and Belonging in the Classroom,” Brittney Miles
likewise calls for bridging collective-formative and interactive-emergent
perspectives on interpreting the body. Highlighting a range of inherited
misogynist and anti-Black discourses, by way of which the meanings
of Black girls’ bodies are read and misread, Miles shows how these
interpretive frameworks are centrally implicated in the reproduction of
structural relations of inequality in schools. She specifically examines
teachers’ misinterpretations of Black female students’ voice and body work.
Exploring Black talk, sass, loudness and quietness, and focusing on dress
and appearance in schools, she illustrates both how dominant racialized and
gendered discourses emerge interactionally and how interaction can take the
form of “embodied reverse discourse,” a bodily practice of reappropriation
that shifts meanings of gender and race, opening “conceptual space for the
production of discursive counternarratives.” While the body’s meaning
derives in tension, in the oppositional space between dominant and counter
discourse, Miles acknowledges that collective-f ormative discourses, which hold
more institutional authority, continually “work their way through microlevel
interactions.” Yet directing attention to the “interactional maneuverability”
that enables embodied reverse discourse to emerge also “allows us to
consider how Black girls’ bodily negotiations may be understood differently
when interpreted from their own perspective.” Miles argues that symbolic
interactionism provides a useful theoretical framework for recognizing these
alternate interpretations and interactional shifts in sensemaking while still
attending to dominant meanings.
“Our manner of making sense often impacts our sense experience,” writes
Chandra Russo in Chapter 9, “Embodied Vulnerability and Sensemaking
with Solidarity Activists.” Reflecting on her experience as an observer-
participant involved in solidarity witnessing, a form of political protest in
which activists collectively engage in physically demanding, vulnerabilizing
strategies of resistance to raise awareness around issues of state violence, she
considers how the interpretive interplay between affect, emotion, and culture
underlying embodied vulnerability “becomes ... meaningful to the task of
12
Introduction
research” and to social movements as “sensemaking projects.” Interview and

ethnographic excerpts from Russo’s participation in the annual Migrant Trail
Walk (in protest of US immigration policies) are particularly illustrative,
showing how bodily labors precipitate interpretive labors. Protestors’
affective experiences of pain and struggle, as they push their bodies to their
physiologic limits, trigger strong emotions, which they interpret through
the collective-formative frameworks of shared culture as well as the interactive-
emergent pathways of verbal and intercorporeal dialog with one another.
Additionally, Russo shows how the embodied vulnerability that solidarity
witnesses experience prompts them, herself included, to reinterpret their
bodies (and ethnographic data) by bringing into their awareness the privilege
of protection afforded to some but not others on the basis of race, gender,
and/or class. Linking bodily experience to interpretation, she presents
a distinctively sociosomatic phenomenological account of knowledge
construction in research and social movement activism.
The volume concludes with a biographical chapter exploring how
researchers embody their scholarship and how their scholarship embodies
them in turn. In Chapter 10, “Our Bodies, Our Disciplines, Our Selves,”
Annemarie Jutel reflects on the embodied roots of the development of her
research program in the sociology of diagnosis. Similar to Russo’s exploration
(in Chapter 9) of how bodily experience can direct the researcher’s
methodology, Jutel posits that the researcher’s body provides an interpretive
framework for their choice of academic discipline. That disciplines offer
collective-formative frameworks for interpreting the body is well known in
body and embodiment literature. Here, Jutel highlights instead the way that
embodied experience can also lead us to our academic disciplines and to
the adoption of the interpretive tools they provide. She explains, “From a
particular embodied stance (illness, diagnosis, catharsis), the scholar finds their
discipline: locating it as a way of understanding, celebrating, or theorizing
their physical existence in the world.” Jutel illustrates this by tracing the
trajectory of her own research and methodology, paying close interpretive
attention to the embodied experiences at its roots. For example, she describes
how her embodiment and identity as a woman runner (and later a cyclist)
provided the impetus for understanding the construction of feminine frailty
as a self-conscious “presencing” of the body that precludes full attention to
the task at hand, and further how feminine self-scrutiny inscriptively engages
moral aspects of body work whereby the surface of the body is taken as
a reflection of its inner depths. Reinforcing the idea that our embodied
experience underlies our academic research, Jutel draws from the well of
her own lived experience to critique the positivist assumption that valid,
“objective” research requires the evacuation of the researcher’s embodied
subjectivity. “Whether we realize it or not,” she writes, “as scholars our
embodied experience is at the root of our academic disciplines.”
13
The contributions curated and juxtaposed in this volume are intended to

offer insight into the relationships among lived experience, meaning-making,
corporeality, materiality, research, and social construction. Individually
and together they challenge the limits of what we know about bodies and
interpretation, crafting new interpretive lenses in the process. Broadening
the panoramic landscape of body and embodiment theory, they set new
terms for what a body is and can be as an object of study and what a body
can be and do in the social world. They affirm, each in their own way, that
to interpret the body is to define and redefine the imaginable, imagined,
and not yet imagined stuff of life.
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18
1
Toward a Strong Cultural Sociology

of the Body and Embodiment
For the task of intellectuals is not only to explain the world; they
must interpret it as well.
—Jeffrey C. Alexander, The Meanings of Social Life:
A Cultural Sociology
Formerly noteworthy for its muted absence from sociological theory, the
body with which contemporary theory concerns itself is no less remarkable
despite it no longer being silent or absent (Williams and Bendelow,
1998; Shilling, 2012). Since the corporeal turn in sociology in the 1980s,
considerable attention has been given to body studies across multiple
academic disciplines within the humanities and social sciences (Shilling,
2016). As with other epistemic shifts, this turn has led to a proliferation
of approaches to understanding the social ontology of the body and its
constitutive role in the embodiment and production of social life and the self.
Many of these approaches—including, among others, the culturally pragmatic
(see Champagne, 2018; Broch, 2020),1 phenomenological (see Merleau-P onty,
1945; Leder, 1990; Csordas, 1994; Young, 2005), interactionist (see Waskul
and Vannini, 2006), and praxeological (see Goffman, 1959; Garfinkel, 1967;
Bourdieu, 1977; Foucault, 1978b; Butler, 1990)—highlight the body’s
embedment in symbolic horizons of meaning.2 Yet, in spite of sharing a
common interest in the cultural dimensions of the body and embodiment,
there is scarcely agreement among scholars working within these traditions
about what culture is (is it a fairly stable system of shared meanings or an
19
emergent property of social interaction?), where it is located (in the mind or

among things?), and whether it has ordering power (does it play a powerful
or feeble role in structuring social life?). Neither is there a settled consensus
regarding the role interpretation plays in constituting the “landscapes of
meaning” (Reed, 2011, p 92) that shape and transform a person’s sense of
the social world nor the bodies and embodiments that may co-constitute that
landscape. Is the body a “sign-bearing, sign-wearing” (Bourdieu, 1984, p
190) surface off of which we unconsciously read social-symbolic value? Or is
it also a fecund reservoir of sensibility and imagination from which culture’s
webs of signification are spun (Geertz, 1973)? Is the body determined by
actions alone or is it something one completes through meaning-making
(Turner, 1991)?
The dissensus I have outlined here, while hardly exhaustive, is
representative of outstanding debates regarding the relative autonomy of
culture (Alexander and Smith, 2003). At the heart of these debates are
competing understandings of the degree to which symbols and meanings
comprise an ideal (value-oriented), as opposed to an instrumental (task-
oriented), resource capable of suffusing bodies and materialities with a
motivational—nay, motifactional—moral significance that animates social
actions, norms, and structures.3 In this chapter, I leverage these intellectual
tensions concerning the relative autonomy of culture to advance the
possibility of a strong cultural sociology of the body, one that approaches
the body as a unique hermeneutical situation—a fusion of subject–object,
ideality–materiality, constraint–potential, and other continua—structured
by cultural codes and dependent upon interpretation for getting itself out
into the social world.
I begin, in the sections that follow, with a rudimentary but instructive
review of how culture and the body have been thematized in modern,
postmodern, and contemporary sociology, often along ideal versus
instrumental (or material) fault lines inherited from early sociological
thought. Then, following a brief description of how a strong cultural,
meaning-c entered approach to body and embodiment stands in
contradistinction to softer cultural approaches that treat culture as an artifact,
I outline the three methodological commitments that define Strong Program
cultural sociology (SPCS): (1) recognizing the relative autonomy of culture;
(2) hermeneutically reconstructing meaning structures; and (3) utilizing
what Isaac Ariail Reed (2011) refers to as “maximal interpretations” to
explain how culture shapes and directs social reality (see also Alexander and
Smith, 2003). Since length limitations preclude a thoroughgoing analysis
of a data-r ich empirical study, in order to elaborate the theoretical power
of SPCS relative to other approaches, I introduce brief empirical examples
excerpted from my and others’ accounts of embodied social phenomena that
illustrate each methodological commitment, applying the tools of analogy
20
Cultural Sociology of the Body and Embodiment
and interpretation to draw out their implications for interpreting the body
and embodiment.
Culture and the body: modern, postmodern, and

contemporary themes
The “absent presence” of culture and the body in early sociology
Both culture and the body, as general sociological topics, share a unique
position within the history of social theory. Until the last quarter of the
twentieth century, sociology paid little to no heed to the integral significance
of either culture or the body in social life (Fraser and Greco, 2005; Shilling,
2012, 2016). This neglect is due in part to sociology’s positivist legacy, which
tended to reduce human action to instrumental behavior, the body to a
brute fact, and, following Cartesian dualism, separated mind from body and
reason from nature (Robertson, 1988; Turner, 1991; Williams and Bendelow,
1998; Alexander, 2003). Having located the social self in the reasoning mind,
and having dismissed culture as either irrelevant or, worse, a primitive and
ignorant adherence to tradition, early sociology conceived for its “modern”
subject the disembodied, rational actor who responded and adapted to the
pressures of social structures “‘larger’ and more ‘powerful’” than themselves
(Robertson, 1988; Seidman, 1994; Howson and Inglis, 2001; Alexander,
2003, p 4). Such a legacy not only blunted sociology to the meaningful
interiors of social actors and social structures, it also occluded from its view
the interpretive fasciae, or symbolic connective tissues, that fuse soma and
other materialities with meaning.
This bare-bones sketch of early sociology’s (dis)engagement with culture
hardly conveys the subtlety of cultural thought alive and well among its
foundational theorists, but its tenor nevertheless rings true. Certain fin de
siècle classical sociologists did acknowledge the historical and structural
importance of cultural phenomena such as ritual, totemism, and collective
representations (Durkheim, 1915), ideological spirits (Weber, 1930), and
cultural forms (Simmel, 1971), but after the 1920s, once sociology was
thoroughly professionalized as a problem-solving, scientific discipline,4
culture, narrowly conceived as either a product of (Mead, 1934) or a resource
for (Bourdieu, 1977) social interaction, was cast to the periphery.
In a similar fashion, the body was inferred but not thematized in the
culturally inflected theories of classical as well as pre-and early postwar
sociology. In Elementary Forms, Emile Durkheim acknowledges the body’s
unique inscriptive capacity, in particular its receptivity to tattooing, which
makes it an expedient surface for emblematizing collective social life (1915,
pp 221–225). Georg Simmel’s (1971) menagerie of social types—inter alia,
the stranger, the miser, the spendthrift, and the adventurer—implicates
21
distinctive bodies and embodiments. One glimpses, as Chris Shilling (2012)

does, the body’s performative dimension in the asceticism of the Calvinist
“calling” described in Max Weber’s (1930) writings on the protestant ethic.
Talcott Parsons’ psychoanalytic model of social internalization presumes an
embodied social actor (O’Neill, 1998). And despite George Herbert Mead’s
(1934) relegation of the body to the world of objects, the gesturing body is
an essential feature of symbolic interactionism.
The exclusion of both culture and the body from the foundational subject
matter of sociology is emblematic of the disciplinary boundary work that
historically served to distinguish sociology from other scientific disciplines
such as anthropology, psychology, and medicine (Turner, 1992; Calhoun
et al, 2009). The positivist epistemology undergirding this disciplinary
boundary work likewise erected rigid divisions between the realm of ideas
and spirit and the realm of matter and science. The resulting cleavage posed a
subjectivist–objectivist dilemma regarding culture’s, but also the body’s, place
in theories of social action: Was culture a relatively autonomous system of
shared meaning providing motifactional ideals and context for social action?
Was it an epiphenomenon of action providing an expedient set of cognitive
tools for directing practices? Or was it, as the body came to be understood,
merely a condition of action, something determined by “other structures—of
a more material, less ephemeral kind” (Alexander, 2003, p 5)?
The homo economicus intellectual style of early twentieth-century sociology
presupposed this dilemma.5 As a “rational” science interested in explaining
how objective social forces structure human action, sociology was resistant
to meaning-centered explanations on the grounds that they dealt with
subjective matter, notably the symbolic foundations of myth, narrative,
imagination, and emotion, which putatively had no place in modern society
(Robertson, 1988; Alexander, 2003). The human body in classical and
modern sociology underwent a comparable process of dichotomization. The
biological reductionism of viewing the body as raw material excluded the
knowledge, experience, and intentions of the lived body; and the idea of
the disembodied rational actor, emblematic of modern conceptualizations
of subjectivity, neglected the myths, motifs, and metaphors through which
individuals apprehend and articulate their and others’ bodies. Setting reason
on par with the divine, and giving it dominion over the natural world, this
rational model of self and society imputed a dualistic mind-over-matter
hierarchy to the human body, principally in the form of a differential
physiognomy of the sexes.6
Positioning culture and the body on the side of subjectivity-idealism in
counterpoint to reason-society established the symbolic and methodological
boundaries against which classical, “modern” sociology defined itself as an
impersonal, objective science concerned with social order (Turner, 1992;
Grosz, 1994; Howson and Inglis, 2001; Alexander, 2003; Fraser and Greco,
22
2005). To approach either culture or the body as anything other than the
incidental tools and products of rational actors and institutions would
have been anathematic to the scientific logic of the discipline. Shoring up
sociology’s disciplinary borders therefore included defending them against
the profanation of “unsociological” approaches. To study meaning, feeling,
and the body-subject as formative social forces in their own right was
tantamount to polluting and disordering the discipline.
What changed? Explanations of the turn in the late twentieth century to
culture and the body emphasize sociopolitical, economic, and cultural shifts
in modes of production, consumption, and identity construction. Among the
drivers of these changes, scholars frequently cite postindustrialization, late
capitalism, and globalization (Robertson, 1988; Jameson, 1991; Martin, 1992;
Turner, 2008); commercialization, digitalization, and the rise of consumer
culture (Featherstone, 2007; cf Woodward, 2012); second-wave feminism
(Turner, 1992, 2008); and the linguistic turn (Alexander and Smith, 2003).
Underscoring the symbolic basis of economic-cum-social action, these
interpretive shifts precipitated new conceptualizations of subjectivity and the
body that undermined Marxian materialist critiques of ideology that specified
culture narrowly in terms of class and political interests (see Robertson,
1988; Haraway, 1994; Turner, 1995; Alexander, 2003; Featherstone, 2007).
Reconfiguring the relationships between technology, economy, and the self,
these theoretical shifts expanded sociology’s disciplinary canopy while also
calling the generalizing tendency of modern social theory into doubt. While
the scope of this chapter prevents me from elaborating these shifts, more
germane to the thematization of culture and the body within sociology is
their shared challenge of having to contend with the conflicting intellectual
“impulses” (Frank, 1991) or “moods” (Lyotard, 1984) of the modern and
postmodern (cf Featherstone, 1989). To assert the possibility of a strong
cultural sociology of the body, we must first assay certain key fractures and
conjunctions between modern and postmodern thought—for the recovery of
the body and culture in contemporary sociology, as well as the development
thereafter of SPCS, presents, each in its own way, a countercurrent to and/or
a reconfiguration of the foundational logics of the modern and postmodern.
Interpreting modernity: the postmodern crisis of meaning and cultural

thematization of materiality and the body
When discussing postmodernity it is important to clarify that the prefix
“post” does not signify a periodizing break with modernity so much as
an interpretive break. Characterized by an attitude of incredulity toward
the grand narratives and systematizing impulses of modern social theory,
postmodernism favors the decentered authority of subjective interpretation
(Lyotard, 1984; Featherstone, 1989, 2007; Seidman, 1994; Bordo, 1998;
23
Susen, 2015). Privileging the ever-fleeting present over historical continuity,

postmodernism rejects cultural theories of text, meaning, and explanation
rooted in notions of coherence and connectivity (Featherstone, 2007).
Consequently, as with modern positivist thinking, it eschews tradition. It also
dispenses with traditional hermeneutic interpretations, since these maintain
that a singular moment or event becomes meaningful only when placed in
relation to a greater whole (Dilthey, 1976; Alexander, 2008).
In the main, postmodernism polemicizes against the modern on two
interrelated fronts, the epistemological and the temporal. In place of
historically situated, discursively grounded knowledge, it posits a plurality
of equally valid interpretations with no fixed or collective meaning. In
place of a system of signs, it posits a protean landscape of image-impressions
(Jameson, 1991), a hyperplastic reality of textual drift in which all is text
but text that is free-floating. Instead of a text, a subject, or an object,
we are given flows, networks, and assemblages—relational velocities and
intensities (Deleuze, 1992). And instead of a meaning-filled history, we are
given “a series of perpetual presents” (Featherstone, 2007, p 5), a horizon
of unweighted differences and the enduring promise of interminable
self-reinvention.
There is a striking, though flawed, egalitarianism to the idea of a social
world comprised of boundless, decentered subjectivities, where everything
can mean anything and no interpretation is judged correct or incorrect.
Because postmodern egalité flattens out meaning through equivalency, it
inadvertently exchanges one homogenizing impulse for another (cf Bordo,
1998). To wit, the interpretive interchangeability that distinguishes the
kaleidoscopic postmodern mood imposes a sublime universalism, that
of the inescapable irreconcilability of difference, which promulgates a
“crisis of representation” (Susen, 2015, p 95). For a discipline that seeks to
explain social action and primarily concerns itself with problems of order,
postmodernism is untenable. This is not to suggest that postmodernism failed
to transform sociological thought for the better. In making such a radical turn
away from objectivity and collective meaning toward subjectivity and private
knowledge, postmodernism challenged modernity’s essentialist claims to a
common world and the hegemony of solidaristic models of social stability.
What is more, the ontological uncertainty that arose from this challenge
inspired new directions for sociological thought, especially with respect to
culture and the body.
Reconceptualizing the material and psychical phenomena that make up
our social world in terms of subjective processes comprised of sensations and
pleasures, affects and feelings, and styles and representations, postmodernism
opened sociological thought to phenomenological, post-structuralist, and
praxeological theories of subject formation. These approaches understand
the self to be an “effect and function of … public and social discourse”
24
and the “acts which constitute its reality” (Butler, 1990, p 185). Neither
reducible to the mind nor to nature, neither exclusively a subject nor an
object, the social self is an embodied being in the world (Merleau-Ponty,
1945), a situation (de Beauvoir, 1949) experienced and enacted in a given
context and therefore constrained but not entirely determined by an array of
guided doings (Merleau-Ponty, 1945; Goffman, 1974). Inseparable from the
material world, the socially constructed self implicates an altogether different
metaphysics, one in which self and body, being the co-constitutive products
of an ongoing achievement (Garfinkel, 1967), are inherently malleable and
multiple yet ontologically durable—the perfect nexus for self-cultivation
through bodily practices, interactions, and projects (Gimlin, 2002), which,
although sometimes personal and idiosyncratic, remain accountable to
collective interpretation.
In addition to facilitating the thematization of the body as a social fact
worthy of study, constructivist inquiry into how one becomes a socially
embodied self insinuated culture’s involvement. Given early sociology’s
general relegation of culture to the purportedly nondeterminative sides
of the material–ideal and objective–subjective dualisms of the time, the
postmodern impulse toward fragmentation that had spurred new questions
about subject formation and the body also reinvigorated interest in
the symbolic dimensions of social life. Extending beyond the confines
of language and discourse, explorations into the culture structures
underpinning self and society began to reconsider the material (physical,
empirical, economic, etc) elements of meaning-making, especially with
respect to how individual meanings become collectively shared facticities
and thus “an essential part” of the description, interpretation, explanation,
and materialization of “social facts” (see Berger and Luckmann, 1966, p 18;
Reed, 2011, p 2).
This more reflexive examination of how culture operates on and through
(and can even formulate) material forces amounted not so much to a
nostalgic backlash against postmodernism as it did a neo-modern effort to
overcome the material–ideal divide (Robertson, 1988; Alexander, 2003).
Marking what some have dubbed “the cultural turn,” social scientists involved
in this effort sought to demonstrate the constitutive role of culture in all
domains of social life (Alexander and Smith, 2003). Doing so called for
liberating the internal, ideational dimension of social action from economic
determinism and moral equivalency without reinstating an overly macro-
social, integrationist, or micro-social, voluntaristic, view of social cohesion
(Robertson, 1988; Alexander, 2003; Featherstone, 2007; Susen, 2015;
Simko and Olick, 2021). For SPCS in particular, this meant reasserting, à la
Durkheim, the understanding that society expresses an observable, concrete,
living reality—a living reality constructed from categories of experience and
thought that filter, represent, and activate underlying social relations and
25
which take part in the ideas and symbols individuals use to describe those
relations (see Durkheim, 1915, pp 17–19; Alexander and Smith, 2003).
If the objects and interpretive conceptual tissues that comprise collective
human experience appear to be mere illusion, as the postmodernists and
post-structuralists assert, it is not because there is no there there. Rather,
it is because “to the immediate data given by the senses” something extra
is added, and that something is the psychical force of moral sentiment and
feeling that we draft from the society in which we live (Durkheim, 1915,
pp 203, 225–226, 348).
At the heart of Durkheim’s conception of culture lies an interdependent
relationship between individual and society mediated by material objects.
Individuals give expression to ideas and experience by “fix[ing] them
upon material things which symbolize them” (Durkheim, 1915, p 228).
Subjectively, these ideas and experiences may be idiosyncratic. However,
if they are to be shareable, they must necessarily connect to the shared
categories of meaning upon which social life is organized (Durkheim,
1915; Mead, 1934; Alexander, 2003). The perdurance of society depends
upon this very process of signification. If not for the materialization of
signs and institutions—those “entities that don’t sleep” (Latour, 2005,
p 70)—individuals would have to assemble the common ground of
social sentiment anew, from scratch, moment to moment, interaction
to interaction. This would hardly be efficient or conducive to the social
coordination of meanings necessary to support complex collective
organization and action. The process of signification that takes place
through the interrelationship of individuals, objects, and background
representations allows us to quickly reassemble the social in our daily
interactions, give it material form, and circulate it beyond ourselves, so
that, in transcending both time and place, we feel its enduring structure
as something living, natural … real.
The symbolic foundation of society that Durkheim illuminates in
Elementary Forms is a central feature of the Strong Program in cultural
sociology. If society is a web of crystalized relations between material
things (signifying surfaces) and collective sentiments (discursive depths),
then culture is the skein from which that web and bodies are woven (see
Durkheim, 1915; Alexander, 2003; Reed, 2011). Furthermore, each
“crystallization” within this web presents not an object—or the body—a s such
but an articulation of our interpretive “grasp on the world,” aka “situation”
(de Beauvoir, 1949, p 68). The task of the cultural sociologist is to tease out
this skein to reveal the interpretive-symbolic connections that structure and
support every articulation of social life, including the conditions of body
and embodiment that make articulation possible. It is with this charge in
mind that I propose the possibility of developing a strong cultural sociology
of the body and embodiment.
26
Toward a strong cultural sociology of the body and

embodiment
An SPCS of the body and embodiment acknowledges that self and society
are constituted through the sensuous and performative workings of a physical
body that is situated within a historically and geographically contingent
symbolic order (cf Crossley, 1995; Champagne, 2018). Consequently, an
SPCS approach to the body and embodiment concerns itself with the
material-symbolic dimensions of the corporeal body and its lived experience
(see Broch, 2020, for an example). The particular focus of this concern
stands in contradistinction to behaviorally oriented approaches that view the
symbolic dimension of the corporeal and lived body as either a background
participant in or a byproduct of objective structures, behavioral practices, and
power (Merleau-Ponty, 1945; Bourdieu, 1977, 1984; Swidler, 1986; Butler,
1990, 1993; Frank, 2012). By restricting the meaningfulness of the lived body
to whatever lines of action external conditions and power structures permit,
these approaches reduce the body (and culture) to an instrumental toolkit
made up of techniques, capitals, and tropes that individuals strategically
deploy to meet the demands of a given social context (Goffman, 1959,
1974; Bourdieu, 1977, 1984; Swidler, 1986; Frank, 2012), or they treat the
body as a discursive tabula rasa upon which meaning inscribes and reveals
itself through gestures, performances, and displays (Mead, 1934; Goffman,
1959, 1974; Foucault, 1978a, 1999; Butler, 1990).
Taking a different interpretive tack, I contend that neither the tasks of
the body nor the practical rules of the social game alone can tell us what a
body is or means. Barring some deeper anchorage to underlying collective
sentiments or structures of feeling, routinized action lacks the emotional,
moral valence necessary to serve as a structural basis for the shared system
of ideas we call society. Since a strong cultural perspective views all forms
of materiality and materially mediated experiences as being imbricated “to
some extent in a horizon of affect and meaning” (Alexander and Smith,
2003, p 12), it seeks to reach beyond surface examinations of “what a body
does” or “what is done to a body” (Crossley, 1995, p 43) to uncover the
deeper meaning structures that situate the workings of the physical and lived
body within broader discourses and narratives that are themselves part of
a symbolic system that patterns interpretation and practice. Indeed, the
interpretive lens of SPCS is particularly well suited to this type of work. If
we consider embodiment to comprise a meaning-filled relation between
the physical and the lived body and thus between the localized self and the
social world, then to understand that relationship requires an interpretive
sociology capable of teasing apart the symbolic ligatures that bind sensation
to sense and, in turn, materiality to meaning. What is needed, I argue, is a
strong cultural sociology of the body and embodiment.
27
The interpretive methodology of a strong cultural sociology of the body and

embodiment
Three methodological commitments distinguish the interpretive impulse
of a strong cultural sociology of the body. Drawing on Jeffrey C. Alexander
and Philip Smith’s (2003) Strong Program in cultural sociology and Reed’s
(2011) cultural work on meaning and interpretation, I characterize these
three commitments as follows:
1. treating culture as an independent variable, thereby acknowledging

its analytical autonomy from social-structural determinations of body
and embodiment;
2. applying hermeneutic methods to reconstruct the underlying culture
structures that contour the “landscapes of meaning” (Reed, 2011) in and
out of which the body, qua embodied situation, is constructed; and
3. utilizing “maximal interpretation” (Reed, 2011) to explain how culture
disrupts and directs social reality—its landscapes of meaning, social
structures, and thus body and embodiment.
In the subsections that follow, I describe these three methodological

commitments in greater detail, contextualizing each in relation to a specific
example of body modification—changing brown eyes to blue with contact
lenses (Bordo, 1998), breast cancer-related mastectomy (Champagne, 2018),
and ritualized tooth extraction (Durkheim, 1915)—in order to further
highlight their specific implications for research on body and embodiment
and to illuminate, more generally, the explanatory purchase that a strong
cultural sociology of the body can grant researchers and others interested
in the theory and matter of the body.
Cultural codes and the relative autonomy of culture

One of the most distinctive characteristics of SPCS is its recognition of
the relative autonomy of culture. It also is its most controversial and,
I would argue, misunderstood characteristic. By treating culture as an
independent and thus relatively autonomous variable (Alexander and
Smith, 2003), SPCS seeks to interpret and explain how cultural codes,
namely in the form of contrastive oppositions thought to be fundamental
to meaning-making, shape social structures and action. Criticisms of
SPCS generally take one of two forms: an argument against the bracketing
out of culture from social structure, on the grounds that it ignores the
behavior-restricting effects of systematic relations of power, or a question
regarding the ontological validity and explanatory relevance of binary
cultural codes.7 I will address the second of these criticisms first, before
28
turning to a discussion of their implications for the reciprocal production

of meaning and power.
With respect to binary cultural codes, it is not the Strong Program’s position
that social phenomena must be slotted into mutually exclusive categories.
Rather, SPCS contends that the cultural meanings that pattern social life are
constructed through comparative relationships of difference. Some of these
relationships are oppositional (this–not-this) while others are more associative
(similar-to-but-different-from–this). We need only to look to the binary
sex-gender order to find examples of each of these. For instance, whereas
the marked (not-male) sex-gender category “female-feminine” is understood
in opposition to the unmarked category “male-masculine,” we find on
either side of this binary an associative relationship between sex and gender
(eg, masculine gender being associated with but different from male sex).
And yet, as this example likewise shows, the affinity of meaning between
corresponding sexes and genders (ie, cisgender) is conditioned upon this
prior opposition between the marked and the unmarked. I must emphasize
here that there is nothing inherently “real” about these categories. They are
socially constructed through relational contrast. It is also important to note
that despite being relatively stable, binary codes can lose their conventional
meaning, become obsolete, or be replaced by new binaries. However, while
they remain in play, binary codes constrain and enable the infinite number
of possible divisions and affinities that can exist between them,8 and it is this
potential for arranging and containing the proliferation or collapse of salient
divisions that speaks to issues of moral valence and power.
In The History of Sexuality, Michel Foucault (1978a, p 93) asserts that power
is not something endowed within a given point or source, it is everywhere.
Power, he argues, is a substrate (think creative matrix). Imagine tension
evenly distributed across the threads of a stretched canvas. What happens
when you tug or press on a section of the canvas? A redistribution of force
creates puckers, warps, asymmetries—differences that develop into salient
formations. These formal effects are what we come to interpret as power;
power is still everywhere, just not evenly distributed. Foucault refers to
these effects, these formations, as “force relations” (1978a, pp 92–94), but
we could just as well apply the terminology of other analytical perspectives
with little to no adulteration. We might, for example, think of them as
symbolic “distinctions,” as observable locations within a social-symbolic field
(Bourdieu, 1984). Or we might think of them as perceived lines or poles of
potential action (Mead, 1934; Merleau-Ponty, 1945; Goffman, 1959, 1974)
whose forms are made intelligible through an interpretive framework such
as a cultural schema or frame (Goffman, 1974), perceptual filter (Friedman,
2013), or cultural script (Alexander, 2004).
Terminology aside, what each of these propositions share in common is
a reliance upon collective representations, or shared classificatory contexts.
29
Just as power is everywhere, so too is meaning. Neither power nor meaning

is endowed. Each must be made, and meaning in particular is made through
symbolization—through interpretive processes of classification (distribution)
that cluster and divide human experience into the more or less crystalized
force relations of meaning we come to know and share as categories of
experience, feeling, and thought, significant gestures, and classifiable
bodies. In short, one cannot divide the substrate of lived experience into
socially intelligible, citable classifications without creating a contrastive
boundary, an inside and outside, that copresents a relation of power.
Like power in my analogy of tugging on an evenly stretched canvas, “the
grip of culture” (Bordo, 1998) makes matter meaningful, but not equally
meaningful; some matter is characterized positively and some negatively.9
And so it stands to reason that meaning matters and that the hermeneutic
reconstruction of meaning eschewed by postmodernism, but embraced by
SPCS, offers an interpretation of the symbolic relations of power as well as
their material stakes.
Consider Susan Bordo’s (1998) plea for recognizing the perils of flattening
out meaning when we ignore the historicity and cultural contexts of
“beautifying” body projects. In “Material Girl,” Bordo critiques a 1988
episode of the Phil Donahue Show in which the host asked a purposively
diverse audience whether advertisements for DuraSoft colored contact
lenses, which proposed to “get brown eyes a second look” by making them
appear violet, were racist. The audience answered “No.” Changing one’s eye
color was a “matter of creative expression,” a form of free play no different
than putting on makeup or styling one’s hair (Bordo, 1998, p 48). Under
the banner of “free play,” the audience viewed “all cosmetic changes as …
having equal political valence … and cultural meaning” (p 48), which is to
say, as Bordo points out, no valence or meaning at all.
What the show’s audience members may not be consciously self-aware of
is exactly what the cultural sociologist seeks to bring to light: the taken-for-
granted forms of meaning—the cultural codes—that scaffold social action
and give materiality its negative or positive charge. The implication of
the rhetoric of “free play”—that choice is free of connotation, that self-
determination is unlimited, and that meaning-making is up for grabs—belies
the cultural mediation of materiality that constrains and enables meaning as
well as choice. The historicity of gendered and racialized codes of civility/
incivility and the beautiful/sublime establishes, along with other background
representations, a “pedagogy” of beauty that specifies different “requirements
… for different groups” and ensures that not all body transformations are
commensurate (Bordo, 1998, pp 48–49). The devaluation of dark skin and
natural Black hair is one example of how racial discrimination relies on
cultural signification to exploit the material affordances and limitations of
the physical body. It also highlights that the meanings we impute to the
30
body and bodily action are what give the body its moral weight. Material
affordances and technology may, like culture itself, enable or constrain bodily
agency, but, as Bordo notes, a white female celebrity’s cornrows and a Black
woman’s hair straightening are not equivalent practices. She writes, “When
Oprah Winfrey admitted … that all her life she has desperately longed to
have ‘hair that swings from side to side’ … she revealed the power of racial
as well as gender normalization, normalization not only to ‘femininity,’ but
to the Caucasian standards of beauty” (p 49).
To heed Bordo’s critique is to recognize that relations of power congeal
between poles of meaning, which themselves delimit potential lines or poles
of action (Merleau-P onty, 1945). What is more, these meaning structures are
often hidden beneath the surface of witnessable practices. Thus the cultural
sociologist of the body must use the tools of interpretation to excavate the
cultural forms of moral sentiment that bring us from sheer corporeality
(body) to lived corporeality (embodiment), to that which is enfleshed rather
than simply inflected with meaning.
The hermeneutic reconstruction of meaning

Strong Program cultural sociology employs the interpretive lens of
hermeneutic reconstruction to show how the elemental structures of
culture—myth, narrative, discourse, and symbols—form the basis of social life
(Durkheim, 1915; Alexander and Smith, 2003; Woodward, 2012). Culture,
like society, does not live alone in the mind. To be knowable and endure,
it must be given form and put into relation. Wrought through and upon
material and corporeal forms, culture allows us to locate meaning in, as well
as impute it to, the body and lived experience, such that we “touch symbols
when we think we are touching bodies and material objects, and vice versa”
(Paz, 1969, p 69). This reversible fusion of materiality and meaning allows
us to (re)make and “[re]finish ourselves” (Geertz, 1973) and our bodies by
way of culture and thus to be embodied as well as have a body.
To better understand the phenomenology of reversibility, it is helpful to
imagine the mutually implicative relationship that exists between the body
and the embodied self in analogical terms. Both a material and symbolic
form, object as well as subject, the embodied self conjoins the parallel figures
of somatics and semiotics—of bodily surfaces conjoined with signified depths; of
sense and sensibility—of physical sense impressions being bound to processes
of symbolization; and of text and textuality—of the physical body-as-project,
or work, and its ongoing interpretive entextualization (see Barthes, 1977;
Csordas, 1994).
What each of these analogies conveys is the notion of an embodied self
that at once experiences thingness and beingness, something that can touch
as well as be subject to touch and that can interpret as well as be subject
31
to interpretation. Most of the time we are not consciously aware of our

bodies. Nor are we generally aware of, as my discussion of Bordo (1998) in
the previous section suggests, the body’s interpretive fusion with meaning,
that is, its embodiment or the quality of being invested with a living value
(Merleau-Ponty, 1945, p 52). This is because in the immersive flow of
everyday life, the body, as Drew Leder describes it, “not only projects
outward in experience but falls back into unexperienceable depths” (1990,
p 53). The inexperienceability to which Leder refers brings to mind a related
phenomenon common to processes of signification, and that is the sign’s
reliance upon the repression—the inexperienceability—of the relational gap
between form and content. Regardless of the form in which it is given (be
it a sense impression, a feeling, material surface, or image) the sign is not
a thing in and of itself but rather an articulation of terms, most simply of
a material signifier (form) and a signified (content).10 When it successfully
represses the relational gap between these two terms, the sign tricks us in a
way to conflate form with content, content with meaning, and meaning with
form. This is what allows us to transform an object into a subject-object,
to fuse a physical body with a situated, meaning-filled embodied self—to
throw together sense-cum-sensibility and text-cum-textuality and touch
ideas when we think we are touching or engaging with material forms. We
can identify this quite readily in binary gender systems of meaning wherein
a soft, voluminous, curvilinear chest is interpreted normatively as feminine
and constitutes a key marker for identifying female subjects in social space
(Champagne, 2018).
In short, processes of signification and interpretation work together.
A sign has meaning when it articulates an interpretative relation between
a signifying surface and a signified depth. The elemental structures of
culture are what help to fuse the relational gap between terms and make
interpretations stick. They assist the interpretive process by forming a type
of material-cultural fascia between “a living structure and its environment”
(Dilthey, 1976, p 236) or, correspondingly, between self and society, body
and embodiment, experience and meaning. Yet, just as we normally remain
unaware of our individual body despite it being ever present (Leder, 1990),
these elemental culture structures are not always available to us at the level
of practical consciousness (see Garfinkel, 1967; Goffman, 1974; Bourdieu,
1977). Consequently, the deep meanings that cultural sociologists seek to
bring out may not be “immediately obvious to the investigator or to the
investigator’s subjects” (Reed, 2011, p 36) even though meaning, like power,
is everywhere. What is needed, then, is a method of analysis that allows
the investigator to dearticulate the sign (given to us, like embodiment, as a
whole) in order to identify its underlying cultural codes that structure the
webs of meaning within which the embodied self is suspended. Hermeneutic
reconstruction provides such a method.
32
In the hermeneutic tradition, the part is understood in relation to the

whole, and vice versa. In classical hermeneutic philosophy, this relay
exemplifies the interpretive work that takes place at the interactional horizon
between a text and a reader. But this relation is applicable to any interpretive
horizon, be it between the familiar and the unfamiliar, an existing schema
and new information, or the local and the global, to name but a few. To
approach the body hermeneutically is to conceptualize it as proposing a
fusion of interpretive horizons—as constituting a meaning-relation between
the physical body and the lived body and, therefore, between the localized
embodied self and the social world. Maintaining a deep interest in these
points of fusion, a hermeneutical, strong cultural sociology of the body
brackets out nonsymbolic structures in order to foreground the cultural
codes and interpretive processes that bind individual sense experience, and
the material body more generally, to systems of meaning.
This meaning-centered approach stands in stark contrast to materialist and
praxeological approaches that either reject interpretation outright (cf Latour,
1996) or reduce meaning to a behavioral relation between objectivities (cf
Mead, 1934; Bourdieu, 1984). Hewing too closely to observable effects is
like mistaking the movements of a weathervane for the wind itself. People
need not observe a weathervane to know windiness, not when they already
have stories and metaphors about and an aesthetic sense of the wind.
How people handle meanings is not always conspicuous, and sometimes
meaning construction happens in our most intimate moments. To access the
inconspicuous requires an interpretive lens with an aperture wide enough
to isolate meaning structures from within and against their experiential
backgrounds. Narrowly pragmatic, action-centered approaches are simply too
restrictive to attend to the structures of meaning within which “objective”
actions, flows, and displays are, themselves, relationally interpreted and
produced. Consequently, they do not permit us appreciable insight into how
social actors locate and relocate themselves through sensuous, embodied webs
of meaning, which, having both a subjective and an objective component,
can prevail even when their objective conditions have changed.
Such is the case with breast cancer-related mastectomy, where the
derangement of normative objective relations (ie, breastedness with biological
sex) is believed to effectuate a “biographical disruption” necessitating
repair (Bury, 1982; Champagne, 2018). Whereas materialist-praxeological
perspectives emphasize a need for materially (or mimetically) restoring
the taken-for-g ranted homology between breastedness and female sex
(and by association femininity), discursive-constructivist perspectives
emphasize a need for narrative (or diegetic) repair (Champagne, 2018). An
SPCS hermeneutical approach walks a line between the two, giving us a
way to understand how meanings are activated and reactivated through a
combination of ritual-like everyday practices, materiality, and narrativity.
33
Take, for instance, this account of a daily parent–child interaction ritual

presented to me (see Champagne, 2018) by Holly, a 40-something,
nonreconstructed, Black female breast cancer survivor. As you read it, see if
you can identify where the phenomenon of reversibility occurs and how it
creates a part-to-whole relationship between the present and the past. Then
ask yourself: What sort of meaning is reconvening here?
With my son, because he was breastfed and he was still co-sleeping

with me, and he’d still touch them [my breasts] for comfort, we
had conversations constantly in preparation of this drastic change
[mastectomy]. To this day [postmastectomy], his hand will still go in
my shirt, and he’s like, “The skin is still so soft.” And that’s just like
heartwarming—that that’s not a big deal [to him].
When Holly says “that that’s not a big deal [to him],” she is referring to the
absence of her breasts. What makes this embodied encounter particularly
“heartwarming” is that it retains and reinforces, for Holly and her son, the
familiarity of a premastectomy bonding ritual and its attendant meanings.
That Holly’s nonreconstructed chest has retained an element of its original
softness creates a sensuous, mimetic, material and therefore durable link
between Holly’s former healthy breast and her currently mastectomized
chest. It therefore permits, under new material conditions, the reconvening
of some of the deeper meanings of wellness previously articulated by the
reversable arrangement held between a soft material surface, the breast, and
ideas of feminine wholeness. Here, meaning is restored not by recreating a
breast mound but by reconnecting embodied experience (a part) to deeper
meanings established over time (a whole). This is a distinctively hermeneutic,
interpretive process, one that strictly pragmatic approaches to the body are
ill-equipped to explain.
Maximal interpretation: theory, description, and explanation

There is a tendency in the social sciences to equate interpretation with
description. It may indeed be the case that social meanings are made visible
through experiential contact with descriptively discrete arrangements of
form, such as symbols or things (Cassirer, 1957; Alexander, 2008, 2010; cf
Champagne, 2018), but that does not mean that description alone is capable
of conveying the social significance of those arrangements. Because meaning-
making involves a hermeneutic relation between part and whole, one cannot
presume to comprehend the proverbial forest by merely mapping out its
trees. In The Interpretation of Cultures, Clifford Geertz asserts that “cultural
analysis is (or should be) guessing at meanings, assessing the guesses, and
drawing explanatory conclusions from the better guesses,” not charting,
34
like a cartographer, the surface “continent[s]‌of meaning” (1973, p 20).

Geertz dubbed his interpretive method thick description, not because it is
rife with detailed observation but because every guess, being comprised of
interpretations of other people’s interpretations, is already thickly layered with
meaning. The aim of analysis, then, is not to render empirical observations
in exhaustive detail. The goal is to unpack their conceptual worlds—the
underlying signifying structures, the symbolic webs (or “fasciae” as I have
referred to them elsewhere) that connect parts to wholes—in order to
evaluate and explain “their social ground and import” (Geertz, 1973, p
9). Cultural analysis of this type seeks to disclose the insinuated symbolic
background within and against which bodies and social action are observed.
To do this, to “ferret out” the hidden landscapes of social meaning, requires
a combination of thick description and analytical abstraction, a fusion of
evidence and theory that cultural sociologist Isaac Ariail Reed (2011) defines
as maximal interpretation.
According to Reed, building a maximal interpretation involves moving
between the signs of fact, which we easily infer from empirical observation,
and the signs of theory, which reflect more comprehensive understandings
of “the causes and consequences of social action in many times and places”
(2011, p 24). The purpose of hermeneutically tacking back and forth between
these two sets of signs is to bring a piece of theory to bear upon a piece
of evidence in order to excavate the “deeper social force … or underlying
discursive formation” (p 23) it conceals and thereby move beyond an initial
minimal interpretation of evidence to develop a new maximal interpretation
capable of expressing the cultural-symbolic depths of the empirical facts at
hand. To better understand the relationship between evidence and theory
and the difference between minimal and maximal interpretations that Reed
is proposing, let us examine a brief example from Durkheim’s Elementary
Forms (1915, p 116):
Among the Arunta, the extraction of teeth is practised only in the

clans of the rain and of water; now according to tradition, the object
of this operation is to make their faces look like certain black clouds
with light borders which are believed to announce the speedy arrival
of rain, and which are therefore considered things of the same family.
Durkheim has provided a minimal interpretation of an Arunta bodily

practice. With only a basic semantic understanding of terms, one can make
connections between the reported events and conclude from the evidence
that the mimetic correspondence between tooth extraction and certain black
clouds accounts for the observed behavior.
While all interpretation begins with evidence, or signs of fact, which
Durkheim has furnished in the quoted example, facts alone do not constitute
35
a maximal interpretation. And although mimetic similarity can both constrain

and motivate highly iconic forms of emblematization that are no less rich
in constructed meaning than symbols that are devoid of such “natural”
correspondence, this particular interpretation of an Arunta rite of passage
fails to move beyond explicit knowledge and thin description to reconstruct
the deeper collective representations—here, the myths, believed supernatural
relations, complexes of meaning with no obvious relation to the signifying
form, and so forth—that not only present a unifying external marker of
identity to this segment of the Arunta population but also give to them a
sense of participating in a shared moral life.11 In other words, a symbol may
be “thick” with significance, but a social scientist’s interpretation of that
significance is only maximal when it (1) moves beyond description and
evidence to unpack and reconstruct the underlying “webs” of meaning that
have been condensed and subsumed under the sign-symbol, which may take
the form of a ritual or practice, and then (2) disentangle this “webbing” for
others by abstracting it through an explanatory theoretical lens (cf Geertz,
1973; Reed, 2011). To move from minimal to maximal interpretation,
Durkheim would have to apply theoretical signifiers, such as his notion of
the totemic principle or collective consciousness, in order to illuminate how the
feeling of sacred communion (collective consciousness) that the Arunta
experienced while gathered together and acting in unison can be given
emblematic (totemic) expression, such that the collective sentiment of unity
they previously experienced may continually reconvene in the material
presence of their missing teeth long after the original extraction event has
transpired. This—the application of theoretical signifiers and interpretation
to evidence—is maximal interpretation.
Certainly SPCS is not the only cultural approach to bring theory to bear
upon empirical facts, but it does so with a meaning-centered understanding
of culture and the body. This distinction is important, not in the least because
where we locate meaning and thereby define culture affects how we theorize
body and embodiment. For SPCS, the meanings that give the lived body its
moral depth are not the byproducts of objective structures (Bourdieu, 1977,
1984), uses (Mead, 1934), or tasks (Frank, 1991). Nor are they confined to
the cultural and economic capitals or the expressive garb that individuals
respectively mobilize or strategically don and doff to differentiate themselves
from others (Goffman, 1959; Bourdieu, 1984). This is not to suggest that
observable behavior and structures are not riven with meaning but rather
that meaning is not reducible to them.
In the same vein as the aphoristic warning that one “[can]not see the forest for
the trees,” to presume to know the embodied self solely from the performative
doings of the physical body—to consider the act everything (cf Butler, 1990)—
loses sight of the underlying sentiments that give the lived body and social
action their organizing moral, motifactional force. This moral force is not
36
intrinsic to things themselves, but it also does not emerge from the irruption
of either material or gestural matter upon the senses (see Mead, 1934; Latour,
2005, p 80). Actions are meaningful only when they find anchorage in a shared
symbolic system, such as a common discourse. Meaning, therefore, is neither
an “hallucinatory effect” of repetition (Butler, 1990) nor the perceptibility of
deviation from a mean (Canguilhem, 1978; Foucault, 1999). As Durkheim
reminds us, neither the habitual rising and setting of the sun nor its occasional
eclipse can account for the religious feeling of awe or the myths we impute to it
(1915, pp 28–29, 84). By way of analogy, it is not the appearance of performative
regularity (or irregularity) or the presence of material affordances that account
for the body’s significance but rather the horizons of meaning within which
these perceptual phenomena are embedded and through and out of which the
lived body is constructed (Butler, 1993; Champagne, 2018).
The meanings and personalities that the “imagination place[s]‌behind
things” (Durkheim, 1915, p 77) are enabled by the collective representations of
culture. These representations allow us to connect “from within the confines
of the skin to what lies beyond [as well as within our] bodily frame” (Dewey,
1934, p 13). As both matter and idea, the body comprises a fundamental
medium through which we are brought into direct, interpretive contact
with the conceptual tissues and material anchors that hold meaning in place.
Through the surfaces of the body, we connect culture to sensuous form and
sensuous form to culture, not only praxically or through ratiocination alone
but, more durably, by way of sense, feeling, emotion, affect, imagination,
and symbolization—the very personal means of mind–body connection that
undergird our individual and collective representations.
If, as Alexander asserts, “interpreting is a way of positioning, of saying who
we are” (2008, p 158), then it may be said that the lived body, in calling out
to itself, actively participates in its own meaning-making, and in so doing
helps each of us to formulate our own maximal interpretations of the self and
society. As the nexus of self and world, body and embodiment are already
thick with meaning. So it is the task of the strong cultural sociologist to
draw equally thick, maximal interpretations of the culture structures that
give body and embodiment their significance.
Conclusion
In this chapter I advance the possibility of developing a meaning-centered,
strong cultural sociology of the body and embodiment, one that approaches
body and embodiment as constituting a uniquely hermeneutical situation—a
fusion of subject and object, ideality and materiality—structured by cultural
codes and dependent upon interpretation for getting itself out into the social
world. Tracing the thematization of culture and the body along the modern,
postmodern, and neo-modern analytical impulses (or moods) that are still
37
present in contemporary sociological thought, I show how competing

understandings regarding the degree to which symbols and meanings
comprise a relatively autonomous and ideal (as opposed to dependent
and instrumental) resource have shaped how each of these impulses
define and locate the cultural dimension of social life. In this manner,
I concordantly show the degree to which each analytical mood considers
culture a “motifactional” (Black, 1994) force capable of suffusing bodies
and materialities with moral significance and thus capable of animating and
structuring social action. Situating the Strong Program in cultural sociology
within the neo-modern context, I specify its methodological commitments
to the relative autonomy of culture, hermeneutic reconstruction, and
maximal interpretation, claiming each of these for the development of a
strong cultural sociology of the body and embodiment. Such a program is,
I argue, uniquely suited to ferreting out the conceptual tissues—the personal
and collective representations, senses and sensibilities—through which the
physical body comes to embody self, society, and world.
Notes
1
For a full discussion of cultural pragmatics as a macro-sociological model of social action
qua cultural performance, see Alexander (2004).
2
In this paper I use the term praxeological to distinguish perspectives of subject
formation that emphasize the role of practices worked on or through the body (eg,
disciplines, displays, doings, performances) from those that emphasize meaning-making
or interpretation.
3
Philosopher David Black argues that motives, which we tend to think of in the value-
neutral terms of cause and effect, are mitigated by underlying motifs (narrative patterns,
themes, and metaphors) that “not only move[ ] us from one moral place to the next, but
also create the moral places we move among” (1994, p 361). In contrast to motivation,
which supposes an instrumental, means–ends relationship to action, motifaction refers
to a narrativistic orientational power that directs action.
4
The professionalization of sociology as a nomothetic science directed toward policy is
due in part to the pragmatic and statistical traditions of, respectively, the Chicago School
and Columbia University (see Calhoun et al, 2009).
5
See Turner’s (1992, p 33) discussion of Weber, Pareto, and Parsons and the interaction
between sociology and economics.
6
Bodies coded male/masculine were associated with the morally elevated Apollonian
characteristics of objectivity, rationality, form, and order, whereas bodies coded female/
feminine were associated with the morally abased Dionysian characteristics of subjectivity,
emotion, formless content, and disorder (see Nietzsche, 1993; Grosz, 1994).
7
See Alexander and Smith (2010) contra Stoltz (2021). If, as Stoltz argues, representational
signs do not derive their meaning in opposition to other signs, then culture may still
exercise relative autonomy from other social structures, just not vis-à-vis a system of
binary oppositions.
8
Consider that on a number line there exists between 0 and 1 an infinite number of
divisions—divisions that are locatable by their proximity to and distance from the flanking
integers. Similarly, the proliferation of identifiable genders in the American context occurs
38
within a relational and therefore self-referential system—expressly, in reference to the

outer male–female representational poles of a binary sex-gender order.
9
See Bordo’s (1998, p 52) reference to the “Doll Test” used in the Brown v. the Board of
Education court hearings to demonstrate the negative effects of segregation on children’s
attributions of positive and negative value, which varied according the presented doll’s
skin color.
10
According to Barthes (1964, p 47), because a signifier mediates the associative elements—
objects, images, and discourses—of a sign, some matter is necessary to it; the signifier is,
therefore, always material (eg, a sound, an image, an object).
11
For further discussion on a variety of related issues, including the distinction between icons
and symbols, motivated and unmotivated signs, etc, see Charles S. Peirce (1955), Roland
Barthes (1957, especially “Myth as a Semiological System,” “The Form and the Concept,”
and “The Signification”), Ernst Cassirer (1957, in particular Chapter 2 “Concept and
Object” and his discussion of intuitive symbolic reality on p 319), Claude Lévi-Strauss
(1966, specifically Chapter 1 “The Science of the Concrete”), Mary Douglas (1970),
Ferdinand de Saussure (1972), Jeffrey C. Alexander (2010), and Anne Marie Champagne
(2018).
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43
2
Thinking the Molecular

Ben Spatz
What are you made of? Look at your hands. Draw one palm across
the other. Feel the density of your tissues, the bones, musculature,
and sinuous ligaments. What gives your tissues substance and
form? You have probably been told that your body is composed
of trillions of living cells. But what are your cells made of? What
is the stuff of life?
—Natasha Myers, Rendering Life Molecular
In this chapter, I contest the assumed primacy of technoscientific and

biochemical methods in determining what human (and other) bodies
are made of. From a perspective grounded in critical race, cultural, and
performance studies, as well as embodied artistic research, I offer an expanded
molecular theory of identity that foregrounds the radical asymmetry of
what are still too often glossed as sociocultural signs or attributes rather
than material substances. This argument builds upon and extends my
previous theorization of technique as knowledge (Spatz, 2015, 2020a).
I begin by surveying a handful of recent critical treatments of “hard”—that
is, technoscientifically graspable—physical and chemical molecules that
foreground their racial and gendered construction. I then consider the politics
implied by a more expansive conception of the molecular, comparing and
contrasting this with theories of the molecular that follow Gilles Deleuze and
Félix Guattari. The final section begins to imagine the implications of such a
conceptual shift for experimental research methods. These include not only
a richer way to theorize embodied difference but also a radical reshuffling of
the dominant disciplinary hierarchies that attach greater epistemic primacy
to more quantitative methods. To understand the radical asymmetry of the
molecular, I argue, we must recognize that critical race theory and other
44
politicized new materialisms refer as much to the substance of the world as

do the harder sciences.1
Hard and soft molecules

As Natasha Myers explains in Rendering Life Molecular, the discovery and
definition of biochemical molecules as “the stuff of life” has revolutionized
the scientific understanding of human embodiment and led, like other
technoscientific developments, to the invention and implementation of
technologies with far-reaching impact that only continues to grow. “In
the twenty-first century,” Myers writes, “life and living bodies have been
rendered thoroughly molecular” (2015, p x), so that the very word life in
some contexts becomes almost synonymous with an analysis of the cells,
tissues, and molecules that biochemistry, neuroscience, physiology, and
other technoscientific disciplines investigate. Yet, as she acknowledges on
the same page, the concept of the molecular begins long before the modern
scientific map of the body: a “propensity to parse the world into molecular
components has a long history that extends back to ancient philosophers
who postulated that the worldly stuff we could see and feel had an unseen
‘inner constitution’; matter, it was thought, was made up of subvisible
atoms or particles.” In her ethnographic study of protein crystallographers,
Myers continues the important work of social epistemology, revealing how
laboratory scientists do not simply discover preexisting material objects
but “render” them in ways that are at once material, social, cultural,
and aesthetic, as well as embodied and performative. Such studies have
been crucial to my own previous attempts to wrest from technoscience
the exclusive claim to authoritative knowledge.2 However, the cultural
construction of technoscientific knowledge is only one side of the coin.
In this chapter I explore the other side, which is no less important: the
materiality and relative reliability of that which is known and rendered by
non-technoscientific experts.
Several recent studies demonstrate that even the most rigorously quantifiable
and technoscientifically specified molecules are also thoroughly sociocultural.
The most critically astute of these, a handful of which I consider in this
section, also highlight the ways in which positing such molecules as purely
biochemical objects not only entrenches the power of technoscientific
ontologies but also reinscribes the racial and gender hierarchies attached
to those ways of knowing. As a first example, the ongoing centrality of
DNA in scientific, political, and critical debates is due to its powerful yet
still not fully understood relationship to the development of bodies. As
Kim TallBear (2013) explains, while DNA is typically formulated as the
material foundation of racial and ethnic heritage, the genetic mapping
of inherited biochemical links also depends upon prior groupings of
45
populations, which are necessarily social and often racial in nature. DNA
thus does not cause or define racial identity any more than it is caused and
defined by social processes of racialization. In human genome diversity
research, faith in “molecular origins” refers back to “ancestral populations,”
which are themselves defined via contemporary “reference populations”
(TallBear, 2013, pp 5–6). As a result, “each of those constitutive elements
operates within a loop of circular reasoning,” inasmuch as the categories into
which genes are sorted are themselves defined by reference to socially and
historically grouped populations. While the rhetoric of DNA assumes that
it grounds populations in materiality, the process of genetic analysis is itself
also grounded in stories about peoples.
DNA is thus “material-semiotic” insofar as it is both “supported by and
threads back into the social-historical fabric to (re)constitute the categories
and narratives by which we order life” (TallBear, 2013, p 7). Moreover, “as
DNA is increasingly called upon to speak to questions of racialized and
exclusionary citizenship and belonging, understanding genetic ancestry
as a multivalent political object could not be more important” (Tamarkin,
2020, p 14). Following such analyses, we must conclude that DNA is not
simply the “stuff of life,” out of which racial, ethnic, national, and citizen
identities are constructed; it is also constructed out of racial imaginaries
and linked to genetic markers by unmarked but hegemonically white
disciplinary histories. What kind of molecule is this, then? On the one
hand, DNA is undeniably a molecule of identity, a material particle that not
only represents but also concretely transmits identity and links individuals
together in a way that is not just social. On the other hand, it is also a
molecule of technique, a socially constructed unit that becomes available only
through the enactment of “repeatable pathways” or disciplinary knowledge
(Spatz, 2015, p 44), in this case of both social history and technoscientific
biochemistry. If my previous work on technique attempted to show how
identity is made of technique—“what we know becomes who we are” (Spatz,
2015, p 56)—I have since become more aware of the importance of stressing
a complementary claim, that technique is made of identity—what we know
arises out of who we are. In other words, the “loop of circular reasoning”
that generates a material-semiotic object like DNA is not a glitch or a flaw
in genetic knowledge but an essential feature of knowledge production.
A theory of the molecular that emphasizes only the technical, or only the
identitarian, is therefore incomplete. What I hope to develop here, drawing
upon TallBear and others, is a concept of the molecular that embraces the
mutual construction of identity and technique.
Quite similar social and political debates and contestations apply to
testosterone, although its molecular structure and its biochemical function
are very different. If DNA is commonly understood as constituting race,
while in fact also being constituted by race, then testosterone is typically
46
understood as constituting gender, while in fact its substance and workings

are also constituted by gender. Paul Preciado’s theory-memoir Testo Junkie
makes this abundantly clear in its investigation and contextualization of
testosterone, or “T,” within a vast social and political matrix of gender and
sexuality. For example, the makers of the Testogel brand of T assume that
its user “is a ‘man’ who isn’t producing enough androgen naturally and who,
obviously, is heterosexual” (Preciado, 2013, p 60). This “man” is presumed
to have his preexisting but insufficient manhood confirmed and consolidated
by testosterone, in a similar way as ancestry is presumed to be preexisting but
inconclusively established before it is confirmed by DNA testing. Biomedical
renderings of transgender identity as a medically approved passage between
two preexisting categories further sediment a one-way relationship between
testosterone and gender, since “in order to legally obtain a dose of synthetic
testosterone, it is necessary to stop defining yourself as a woman.” In contrast,
what Preciado wants to introduce as gender “piracy” or “hacking” involves
a radical destabilization of the relationship between technique/technology
(testosterone as biochemical hormone) and identity (testosterone as molecular
manhood). This can be effected, he suggests, through a kind of embodied
research that embraces “the invention of new techniques of the self and
repertories of practices” (Preciado, 2013, pp 55, 351).3 The molecule at
the heart of such research cannot be simply biochemical, as it is produced
through both technoscientific practices of biochemistry and cultural and
embodied practices of gender and sexuality. For Preciado, a principle of
self-experimentation must be at the heart of gender liberation, so that
“anyone wishing to be a political subject will begin by being the lab rat
in her or his own laboratory” (p 353). But the counterpart to this claim is
the possibility of inventing genuinely and materially new gender identities
through experimental practice. After all, the point of experimenting with a
molecule like DNA or testosterone—not in the technoscientific laboratory
but in the laboratory of everyday life—is not merely to change oneself by
changing one’s techniques but also to invent new techniques that, because
they are made of the “stuff” of identity, may carry a politics of their own.
DNA and testosterone are among the innumerable biochemical molecules
that make up human and other living bodies. Tracking the animate journeys
of the metals lead and mercury, Mel Y. Chen analogously examines how
these two substances, despite occupying “the lowest end of the animacy
hierarchy”—even Aristotle considers them “dead” matter, lacking the
animating principle of “soul”—can nevertheless become racialized, both
constituting and being constituted by racial formations (Chen, 2012, p 4).
For Chen, the metal lead is not only the chemical element Pb but also, again,
a “material-semiotic” substance that may at times be “animated in novel
ways,” taking on “new meaning and political character” as it shifts racial
identities—for example, from a disabling pollutant raced and classed as black
47
and poor to an invasive asian or chinese toxin endangering the presumed

intelligence and innocence of white children (p 166).4 Going even further
to theorize the “biomythography” of racialized molecules, Tiffany Lethabo
King explores the relationship between blackness and indigo as portrayed
in Julie Dash’s film Daughters of the Dust.5 Rejecting the concept of labor as
too reductive to capture the relationship between black embodiment and
the indigo plant, T.L. King describes “Blackness as coterminous with a
series of chemical reactions and as porous bodies that exceed the humanist
ontological boundaries that would separate plant, objects, and human flesh
from one another” (2019, p 119). In Dash’s portrayal of indigo plantation
workers as “blue-handed,” we find not merely a portrayal of black labor but
also a project of artistic research that reveals “a molecular process of a body
becoming both flesh and indican” (p 130; indican is a chemical precursor
to indigo dye). While the “indigo stain is knowable only at the molecular
level”—“slaves are poisoned and die,” but the chemical does not really
appear as a bluish tint on the skin—it becomes “perceptible to the human
eye … through decolonial art such as Dash’s,” which makes visible forms
of molecular violence that are otherwise hidden by colonial regimes of
knowledge (p 130). As with Chen’s tracing of lead, toxicity here is racialized
in ways that biochemistry cannot explain. It is not only that the biochemical
molecule indican helps to construct the meaning of blackness; equally, the
indigo dye is blackened through a historical retelling that refuses to exclude
slavery and colonialism from the realm of the material.
My claim here is that a racial analysis of molecules, or a molecular analysis
of race, does more than reveal how material objects and substances are swept
up into social and cultural discourse. This claim could be made while keeping
intact an ontological distinction between culture and matter that attends to
only one direction of flow between them: the way in which sociocultural
forces act upon material substrates. No scientist would deny that this is the
case. What critical thought contributes, however, is a further claim: that
molecules are themselves materially constituted by sociocultural practices,
there being no pure substrate of materiality outside the sociocultural. If this is
the case, then no absolutely distinct biochemical model can be separated from
the racialized and gendered contexts in which it is mobilized. Instead, what
we encounter are relatively distinct yet overlapping disciplines, each with their
own methods and onto-epistemologies for storying the material: molecular
biology, with its technoscientific quantification of matter; anthropology, with
its studies of the work that molecules do in particular situations, including
those of the scientific laboratory; cultural studies, analyzing the entanglement
of the biochemical with other discourses on a larger scale; and others even
farther afield, such as the biomythographics of artistic research. A genuinely
interdisciplinary perspective must recognize the legitimacy of all these
disciplines—as well as those still excluded from academic recognition—in
48
making claims about what a given molecule means or does. A truly radical
interdisciplinarity—one that is also intersectional—would also recognize the
differential power dynamics among these fields and critique the prevailing
hierarchy of knowledge by which they are accorded differing ontological
force. It is, after all, social and political history that determines why some
disciplines are understood as defining the most fundamental reality, others as
studying the merely cultural, and others, with even less epistemic legitimacy,
as merely forms of culture themselves.6 To approach the question of what
is material therefore demands an inquiry into the differential legitimization
of diverse forms of knowledge.
I have introduced the molecular through the “hard” molecules of
technoscience in order to appropriate it for a range of molecules that are not
measurable or localizable in the same ways. To begin with, let us consider
the materiality of what I call embodied technique.7 A gesture, a melody, a
joke, a dance, a rhythm, a habit, a gait, an exercise: By what right are such
named chunks of embodied technique habitually excluded from the realm
of the material? In whose interest is it assumed that aspects of embodiment
that cannot be reliably located and measured by technoscientific means
are in that sense immaterial? Would it not be more accurate—and more
ethical—to name those aspects of material embodiment that are localizable
and quantifiable as such, appreciating the extent of their reliability, and the
technologies this affords, but not for that reason according them greater
ontological reality? Taking the primary example developed in my own
artistic research practice, a song cannot be extracted from the body (see
Spatz, 2015, pp 136–147; Spatz, 2019). One cannot pull a song out of the
body and examine its structure independently, using the anatomical and
anatomizing method that arguably founds modern science by extracting
natural objects from their temporal and geographical contexts (Knorr
Cetina, 1992). But this does not mean that we cannot work with songs or
that they do not push back against us in their own material ways. A song
is materially embodied, even if it cannot be isolated anatomically. What
must be rejected is a definition of materiality that is based upon anatomical
dissection.8 Songs are also components or elements of our bodies. They
are inside us while also constituting us, like biochemical molecules, even if
they cannot be extracted or measured biochemically. The same goes for all
kinds of embodied knowledges: the only way to get such phenomena out of
matter is to actively exclude or dematerialize them through the invention of
an immaterial stratum of “mind” or “culture,” that which is defined against
matter. If we avoid this step, we can affirm the materiality of phenomena
that otherwise remain trapped within limiting categories of the social, the
cultural, and the cognitive.
What then are bodies made of? We are, of course, made of molecules in
the sense developed in biochemistry. We are composed of cells, inhabited
49
by bacteria, orchestrated by hormones, coordinated by neurons, and

constituted by many kinds of molecules moving at different speeds, from
the slowness of bone to the lighting of electrochemical impulse. But we
are also literally, materially, and not just metaphorically made of songs,
gestures, memories, ideas, and techniques. There is no strict ontological
line to be drawn between technoscientific molecules and other kinds of
molecular substances.9 On the contrary, the former are simply and precisely
that: molecules accessible to technoscientific methods. This does not make them
more real or more material. A wider world of the molecular would include
many other relatively reliable patterns—flows of repeatability that subtend,
enable, and compose organisms and societies—whether or not these can
be physiochemically isolated. Even within the “hard” (quantifiable and
quantifying) sciences, the “stuff” of the world is not as symmetrical or
epistemologically stable as the folklore of scientific positivism would
suggest. It is already not possible to handle or manipulate an atom of
hydrogen and an atom of iron in the same way, to say nothing of what it
means to “handle” or work with a photon or a quark. My aim here is not
to determine what counts as a molecule but to offer a conceptual move
through which such a question might be seriously posed in an epistemic
context much wider than that normally suggested by the concept of the
molecular. To do that, we must first let go of certain assumptions that
limit and reduce the concept of the molecular, even in post-structuralist
theory, by romanticizing it.
The romance of the molecular

I cannot go any further without putting the concept of the molecular
developed thus far into conversation with that developed by and in response
to the work of Deleuze and Guattari. I began this chapter by surveying
racialized and gendered instances of the molecular, in which what is salient
is the extent to which allegedly purely biochemical molecules such as DNA
and testosterone are in fact heavily determined by formations of race and
gender, not only in their effects but in their very constitution. A molecule
in this sense is always “material-semiotic,” as both TallBear and Chen assert,
or what Deleuze and Guattari call a “particle-sign,” here perhaps imaginable
as a glob or chunk of identity-technique that must be analyzed in terms of
both knowledge and power, interdisciplinarity and intersectionality.10 The
application of Deleuze and Guattari’s work to race and racialization has been
undertaken by a number of thinkers who, in the face of the “deontologisation
of race” (Saldanha, 2006, p 9), a widely accepted strategy to undercut racism
by rejecting racial categories, call instead for an alternative reontologization
of such categories. According to Arun Saldanha, race must
50
be conceived as a chain of contingency, in which the connections

between its constituent components are not given, but are made
viscous through local attractions. Whiteness, for example, is about
the sticky connections between property, privilege, and a paler
skin. There is no essence of whiteness, but there is a relative fixity
that inheres in all the “local pulls” of its many elements in flux.
Emergence and viscosity are complementary concepts, the first
pertaining to the genesis of distinctions, the second to the modality
of that genesis. (p 18)
The dynamics of viscosity and emergence that Saldanha describes are not
mere metaphors. These terms aim to describe the actual, material ways in
which racial and other identities operate in practice, rematerializing race
and revealing the ways in which identities are not merely constituted by
knowledge but also subtend every epistemic technique. Drawing on Elizabeth
Grosz’s Deleuzian feminist analysis of how sex is dichotomized into “the
great binary aggregates” of male and female, which Deleuze and Guattari
posit might be dismantled and recombined to proliferate “a thousand tiny
sexes,” Saldanha suggests that “the molecularization of race would consist
in its breaking up into a thousand tiny races” (2006, p 21, italics original).
I would add, however, that the molecularization of race cannot take place
purely through desedimentation. Instead it calls for a kind of material
experimentation with identity that must not only fracture and dismantle
old identities but also generate new ones. Following Saldanha, race might
be conceived as “irreducible” (2009, p 9) in a chemical rather than social
sense. It is not that an individual’s racial identity is unchangeable; on the
contrary, a molecular or reontologizing approach to identity troubles the
fixed assignment of identities to individuals. In Saldanha’s terms: “Nobody
‘has’ a race, but bodies are racialised” (2006, p 18). How might we begin to
think the relations of technique and identity in this way?
The Deleuzo–Guattarian concept of the molecular is defined in opposition
to the molar. Both terms have the same root, moles, meaning mass or
barrier, indexing the heaviness or inertia of forces; “molecule” simply adds
the diminutive cule.11 In the extraordinarily generative key passages on
the molecular in A Thousand Plateaus, what comes through is the latter’s
power of flight, its capacity for resistance and excess, always in relation to a
dominating molar force:
You become animal only molecularly. You do not become a barking

molar dog, but by barking, if it is done with enough feeling, with
enough necessity and composition, you emit a molecular dog. … Yes,
all becomings are molecular: the animal, flower, or stone one becomes
are molecular collectivities, haecceities, not molar subjects, objects or
51
form that we know from the outside and recognize from experience,
through science, or by habit. If this is true, then we must say the same
of things human: there is a becoming-woman, a becoming-child,
that do not resemble the woman or the child as clearly distinct molar
entities. (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, p 275)
The opposition between molar and molecular is evocative, but it easily

falls into a romance of the latter, or what I would call an (interdisciplinary)
knowledge analysis lacking an (intersectional) power analysis. If oppressive
power is equated with the molar—that is, the solidly aggregate—then where
is the scope for building robust solidarities, let alone alternative societies
and more just worlds? By the same token, if the molecular is imagined as
inherently ethical, or “radical” in a positive political sense, then we have no
way to work practically with violent or dangerous molecules. What shall
we do with molecular whiteness or particles of toxic masculinity? What
if some molecules form a tumor? Is it good to become a molecular dog?
And how can a molecular “woman” or “child” come to be if they bear
no relation to the molar entities out of which they have desedimented?
Some varieties of current black studies, especially those called afropessimist,
vehemently contest the claim that “bastard and mixed-blood are the true
names of race” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, p 379; Saldanha and Adams,
2013).12 To dissolve identity categories is not always desirable. Guattari
writes: “It seems important to me to destroy such gross categories as ‘woman,’
‘homosexual’ and so on. Nothing is ever as simple as that. When we reduce
people to categories—black or white, male or female—it is because of our
own preconceptions” (1984, p 235). But what if, in order to avoid reducing
people to categories, we need not destroy the categories themselves, as
elementary but irreducibly complex substances? What if the categories,
molecularized, reveal a diversity of potential and effect that far exceeds the
basic formulation of molar and molecular?
From proteins to songs, every kind of molecule works differently and in
differing combinations. When the molar is simplistically rejected in favor
of a romance of the molecular, we miss the diverse operations that a richer
molecular paradigm can reveal. This concern is raised by a handful of
incisive critiques of molecular theories that follow Deleuze and Guattari.
Christopher Miller’s (1993) early critique of A Thousand Plateaus, for
example, is concerned directly with the politics of identity and with the way
in which the anti-identitarian or “nomadological” stance of that volume
conceals its profound reliance upon anthropological and indeed colonial
sources of knowledge. Of particular relevance here is Miller’s critique of
what he calls “nomadological immunity” (1993, p 21): the way in which
molecularization, understood as the dissolving of molar identities, can be
operationalized as an escape from politics and the analysis of power. This
52
leads Miller to ask if there is “not a certain cosmopolitan arrogance at work”

(1993, p 21) in Deleuze and Guattari’s attempts to sever anthropological
knowledge from its origins in particular identities, nations, and cultures.
A related point is made by Jodi Byrd, who criticizes those who call “for
transformational new worlds of relation and relationship that move us
toward a joyously cacophonic multiplicity and away from the lived colonial
conditions of indigeneity within the postcolonizing settler society” (2011,
p 18). Like Miller, Byrd highlights how the “Indian” or indigenous figure
appears in Deleuze and Guattari’s work as a “philosophical sign” and a
“ghost in the system” that underwrites the radical line of flight into the
molecular while itself being erased in that transit (p 19). In such calls, Byrd
suggests, indigenous technique (knowledge and ways of being) is exalted
and romanticized in the same breath as that in which indigenous identity
(a political formation) is erased. An even more sharply worded critique is
offered by Jordy Rosenberg, who suggests that the “molecular” posited by
some new materialisms may actually be defined by its exclusion of politics,
“as particulate matter becomes a kind of sublime miniature and a point at
which ontological wonder blooms” (2014). As Rosenberg suggests, the
fetishization of technoscientifically produced molecules can be another
kind of (white/male) fantasy in which the capacity to redesign bodies at a
chemical level allows for the jettisoning of cultural politics with a kind of
“vicious, amnesiac joy.”
In my view, these important critiques demand not a complete rejection of
the molecularization of race and identity but rather the restoration, to the
material substance of race, of a certain heaviness (perhaps that of the “molar,”
but now without any sharp distinction between the two terms). It is not the
joy of molecular experimentation that is the problem but the erasure that
joy enables. If a focus on molecularization as a process can overemphasize
flux and flow and make the transformation of the world appear too easy,
this needs to be counterbalanced by a greater awareness of sedimentation
and a willingness to look more unflinchingly—although not in structuralist
terms—at violence, including racism, antiblackness, and colonial genocide,
as part of what is carried in the molecular.13 This is, again, why I did not
begin this chapter with the work of Deleuze and Guattari, as influential as
it has been. To think of identity and technique in terms of the molecular
should not be an invitation to jettison larger-scale political analysis in favor
of a micropolitics imagined as radically freeing. On the contrary, the concept
of the molecular should equally serve to remind us that very tiny things
can be very dangerous and that molecules too small to see can bring down
worlds. After all, there exist molecules of which half a gram or less will kill
you on contact, while other molecules are so ubiquitous as to be confused
with empty space. In short, there is nothing light or easy about molecules.
To restate my earlier claim: identity is made of technique, but technique is also
53
made of identity. There is, then, no escape from identity in the molecular.
Chemicals are not simple, easy, or light just because they are physically
small. Some molecules are indeed common and mundane. Some are inert
and barely react or combine with others. But molecules also exist that are
deadly, volatile, and explosive, even in small quantities. In their thinking of
the molecular, Deleuze and Guattari do not fully account for this radical
asymmetry. As much as they attempt to offset such a reading, they stage a
series of oppositions between the molar and the molecular in which the latter
invariably functions as the hero. As Miller observes, Deleuze and Guattari
frequently state that there is nothing superior about the molecular over the
molar, but their prose does not read that way and their examples do not bear
this out. If Deleuze and Guattari offer a power analysis of the molecular, it
is one that does not go very far into the details.
I do not reject the possibility of joy and transformation—or even moments
of limited, provisional, and immanently contestable artistic or nomadological
“immunity,” in which the world and its injustices seem to fall away. It would
not be possible to go on living from day to day if such experiences were
strictly denied. But I do reject the idea that the process of molecularization
works in one direction only, or that molecularization is a good in itself.
I would defend a politics of identity by reminding thinkers of molecules that
identity does not disappear when it is molecularized. That identity is made
of technique means that it can never be fully locked down. Even the most
heavily sedimented identities will always remain open to change as they travel
across times, places, and bodies. But that technique is made of identity means
that it never fully or finally escapes the sedimented structures of power that
produce and sustain it. Hence molecules of technique, in their relatively
free circulation, are real and can be dangerous—can have violent effects—
particularly when their substance as molecular identity is misunderstood.
As Thomas DeFrantz writes:
Again, and again, dances created in black environments are shared

and then later used in contexts that have little reference to breathing
black people. You drop the stanky leg or the nae stinky into your
contemporary performance project. It’s supposed to feel hip and
aware or funny and ironic. You vogue or j-sette to demonstrate your
of-the-moment ability to get down with the kids. Just stop it. You
don’t understand what those dances are for or how they operate or
what they can do. It’s like playing with fire. (2007, p 10)
I have added italics to the final sentence to highlight its resonance with the
language of chemistry. With DeFrantz’s admonition in mind, I would jettison
any remaining attachment to the molecular as a good in itself, turning instead
to focus on its radical asymmetry.
54
“Asymmetry” is one of the key concepts proposed by Andrew Culp in

seeking to exchange a positive, joyful Deleuze for a negative or “dark” Deleuze.
The term, for Culp, “expresses difference as formal inequivalence. Asymmetry
works to impede reciprocal relations and prevent reversibility.” It establishes a
“relationship of incommensurability,” in contrast to mere complexity, which
more often enacts a “flattening,” a “uniformization of diversity,” which “can
both mobilize and impair forces” (Culp, 2016, pp 33–34). I do not find a
negative Deleuze more satisfying or useful than a positive one, but I agree that
asymmetry is much more than nondialectical. A molecule of whiteness behaves
entirely differently than a molecule of blackness—and neither whiteness nor
manhood, nor any other category of hegemonic domination, can be reduced
to an abstract concept of the molar. This means, among other things, that
we have no business talking about embodiment or materiality without taking
seriously the work that has been undertaken in critical race theory, black
studies, critical indigenous studies, and other politicized new materialisms
to theorize the matter (and not just the sociality) of the world. This is what
it means to go into the details. Such fields recognize the twisting of power
and knowledge in material-semiotic molecules and are thereby enabled to
undertake radically interdisciplinary and intersectional analysis. With regard
to “the body,” it must then be stated that the body as archive, as memory,
as habitus, as sociomaterial formation—the whole messy and excessive
nonbiomedical body long theorized by cultural studies—is the gendered and
racialized body. Racial and gender identities are not added secondarily to a
substrate of technoscientifically determined embodiment. They are the very
stuff of life, as much as bones and tissues. If we do not recognize this materiality
and substantiality of identities, then we misunderstand the body, and indeed
society, on a material level. But such recognition requires, as suggested here,
a radical overturning of the disciplinary hierarchies that would locate cultural
analysis on a more superficial level than quantitative sociology and the even
more strictly quantitative fields of technoscience.
Radical asymmetry
In the first section of this chapter, I argued that racial and other identities
are not merely layers of culture, symbol, or discursive meaning added to
a more fundamental physical or technoscientific reality but should instead
be understood as “material-semiotic” chunks or molecules of technique-
identity. In the second section, I clarified that the molecular substance of
such identities does not automatically become easier to work with when
it is rendered in this way. While molecularizing identity can open up
new possibilities for experimentation and intervention, the identification
of molecules as racialized and gendered rules out any easy escape into
molecularity. Conceiving of embodiment and identity in this way—for this
55
is precisely a theory of embodiment that refuses to separate cultural identity

from the materiality of the body—opens the door to a world of material
complexity and interactive dynamics.
The point is that “white” and “black,” for example, are not only mutually
constituted principles but also incommensurable and irreducible substances.
Perhaps even more importantly, in their irreducibility such identities also
establish no larger container, and certainly no grid or axis, onto which
other identities could be mapped. Recent critiques of “identity politics” as
defined by a static grid (eg, Massumi, 2002; Puar, 2017), often drawing on
Deleuze and Guattari, have failed to dislodge prevailing models of race and
gender, perhaps in part because they have replaced the grid model with an
open field of undefined interactivity that flattens out crucial asymmetries.
Reacting against such moves, Frank Wilderson has offered a structuralist,
afropessimist mapping, in which the “red” or indigenous being is located
halfway between the white and the black—a schematic model that ignores
the complex relations of indigeneity to land and citizenship, which trouble
the very constitution of the racial (cf Barker, 2005; Wilderson, 2010; T.L.
King, 2019; Rifkin, 2019). My own theorization of the molecular began
from an engagement with jewishness, another identity that also cannot be
mapped onto a black/white spectrum or grid and which may at various
times and places be more or less or differently racialized (see Brodkin, 1998;
Slabodsky, 2014; Traverso, 2016; Spatz, 2019). From this starting point,
I have attempted to think through the politics of identity in a way that avoids
both the trap of structuralism, exemplified by Wilderson, and the excesses
of some post-structuralism, as described in the previous section. The key to
this delicate navigation is the radical asymmetry of molecules.
While we might say that blackness, whiteness, brownness, indigeneity, and
jewishness all circulate in practice as molecular substances, these identities
are no more functionally symmetrical or equivalent to one another than are
water, diamonds, and neurotoxins. Not only are these identities not four
“positions” on any kind of grid, they are arguably entirely different kinds
of things, radically asymmetrical phenomena, which, in any attempted
comparison, must take us far away from any gridded or spectrum-like
model of identity, technique, and embodiment. To think identities in this
way is to leave behind some of the meta-categories that remain hegemonic
and pernicious in social theory: “race,” “gender,” “sexuality,” “class,” and
so on. It is these categories, apparently so innocent, that lead us toward a
false symmetry: as if black and white, or male and female, were two sides
of a coin, rather than radically asymmetrical materialities. Even the term
“identity” itself must be questioned, although I retain it here as the slower and
more inertial counterpart to technique. For the same reason, I cannot fully
avoid the term “race”—many of the sources I am working with rely upon
it—but I employ it only to summon a series of more powerful molecular
56
substances to displace it. In fact, the same displacement applies to many other
meta-categories of identity that might at first seem to be separate from race
but which ultimately bleed into it: nation, language, citizenship, gender,
ability, and so on. I focus here on the racial because of the vital work being
done in critical black and indigenous studies and related fields—work that
is more politically trenchant, and more engaged with radical asymmetry,
than related theories of gender or class. Whereas theories of gender seem
to have moved more easily into a molecularizing or technicizing approach,
race—in an ongoingly colonial, capitalist, and white supremacist age—seems
to carry a greater inertia, a greater stubbornness, that troubles the line of
flight into the molecular. Class analysis, for its part, unless it reontologizes
race and nation, cannot avoid the limitingly quantifying assumptions of
economic theory. Specific racial identities are then especially powerful and
urgent leverage points for rethinking the molecular relations of technique
and identity.
Thinking race in apprenticeship to black studies especially compels
us to push beyond the idea that certain bodies carry race—that race is a
property of racialized bodies—and to recognize instead how race intersects
and transects bodies, inheres in the floors and windows, floats in the
air, and is atmospheric, palpable, chemical. Yet, in the same breath, race
theorized from blackness extends its slippages to other kinds of identities
and causes a vast conceptual house of cards to collapse. Blackness may
be a gender (Ziyad, 2017; Nyong’o, 2021). Whiteness may be a religion
(Carter, 2021). Jewishness may be a gender, a language, a way of thinking
(Pellegrini, 1995; Boyarin, 1996; Kraemer, 2020). From the perspective
of a critical hermeneutic methodology based in the arts and humanities,
sociological categories of race and gender are rough approximations of what
is materially experienced in concrete moments, events, and practices. Such
a perspective might even take the nation-state, major religious formations,
and Marxist formulations of class as subcategories of the racial, where the
racial is understood as the molecular materiality of technique/identity. The
materialities of blackness—and, indeed, of whiteness, brownness, and other
ethnicons beyond the grammar of color—are not limited to “race” as a census
category offered by the nation-state.14 These materialities are transnational,
in some cases perhaps planetary, and their recognition is bound up in a call
that increasingly exceeds that of antiracism: decolonization (Tuck and Yang,
2012; Mignolo and Walsh, 2018; Gopal, 2021).
In this sense, race refers to a concept of technique/identity that
incorporates not only embodiment and culture but also deep histories and
materialities of trauma, dissociation, shame, violence, pleasure, and loss. The
concept of embodiment, like many others, has been rendered misleadingly
uniform by technoscientific methods of measurement. Thinking race
anew, even reontologizing it (to ontologize it in a different way), reminds us
57
that embodiment is shot through with difference as well as similarity and

that colonialism is embodied both as sedimented memory, or “traces of
history” (Wolfe, 2016), and as present technique. Colonialism and its racial
substances are in the buildings and roads, in the air and water, and in our
bodies (Liboiron, 2021). Identity, as much as bones and tissue, is what we are
made of. To begin to grasp this, we may have to replace sociological models
of identities as labels or axes with an experimentally oriented, historically
grounded, politically trenchant, and epistemologically provisional molecular
engagement with identities as asymmetrical substances that compose the
world. This requires a non-gridded, nonbinary formulation of identity as
comprising and comprised of technique but not one that therefore envisions
a world of pure flux and flow.
Here again the language of chemistry is instructive: while molecules can be
reduced to atoms and subatomic particles, physics on that level reveals little
about how actual molecules behave. There will be no “table of elements”
for a molecular theory of identity, let alone a set of general laws or principles
to govern them. As Philip Ball writes: “The Periodic Table really belongs
to that realm where chemistry becomes physics, where we must wheel out
the algebra and the cosines to explain why atoms of the elements form
the particular unions called molecules” (2002, p 6). The Periodic Table,
according to Ball, gives us only atoms, not the molecular: “Many people
believe that the nuclear bomb was itself the product of physics, but writing
E=mc2 does not give you Hiroshima.” On the contrary, creating the atomic
bomb required “separating isotopically distinct molecules of uranium
compounds” (p 9)—along with, we might add, particular material structures
of orientalism, coloniality, whiteness, and fascism, which Ball cannot think
alongside uranium. Following Ball’s account of chemistry as beginning in
the moment when the gridded quantification of the table of elements is
exceeded, the molecular upon which I would call to think racial and other
identities is a much wilder zone than any table can grid. This molecular,
too, is “a craft full of possibilities,” of “wonderful, inspiring, inventive
possibilities,” of “terrible, nightmarish possibilities,” and of “mundane but
useful things, bizarre things, hard-to-understand things” (p 10). What I hope
to approach by thinking identity and embodiment in this way is the possibility
of establishing theoretical and practical links between the large-scale analysis
of race on sociological and historical levels and the micro analysis of specific
moments and events. While much work in cultural and performance studies
has aimed to do this, the vocabulary available for theorizing relationships
between bodies, identities, and knowledges still often remains constrained by
a dominant model in which (material) bodies are, on the one hand, defined
and positioned by racial and other (social) identities and, on a completely
different level, in possession of (cognitive) knowledge. If, on the other
hand, bodies are actually made up of identity-technique molecules, then a
58
very different lexicon of analysis and pragmatics of experimentation might

be activated.
We might speak of how racial and other identities operate in particular
moments and instances, including on the largest scales: flexible like rubber,
flickering like flame, impenetrable like diamond, or any of the properties
of bone, ebony, steel, ice, sand, and so on. Such imagery is already present
in Sara Ahmed’s assertion that “race, like sex, is sticky; it sticks to us,
or we become ‘us’ as an effect of how it sticks, even when we think we
are beyond it” (2004, §49). Or, as another writer and poet muses: “I
think about identity particles all the time; they hover like bees or clouds
depending on my mood” (r. erica doyle, in Rankine et al, 2015, p 253). In
such usages, the language of chemistry evokes a materiality of embodied
identity that extends further into a world of mess and complexity than
any geometrical model can express, but which at the same time avoids
leaping or spiraling into an open field of free experimentation—as if the
total replacement of the molar by the molecular could offer anything more
than a kind of heat death, a dissolution into meaninglessness. Radical
asymmetry here is not geometrical asymmetry. Instead, its ontology is
more like the chemical.
What, after all, is racial brownness, if not, as José Esteban Muñoz conceives
it, the “brown commons”:
I mean “brown” as in brown people in a very immediate way, in this

sense, people who are rendered brown by their personal and familial
participations in South-to-North migration patterns. I am also thinking
of people who are brown by way of accent and linguistic orientations
that convey a certain difference. I mean a brownness that is conferred
by the ways in which one’s spatial coordinates are contested, and the
ways in which one’s right to residency is challenged by those who
make false claims to nativity. Also, I think of brownness in relation to
everyday customs and everyday styles of living that connote a sense
of illegitimacy. Brown indexes a certain vulnerability to the violence
of property, finance, and to capital’s overarching mechanisms of
domination. (2020, p 3)
The slippage here, from brown commons to brown people to brown

customs and styles, like that from black bodies to black thought to black
worlds, is not a mistake or a gap in logic. It is an innovation, a challenge, a
demand for a kind of poetic thought that can see through the division of
knowledge and power, or technique and identity. A similar slippage is found
in the yellowness of Anne Anlin Cheng’s “yellow woman,” which “is not
meant to essentialize but to name the processes of racialization” and which
therefore “denotes a person but connotes a style” (2019, p 1). It is found
59
again in Jean-François Lyotard’s lowercasing of “jews” as a figural position,

in principle open to anyone, rather than a particular identity grounded in
“real Jews” (Hammerschlag, 2010, p 10). Of course, jewishness is not a
color—or is it? Does the same figurality, the same slippage between real
people and transferable styles, apply to judaism, to islam, to queerness, to
class positions, to nations large and small, to the european, to whiteness? As a
slippage between knowledge and power, or identity and technique, we must
affirm that, yes, something like this characterizes all identity categories, all
ethnicons, including and beyond those indexed by an emerging decolonial
grammar of colors: white, black, red, brown, yellow, muslim, jewish, queer,
trans, disabled, and so on. But this slippage does not apply in the same way
to each. It does not apply symmetrically.
The molecularity of identity is nowhere more evident than in the
making and sharing of what is called art. Yet the capitalist framework of
art production works incessantly to conceal that molecularity as it unfolds
through embodied and artistic research. Perhaps, then, it could be the
work of emerging experimental research methods, including those that
go by names like “practice (as) research” and “artistic research,” to reveal
the ways in which the complexities of the world are present in specific
moments of encounter. This would be done not in order to resolve those
complexities, or even to posit the artistic encounter as an exceptional or
utopian space (Miller’s “immunity”), but in order to generate new forms
of knowledge that might participate in long-overdue reconciliations.
Certainly, my own need to theorize identity in relation to technique, and
my interest in the molecular as a way of avoiding both the static grids of
“identity politics” and the erasures of postidentitarian proposals, arises
from my epistemic position at the intersection of performance studies
and performance practice, as well as from my racial and gender identities.
Artistic and embodied research methods claim to develop new ways
to investigate the materiality of life, practice, and worlds. They apply
methodological rigor and institutional resources to the study of being and
existence through new forms and new structures of knowledge. They could
therefore be sites at which racial and other identities are investigated with
a combination of critical precision and poetic force. Learning from black
studies means acknowledging that one can never separate the meaning of
blackness, at least in europe and the americas, from the history of slavery
and the ongoing forces of antiblackness and white supremacy, but neither
can blackness be reduced to or equated with that history. If black studies
research models a trenchant analysis of molecular identity that moves
beyond “race” into a poetic and biomythographic ontology that is in
some ways aligned with artistic research, then much work remains to be
done in the tracking of whiteness, jewishness, queerness, and numerous
other materialities beyond the limited ways in which they have thus far
60
been conceived and modeled. In every case, there are heavy histories and
ongoing, large-scale power relations to contend with, but also emergent
and unfixed relations of experimentation, discovery, and care, all of which
might be brought to presence in future methods.
Artistic research—with other experimental methods that reject the
onto-epistemic cut separating technique and identity, knowledge and power,
instead placing the cut elsewhere to reveal other realities (on this notion
of the cut, see “Two Cuts” in Spatz, 2020b)—implements a shift from the
register of theoretical account to that of practical experimentation. It calls for
experimental research in, rather than on, both identities as fields of knowledge
and knowledges as fields of identity. Such approaches cannot claim to solve
or resolve the problem of identity but perhaps can offer a different way into
it, taking identities as substantive and asymmetrical research problems rather
than barriers to research. What if we took for granted that racial, gender,
and other identities are constantly present, in our bodies, in architecture,
in places, but that they manifest in different ways, radically asymmetrically?
What if we attempted to investigate the phases and states, the reactions and
catalysts, the compounds and solutions, through which identities act and
interact in particular moments?
This would be both a chemistry of identity and a reframing of chemistry
from the perspective of critical decolonial thought. It would be both an
expansion of a conceptual framework (the molecular) and a methodological
shift in the very forms of knowledge (embodied, artistic, situated, poetic
research). Perhaps such a move could allow us to speak of identity as real and
present, full, material, active, dynamic, and, at the same time, not static, not
individualized, not amenable to any kind of grid. Perhaps a turn away from
some of the disciplinary limitations of sociology and law (to say nothing of
economics and cognitive science) could enable us to recognize that the being
of identities operates not only in the classification of bodies but also as the
substances that make up those bodies. This claim is not so much paradoxical
as it is experimental. It is not so much anti-or postdisciplinary as radically
interdisciplinary, with everything yet remaining to be said and with much
more than saying needed.
Notes
1
An early form of this argument was advanced in Spatz (2019). That article focuses on
an experimental approach to contemporary (jewish) identity developed in my artistic
research, whereas this one attempts to establish a wider theoretical framework. Following an
orthographic practice that I first implemented in the 2019 article, in this chapter I lowercase
all identity terms, even those that are often capitalized (jewish, black, white, chinese, etc).
In quotations, I retain each author’s capitalization or lowercasing of such terms.
2
My previous work (Spatz, 2015, 2020a) has relied especially upon Karin Knorr Cetina’s
discussion of the unfolding nature of scientific objects, including proteins, and the
“libidinal” quality of the relationships scientists develop with them, in Schatzki, Knorr
61
Cetina and von Savigny (2001); and upon Hans-Jörg Rheinberger’s (1997) detailed
treatment of the constantly shifting boundary between the known and the unknown
through the iteration of experimental systems; see also Pickering (1995). I find these
works in some ways more precise and compelling than Karen Barad’s better-known but
limitingly physicalist concept of “intra-action” (2007).
3
For more on Preciado’s work as a model for embodied and artistic research, see Spatz
(2020a). On gender as technique, see Spatz, “Gender as Technique” (2015, pp 171–214).
4
Chen’s discussion of viruses as “nonliving” yet “closer to life” has become even more
relevant in the era of COVID-19, including with regard to the racialization of its chinese
origins. On the lowercasing of chinese and other identity terms in this chapter, see note 1.
5
On biomythography as method, see also Chen (2012, p 167) and Rosamond S. King
(2019).
6
A call for interdisciplinary intersectionality, or intersectional interdisciplinarity, is the
endpoint of my chapter “Thresholds” in Blue Sky Body (Spatz, 2020a), as well as a central
aspect of the larger project of which this chapter is part.
7
Developing a materialist and epistemic concept of technique is the main goal of What
a Body Can Do (Spatz, 2015). That book builds upon and extends the work of Mauss,
Foucault, Bourdieu, and Butler, arguing that embodied technique is epistemic: It is
knowledge as much as it may also be repetition, performance, habit, or rules.
8
It might be suggested that, from Mauss and Merleau-Ponty to more recent developments in
new and speculative materialisms, the embodiment and materiality of technique is already
well established. Perhaps this is true within a certain narrow theoretical register, but there
is no sense in which the materiality of song or gesture is broadly understood to rival that
of bone or tissue. Moreover, recognizing that a song is materially embodied in the act of
singing is very different from treating songs as substantive knowledge, let alone as a kind
of material substance. My thinking here begins from the predominantly white thinkers of
technique, habitus, and performativity cited in Spatz (2015) and extends further through an
engagement with radically new materialist approaches being developed in black studies. Some
of the works I have been learning from include those of Weheliye (2014); Sharpe (2016);
Moten (2018); Nyong’o (2019); T.L. King (2019); Bey (2020); and McKittrick (2021).
9
This is not to suggest that anything and everything exists in molecular form, as in a “flat”
ontology. As I have argued elsewhere (see “Thresholds” in Spatz, 2020a), the problem
with a flattening “object-oriented ontology” (eg, Harman, 2018) is that, in its attempt to
render everything commensurable, it jettisons any concern for the depths of knowledge.
Such an approach is not even interdisciplinary, let alone intersectional.
10
For an application of Deleuze and Guattari’s “particle-sign” to the “molecular action of
art,” see Katve-Kaisa Kontturi, “From Double Navel to Particle-Sign: Toward the A-
Signifying Work of Painting” in Barrett and Bolt (2013).
11
Online etymology dictionary: https://www.etymonline.com/word/molecule.
12
For an analysis of the antiblackness sometimes carried by calls for multiracialism, see
Sexton (2008).
13
The need for an analysis that is unflinching but not structuralist refers to my critique of
Frank Wilderson’s work, which I develop briefly later in the chapter and more extensively
in the larger project of which this chapter is a part.
14
I borrow an expanded sense of the term “ethnicon” from Baker (2017, pp 16–46).
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65
3
Interpreting Africa’s
Seselelãme: Bodily Ways of
Knowing in a Globalized World
Kathryn Linn Geurts and Sefakor Komabu-Pomeyie
West Africans enjoy a sensory-emotional, embodied way of knowing that

can be summed up with the Anlo-Ewe phrase seselelãme. This compelling
term, seselelãme, comes from the language Sefakor Komabu-Pomeyie grew
up speaking in southeastern Ghana, and it forms the basis for decades
of work Kathryn Geurts has conducted as an anthropologist and guest
among Anlo people. Functionally, seselelãme captures a panoply of sensory-
emotional experiences, signals, and perceptions, distinguishing it from
ontological traditions that emphasize atomization, fragmentation, and
categorization. This situates seselelãme almost in opposition to longstanding
Euro-American ways of being, which have privileged splits among cognition,
sensory perception, emotional feeling, and behavioral expressions.1 Those
seeking to challenge the mind/body dichotomy can be found throughout
society, from academics such as linguist George Lakoff and philosopher
Mark Johnson (1999), as well as neuroscientist Antonio Damasio (2000),
to practicing psychotherapists such as Susan Aposhyan (2007) or medical
doctors such as James S. Gordon, who founded and directs The Center for
Mind-Body Medicine. With Anglo-Americans and other Global North
populations fervidly trying to weave or knit together entities that have
been epistemologically separated for centuries (such as mind, body, spirit;
individual, community, globe; human, animal, planet),2 seselelãme seems to
appeal to some as a potential (if small) panacea. This chapter explores its
contemporary spread into a globally popular phenomenon appearing in
films, workshops, blogs, therapy sessions, and other venues spotlighted on
the world wide web.
66
INTERPRETING AFRICA’S SESELELÃME
This early twenty-first century spread of seselelãme raises thorny questions.

For example, what sorts of interpretations are being made about seselelãme by
people attempting to deploy it in Euro-American contexts? When claiming
that seselelãme is a “concept” that “posits that everything is connected”
(Jude, 2016), how does this distort and “Westernize” an organically African
phenomena? What are the implications of individualizing and commoditizing
seselelãme in New Age, self-actualization workshops in Global North
contexts? In what ways does this perpetuate “symbolic and structural
asymmetries underpinning institutional power/violence” (Champagne and
Friedman, personal communication, November 5, 2019)? When seselelãme
is culturally appropriated and then marketed as “an inner realm in which
all the world is experienced and felt” (Shepherd, 2017, p 17), how does
this compound Global North and Global South discrepancies, tensions,
and mistrust? We agree with French anthropologist François Laplantine’s
assertion that “five centuries of rationalocentrism” succeeded in mistreating,
repressing, and forgetting “the sensible, the life of the emotions, the body,
and the physical character of thought as it takes shape” (Laplantine, 2015, p
1). But we also submit that seselelãme proves Laplantine’s assertion to be true
for only some people on the planet. Despite centuries of Western dominance
through enslavement, colonization, neocolonialism, and neoliberalism,
Africans have persisted in valuing bodily ways of knowing, and recent processes
of globalization have allowed others to pick up on this valuable way of
knowing that is crystalized (for some) in the Anlo-Ewe word seselelãme.
Here we work to problematize some of the ways in which seselelãme is being
used in Global North contexts, and we argue that materially more powerful
people (often connected to Global North institutions, geographies, and
economies) are culturally distorting, culturally appropriating, and culturally
stripping seselelãme of its organic meanings and biotic qualities.
Seselelãme in African everyday terms and in academic

parlance
In the spring of 2020 Komabu-Pomeyie put out a social media inquiry on
WhatsApp to a network of Ghanaians, asking a number of questions about
what seselelãme means to them. A 32-year-old female teacher we call Sena
answered with the following discussion:3
Seselelãme is a word which implies a lot of personal innate

experiences: for example, such experiences that start from the mind
[and go] to the heart or any of the senses which can reflect in the entire
body system of the individual. It can create emotional experiences such
as joy, anger, sadness, rejection, acceptance. It can also create sensational
experiences such as love, fear, cold, heat, excitement, shock, hatred.
67
Another respondent, Mawuli, a 40-year-old male attorney, succinctly

pointed out:
Seselelãme can mean a lot of things. It can mean intuition, or instinct, or

sensation. It depends on the context. That’s how Ewe is. For example,
the word “whu” … can mean move away or open or blood; and when
doubled it can mean dust. So, context is important for Ewe words.
Indeed, context is important. Seselelãme emerges from Ewe-language

contexts in West Africa, and Anlo-Ewe is typically associated with coastal
southeastern Ghana. Over the decades we have variously translated seselelãme
into the English language using phrases such as bodily ways of knowing;
feeling in the body; hearing in the flesh, organs, and skin; and, at the level of
the morpheme, perceive-perceive-at-flesh-inside. Our interest in seselelãme
is rooted in the study of sensory aspects of Anlo history and sociocultural
orientations (Geurts, 2002a, 2003).4 However, a subsequent research project
(Geurts and Adikah, 2006) led to our assertion that seselelãme should be
considered a local (Anlo-Ewe) iteration of a broad pan-African—even Black
Atlantic—foundational schema or source domain. Following Brad Shore’s
(1996, p 118) theoretical ideas about analogical transfer underpinning “the
creative life of cultural models,” we suggested that seselelãme operates as an
out-of-awareness or “usually unconscious schematizing process” resulting
in a globally reaching “family of related cultural models” threading together
Black Atlantic sensibilities and worlds.
Shore’s theoretical approach belongs within psychological anthropology’s
efforts to embed cognition and problems of meaning within culturally deep
contexts and webs (building from Geertz, 1973). This framework supports
our earlier claims that seselelãme functioned in Black Atlantic worlds as a kind
of interpretive “template, a common underlying form that links superficially
diverse cultural models” while simultaneously contributing to a “sometimes
ineffable sense of ‘style’ or ‘ethos’” characteristic of a particular social group
(Shore, 1996, p 117). As examples, we pointed to such cultural models as
signifyin(g), doing the do, an aesthetic of the cool, spirit work, conjuring,
and so forth (described in Geurts and Adikah, 2006). These interpretations
sit at the far psychological and cognitive pole of our interpretive work.
Gradually we realized a model and schema approach (utilized by a number
of psychological anthropologists, such as D’Andrade and Strauss, 1992)
was overly mentalistic for our purposes. Seselelãme demanded that we move
beyond psychology’s often disembodied approaches and also beyond what
Howes (2006, p 115) identified as “the verbocentrism of the linguistic model,
the ocularcentrism of the visual culture model, and the holism of both the
corporeal and material culture models.” Seselelãme was very clearly rooted in
relationality, not only of individuals and their cultural communities but also
68
of minds and bodies as well as of perceiving people and “sensible objects.”

We found promising theoretical frameworks in some of the early work of
anthropologist Thomas Csordas.
Csordas developed a cultural phenomenology approach in his early
work on embodiment, experience, and the self (see Csordas, 1994), and
we borrowed his phrase “somatic modes of attention” (Csordas, 1993)
as we described the significance of seselelãme (or bodily ways of knowing)
in Anlo everyday life (Geurts, 2002a). Csordas (1990) drew heavily on
Merleau-Ponty and Bourdieu, so, taking his cue, we explored (Geurts,
2002a, p 233) ways in which seselelãme was akin to habitus—especially
when conceptualized as “history turned into nature” or a “durably installed
generative principle of regulated improvisations” (Bourdieu, 1977, p
78). A weakness in Bourdieu’s theory lay in his failure to explain how
one develops or internalizes habitus, so we paid special attention to child
socialization practices in Anlo settings and documented ways in which
certain sensory orientations were reinforced (Geurts, 2002a, pp 73–107).
We demonstrated that seselelãme is most certainly durably installed in Anlo-
Ewe people, but generational changes, cultural conflicts, globalization, and
additional forces also lead to improvisations. For example, certain classical
religious orientations persist, such as perceiving a rock at a threshold as
a legba, or spiritual guardian, even though modernity’s rationality enables
Anlo people to improvise by cognitively acknowledging it is a stone while
physically avoiding any encounter or confrontation with the entity (for a
longer exploration of this ethnographic point, see Geurts, 2002b). A person’s
“nature,” sedimented and cultivated through socialization experiences,
bumps up against global cultural forces that spur human adaptation
“instincts” and call forth improvisational responses. By this we are not
suggesting that there is a singular Anlo-Ewe “history-nature” but rather a
multiplicity—variations in class, gender, age, ability, religious orientation,
and so forth—and therefore habitus has been a useful theoretical tool in
exploring the extent to which seselelãme undergirds Anlo identity formation
and relationality.
Most significantly, however, our work on seselelãme has been influenced
by the sensory anthropology of David Howes (1991, 2003) and the cultural
histories of Constance Classen (1993, 1997). Howes and Classen have
long argued that the “ways we use our senses, and the ways we create and
understand the sensory world, are shaped by culture. Perception is informed
not only by the personal meaning a particular sensation has for us but also
by the social values it carries” (2014, p 1, emphasis added). Historically,
studies of sensation in Euro-American scholarship were the purview of
the discipline of psychology, so anthropological and cultural-historical
treatments of the senses (emerging in the late 1980s and early 1990s) helped
pave the way for our own excavation of an Indigenous Anlo sensorium
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(see Geurts, 2002a, pp 37–69; Geurts and Adikah, 2006). These initial
projects brought seselelãme to the foreground as we investigated not only the
personal meanings of sensory experiences but also the cultural grounding of
bodily ways of knowing and child socialization practices that inculcated such
implicitly relational selves (Geurts, 2002a, pp 73–165). Our approach to “the
body” therefore aligned well with an emerging interdisciplinary approach
called “sensory studies,” which in part aimed “to help problematize the
increasingly homogenized notion of ‘the body’ in contemporary scholarship
by advocating a modal and intermodal or relational approach to the study
of our corporeal faculties” (Bull et al, 2006, p 6).5 Indicating clearly that
“the senses mediate the relationship between self and society, mind and
body, idea and object,” the authors of “Introducing Sensory Studies” took
the following stance on the body:
This relational focus will disrupt the presumption of the unity of the
body (which has simply taken over from the modernist presumption of
the unity of the subject) by highlighting the differential elaboration of
the senses in diverse times and places, and underscoring the multiple
forms of human sensuousness. (Bull et al, 2006, p 6)
Our own excavations of an Indigenous Anlo sensorium, and our explorations

of seselelãme, further disrupted assumptions about the supposed universality
of a five-senses model of the body and the privileging of categorical ways
of thinking and knowing the world.
When Howes then brought to the English-speaking world French
anthropologist and philosopher François Laplantine’s Life of the Senses, this
profoundly underscored the work we had already done on Anlo experiences
and epistemologies. Laplantine’s exposé helped to breathe new life into
seselelãme. Howes provided us with a snapshot of Laplantine’s insight by
explaining that “categorical thought … attributes properties to those things
it isolates from the flux of existence and cleaves to the logic of the excluded
middle,” whereas modal thinking encourages us “to focus on duration,
modulation, and rhythm instead of essence and identity” and is “sensitive
to the slightest gradations and movements and affects” (Howes, 2015, pp
ix–x). As mentioned earlier, Komabu-Pomeyie reached out on social media
to a network of Ghanaians, asking them to share experiences and musings
about seselelãme. We will now turn to one of the responses to illustrate
modal thinking. The following is an unedited communication from Kodzo,
a Ghanaian medical doctor. What we want to draw particular attention
to is how his meditation on seselelãme captures a rhythm about his life, a
movement looping his professional focus and intensity into his feelings of
delight, elation, disappointment, frustration, and shame. His dedication to
70
learning and academic achievement does not occur at the expense of being
alert to his sense of happiness, joy, and worthiness. Kodzo wrote:
I am an Ewe who hails from Dodome in the Ho West District of the

Volta Region of Ghana. I learnt Twi as a second African language
due to my professional work in Twi or Akan speaking communities.
The nearest word I learnt in Twi similar to seselelãme or feelings is
atinka. I experienced happiness, joy, delight and elation especially
when I excelled academically. E.g. As best pupil in basic school, first
to qualify to enter secondary school form 3; best biology student in
sixth form; graduation with first degree in medicine and surgery; and
Master’s degree with distinction.
He then goes on to list a series of events and accomplishments that have

given him “a feeling of self-satisfaction and fulfillment (dzidzeme kporkpor –
Ewe)”; for example:
Professionally, when I had a successful cervical cerclage at the first

attempt. The product of that salvaged pregnancy is now a lecturer
in University of Ghana. Also a successful first tracheostomy to save a
child’s life and received a commendation from my former Teaching
Hospital. I also diagnosed and treated a lady who suffered 14 years from
Sheehan’s Syndrome (dysfunction of pituitary gland) with only a good
clinical history taken without the aid of laboratory tests. And recently
the detection of a rare congenital abnormality of Dextrocardia/situs
inversus in a 4 month old [sic] baby referred to the Cardiologist. In all
these cases and other similar cases, I experienced a sense of worthiness
or usefulness (nudzedze/vevinyenye –Ewe). I have also felt a sense of
disappointment, frustration, shame when I lost some of my patients
I thought I could have saved, if I had acted differently, or more swiftly.
E.g. my first attempt at hysterectomy, a snake bite, and a road traffic
accident case.
I also experienced a sense and feeling of being very useful/worthy/
important to my home community when I undertook free health
screening and treatment in my traditional area on 2 occasions after
which the chiefs and elders came to express their gratitude with the
donation of foodstuffs and fruits to my team. The same was when
I rehabilitated a bore-hole to supply potable water to one community
under the IFP Alumni Award in 2015. These are a few of the instances
that readily come to mind talking of my feelings or seselelãme. I hope
you will find them useful.
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Kodzo’s reflection is striking in the way it tacks back and forth from
achievement (successfully performing a cervical stitch on his first attempt)
to heartfelt sentiment (the baby delivered through that procedure is now a
professor); the way it moves from palpably sensible activities (performing
a tracheotomy on a child, rehabilitating a bore-hole to bring forth clean
water) to a wide range of emotions (gratitude, happiness, disappointment,
and shame). We can feel an alertness and intensity as the doctor recollects
what seselelãme calls to mind. Another response from Komabu-Pomeyie’s
network of Ghanaians came from Akpene, a 40-year-old nurse, and we
present it here unedited:
To me seselelãme means feeling … this feeling comes at different levels.

It could be very strong or very low. It could be an expression of joy or
sadness. When it is extreme, one feels he or she is dreaming. I had this
experience when I lost hope of getting admission to the university. At
the final stage, I (out of the blue) received my admission letter. On my
way from my station back to Accra, I had to constantly touch some
passengers or ask them to pinch me in order to confirm that I was not
dreaming. The second one was when I lost my elder brother. I lost the use
of my limbs for some minutes because of how I was extremely shocked.
Reference to dreaming is very telling here, as it connotes an alternate

state of consciousness. Feelings are so strong (extreme) that Akpene
shifts into a qualitatively different mode of being (a dream-like state) and
requests pinching of her skin to transform her orientation back toward the
surrounding passengers. Laplantine (2015) stresses how modal thinking dwells
on forming, deforming, and transforming rather than concerning itself with
fixity and stability. Categorical thinking, by contrast, dwells on drawing but
never withdrawing traits, since withdrawal would dissolve the category’s fixity
(Laplantine, 2015). Dreaming, however, perpetually draws and withdraws.
It revels in processes of forming, deforming, and transforming, so likening
an experience of extreme seselelãme to dreaming illustrates its modal nature.
Another striking feature of this recollection is the mixture of emotions and
physicality: joy, sadness, loss of hope, shock, dream state, touching, pinching,
and paralysis of limbs. Another response, from a university lecturer named
Nunanan, exhibits these same features:
Seselelãme is an emotional expression of the self on seeing or hearing

anything that depicts a situation of sorrow, regret, fear or pity at an
event. It may lead to goose bumps where your bodily hair may stand
on edge with a thrilling sensation running through you. This feeling
varies in degrees depending on the event. It may be mild when the
event depicts sorrow. But intense when it depicts fear.
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We are initially told of emotional dimensions of seselelãme—sorrow,

pity, fear—but then encounter body hair standing on edge. This physical
manifestation, the goosebumps (piloerection), evoke an energy, a palpable
change that is also indicative of modal thinking. We would suggest that these
Ghanaian accounts of seselelãme are organic and vital: they are “without
additives”; they are “free from pollutants” and exude an alive, sentient,
breathing quality. We now turn to instances of its globalization and examine
efforts to fix, stabilize, and commoditize seselelãme.
Seselelãme and globalization

A rapid migration of seselelãme into Global North contexts (primarily via
the world wide web) has led to some peculiar and occasionally simplistic
interpretations. For example, a fitness coach declared on her website that
seselelãme better categorized—compared to a range of English language
descriptors—the kinds of classes she taught. She indicated that on the
gym schedule her classes were typically listed under Body Mind Classes, as
opposed to Group Exercise Classes, but she found “the arbitrary distinction
sometimes hilarious, sometimes exasperating” and asked: “What Body Pump
or High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT) class isn’t using both body and
mind and what yoga or Nia class isn’t group exercise?” (McCulley, 2019).
She indicated that if she had to describe or categorize what she taught, she
would “call it movement, not exercise or dance or martial arts” and she would
“say it is systemic, whole-body and sensory-centered … it is about presence,
awareness and responsiveness … it creates health through integration and
is as much about what we do outside the studio as it is what we do in it”
(McCulley, 2019). Finally, McCulley indicated: “I might call it Seselelame.”6
Though we are completely in favor of fitness students and mainstream
Americans moving their bodies more regularly and pursuing greater attention
to their feelings, we are not convinced that these practices or experiences
automatically translate to seselelãme, and we are dubious about its cultural
borrowing or appropriation.
Linguist George Lakoff and philosopher Mark Johnson open their 600-
page book Philosophy in the Flesh with three short sentences: “The mind is
inherently embodied. Thought is mostly unconscious. Abstract concepts
are largely metaphorical” (1999, p 3). It was bold and provocative for them
to assert the basic premise of our brains and cognitive processes as being
somatically embedded or corporeal. Several implications of their assertion
will help to shed light on our concerns about a globalization of seselelãme.
They contend, “since reason is shaped by the body, it is not radically free,
because the possible human conceptual systems and the possible forms of
reason are limited” (Lakoff and Johnson, 1999, p 5). As a species, humans
evolutionarily share basic body morphology, and it is through this limited
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body morphology that human reason has grown (Lakoff and Johnson,
1999). However, cultural diversity in language and experience creates
at least some variation. In fact, they explain, “once we have learned a
conceptual system, it is neurally instantiated in our brains and we are
not free to think just anything” (p 5). If conceptual systems are neurally
instantiated, resulting in our not being free to think outside or beyond
them, then what about the instantiation of “bodily ways of knowing” or
something like seselelãme? If a fitness coach in the United States declares
what she teaches to be seselelãme, will students in her Body Pump or High
Intensity Interval Training class be able to then experience seselelãme? Lakoff
and Johnson (1999, p 6) hedge by suggesting that “our conceptual systems
are not totally relative and not merely a matter of historical contingency,
even though a degree of conceptual relativity does exist and even though
historical contingency does matter a great deal.” A degree of relativity does
exist; historical contingency does matter. Here, as the term moves “out
of Africa” and circulates around “the web,” we wonder to what degree
historical contingencies surrounding seselelãme matter and what happens
as it is reinterpreted in new contexts.
The whimsical phrase “focus pocus now dot com” is used by McCulley,
the fitness coach, to designate one of the sites where she imparts her wisdom.
As indicated, she thinks that seselelãme aptly captures what she teaches, and
she provides the following background:
Seselelame is a West African word that a genius coach friend taught

me not long ago. She learned it from Philip Shepherd’s book Radical
Wholeness in which seselelame is described as “an inner realm in which
all the world is felt.” I haven’t read Shepherd’s book but this term
captures my imagination. (McCulley, 2019)
Seselelãme as “an inner realm in which all the world is felt” sounds like
the end goal of a spiritual quest; it has the ring of New Age promises of
enlightenment, or attainment of a godlike overview. To be able to feel all of
the world—from Asia to Europe to Africa to the Americas—inside of yourself,
in your inner realm, once you have engaged in a workout at the gym is,
needless to say, a tall order. Some would say this is simply hyperbole and not
meant to be taken literally. But a second claim found on focus pocus now
dot com is that “seselelame … recognizes that the entire human experience
is felt in our bodies” (McCulley, 2019). In comparison with what Ghanaians
say about seselelãme, this is a rather preposterous claim. To suggest a workout
at a gym can lead to feeling the entire human experience in one’s body is simply
not sensible; it is abstract and categorical. Through recourse to measurement
(entire, not just partial), it makes an attempt at prestige. What we want to
ask is, how did seselelãme become linked to such a claim? What was “picked
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up” from Geurts’ writings that then led people in Global North contexts to
embellish, exaggerate, or distort seselelãme in this way?
Anthropology has rightfully been criticized for advancing the European
Enlightenment project of “differencing” and “othering” peoples all over the
world. Princeton University professor of music Kofi Agawu, who grew up in
the northern Ewe-speaking area of Ghana, has argued eloquently about the
disingenuousness of supposedly comparing cultural practices when the people
live in drastically different economic spheres (2012, p 123). He calls out those
of us ethnographers who have been too wedded to “a persistent strategy of
‘differencing’” and too slow to “embrace sameness” (p 120). While Geurts’
work resisted “essentializing” Anlo-speaking people and made great effort
to account for processes by which the so-called “knowledge” reported in
publications was arrived at, in the end some of the renderings of seselelãme may
very well have downplayed “residual similarities” among Anlo-Ewe people
and other human groups, and some of the descriptions of seselelãme may have
given an “edge to strangeness and novelty” (pp 119, 123). But a perceived
“edge” of difference has been amplified through the globalization of seselelãme.
Interpretations of seselelãme as novel and exotic are apparent in Phil
Shepherd’s use of this Ewe term. On his website, Shepherd describes himself
as an “international authority on embodiment,” and the autobiographical
opening of his book Radical Wholeness portrays a longstanding interest in
“cultures radically different from [his] own” (2017, p 7). In fact, his first
chapter title—“Feel-Feel-at-Flesh-Inside”—seems aimed at demonstrating
such global cultural awareness. He devotes at least ten pages to explaining
what he learned about Anlo-Ewe sensory philosophy from reading Culture
and the Senses (Geurts, 2002a), and as a jumping off point for explaining
his own journey “into greater embodiment,” he borrows our morpheme-
by-morpheme account of what seselelãme can be understood to index.
Shepherd’s enthusiasm is palpable. Writing for a lay rather than scholarly
audience, his book blends genres of memoir and self-help guide. He asserts
that relative to “our culture” in which “we live in our heads” and “deem
the body to be without intelligence,” in some “radically different cultures”
(such as Anlo-Ewe), people are attentive to their bodies (Shepherd, 2017,
p 43). For purposes of interpreting the body, Shepherd’s view is a provocative
hypothesis, but it is unproven (which will be discussed later) and by no
means representative of what we think the existence of seselelãme means.
Othering, exoticizing, and cultural appropriation are, of course, completely
entangled. Making “other cultures” appear exotic or at least “non-Western”
evolved alongside the discipline and profession of anthropology, a religious
zeal for missionizing, and a political agenda of expansion and colonization.
Negative (racialized) stereotyping has been transmogrified, to some extent,
into lucrative cultural appropriation (eg, see Greene, 2008), so that trafficking
in things (formerly marked as) “primitive” can now be profitable. It is not
75
surprising, therefore, that Shepherd has trademarked (for profit) a practice

by means of which people can appropriate/acquire such a different and
desired way of being. On his website we find options to pay-to-engage in
training workshops on The Embodied Present Process™ (TEPP), “a series
of practices that were developed by Philip Shepherd to help people gently
undo the stress and imbalances that are caused by living in the head, and
find instead what it means to rest in the deeper, connected intelligence of
the body.” Categorical thinking is on clear display here with the head and
the body understood as separate, divided, and distinct. Various societies are
also categorized and distinct, which comes through in the following text
from Shepherd’s website where he accentuates distinctions between “our
culture” and those that are “radically different”:
The Anlo-Ewe don’t just hear sounds; they feel them through the
body. They don’t just see sights; they feel them in the body. So while
we have only the Chosen Five—each an exteroceptor that imputes a
boundary around the self—the Anlo-Ewe have seselelame, an inner
realm in which all the world is felt. … Seselelame is an umbrella
or “uber” sense that feels reality reverberate through “the cavern.”
(Shepherd, 2017, pp 17, 23)
The phrase “an inner realm in which all the world is felt” is what McCulley,
the fitness instructor, mentioned in relation to how her classes at the gym are
unique. One of the problems here is that seselelãme has nothing to do with
feeling “all the world.” We are also not aware of any bodily way of knowing
(nor an organ or “an inner realm”) that makes such an experience possible.
These distortions of seselelãme remind us of one of Agawu’s points in his
essay “Contesting Difference”: “While Africans deserve full recognition
for whatever is unique about their critical and cultural practices, they do
not need fake or facile attributions” (2012, p 120, emphasis added), and “what
I am arguing for … is not sameness but the hypostatized presumption of
sameness” (p 126). Imagining Anlo-Ewe people possessing an “uber sense”
and an ability to feel the whole world creates a caricature, not simply a difference.
Julia Jude is a systemic psychotherapist who vacillates between equating
seselelãme with AOTI (an acronym she uses for African Oral Traditional
Ideas [2016, p 555]), passing it off as “my inventive approach [sic]
Seselelame” (2013, p 194) and elevating it to an analytic perspective on
the same plane as phenomenology, feminism, and systemic constructivism
(p 136).7 When conducting a Google search query about seselelãme,
Jude’s Journal of Family Therapy article (2016) comes up as the first search
engine response page, which is disappointing since seselelãme does not
coincide with any of the ways she deploys it. What are we to make of
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this? Similar to McCulley and Shepherd, Jude both distorts seselelãme and
treats it pragmatically—zeroing in on its potential for commoditization.
At the end of her dissertation she explains that she plans on “applying
the Seselelame approach within a clinic-based setting” and “facilitating
workshops … as a way of introducing the Seselelame frame” and
“establishing a training placement, creating opportunities for trainee
family therapists to experience the Seselelame approach” (2013, p 225).
She also indicates engagement in “publication of a Seselelame tool kit”
and “a Seselelame performative arts project for working with young
people” (p 226). Barely attributing seselelãme to the Ewe language or
Anlo-Ewe people, Jude explains: “I came to take on knowledge from
my ancestry that promotes a feeling in the body perspective” (2016
p 556), and “the description of ideas from AOTI provides an understanding
of the themes that I found helpful which led to transforming some of the
main principles of AOTI resulting in the invention of Seselelame” (2013,
p 108). Other than a passing comment about how “I was encouraged by
my supervisor to become curious with my inventive approach Seselelame”
(p 194), we can find no reason for the word to even appear in her
dissertation; she uses it incorrectly, and in nearly every instance it could be
replaced by the English word “feeling.” On the other hand, seselelãme has an
exotic, catchy quality; it could yield good market appeal and merchandizing
power, which seems to be the motivation behind Jude’s claims to have
established these trademark-worthy expressions: The Seselelame Tool Kit
book (p 94); The Seselelame Approach (p 98); The Seselelame Model
(p 197). Making seselelãme itself into products and services is a manifestation
of categorical-rationalist thinking in the extreme and the antithesis of the
modal thinking so beautifully exhibited by seselelãme. It isolates, fixes, and
stabilizes seselelãme’s properties into three categories of services. Mirroring
Shepherd’s description of seselelãme as “an inner realm in which all the
world is felt” (2017, p 17), Jude ultimately concludes that “seselelame
posits that everything is connected” (2016, p 563).
The distortions and exaggerations we see in the claims of Shepherd,
McCulley, and Jude play to Global North cultural trends centering on
personal transformation, mindfulness training, and the human potential
movement. The Esalen Institute in California, for example, describes itself
as “a global network of seekers devoted to the belief that we are all capable
of the extraordinary,” so a seselelãme workshop teaching people to find their
inner realm, where they will be able to connect everything and feel the whole
world, could certainly appeal to those desiring extraordinary capabilities and
be quite lucrative as well. At this point we return to more organic renderings
of seselelãme as a means of probing why the reification and commoditization
of seselelãme is problematic.
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Ewe speakers interpret seselelãme

As Ghanaians wrote text messages to Komabu-Pomeyie in the spring of
2020, reflecting on situations when they considered seselelãme to be at play,
they used English words such as intuition, instinct, emotion, and feeling;
they provided examples that included spiritual experiences, emotional
reactions, sexual encounters, and more. A teacher named Akosiwa
communicated: “The semantic field (meaning) of the Ewe word seselelãme
is very wide and subjective. Seselelãme could have English equivalents like
sensation, ecstasy, feelings, emotions, excitement, agitation, etc.” Another
person, named Mensah, who is a typical traditional farmer from Dzodze,
reflected that if he used the English language to describe seselelãme he would
say: “Feelings, like attitudes, are predispositions to behavior. They run deep
inside our bodies and are in fact the basis of our emotions, like anger and
joy. They may not necessarily be logical but yet influence and sometimes
determine our behavior.” Predispositions to behavior running deep inside
our bodies is close to Bourdieu’s habitus as “history turned into nature”
or “durably installed generative principles” (1977, p 78). What follows is
Mensah’s example of experiencing seselelãme (punctuation and phrasing
edited lightly):
For instance, yesterday I hired some three women to help me harvest

my corn and the agreement was that at the end of everything they
would take a bowlful of corn as payment. They were to work from
8 am to 3 pm. They came around 10 am and closed at 1:30 pm without
harvesting all the corn on the farm. However, they insisted they
wanted a bowlful each of corn, per the agreement. Remember, these
are visibly poor village women. Now, here is the feeling: I felt pity
for them and at the same time felt bad about their not fulfilling their
side of the bargain. And so (even though out of the feeling of pity for
them) I agreed they should fetch their bowl each of corn. But, when
they started filling their bowls, I had a very bad feeling that they were
cheating me, and so I became restless but had to control myself not to
stop them. That feeling that they cheated me got the better part of me
for the rest of yesterday. I felt pity for the poor guys [sic] so I agreed
they should take the corn, but at the same time I had another feeling
that nearly made me stop them.
In Mensah’s recollection we find neither an epiphany nor a claim that “all

the world is felt.” Instead we hear a somewhat complex account of corporeal
stirring, visceral provocations, intuitions, even conflicted emotions. We are
reminded of Howes’ observation (2015, p x) that modal thinking encourages
us “to focus on duration, modulation, and rhythm instead of essence and
78
identity” and it is “sensitive to the slightest gradations and movements and

affects.” While Mensah made a passing reference to an identity marker
(“visibly poor village women”), it does not dominate the reflection. Instead,
there is an emphasis on deeply embodied feelings that are predispositions
to behavior, and then the account of fluctuations from a sense of pity and
charity to resentment (at being cheated) and then even honor (at fulfilling
the bargain). He made an agreement, then felt restless and conflicted, yet
mustered (self-)control to refrain from reneging on the deal. We get a clear
sense of modulations and gradations, movements and affects in the account.
Thinking, analysis, and conclusions (cognitive processes) were also involved
in his working through the experience, but we think he used this as an
example of seselelãme because he wanted us to appreciate how his body’s
visceral, palpable sensations were vital. There was no clear and easy way to
categorize the situation (cheating and fraud? pity? charity and justice?) and
his body provided signals that marshaled a history (upbringing, training,
parenting, enculturation) that called forth those “durably installed generative
principles.” For Anlo-Ewe and other African people, this bodily way of knowing
or seselelãme is deeply valued.
Reflecting on recent experiences she could recall that would also help to
illustrate what Anlo-Ewe people mean when they use the term seselelãme,
Komabu-Pomeyie wrote (personal communication, January 20, 2020):
A lady and I were carrying the setup communion table to the front of
the congregation during a communion service at church last Sunday.
Then, suddenly, I felt “the glass communion cup will fall and break”
because I was in [a]‌wheelchair. I smiled it off because I thought it was
a strange thought. After we had put the table down, the lady, in an
attempt to lift up the lace covering the table, caused the communion
cup to tilt, fall, and break. Instantly, I felt, “Oh! God was speaking
to me through that feeling before. Why didn’t I take it seriously and
forewarn the lady to be careful?” I consider seselelãme the appropriate
word to convey this experience because I had heard and perceived
(within me) the consciousness that something was going to happen.
Premonition, clairvoyance, and intuition are English words that seem

appropriate here. So why do we want to consider this an instance of
seselelãme? Komabu-Pomeyie drew attention to herself in the wheelchair: this
dimension of her embodiment was at the forefront of her premonition
that the communion cup was going to break. Concluding it was a strange
thought (probably questioning why she herself would think that a person
with disability was not capable of setting up communion), she then smiled
it off. She dismissed the thought, or put it aside, and in recollecting what
she did, she referred to it as smiling it off. This is a brilliant way of capturing
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how a human smile can have the effect of melting, soothing, or calming
feelings in the body, flesh, or skin. It also demonstrates the high value
that Komabu-Pomeyie and Anlo-Ewe people place on being attentive to
visceral dimensions of knowing. In this example we also see that seselelãme
does not always result in bodily ways of knowing that lead to triumph or
positive outcomes. Sometimes knowledge is off or wrong, no matter
how we arrive at it, and so this also contrasts sharply with Global North
appropriations of seselelãme that fixate on how it supposedly brings power
or extraordinary capabilities.
Psychology, possessive individualism, and seselelãme’s

intersubjectivity
Academic psychology has also shown an interest in interpreting seselelãme,
and here we will discuss two studies. The first of these aimed at bringing
into social and cultural psychology a historically underrepresented group,
Africans, and sought to explore “differences in the importance of the
internal body in the experience and expression of emotions in two cultural
contexts: Ghanaian and Euro American” (Dzokoto, 2010, p 69). These
are laudable goals, and our discussion of the study is not meant to imply
any condescension. The experiment involved 70 undergraduate students
from two different social science departments at a Ghanaian university and
compared them to 100 Euro-American students from a large midwestern
university. It drew on two different tests: the Body Awareness Questionnaire
(BAQ) and the Trait Meta-Mood Scale Attention to Emotion subscale
(TMMS). Dzokoto found that “Ghanaians were significantly lower on
the attention to emotion subscale,” and her hypothesis was confirmed that
“Ghanaian subjects would score significantly higher on a measure of somatic-
focused awareness” (2010, p 72). She then explained, “According to these
results, the concept of ‘feel-feel-at-flesh-inside’ was successfully demonstrated
numerically through the concept of somatic-focused awareness as measured
by the Body Awareness Questionnaire.” Interestingly, Dzokoto points out
that the Ghanaian participants in the study were English-speaking university
students, which brings in two factors we might expect to cause them to
exhibit more “Western influence” in their mode of thinking and being. But
even though they were from the more, relatively speaking, “Westernized
sector” of their own African society, they still exhibited the difference that
Dzokoto hypothesized.
Several subsequent studies have referenced Dzokoto’s work as they have
taken up what is often called “the mind–body problem.”8 One particular
study featured Anlo-Ewe people and seselelãme quite prominently and
raised questions about distinctions between “interoceptive awareness and
interoceptive accuracy” (Chentsova-Dutton and Dzokoto, 2014). The
80
researchers reviewed a range of qualitative studies that demonstrated cultural

elaboration of somatic attentiveness and they wanted to explore whether
experimental psychology could verify such differences. Interoception
included both proprioception and visceroception, the processing of signals
from the skin, muscles, joints, and inner organs (2014, p 667). Awareness
was defined as the “self-reported tendency to attend to actual or perceived
internal changes,” and accuracy meant a “degree of precision in estimating
actual physiological signals, such as heart rate” (p 667). Participants in the
experiments included 61 West Africans in Accra, Ghana, and 61 Euro-
Americans in Washington, DC. In a nutshell, the experiment involved
participants viewing two different film clips (one neutral and one fear-
provoking) while their heart and respiratory rates were measured, and they
continuously recorded perceived changes to their heart rates. The study’s
conclusions reported:
West Africans were more likely than European Americans to endorse

beliefs about being able to accurately monitor their bodily signals. Yet
the measure of interoceptive accuracy, as captured by the coherence
between in-the-moment perceived and actual heart rate in response
to a scary film clip, told a different story. Although participants across
cultural groups had little success in accurately perceiving changes in
their heart rates, West Africans fared worse, not better, than European
Americans in this task. (Chentsova-Dutton and Dzokoto, 2014, p 674,
emphasis added)
The authors were surprised that participants who engaged in the study in
Accra were not able to demonstrate greater accuracy at perceiving their heart
rates. They asked: “How can we explain the fact that West Africans, who
think of themselves as highly attuned to their bodies, are actually less able
than European Americans to detect bodily changes” (Chentsova-Dutton
and Dzokoto, 2014, p 674)? Several possible explanations were explored.
The discipline of psychology shows that people who report more somatic
symptoms (relative to other people) are often not good at accurately detecting
actual physiological changes in their bodies. Certain situational circumstances
can activate their somatic schemata, and this seems to interfere with accuracy,
or seems to have a disruptive effect. It is possible that asking participants to
track their heart rates caused the activation of their “schemata for the types of
heart rate changes that are associated with fear,” which include an expectation
of spikes. But anticipating the fear-induced spikes could inadvertently cause
them to overlook “actual, typically more gradual, increases and drops in
heartbeat over the course of the film” (p 675).
Unlike the uses of seselelãme discussed previously, which aim to appeal to
popular audiences and enhance commercial activities, these psychological
81
studies were conducted by academic researchers and described for a

scholarly audience. We are not trying to suggest, therefore, that all
of the cases presented in this chapter are alike, and we are not trying
to blanketly call into question the value of psychological studies. We
are, however, concerned that even the treatment of seselelãme by well-
meaning psychologists diverges quite a bit from how it functions in its
organic context. Ghanaians and Ewe-speakers consulted for this project
by and large provided examples in which relationality was of primary
importance as they considered how seselelãme functioned in their everyday
lives. In the psychology settings there is a kind of artificially constructed
individualism: subjects are treated in isolation of each other and asked
to fixate on something that has little or no intersubjectivity. Among the
responses Komabu-Pomeyie received, Ama related the following (edited
lightly for grammatical purposes) as instances when seselelãme captures
what she has experienced:
I hear how a dear one passes on and tears begin rolling down my cheeks,
just because my receptive heart told me that’s a loss. I hear that someone
dear or close to me has won a visa lottery and quickly I jump up in
excitement, all because my receptive heart tells me that’s good news and
so my emotions follow and are exposed publicly or openly because of
that piece of news. This indicates that I experience emotional changes
based on what I receive into myself as information—good and bad,
positive and negative—as well as what my senses receive.
The emphasis here is on how sensory and bodily ways of knowing

influence social-emotional relationships, rather than serve as a microscope
for individualized and self-contained physiological measures. This latter
fixation links up with Global North trends in individualized medicine and
fitness regimes, which are often cast in a positive light, but it also “pollutes”
seselelãme (to extend our organic metaphor). Connectedness to other people,
or sociality, consistently emerged as we asked Ghanaians to offer examples
of seselelãme. Kwame wrote:
What does seselelãme mean? It means what I feel after an occurrence.

The emotions that fill my heart after an experience. How do you
translate seselelãme into the English language? Emotional rapture;
emotional meltdown. There was a time when someone insulted me—
Eku gbagbawo (boy with a damaged eye). All through my childhood as
a boy with partial disability with regards to my eyes, countless people
looked down on me and teased me and it really affected my self-esteem
growing up. So I can relate to seselelãme as a growing-up boy.
82
Kwame initially offered feelings of his individualized self, so we might

anticipate reflections or comments on interior sensations. But immediately
after suggesting the creative translation of “emotional rapture, emotional
meltdown,” his grounded example of seselelãme reflected an intersubjective
consciousness. His deflated self-esteem, or his feelings of emotional
meltdown, came about because of teasing, insults, people looking down
on him. Seselelãme nearly always conjures intersubjectivity rather than an
individualized psycho-physiology fixated on counting or measurement (of
something such as heartbeat).
While this difference in understanding and investigating seselelãme is
certainly reflective of differences in disciplinary methods (eg, psychology
versus anthropology and sociology) and the approaches taken by various
scholars, we would suggest that the schism extends beyond academic fields.
It also highlights a fundamental difference in what is valued and what is
believed to be real. In the psychological studies of seselelãme that we discussed
earlier, the social is absent; seselelãme is stripped of its cultural context, for who
lives in a psychological experiment?9 Imposing onto seselelãme the question
of interoceptive awareness compared to interoceptive accuracy introduces
a value system that has little connection to the lived reality of seselelãme.
Whether or not a person can accurately measure their own heart rate is a
question emerging from a cultural world valuing atomization, categorization,
calculation, measurement, and power—as well as reality as that which can be
perceived in data. This cultural world also privileges possessive individualism,
whereas seselelãme comes from a cultural world in which fluidity, movement,
synesthesia, and intersubjectivity are valued.
Concluding remarks
This chapter has presented a handful of ways in which seselelãme has been
culturally appropriated, commoditized, distorted, removed from its organic
context, and adulterated. Why should this matter? What is at stake here
and why should we care? In the first instance, if seselelãme attracts people
(especially in the Global North) because it offers an alternative to mind–
body dualism or “five centuries of rationalocentrism,” then it behooves us to
listen closely to those who organically live with seselelãme and align our own
interpretations of seselelãme with theirs rather than distort—or pollute it with
our own. Only then might we actually learn from seselelãme and maximize
our potential to cross over into a more rhythmic, sensible, transformative
(noncategorical) mode of being and knowing. We repeat Kofi Agawu’s
claim that “While Africans deserve full recognition for whatever is unique
about their critical and cultural practices, they do not need fake or facile
attributions” (2012, p 120). Fake and facile representations lead to stereotypes
83
and racialized misunderstanding; so does theft of natural resources, which

leads to our second point.
Commoditization of seselelãme perpetuates an age-old symbolic and
structural asymmetry rooted in the violence of the transatlantic slave
trade, the looting of Africa for gold, timber, oil, coltan, and more, and the
institutionalized power-hold Global North entities and people have over
people of African descent. At this point it is doubtful that more than a few
hundred or few thousand dollars have as yet been earned in the Global
North through seselelãme, but that is beside the point. What is at issue is a
persistent pattern of extractive practices, when it comes to Africa, by those
who are more economically powerful. In his essay “Interrogating Piracy,”
South African scholar Adam Haupt (2014) discusses how things African
have been consistently appropriated and “reworked” as if they are simply
“raw material” without any attempt being made to engage the actual
cultural context in which the thing originates.10 His use of “raw material”
strikes a chord because it links historical extractions from the ground with
contemporary appropriations of aesthetic, symbolic, and bodily material—all
of which can be “reworked” in ways not unlike what we observed in gyms,
workshops, and therapy strategies.
Finally, from the vantage point of Euro-American Enlightenment-
inspired academic and scientific perspectives, seselelãme does, in technical
ways, “belong” to a person; however, in its organic context it is much
less about individualism than intersubjectivity. For centuries, Anglo-
American tendencies have favored “one body, one self ” and “one person,
one vote,”11 while Anlo-Ewe tendencies have privileged socio-centrism,
porosity of selves, and intersubjectivity. As we have seen with Laplantine’s
distinctions of categorical and modal thinking, these alternate ontologies
and epistemologies amount to almost a civilizational difference. When the
discipline of psychology attempts to insert an ancient (and “non-Western”)
phenomenon into its experiments it ends up distorted and even polluted. To
extend our metaphor, this bourgeois and possessive individualist approach
to humanity, animality, and the planet has resulted in catastrophe. Until
Global North entities and the individuals who populate these institutions
change deeply, something as organic and biotic as seselelãme will remain
beyond their grasp.
Notes
1
For an extended discussion of these categories and how seselelãme poses alternative pathways
to processing experiences and ways of knowing, see Geurts’ (2002b) piece that deals with
“cultural categories.”
2
For yet another three-way division, see Laplantine’s (2015, p 59) discussion of “the
impossibility or at least the difficulty that is still often ours today, of perceiving a continuity
between the different dimensions of the living: organic life (reduced in Descartes to the
mechanical), psychological life, life in society.”
84
3
Participants in the survey have all been given pseudonyms and composite identities.
4
A plural “we” and “our” is used in this chapter to refer historically to Geurts and numerous
Anlo people involved in this research, as well as specifically to Komabu-Pomeyie and
Geurts as coauthors. For background on how we met see Geurts and Komabu-Pomeyie
(2016).
5
For a more current overview of sensory studies, also see Howes (2019).
6
Variations in the spelling, accenting, italicization, and capitalization of the term seselelãme
reflect its usage among the Western institutions and persons discussed in this chapter.
7
Here we might point out that seselelãme could very well be or become such an analytic
perspective or ideology. It is not difficult to try a thought experiment in which Africa
colonized Europe (in history) and therefore nowdays in school instead of studying
Cartesianism or phenomenology we would be studying ubuntu or seselelãme. But that
did not happen, so it is only in a thought experiment that seselelãme presently holds
such stature.
8
The “mind–body problem” takes up the relationship between mental entities and physical/
material phenomena, or the problem of consciousness and the brain (see Feigl, 1967;
Kim, 2010). Within the field of psychology, a particular programmatic orientation has
recast the mind–body problem in terms of “visceral perception” or the mind’s ability to
detect shifts, changes, or movement within internal organs of the body.
9
By critiquing specific studies that touch on seselelãme we do not mean to suggest that all
psychology research absents the social (see especially Markus and Kitayama, 2010). And
while psychology may not center the social, social-psychology and cognitive cultural
sociology certainly do (see Turner, 2008).
10
In this specific instance Haupt is referring to the Solomon Linda case of his song “Mbube,”
which was appropriated numerous times over and eventually used by Disney Corporation
in its film The Lion King, but the point is more generalized throughout the piece.
11
See our critique of Antonio Damasio’s neuro-biologically based psychology in Geurts
(2005).
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4
Gender on the Post-Colony:

Phenomenology, Race, and
the Body in Nervous Conditions
Sweta Rajan-Rankin and Mrinalini Greedharry
What is the body and what can it do? How does the lived body experience
itself and what are the structural and historical vectors that mediate its
emergence and disappearance? The intermittent appearance of the racialized
body in and out of theory, history, and politics compels us to ask the questions
that have dominated body and embodiment studies (Douglas, 1966; Elias,
1978; Turner, 1984, 2012; Featherstone et al, 1991; Butler, 1993; Shilling,
2003) in a new way. This chapter was written in a moment when Black
and racialized bodies have once again gained prominence because of the
brutal murder of George Floyd in the United States, suffocated under a
white policeman’s knee. And yet, we have been here before and found that
just as suddenly as the racialized body appears in our critiques and analyses,
it disappears.
Critical approaches to the body, from social constructionism (Weinberg,
2012) to feminism (Mohanty, 1991; Crenshaw, 1994) to critical race studies
(Weheliye, 2014), have attempted to respond to the disappearance of the
racialized body with varying levels of success. Feminism, as a unifying
arc and promise of gender justice, has needed to reckon with its own
racializing imaginaries, working through white feminisms’ uncomfortable
relationship with Black women’s class and race subordination (Olufemi,
2020). Epistemological claims advanced within white feminism and the
European philosophical tradition—about gender as a category and gender
equality as a social process—have failed to consider how colonial histories
perpetuate unequal subject locations for people of color and, in particular,
women located in the Global South. While there have been movements
88
Gender on the Post-colony
toward integrated analysis (intersectional theory presents one example

[Crenshaw, 1994]), the basic crux of the argument has not been addressed.
The bodies, stories, narratives, and embodied histories of Black, Indigenous,
and other women of color have been noticeably absent in both white feminist
scholarship and race scholarship.
We contend that gender is a colonial formation, insofar as the concept
and constructs of gender have been derived from Western epistemologies
that underpin social orders and norms typical of Western societies. Due to
the mainstreaming of concepts concerning gender, patriarchy, and sexual
and reproductive control, the multifarious representations through which
women’s identities and embodied belongings emerge—for example, within
African countries—are read or interpreted through lenses of oppression
and victimhood. Similarly, while there have been powerful theoretical
interventions that have explored the phenomenology of Blackness and
racialized bodies, they have tended to focus on the Black man’s struggle
within colonialism, and Black women’s experiences are again sidelined.
The solution is not further expansion of representation and identity politics.
Rather, it is a full force challenge to the conceptualization of gender and race
as distinct but parallel categories; it is a reinterpretation of the multiple axes
within which gendered and racialized bodies are constructed and eroded in
different and uneven ways in the development of colonial histories.
In order for this reinterpretation to be successful, however, meaning and
materiality associated with bodies must be spoken from as well as through an
engagement with Black feminist writers—for such an engagement is both
the interpretative (theoretical) device and the method by which the Black
woman’s body appears and stays visible in our theories and our research. It is
in this spirit that we explore the formation of “gender on the post-colony”
through a close reading of Tsitsi Dangarembga’s (1988) award-winning novel
Nervous Conditions, which advances and speaks to the limitations of Frantz
Fanon’s (1986) phenomenology of Blackness.
The phenomenological tradition of body studies has been slow to
understand how the corporeal schema of racialized subjects develops in a
racist or colonial world, but postcolonial novelists have theorized this through
their representations of the colonial architectures of power. Dangarembga’s
Nervous Conditions, for instance, theorizes the potentialities and limits of
Zimbabwean girlhood through the eyes of two African girls, Tambu and
Nyasha. The use of dual protagonists, similar but not identical, allows us to
see the intersecting interpretive frames that link colonial actors with their
material and biographical environments through, for example, ruralism, the
homestead, and colonial patriarchy; religion, sexuality, and the regulation
of women’s bodies in the missionary school; modernity, purity and danger,
and embodied erasures; pleasure and self-awareness; disease and sickness;
starvation and longing; colonial mimicry, ambivalence, and arrival. We argue
89
that our textual analysis allows for a nuanced understanding of how African
womanhood is negotiated and how girls’ bodies are made available for, and
find ways to resist, colonial architectures of power.
Phenomenology of Blackness
The phenomenological tradition of body studies emerges from the writings
of Husserl (1990), Heidegger (1962), and Merleau-Ponty (1962), who each
in their own way sought to challenge Descartes’ famous proposition “cogito,
ergo sum” (I think, therefore I am), which, situating the seat of the self
in the reasoning faculty of the mind, set up a dualism between mind and
body. Phenomenology did not offer a method for solving this mind–body
dichotomy so much as it presented a new analytical lens through which to
interrogate it (Crossley, 2012). According to Descartes, the search for the
truth required a quest for rationality outside the fleshy self: “in Cartesianism,
the human mind is viewed as an island of awareness afloat in the vast sea of
insensate matter” (Leder, 1990, p 8). Descartes’ proposition sets up a split
between rationality and sensuous experience, with the seat of the self (the
thinking/rational mind) capable of existing in spite of—and thus independent
from—bodily senses.
The premise of mind–body dualism has been debunked by numerous
theories of the self, most notably the social constructionist tradition, which
relocates bodies within social contexts, histories, cultures, and institutions.
Social constructionists such as Mauss (1973) refer to techniques of the body
as specific ways in which the bodily practices of everyday life are products
of enculturated experience, arguments that are also found in Foucauldian
and Bourdieusian perspectives on social life (see Foucault, 1979; Bourdieu,
1984). The most profound challenge of social constructionists to Cartesian
dualism has been their dismantling of biologically essentialist ideas of the
naturalized body to explain social differences, particularly gender, race,
and sexuality. Constructionists consider instead how institutional structures
create conditions for these inequalities. As Weinberg (2012, p 144) notes,
the social constructionist tradition provides a rigorous epistemic basis from
which to challenge essentialist thought, which “seeks to reduce historical
and cultural difference to biology” and thus “runs the risk of reifying and
indeed promoting inequality and injustice.”
While Cartesian dualism locates the mind (and hence the reflective
rational self) outside the body, Husserl (1990) considers that perception is
a sensuous experience and that knowing the self is a relational exercise
involving an embodied disposition—a way of seeing and interpreting
experience. Drawing on Husserl and influenced by Heidegger (1962),
Merleau-Ponty (1962) expands the interpretive process by which bodies
can know themselves through intersubjectivities and relational engagements
90
with social and cultural life. He maintains that locating bodies is the central
process through which we become “beings-in-the-world.” He suggests in
the Phenomenology of Perception (Merleau-Ponty, 1962) that the body cannot
know itself without engaging with the external world, a process that can be
achieved only through the senses. “The corporeal schema is a sense of itself
that the body arrives at through the meditation of its involvement with the
world” (Crossley, 2012, p 137).1
It is precisely this corporeal schema that Frantz Fanon (1986), in his
groundbreaking book Black Skin, White Masks, suggests is an unachievable
task for Black bodies who cannot know themselves under the weight of
colonial oppression. The freedoms and agencies that Merleau-Ponty alludes
to—of becoming a self-knowing, rational, agentic self—are ultimately
denied to Black bodies, who under colonial capture are stripped of their
humanity and relegated to objecthood. Locked in colonial struggle, the
white man is overidentified as subject and the Black man as object (Rajan-
Rankin, 2018). In response to the colonial problematic, Fanon reveals not
how it feels to be Black but how it feels to be made to feel one’s Blackness
in a world that reviles it. The method that Fanon develops for this account
combines psychoanalytic theory and phenomenology of racism with what
he calls “sociogeny,” a term he coins to convey that, notwithstanding the
way it is lived in body and mind, racism is rooted in socially, rather than
biologically, produced phenomena. The term sociogeny thus allows him
to do several things at once, including: prioritizing a genealogical account
of racism itself; critiquing the insufficient explanations of racism found in
psychoanalysis, psychology, and psychiatry (Mannoni, 1956; Adler, 1964;
Lacan, 1977); and challenging the phenomenological schemas of European
philosophy that fail to account for the struggle of the colonized subject to
attain their humanity as anything but the belated entry of racialized men and
women into a universal existential drama (Sartre, 1976). What Fanon wants
to assert, by contrast, is that “Black consciousness is immanent in its own
eyes” (1986, p 135). He writes, “I am not a potentiality of something else;
I am wholly what I am. I do not have to look for the universal” (p 135). The
phenomenology of the racialized body that Fanon gives us, then, is rooted
in an account of how colonial societies produce Black bodies.
However, Fanonist phenomenologies of Blackness are centered on the
Black man’s body, which raises questions about how Fanon’s work can be
used to theorize the lives of colonized women. Fanon recognizes both
gender and sexuality as vital parts of the colonial machine and questions
whether there can be authentic human relationships in a society structured
by colonial inequalities. He knows that the experience of women of color
differs from that of men of color in the colony, but his discussion of Black
women is confined to his chapter on sexuality, specifically Black women’s
relationships with white men (and their referred impacts on Black men’s
91
psyche) rather than gendered experiences of colonialism per se. As feminist

critics have argued, the theoretical scope of Fanon’s methodology is too
limited to help us understand the gendering of the colonial body. While
he observes the difference that gender makes in people’s lived experiences
of colonialism, he cannot assemble a theoretical space in which gender and
race are both crucial factors of subject formation (Doane, 1991; Bergner,
1995; Greedharry, 2008).
Since Fanon’s study of the existential and psychoanalytic dimensions
of race, postcolonial critics have articulated structural formulations of
the phenomenology of Blackness. Achille Mbembe’s (2001) theorization
of “becoming blackness” explores the vertiginous assemblage of human
bodies as commodity orders of modernity and capitalism. Thus, cemented
by modernity and class power, colonial power simultaneously creates
hierarchies of gender, race, and sexuality. Colonial architectures of power
then create “structuring processes” by which racialized bodies are placed
within hierarchies of difference. As we will discuss in our textual analysis
of Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions, Black male power, while subordinate
to colonial power, nonetheless asserts its privilege through the control of
gendered and sexualized bodies. These structural frames become absorbed
into narratives of everyday life, and gendered and racial identity formulations
become internalized by Black bodies. These structures are not static but
self-reinforcing; even in the absence of coloniality, they persist as separate
heuristic devices that position gendered power and racial power in ambivalent
relationship to each other.
Gendering the colonial body

The limitations of Fanon’s phenomenology and psychoanalysis of race call for
us to supplement his work with an understanding of how gender is inscribed
onto the native body as a consolidation of colonial power. Our aim here
is to demonstrate how gendering, as much as racialization, is a product of
colonial ambitions to categorize, tame, discipline, and shape the colonized
body. This may seem a counterintuitive proposition, since the racialization
of bodies can be readily understood as a strategy of colonial power while
gender does not tend to be understood in these terms. However, building
on the work of postcolonial feminists and gender historians (Nandy, 1988;
McClintock, 1995; Sinha, 1995; Stoler, 1995, 2002; Oyewùmí, 1997; Puar,
2008), we argue that gendering operates in parallel ways to racialization.
For example, sexist discourses commonly ascribe irrationality to women in
order to render them inferior, just as racist discourses commonly cast people
of color as inferior to whites both biologically and mentally. Nevertheless,
such ascriptions may also work in divergent ways; for example, where white
women’s bodies are understood to be delicate and physically fragile, Black
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women’s bodies are thought to be robust and able to endure significant

physical stress. In this case, the effect is to naturalize the deployment of
Black women’s bodies for the labor that keeps the colony functioning and
profitable. The colonial order of things produces this differential gendering
of the body in order to reinforce colonial relations of power, confining white
women to the business of producing and reproducing the colonial home
and Black women to the business of physically maintaining the colonizers
and building the colony.
Certain practices and processes of gendering are thus effects of the
colonial machine, rather than a reflection of natural, universal differences
between genders. The historical process by which gendering was used to
colonize has only been further entrenched by Western feminist thought,
which has the authority to delimit the range of meanings of the word
“woman” as well as the embodied experiences that correspond to it
(Jayawardena, 1986; Trinh, 1989; Mohanty, 1991, 2003; Spivak, 1993,
2010; Oyewùmí, 1997). Oyewùmí (1997) argues it was British colonialism
that first brought particular forms of gendered thinking to precolonial
Nigeria. She particularly disputes the Western gender analysis that Yoruba
women were already oppressed as women in their culture, and then
additionally oppressed as Africans—a commonplace reading of colonized
women’s oppression. Instead, she argues it was the colonization of Africa
that brought gender thinking to Yorubaland at the same time as it produced
racial difference, thus colonizing the women “as Africans together with
African men and then separately inferiorized and marginalized as African
women” (Oyewùmí, 1997, p 122). As a result of both historical processes
and epistemic dominance, Western scholarship does not recognize the
importance of colonialism in forming the gender categories to begin
with, and yet it offers feminist analyses based on those ostensibly universal
categories as an emancipatory solution for colonized women.
None of this is to suggest that colonies were free from gender-based
oppression before colonialism, especially since different gender orders with
their own dynamics of power and resistance were in place before contact
with Western Europeans. However, it is to draw attention to the fact that
in former colonies the emancipatory trajectories available to women, which
Western feminist analyses had advanced (eg, access to Western education),
bound them ever more closely to the structures and discourses of modernity.
As subaltern studies and decolonial scholars have noted, modernity, like the
Enlightenment, turns out to be another incarnation of provincial European
values presented as universal ones (Chakrabarty, 2000; Mignolo, 2011). The
colonized woman’s journey into modernity frequently demands that she
abandon embodied practices that give her meaning and presence (such as
non-Western clothing, cultural rituals, foods), thereby, in effect, recolonizing
what remains of her already colonized body.
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The key problematic, then, remains the disappearance and erasure of the
colonized woman’s body precisely because in feminist analyses the bodies
central to the analysis are white women’s bodies and in colonial analyses they
are Black or Brown men’s bodies. Which theoretical approach will allow us
to make visible a body that has been colonized through both racialization and
gendering? It seems clear that we must begin with the colonized woman’s
own account of her body and its experiences. It is for this reason we propose
to turn to literary texts as a source of theory about the lived experience
of the colonized woman. Literature produced by colonized or formerly
colonized women themselves offers us not a simple transcription of what
these women experience but an interpretation of how their bodies live,
move, and shape themselves in a world that does not see them. It signals a
return, and an intention, to reclaim the telling of their own stories, without
they themselves or their stories being filtered through gendered or racialized
hierarchies that have historically silenced their voices.
Literature as organic theory

Given their unequal access to academia and other sites of intellectual
influence, colonized women have frequently used literature and life-writing
as modes in which to build theories. Since available academic theories
neither visibilize nor allow colonized women to imagine their bodies,
literary forms offer them the freedom to describe worlds that would be
almost impossible to capture through the methods and practices of academic
research and theory. In this chapter, we read the novel Nervous Conditions by
contemporary Zimbabwean author Tsitsi Dangarembga (1988) as an instance
of what we might call an organic theory of the native woman’s body. Part
of the justification for our interpretation lies in the author’s own explicit
intention to create a set of maps that might allow Black Zimbabwean women
to navigate their particular terrain. As Dangarembga notes in an interview
published in the novel: “I think mapping the ground helps in making choices.
Such maps, written in an engaging way, are part of what I perceive some
of my responsibility as a novelist to be” (1988, p 211).
The author also signals an intention to respond to the limits of Fanon’s
phenomenology of racism and colonialism. The title itself provides an
intertextual clue to its connection with Fanon’s work, taking a line from
Jean-Paul Sartre’s introduction to Fanon’s final book, The Wretched of the
Earth: “the status of ‘native’ is a nervous condition introduced and maintained
by the settler among colonized people with their consent” (Sartre, 1968,
p 20). For Sartre, as much as for Fanon, the nervous condition is one
induced by the violent effects of living under colonial rule, but Fanon rarely
discusses the nervous conditions found in colonized women. In taking her
title from Fanon for a narrative that is consistently and clearly focused on
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the lives of women, Dangarembga turns the text into an explicit challenge
to both Fanon’s and Sartre’s theories of colonialism, which see colonialism
as a pathology lived primarily in men’s minds and bodies. Sartre’s reference
to “consent” in the creation and perpetuation of the nervous condition
also speaks to the structural machineries of colonized memory that persist
in locating racialized bodies as being out of place (Douglas, 1966). The
embodied task of Black presencing is, then, to examine how Black bodies
are not just bluntly thrust into emergence or erasure but are agentic actors
who pivot, navigate, resist, and recover within an unequal plane of power.
Finally, a central aspect of our interest in the novel lies in the close,
defamiliarized attention that Dangarembga gives to embodied experiences.
Defamiliarization is a literary technique whereby close, phenomenological,
attention to ordinary everyday experiences renders them new to the reader,
enabling them to experience familiar situations and sensations as if for the first
time (Shklovsky, 1965). In this way the text grants us entry to a landscape
wherein the vitalism and enchanted materialism of everyday life can come
to the fore (Bennett, 2001). Nervous Conditions is replete with moments in
which adolescent girls discover what is possible in a native, female body. It
thus offers an immediate account of how gender makes their bodies available
to colonialism even as they offer resistance through subtle and overt forms
of refusal.
Setting the scene: Tsitsi Dangarembga’s

Nervous Conditions
Nervous Conditions is the first novel in a trilogy about the life of Tambudzai,
a young woman who grew up on a rural homestead in Southern Rhodesia
in the late 1960s. Tambu is coming of age at the same time as the nation.
Rhodesia, then under minority white government rule, entered a period of
civil war in 1965, which led to the formation of the independent nation of
Zimbabwe in 1980. Tambu’s world consists of the dynamics of life within an
extended Shona family. Her mother, Ma’Shingayi, and father, Jeremiah, rely
on the patriarch of the family, Jeremiah’s oldest brother, Babamukuru, who
takes his patriarchal responsibilities very seriously. Babamukuru is married
to Maiguru, who, like him, is a college graduate and works as a teacher.
Together they have a son, Chido, and a daughter, Nyasha. Soon after the
novel opens, Babamukuru has just returned from studying in England to
take up the post of headmaster at a Christian mission school. Tambu’s older
brother, Nhamo, seems destined to continue in his uncle’s footsteps, going
to live and study at the mission school until a sudden illness takes his life
and it is decided by the patriarch that Tambu will be given his educational
opportunities instead. Against her mother’s will, Tambu leaves the homestead
to go and live in Babamukuru’s house and begins to experience colonial
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education for herself. The action of the novel shifts back and forth between
the homestead and the mission school, which allows us to see how both
Tambu and Nyasha struggle to shape themselves into “good native girls.”
Though deeply attached to each other, the girls have different
understandings of what is possible, and they choose different strategies
for navigating their lives. By the end of the novel, we see two versions of
African girlhood struggling with modernity and Black identity. Nyasha’s
Western education brings a restless consciousness that sits in deep conflict
with her traditional roles and is manifest in her “nervous condition” of
disordered eating. Tambu has won a scholarship to the prestigious Sacred
Heart convent school and is about to leave her uncle’s home for further
trials in colonial education. She has learned to survive “under the radar,”
navigating the classed expectations of being a poor relative and learning to
capitalize on her uncle’s benevolence, only to find herself in an ambivalent
relationship with her emerging self. Unable to go back and uncertain about
what lies ahead, both girls are locked in a vertiginous assembly of becoming
and disappearing: the nervous condition.
A colonial education
Dangarembga’s foregrounding of the problem of education is commonplace
in postcolonial literature, where education is the apparatus through which
colonial subjects acquire worth and mobility. However, as Nair (1995)
notes, the many fictional representations and critical discussions of colonial
education do “not address the anonymous female subjects who were not
allowed an education in the first place” (p 130). When we first meet her,
Tambu’s body is valued as one that may be exchanged for material value
to her family, in the future, as a wife and mother. An education does not
appear to increase the value of Tambu’s body within this economy and so
she is not allotted one. Through much of her early life in the homestead,
Tambu is almost invisible: Babamukuru has sent money for her school fees,
but her father has misappropriated those funds. She works hard growing her
own crops to sell and obtain money for her fees, and her brother thwarts her
efforts. However, when her brother dies unexpectedly, she takes his place at
the missionary school. The death of her brother gives her a new life within
the colonial patriarchy. It is a reality that she states matter-of-factly: “I am
not sorry my brother died. … [T]he event of my brother’s passing and the
events of my story cannot be separated, my story is not after all about death,
but about my escape” (Dangarembga, 1988, p 1). It is only the absence of
other colonized boys in the family that makes Tambu’s body available for
education. Access to the school is a crucial turning point in her life, since
education gives her female body license to move around the world as the
men do, off the homestead and into the mission school.
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Thus far, the story conforms to an understanding that education is what

liberates colonized women from their oppressed situation within traditional
family and kinship structures. Dangarembga’s narrative, however, is equally
scrupulous in its reflection of how education that moves Black women in
new directions simultaneously shuts off the other paths along which they
traveled easily before and which are important to them. When Tambu arrives
at the mission, she has a sense of herself as a peasant body in her “tight, faded
frock that immodestly defined [her] budding breasts, and in [her] broad-toed
feet that had grown thick-skinned … the way the keratin had reacted by
thickening and, having thickened had hardened and cracked” (Dangarembga,
1988, p 58). Arriving at her uncle’s luxurious house, Tambu acutely feels
her class inferiority and seeks familiar markers of home. She is consoled by
the idea that she might be sleeping with the live-in servant, Anna. Tambu’s
speculations are disproved, as Anna begins to adopt new behavior such as
“kneeling down to talk to [her] and not looking at [her] as she talked but
at a spot on the floor a few inches in front of [her]. The worst thing was
that she hardly talked at all, said no more than the few words necessary to
convey her message” (p 86). Tambu is discomforted by this change. A body
still so like hers, familiar to her, suddenly becomes unreachable. She appears
to hold out hope that she will remain a person with whom Anna can talk,
since her education “was not to be such a radical transformation that people
would have to behave differently towards [her]. It was to be an extension
and improvement of what [she] really was. Anna’s behavior made [her] feel
uncomfortably strange and unfamiliar with [her]self ” (pp 86–87).
The strange feeling Tambu has about herself is an early signal to the reader
that education not only improves lives but can also bring a sense of loss and
nonbelonging. It is a mark of her misunderstanding of colonial education-as-
liberation that Tambu did not understand that these changes would happen
to her, too. Before his death, her brother Nhamo also slowly disconnected
from the homestead, avoiding the rural women who “smelt of unhealthy
reproductive odours” (Dangarembga, 1988, p 1) and the rural men who “gave
off strong aromas of productive labour” (p 1). Tambu’s cousin, Nyasha, and
her older brother, Chido, are similarly alienated from the homestead when
they return to it after a period of living in England. They no longer speak
Shona and cannot take their place easily in the family life of the homestead.
By contrast, returning to the homestead is a notably happy occasion for
Babamukuru, because it redoubles his sense of agency. On the homestead
he is a hero, celebrated and able to see his own accomplishment. He is
even allowed to pick up a hoe and join in as if he was still a homestead boy
(Dangarembga, 1988, p 6). For an educated woman, such as Babamukuru’s
wife, Maiguru, returning to the homestead is more ambiguous because she
cannot comfortably occupy the spaces of both the traditional homestead
and school. The agency that Maiguru has on the homestead is at the same
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time overdetermined and curtailed. Her role as the patriarch’s wife means
that greater demands for certain kinds of reproductive labor fall upon her—
cooking, laundry, management of food—so she appears to be in charge.
At the same time, however, the women on the homestead do not trust or
valorize her accomplishment as an educated woman and merely defer to
her as custom requires. Maiguru experiences her education as a burden
that forces her to work harder and harder for a home and family in which
her labor goes unrecognized. Tambu does not experience her return to the
homestead as a celebration either, which contrasts strongly with her account
of the triumphal homecoming given to her brother.
Regulating “good native girls”

The degree to which education both gives women access to mobility and
changes the way they relate to other bodies is closely tied in the novel
with sexuality, and how the women experience and use their own bodies.
Dangarembga establishes, at several points, that the “puritanical” colonial
norms Babamukuru seeks to impose on his daughter, niece, wife, and
sisters-in-law are derived from the Christian morality he has learned at
school. Tambu’s relatives neither express shame nor use euphemism on
the homestead when discussing the young women’s sexual development.
We see this, for example, when family members discuss the near future in
which Nyasha will become sexually active: “‘The breasts are already quite
large,’ [Mainini] declared, pinching one and causing Maiguru to wince with
embarrassment. ‘When do we expect our mukwambo,’ my mother teased
her niece” (Dangarembga, 1988, p 133). Sexuality on the homestead is
regulated, but according to different norms. Babamukuru’s incorporation of
Christian norms into his role as the patriarch of the family enables him to
extend his authority further, even into the girls’ pleasures and experiences
of their own bodies.
Tambu and Nyasha are both aware that bodily pleasures are structured
by social relations. Tambu experiences pleasure in her body’s sensations
and capacities, but she is acutely sensitive to how others perceive her. She
enjoyed dancing with her family as a child, “music and movement pulsing
through the night to make your skin crawl and tingle, your armpits prickle,
your body impatient to be up and concerned with the beat” (Dangarembga,
1988, p 42). The dancing she describes here is at the same time a communal
practice and an individual sensation. The sensation she feels in her own body
develops further as she pays more attention to the music: “My movements
had grown stronger, more rhythmical and luxuriant; but people had not
found it amusing anymore” (p 42). She does not refer to any sexual feelings.
This sensation is purely something she enjoys within herself, but the failure
to elicit amusement from others leads her to conclude that “there were bad
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implications in the way I enjoyed the rhythm” (p 42) and, accordingly, her
“dancing compressed itself into rigid, tentative gestures” (p 42). What Tambu
expresses here is not a conscious attempt at self-discipline (“I danced”) but
rather something the “dancing” does to itself. She does not stop dancing,
since dance is a communal activity in her family and, as evidenced by
reactions to Nyasha’s and Chido’s failure to dance at the homestead (p 43),
it would be abnormal to avoid it. But Tambu no longer takes the same
pleasure in her body for herself for some time afterward.
Tambu’s decision to continue dancing, albeit in “rigid, tentative gestures,”
is characteristic of her strategy for resolving the conflicts of being a female
body in the post-colony. She perceives that there are contexts and social
relations that she must attend to if she is to survive: “I was always aware of
my surroundings. When the surroundings were new and unfamiliar, the
awareness was painful and made me behave very strangely. At times like
that I wanted so badly to disappear that for practical purposes I ceased to
exist” (Dangarembga, 1988, p 112). As she learns what is expected of her,
she finds the easiest way to negotiate those expectations is to make herself
smaller—like the compression of her dancing—so that she can participate
normally without drawing attention to her own feelings or desires. Tambu’s
desire to make herself disappear is a poignant reflection of how the problem
of being a colonized woman, constantly under erasure between gender and
race, becomes embodied. She literally experiences her body as one that
must disappear in order to resolve the tensions of colonized womanhood.
In so doing, Tambu’s disappearance from her knowing self might suggest a
Cartesian split, a mind–body dualism, where the mind confronts a reality
where her native body cannot be in its natural state. Considered in the light of
the distinction that Leder (1990) makes between the “ecstatic” and “recessive”
body, whereby pleasure and pain respectively expand or contract the body’s
capacity for self-recognition, it is far more likely that Tambu’s “dys-appearing
body” is keenly aware of pain and pleasure and bends to accommodate the
environment it inhabits. Leder writes, “As ecstatic [pleasure], the body
projects outside itself into the world. As recessive [pain], the body falls back
from its conscious perception and control” (1990, p 169). Tambu’s innocent
pleasure as she dances for herself can be seen as the ecstatic body expanding
its sense of freedom with each rhythmic movement. As she becomes aware of
the disapproving gaze of her family members, the ecstatic body recedes—she
becomes more self-conscious and the recessive body intrudes, bringing her
movements in line with the expectations of social control.
The contrast between Tambu’s and Nyasha’s negotiation of pleasure is
one of the most marked differences between them. If at times they are
almost twins, at other times their embodied experience demonstrates both
different understandings of the limits and possibilities of their bodies and
the different strategies for surviving colonialism that these generate. At a
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school dance, Nyasha dances with Andy, a wealthy white Rhodesian boy,
and lingers with him in the driveway when they return home. The innocent
circumstance becomes a trigger for a violent showdown between father and
daughter, in which he beats her mercilessly and she, refusing to be docile,
fights back. Babamukuru’s concerns about how it might seem if a daughter
of his is seen or thought to behave in sexually inappropriate ways are heavily
tied to his sense of himself as a model colonial subject. Nyasha, who intuits
the absurdity of her father’s investment in colonial norms, is more acutely
aware than Tambu that the requirement placed upon her to discipline her
own body’s sensations and needs is demanded of her in the name of colonial
patriarchy. It is an awareness she has gained through her education. It is,
however, a demand she utterly rejects.
As the fight between father and daughter subsides, however, Babamukuru
warns that Nyasha’s audacity in fighting back will lead to her death because
“we cannot have two men in this house” (Dangarembga, 1988, p 117).
The colonial Christianity that has structured Babamukuru’s existence turns
into a grave for the colonized woman: if she tries to inhabit the same space
as the colonized man, she risks death. A phenomenological reading of
Nyasha’s conflict suggests that while colonial Christianity has structured her
education and liberation, it also has produced in her a dissident body with
modernizing notions of female selfhood that threaten African patriarchy
and must be subject to control.
Sick bodies: hunger, longing, and wasting away

Under the constant pressure of gendered and racialized colonial discipline,
the colonized woman develops a nervous condition of her own. Although
some critics have argued that the women’s hysteria portrayed in the novel
is a manifestation of the impossibility of women articulating their critiques
(Thomas, 1992), we agree instead with Patchay (2003, p 152), who contends
that “when women’s voices are silenced, their bodies can speak” (see also
Bahri, 1994). Nyasha, Tambu, and Ma’Shingayi, the three women in the
novel who experience sickness, each use their bodies to refuse the incursions
of colonial modernity into their lives. Yet, in their lines of refusal, each
deploys different tactics consonant with their varying positions within the
colony. In Nyasha’s case, the line is what she is allowed to be in her own body.
For Tambu, the line is what relationship she can have to her community.
And for Ma’Shingayi, the line is what form of life is left to her.
Early in the novel we see that Nyasha has a difficult relationship to eating,
not because of a biological or psychological condition but as a response to an
environment in which patriarchal control is repeatedly played out through
the preparation and consumption of food. Tambu’s first visit to the mission
home includes an elaborate dinner in which Babamukuru and Maiguru
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enact gender hierarchies—one in which men are served first, for example,
and women and children make do with what is leftover. Babamukuru insists
that everyone act in accordance with his rules, and even though Nyasha’s
capacity to question, if not defy, his rules is evident, she is not as divested
from his rules as she seems. Her disordered eating intensifies when she is
under pressure to succeed in her studies, an internal conflict that occurs
at least partly because she senses that her success satisfies Babamukuru’s
colonial ideals. Her academic success vindicates his strategy of colonial
obedience, but it also means that her intellect, the very thing that allows
her to challenge Babamukuru’s thinking, is compromised. She undertakes
a strategy of overcompliance with his authority, as Tambu witnesses on one
of her visits back to the mission.
She sat down very quietly and that was the beginning of a horribly
weird and sinister drama. Babamukuru dished out a large helping of
food for his daughter and set it before her, watching her surreptitiously
as he picked casually at his own meal to persuade us he was calm.
Nyasha regarded her plate malevolently, darting anguished glances
at her father, drained two glasses of water, then picked up her fork
and shovelled food into her mouth, swallowing without chewing.
(Dangarembga, 1988, p 202)
Having disciplined her body to swallow what the social order demands, she
immediately retreats to the bathroom to throw up everything she has eaten,
refusing to absorb or digest it. Despite the spectacle of compliance, she loses
weight, becomes frail, and passes out at the dinner table one evening, but
this still does not drive her parents to consult a doctor. As with Tambu’s
desire to disappear, the fact that Nyasha is apparently ever more compliant
and literally takes up less and less space is not in itself a problem in the body
of a colonized woman. It is, instead, her expression of both violent rage and
despair that finally pierces the family’s denial:
Nyasha was beside herself with fury. She rampaged, shredding her
history book between her teeth (“Their history. Fucking liars. Their
bloody lies”), breaking mirrors, her clay pots, anything she could lay
her hands on and jabbing the fragments viciously into her flesh. ...
“They’ve trapped us. They’ve trapped us. But I won’t be trapped. I’m
not a good girl. I won’t be trapped.” Then as suddenly as it came, the
rage passed. “I don’t hate you Daddy,” she said softly. “They want me
to, but I won’t.” She lay down on her bed. “I’m very tired,” she said
in a voice that was recognisably hers. “But I can’t sleep. Mummy will
you hold me?” She curled up in Maiguru’s lap looking no more than
five years old. “Look what they’ve done to us,” she said softly, “I’m not
101
one of them but I’m not one of you.” She fell asleep. (Dangarembga,
1988, p 205)
The scene is heartbreaking—a colonial subject who is exhausted by the effort

simply to find a way to be herself, to be in a body that must consume the
colonial order of things but never take up more space within it. The speed
with which she vacillates from wanting to efface and destroy herself to then
deeply desiring reconciliation with those she loves gives the reader a sense
of the pain Nyasha feels—the pain of being colonized not only by those in
authority (Nyasha’s “they”) but those most intimate with you. Even in the
depth of her anguish, Nyasha recognizes that Babamukuru is not really the
one to blame and that hating him would only be to complete the cycle of
self-colonization.
Perhaps because of her proximity to the patriarch, Nyasha’s embodied
howl against what the colonizing natives are doing to themselves is the
most spectacular and prolonged. Tambu’s conflict with Babamukuru is
more episodic and occurs when he insists on a Christian solemnization
of the marriage in which her parents have been living for several years.
Babamukuru “solves” the problem of Tambu’s father’s multiple sexual
relationships by insisting on a Christian wedding to reinforce both a
European and Christian model of monogamous relationship. As soon as
the prospective wedding is discussed, Tambu experiences it as disease in her
body: “I suffered a horrible crawling over my skin, my chest contracted to
a breathless tension and even my bowels threatened to let me know their
opinion” (Dangarembga, 1988, p 151). All of these might be considered
classic symptoms of anxiety, but Tambu herself understands it as the
product of a conflict in her understanding of Babamukuru’s authority,
which expresses itself through her body. Fully inculcated into the mission’s
teachings about sinfulness, she sees the moral rightness of Babamukuru’s
idea that her parents should be married, but the wedding also “made
a mockery of the people [she] belonged to and placed doubt on [her]
legitimate experience in this world” (p 165). The conflict between what
she feels about herself, in herself, and the demands of the (post)colonial
Christian order leads her to an even more intense embodied experience
in which she does not know, once again, how she can exist. Now she
is not merely compressing herself and her movements, she is losing a
sense of her own coherence and solidity. The conflict brings her to the
realization that she has lost a part of herself that she had before she settled
into mission life: “My reverence for my uncle, what he was, what he had
achieved, what he represented and therefore what he wanted, had stunted
the growth of my faculty of criticism, sapped the energy that in childhood
I had used to define my own position” (p 167). It is a reminder that the
homestead is not inevitably the site of silence, oppression, or incapacity
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for the colonized woman. Contact with colonial education dissolves some
capacities even as it develops others.
At first, only Tambu’s body is able to manifest this understanding: “I found
I could not get out of bed. I tried several times but my muscles simply refused
the half-hearted commands I was issuing to them” (Dangarembga, 1988,
p 168). There is even a suggestion that she knows she is only pretending,
a remnant of the part of Tambu that desperately tries to govern her body
according to her uncle’s rules, but the appearance of Babamukuru himself
at her bedside does not result in any change. Tambu, now narrating the
experience as if she were outside her body, notices that “the body on the
bed did not twitch” (p 168). Nevertheless, she continues: “Meanwhile,
the mobile me, the alert me, the one at the foot of the bed, smiled smugly,
thinking I had gone somewhere he could not reach me, and I congratulated
myself for being so clever” (p 168). At last, instead of disappearing as a
response to colonial gendering, Tambu takes herself elsewhere, leaving her
body behind to deceive others. The splitting of her body continues while
Maiguru and Babamukuru discuss her condition, but she cannot sustain
this displacement: “I slipped back into my body. I found I could speak
again” (p 169). Finding herself back in her body, Tambu asserts, for the first
time, that she does not want to go to the wedding. As with his reaction to
Nyasha’s supposed indecency, Babamukuru responds to this challenge to his
authority with physical punishment. Yet Tambu is able to endure it. Unlike
her mother and her cousin, she redoubles her control over her body “with
a deep and grateful masochistic delight” (p 171). She explains: “To me that
punishment was the price of my newly acquired identity” (p 171). Tambu
does not destroy herself but instead cultivates a capacity to enjoy the pain.
Although, like Nyasha, her bodily refusal does not help her to recover what
she has lost, she learns a different way of surviving in the colony, and it is
this strategy that carries her toward the conclusion of the novel—it indicates
Tambu’s agency in being able to pass between the recessive and ecstatic body
state and negotiate between “presence” and “dys-appearance” (Leder, 1990).
Ambivalence and arrival

If the point of Tambu’s journey has been to acquire the same colonial
education as Babamukuru and Maiguru, then the novel comes to an
ambiguous conclusion. Tambu accomplishes her goal and the final chapter
begins in a triumphal tone: “All the things that I wanted were tying
themselves up into a neat package which presented itself to me with a
flourish” (Dangarembga, 1988, p 195). The sting comes, however, as soon
as Babamukuru, Maiguru, and Nyasha deliver Tambu to the school. At a
moment when she hopes to be “seen” for her individual accomplishments, the
force of erasure redoubles. Having made it through the trial of Babamukuru’s
103
colonial discipline, the signs are all around Tambu that she has not arrived at
the better place she had imagined and that others who have tried to acquire
a colonial education before her have not fared any better. Nyasha, as we
saw in detail earlier, suffers a breakdown, causing Tambu to wonder: “If
Nyasha who had everything could not make it, where could I expect to
go?” (p 206). Indeed, whether or not Nyasha will survive remains unclear
at the conclusion of the novel. Ma’Shingayi diagnoses the “Englishness”
Tambu is learning as the ultimate threat, the thing that is killing Nyasha
and might kill Tambu, too, if she is not careful. The last page of the novel is
crystallized by Ma’Shingayi’s diagnosis, which Tambu finally acknowledges
as an important and real understanding of colonialism’s effects on the lives
of the women she loves. The triumph that began the chapter dissolves into
a genuine moment of postcolonial awareness: “Although I was not aware
of it then, no longer could I accept Sacred Heart and what it represented as
a sunrise on my horizon” (p 208). Tambu has arrived at her goal, but she is
also beginning to understand that within the colonial order of things, the
goal itself might be the trap.
An end to nervous conditions?

The nervous condition is not only a state of flux, a liminal space between
modernity and tradition, a form of entrapment, but also an awakening.
Postcolonial modernity presents a key dilemma for racialized subjects: How
can a body just be without being devoured by disappearance? We began our
chapter by noting that the racialized body becomes visible only intermittently,
sometimes sharply when movements such as Black Lives Matter focus our
eyes on what has always been before us. At other times, however, our vision
is weakened, obscured by the narratives of emancipation and education we
have cultivated in order to believe that the “body” really could mean the
Black woman’s body as much as the Black man’s body or the white woman’s
body. Our reading of Nervous Conditions highlights a phenomenology of
Blackness that is as relevant to the colony as it is to the metropole. It makes
visible the silent and sometimes violent ways in which agency erupts in the
patterns of appearance and disappearance of the girls through the text, in
ways that mirror the larger patterns of appearance and disappearance of the
Black woman’s body in our theories and politics.
Tambu’s body appears on the scene of education, enrolled in the trajectory
of modernity and emancipation postcolonial society proffers, only when no
men are left. She works her way through the structuring process of colonial
education and learns to make her girl’s body appear and disappear at will in
order to survive and make progress. This is a subtle art because it is highly
contextual and socially structured but also agentic and negotiated within
the limited choices available to her.
104
Nyasha has an intuition, perhaps from her earlier contact with the
postcolonial metropole, that she must not tolerate any attempts to make
her disappear. Instead, she experiments with her body in a chaotic but
determined way, sometimes complying with the demand to be a “good
native girl” in a way that also damages her body. Like her cousin Tambu, she
recognizes the colonial demand to appear and disappear as a young woman
whenever it is asked of her, but she refuses to understand that demand as a
reasonable one. In Nyasha’s analysis, colonial education might still hold out
the possibility of escape from colonialization if it also allows her to remake
the contours of trajectories that have been shaped to fit the bodies of men
like Babamukuru, Nhamo, and Chido.
To argue, as we have, that gender is a colonial construct is to draw attention
to the multiple ways in which the colonial architecture is built for and
imagines racialized male bodies, just as the feminist response to colonial
power has been built for and imagines gendered white bodies. Living in such
a world has brought young women like the fictional Tambu and Nyasha to
experience a nervous condition of their own, in which they try to understand
how they could enjoy, make use of, exceed, and care for their unimagined
bodies, bodies that neither the colonial nor postcolonial worlds have yet
been shaped to hold. We all live in nervous conditions: caught between
consciousness and the limits of our immediate realities. The difference is
that some of us cannot describe our realities in a way that is understood as
real, material, and consequential because gender and race are continually
separated out as separate threads of a deeply interwoven fabric. It is in this
wakeful state that we recognize gender on the post-colony as an ambivalent,
constantly negotiated, reinterpretative activity of being, becoming, existing,
surviving. By resurfacing the phenomenology of the Black female body, we
are able to witness these artful forms of resistance.
Note
1
We do not have space here to provide a more detailed comparison of social constructionism
and phenomenology (nor is it opportune, since this would detract from the emphasis
on Black feminist voices), but the contrasts between the two approaches to the body
and theories of self are important when we consider how histories are interpreted, how
stories of self are told, and by whom they are told.
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5
Reinterpreting Male Bodies and

Health in Crisis Times: From
“Obesity” to Bigger Matters
Lee F. Monaghan
In the context of an ongoing, highly contentious “war on obesity” (O’Hara

and Taylor, 2018), bodies categorized as “too heavy” or “fat” are routinely
positioned as targets for “helpful” interventions. Simplistic calls to eat less
and move more, incorporating “pedagogies of disgust” (Lupton, 2015) that
are amplified by dramatizing and moralizing mass media (Raisborough,
2016), routinely incite populations to get trim and “win the battle of the
bulge.” Bodies medically deemed to be overweight or obese (read: most
people) are, after all, “known” to be a “big problem” not only for individuals
but also health systems and economies that can ill afford to be further
burdened. “The end of the obesity epidemic,” as suggested by Gard (2011),
has not materialized. Rather, rhetoric about this putative problem has
been reinvigorated amid entangled and cascading crises (notably economic
and fiscal concerns following the 2008 Great Financial Crisis) and, most
recently, the urgency evoked by a “dual COVID-19/obesity crisis frame”
(Monaghan et al, 2022). Amid the fear, panic, moralizing action, and intense
stigmatization that typically accompany the outbreak of a novel infectious
disease (Strong, 1990), populations have been warned that “excess” weight/
fatness increases the risks of SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID-19),
notably hospitalization and death. It was in this context that the United
Kingdom’s (now former) Conservative prime minister Boris Johnson
reiterated the virtues of weight loss for himself and fellow citizens after
contracting COVID-19 and being admitted to intensive care (O’Connell
et al, 2021).
109
As per Johnson’s publicly expressed concerns about his physicality and

fitness, male bodies and health are thoroughly implicated in a biomedical
gaze that would seek to render us all conscientious weight watchers.
A central premise of this chapter is that there is a need to reinterpret this
gendered “body project” (Shilling, 2012), especially amid pathologizing
medicalized calls that seemingly provide an incontestable basis for state-
sanctioned interventions. Such a proposition is made in view of numerous
problems and questions. For instance, what prejudices are expressed when
health promoters repeatedly target “idle fat blokes” and urge them to get
off the couch and lose weight (Monaghan, 2008)? What about the ethics
of such calls given that most people are unable to lose weight and keep it
off (Rothblum, 2018) and suggestions that the “fight against fat” is a form
of communicated or “symbolic violence” (Bourdieu, 2001; see also Warin,
2020)? Arguably, such issues tend to be ignored as part of a more general
problem. As explored by Monaghan and Atkinson (2014), with reference
to a range of discredited masculinities, whether the targets are “fat blokes”
or other “deviant groups” (eg, drug-using bodybuilders, nightclub security
staff, boys who “fail” to participate in physical education), the problem is
reduced to certain types of male bodies. These types must be targeted and
corrected, whether via therapeutic interventions or regimes of discipline
and punishment.
In qualifying what follows, I am not trivializing real problems enacted and
experienced by groups of men and boys or the gendering of institutions
that are observably toxic in their effects. As explained by Scott-Samuel
(2014), patriarchy and neoliberalism might be viewed as two intertwined
venomous snakes that have proven disastrous in contexts such as the politics
of warmongering and health promotion (see also Scott-Samuel et al [2009]
on problematizing masculinity as an ideology). Rather than trivialize such
concerns, I will offer the sociological argument that the war on obesity risks
obfuscating social structures and processes that demand critical interpretation.
When advancing this argument, I will first discuss the putative “problem”
of weight/fatness, including reference to some of my previously published
research on male bodies. Rather than detract from feminist scholarship
on women’s and girls’ corporeal concerns, my aim is to complement a
profeminist agenda by interpreting the war on obesity as a bellicose expression
of masculine domination (Monaghan, 2008). Second, I will offer a critical
lens on the broader context that impacts people’s life chances, health, and
well-being. In particular, connections are made with calls within medical
sociology and critical studies on men’s health to scrutinize embodied
social structures and broader material conditions of existence (Lohan,
2010; Robertson and Williams, 2010). Such thinking, comprising efforts
to theorize rising inequalities, serves as a point of contrast to a “narrowly
logical” focus on “deficient” male bodies and behaviors.
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Reinterpreting Male Bodies and Health
The “problem” of men’s and boys’ weight/fatness:

things are not what they seem
Populations have reportedly been facing a public health catastrophe since
the late 1990s—an obesity crisis or “global epidemic” (World Health
Organization, 1998, 2021)—caused by an excess of calories ingested
relative to those expended, otherwise interpreted as gluttony and sloth
(UK Parliament, 2004). People are allegedly storing up problems for the
future not only in terms of unnecessary illnesses and early mortality but also
by burdening health services, whether publicly funded, through taxation,
or privately funded, with higher insurance premiums (The Report of the
National Taskforce on Obesity, 2005). In short, the obesity epidemic has
been constructed as “modernity’s scourge” requiring “a ‘war on obesity’”
(Gard and Wright, 2005, p 69). We are told that “excess” weight/fatness
must be combated, with US surgeon generals making statements such
as obesity is “the terror within” and is more threatening than “weapons
of mass destruction” (Monaghan, 2008, p 1). In Britain, successive chief
medical officers have described obesity as “‘a health time bomb’ that must be
defused” (UK Parliament, 2004, p 8) and a threat that is in the same league
as “terrorism, war, flooding and disease pandemics” (Borland, 2015). Such
alarmism persists. “The problematisation of fatness in COVID-19” (Pausé
et al, 2021) is the most recent manifestation of this crisis frame, comprising
signature elements that divert attention away from political and structural
factors (eg, rising inequalities) that incontrovertibly undermine health.
The authoritative framing of weight/fat as a public health crisis (Kwan
and Graves, 2013) is symbolically and materially significant. It adds gravitas
to what might otherwise be dismissed as the superficial (yet oftentimes
oppressive) preoccupations of the fashion-beauty complex, a web of meanings
and practices that have long been critiqued by feminist scholars (Chernin,
1981; Bordo, 1993). Feminist writings on the vicissitudes of weight-loss
culture retain their relevance and bite, though “obesity discourse” (Evans
et al, 2008) also exceeds gendered concerns about normative discontent and
the tyranny of slenderness among women and girls. Within the anti-obesity
terrain everybody is a potential target for corrective or preventative action,
in the interests of promoting healthy bodies and a healthy, productive nation
(Academy of Medical Royal Colleges, 2013). Furthermore, given the social
construction of childhood as a crucial stage in the lifecourse, with young
people defined as the future lifeblood of the nation, anti-obesity interventions
often target schoolchildren whose “vulnerability” warrants urgent action
(Rich et al, 2020). Interventions include the monitoring of children’s body
mass index (BMI) and lunchboxes or even being made to run “fat laps”
during physical education (Gard and Wright, 2005, p 185). As seen in my
ethnographic research in a college in England, efforts to tackle childhood
111
obesity proceeded even when boys’ bodies appeared underweight. Here

“health” served as a thin rationale for interventions that were in practice
geared toward promoting middle-class ideals of social fitness—the civilizing
of recalcitrant male bodies (Monaghan, 2014a).
The framing of “excess” weight/fat as a massive public health crisis also
means that men are extolled to work on their bodies as part of a responsible
effort to overcome their exposure to (self-imposed) risk (eg, in terms of
diabetes and heart disease; for a recent critical review of obesity science and
epidemiology, see Monaghan et al, 2022, pp 45–54). The advancement of
this “body project” (Shilling, 2012), which ostensibly seeks to “empower”
men but discredits many as deficient or deviant, has attracted the attention of
scholars who critique the absence of the “fat man” within feminist writings.
“So widely is the net of deviance and its attendant gaze being cast,” write
Bell and McNaughton (2007, p 126), “that it is impossible to continue to
deny or downplay the impact of the war on fat on both women and men”
(emphasis in original). Those studying men’s health have subsequently
critiqued discourses that target men for corrective body work. For example,
Gough (2010, p 128) states that much attention is being directed at “the
particular vulnerability of ‘fat blokes’ in an age of media inspired male
objectification.” This observation emerges in Gough’s critique of a men’s
“obesity reduction manual,” which prioritized hegemonic masculinity
more so than health—for instance, the value of the rational mind over the
emotional body or the construction of male bodies as machines that require
maintenance and fixing much akin to cars that must be given the “correct
fuel” and technical servicing. Hence, Gough urges caution when reading
popular media that “recycle a restricted range of masculinised symbols
and practices—and which focus mainly on individual rather than societal
changes” (2010, p 138) that could improve health.
While obesity discourse, or the Weight-Centered Health Paradigm
(WCHP) (O’Hara and Taylor, 2018), has considerable traction in body-
oriented consumer cultures and masculinity scholars are rightly addressing
this (similarly, see Lozano-Sufrategui et al, 2016), concerns about male
fatness or corpulence are not new (Gilman, 2004). Whether referring to
Falstaff in Shakespeare’s Henry IV, whose flesh signified frailty (reproduced
on the cover of a report on obesity by the United Kingdom’s National
Audit Office, 2001), or concerns about “tubby” Canadian men during the
Cold War (McPhail, 2009), men’s fatness has been discredited in various
times and places. Similarly, Monaghan and Hardey (2011, p 64) note how
in Britain “the social, scientific and political concerns of the Enlightenment
gave rise to” such figures as George Cheyne (1673–1743) and William
Banting (1796–1878)—men who “suffered” from corpulence, with Banting
writing the first recognizably modern diet book in the late 1800s. However,
contemporary obesity epidemic rhetoric has, especially since 2000 and
112
most recently following the outbreak of COVID-19, rendered the fight

against fat (or simply weight, given that the BMI does not actually measure
fatness) ubiquitous in its manufacturing of deficient or risky (male) bodies.
“Surveillance medicine” holds sway here via “attempts to bring everyone
within its network of visibility” (Armstrong, 1995, p 139, emphasis added).
Medicalized calls to fight fat/weight are expressed in myriad contexts.
These contexts not only include popular manuals wherein male bodies are
commodified as objects for aesthetic evaluation and scrupulous body work
(Gough, 2010). They also include mass media, which mockingly claim
that most men are “denting their seats” (BBC Online, 2007) or trumpet
ministerial exhortations, as seen when Boris Johnson asserted that his
weight-loss efforts were worthy of emulation in order to “save” the health
service “time and money” (Sky News, 2020). One might also note less
abrasive or moralizing statements within masculinities scholarship, which,
though generally valuable, takes medicine’s epistemic authority for granted
when discussing “overweight” as one of those “risk factors” where “men as
a group really are worse off” (Connell, 2000, p 193). The medicalization of
men’s bodies as “overweight,” to draw from Conrad and Schneider (1992),
might help to reframe putative deviance as an issue deserving of compassion
and care (badness becomes sickness). But an “obvious” problem here is that
millions of people are socially constructed as pathological (unhealthy or
potentially so) and in need of correction, often via behavioral prescriptions.
This medicalization, which has shaded into medical imperialism and even
iatrocracy (rule by the medically qualified) in the COVID-19 era (Dingwall,
2022), is also highly dubious on scientific grounds. Epidemiological evidence
would suggest that “overweight” may generally be associated with a mortality
advantage at the population level (Flegal et al, 2013), and even moderate
obesity may protect health in certain instances—what has been termed “the
obesity-survival paradox” (for a recent review, see Monaghan et al, 2022,
pp 51–54).
Critical literature on “the obesity epidemic” systematically challenges the
conventional narrative, echoing earlier feminist and fat activist writings on
the body, health, and medicine. As suggested within critical weight and fat
studies (eg, Rothblum and Solovay, 2009; Cooper, 2010; Rich et al, 2011;
Monaghan et al, 2013; Monaghan, 2014b; Pausé et al, 2021), things are
not what they seem. Indeed, the science, ethics, and ideology of obesity
discourse and the WCHP have come under increasing scrutiny (Gard and
Wright, 2005; Campos, 2011; Lupton, 2018). It is not my intention to
review this literature or its calls for a paradigm shift; I lack the space and
others have done a useful job in that regard (eg, Bombak, 2014; O’Hara and
Taylor, 2018). Rather, in what remains of this section of the chapter, I will
highlight (1) some core themes, (2) principles associated with an alternative
approach, and (3) resistances to critical thinking before (4) noting aspects of
113
my research on men and the war on obesity. By covering these points, I aim
to further the broader editorial remit of this volume to interpret human
bodies, with reference to a specific field of health (practice). In so doing,
and as will be elaborated upon in the remainder of the chapter, I seek to
advance an embodied sociological approach that scrutinizes social structures
and processes that exceed, while affecting, fleshy bodies.
Critics of the war on obesity acknowledge that there are weight extremes,
at both ends of the light–heavy continuum, wherein certain health risks
are amplified (eg, Campos, 2004, 2011; Campos et al, 2006). However,
their general argument is that this fight is “off target” and the “cure” may
be worse than the “condition.” An important lesson from this literature
is that an ostensibly well-meaning project to slim down the population
not only is ineffective but has many unintended negative consequences.
Problems include reinforcing the idea that certain body shapes and sizes
are unacceptable, fueling disordered eating and other harmful weight-
loss practices, and promoting individualistic rather than social-structural
interventions that may amplify health inequalities (Evans et al, 2008).
Accordingly, critics argue that obesity discourse must be challenged and even
rejected in favor of a more holistic and socially just approach that prioritizes
health and well-being rather than weight (Bombak et al, 2019; Aphramor, 2020).
Body materiality and biomedical concerns are not necessarily rejected by
those who challenge the war on obesity. Indeed, conscientious objectors in
the health professions include critical dieticians who advocate Health-At-
Every-Size (HAES®), a weight-neutral approach that aims to measurably
improve metabolic health and well-being through behavioral change.
HAES® is by no means perfect. For example, practitioners have been urged
to avoid reproducing nutritionism and “healthism” (Crawford, 1980) where
food and lifestyle “choices” become a panacea for problems that are beyond
individual control (Brady et al, 2013). However, rather than becoming
“administrators” in the weight-loss business, a subtype of “obesity epidemic
entrepreneur” (Monaghan et al, 2010), HAES® practitioners reject the
WCHP in favor of what they consider to be a more ethical, inclusive, and
effective approach (Aphramor and Gingras, 2011; Bacon and Aphramor,
2011, 2014). HAES® principles include intuitive eating, taking joy in bodily
movement, and respecting one’s body and its treatment. Those supporting
HAES® also encourage an understanding of and resistance to size-ism, or
stigma and other forms of discrimination directed at “fat people.” More
radically, with their Well Now project, Aphramor (2020), a former HAES®
advocate, seeks to challenge the architecture of an individualizing lifestyle-
oriented or behavioral approach to health. Their challenge is articulated via
a focus on structural issues, including white supremacy and the embodied
consequences of trauma in oppressive societies. When questioning the
public health focus on obesity, other critics have recently attempted to
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integrate weight-inclusive paradigms with Indigenous knowledges. Cyr and

Riediger (2021), for instance, foreground histories of colonial violence
and theft of land in Canada, exposing the inadequacies (likely offensiveness
and strategic ignorance) of public health advice to Indigenous communities
to eat “traditional, land-based food” (pp 494–495) to redress “health
disparities” (for further discussion, see Monaghan et al, 2022).
These critical responses might be difficult for some readers to swallow,
given the evil view of obesity and the authoritative legitimization of fat
fighting by the state and medical–industrial complex. Furthermore, there
are emotional as well as cognitive constraints (as embodied by those charged
with administering the war on weight/fat) rendering reflexivity difficult,
if not painful. Aphramor and Gingras (2011), for example, discuss how
middle-class women working as dieticians may have to come to grips with
the shame of unintentionally harming larger people who are under their care.
Grappling with shame sits alongside the fear of institutional repercussions,
such as charges of professional irresponsibility when going against the party
line. And there are obvious difficulties for advocates of men’s health and
well-being. After all, claiming that most men are overweight or obese and
that their physiology renders them especially at-risk concords with “the
new public health” wherein men are deemed “weaker and more physically
vulnerable than women” (Petersen and Lupton, 1996, p 87). The idea that
something should be done to combat obesity is thus promoted in the name
of a “gender equitable” approach—a seemingly laudable call that nonetheless
reproduces stigma or even “civilized oppression” (see Rogge et al, 2004).
Reports of men’s greater susceptibility to COVID-19, especially if obese, are
also marshalled in the ongoing war on obesity. The aforementioned “dual
crisis frame” has been widely circulated by the mass media despite uncertain
and contradictory scientific knowledge (Hartmann-Boyce, 2021; Monaghan
et al, 2022; on disconfirming evidence among men, see Taylor et al, 2021).
There are additional constraints on advancing critical perspectives, at least
among Western populations who do not share the same appreciation of
fatness as observed in other cultures (Popenoe, 2004). For example, there
is a quasi-religious and highly profitable fervor to eradicate fatness amid
pervasive sociocultural anxieties about national fitness, degeneracy, and, as
with declining US hegemony (Wallerstein, 2004), increasing redundancy and
military impotence. It is not unusual for cultural anxieties to be projected
onto minority ethnic groups or “the darker races” as a covert form of racism
(Campos, 2004; Campos et al, 2006), as well as onto women’s bodies amid
changing gender relations and familial obligations. However, sociocultural
anxieties are also transposed onto white male bodies qua embodied subjects
who risk failing as presumed guardians and agents of social progress (White,
2013). Obesity warmongering is executed on well-established gendered
terrain, which also means that “collateral damage” (Herndon, 2005), such
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as body dissatisfaction, is unevenly distributed (Monaghan and Malson,

2013). This fight not only potentially discredits larger male bodies, it also
impacts many females in a cultural context wherein fatness is feminized
and women are more likely than men to embrace popular weight-loss
methods—what Germov and Williams (1999) term “the sexual division of
dieting.” Indeed, there is a case for arguing that the war against female and
feminizing fat reproduces masculine domination at a macro-social level while,
paradoxically, both threatening it and promising to recoup it at an individual
and microinteractional level (Monaghan, 2008). Aspects of this process are
intimated by Gough (2010), noted earlier, though I will further ground this
argument by outlining some insights from my previously published research
on men and weight-related issues.
Monaghan (2007, 2008) draws from an ethnography undertaken at a
commercial weight-loss club in Northeast England and in-depth interviews
with 37 men. Participants were predominantly white and working class, the
mean age was 43, and most would have been medically classed as overweight
or obese based upon self-reported weight and height. Data were generated
between 2004 and 2006 against the backdrop of a highly publicized war
on obesity. Particularly large men, who might be medically defined as
“morbidly obese” (sic), talked about their experiences of stigma (eg, being
called a “fat pig” in the street), with some also mentioning how their children
were discredited by association, something Goffman (1968) refers to as
“courtesy stigma.” These men’s sense of masculinity—a relational identity
entwined with a publicly expressed ethic to care for oneself and significant
others—was spoiled in these contexts. While it was anticipated that most
of the men from the weight-loss group would endorse the BMI, insofar as
“health” and longevity provided an acceptable account for publicly seeking
to lose weight (medicalization helped to masculinize dieting and efforts to
recoup a more gender-appropriate body), many rejected this “gold standard”
(Ruppel Shell, 2003, p 33) measure of “excess” weight/fat. In fact, the BMI
was consistently referred to as ridiculous. Only two men sought to comply
with the BMI; both were retired middle-class members of the weight-loss
club who had recently been told by a nurse that they were (almost) obese
(Monaghan, 2007).
Interestingly, most men sought to lose weight (sometimes a considerable
amount), but they refused to achieve what medicine deems a “healthy
weight” (BMI 20 to 24.9 kg/m²). This “secondary adjustment” to—or,
more precisely, “expressed distance” (Goffman, 1961) from—the gendered
culture of slenderness was compatible with the social construction of
masculinities. After all, manhood is associated with having a physical
presence, of occupying space in the social world, and everyday perceptions
of “bodily bigness” (incorporating a certain degree of fatness as well as
lean body mass) are more accommodating for men. For instance, Campos
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(2004) writes that while Brad Pitt would be deemed overweight on the
BMI, Jennifer Aniston would have to gain approximately 55 pounds in
order to have the same BMI (implying she would likely be perceived as
“fat,” or at least “too big” or “heavy” and thus unattractive according to
normative ideals of femininity). Other actors, such as Russell Crowe, would
be classed as obese. In short, everyday perceptions of overweight/obesity
are gendered in ways that typically enable men to accommodate “larger”
bodies and be viewed by others as acceptable, if not desirable (similarly, see
Bergman, 2009). This gendered inequality in body norms has long been
challenged by feminist scholars when arguing that “societal disapproval of
fatness” mainly hurts women (Wiles, 1994, p 33).
Yet, as suggested earlier, men do not necessarily escape weight-related
harms. While normative male embodiment may incorporate a range of
acceptable shapes and sizes, “big fellas” (Monaghan, 2008) are not immune
from fat oppression. Indeed, respondents in my research shared hurtful
insights on forms of surveillance, domination, and symbolic violence.
Large male bodies were, metaphorically speaking, “shot at” from numerous
directions, for example, clinicians who labeled them “obese” (itself an
offensive term to laity), wives who “nagged” them and refused to have sex
until they lost weight, abrasive remarks from parents, and so forth. Most
men understandably wanted to become smaller targets, even if that meant
entering a traditionally woman-centered weight-loss group. Certainly,
there were culturally circumscribed limits to their weight-loss efforts,
noted earlier with reference to their expressed distance from the BMI. Such
responses might irk health promoters. However, rather than correcting
laymen who dismissed medicalized weight-for-height measures, Monaghan
(2007) reported and honored their justifications for levels of body mass that
medicine labels too heavy (implicitly or explicitly too fat). Justifications
included the compatibility of heaviness, healthiness, and physical fitness
(eg, some elite sportsmen, such as world-class rugby players, are technically
obese); looking and feeling ill at a supposedly “healthy” BMI; and resisting
irrational standardization amid bodily diversity. One conclusion from this
research is that while men often seek accommodation within a symbolic
system of masculine domination wherein feminine and feminizing fat must
be combated, there remains a broader politicized need to challenge the war
on obesity wherein women and children are typically less able to shield
themselves. For instance, women and girls with a BMI ≥ 25 kg/m² (ie, what
medicine calls overweight) cannot justify their size with appeals to robust
models of masculine physicality. Arguably, important life events may help
mitigate societal disapproval of women’s fatness, such as pregnancy (Wiles,
1994), though the increasing degree to which medicine defines maternal
weight as risky for the unborn also needs to be reckoned with here (Bombak
et al, 2016).
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In sum, medicine and public health define weight/fatness as modernity’s

scourge, necessitating a war on obesity. The expressed rationale for this
metaphorical war is to promote health and mitigate or avoid the risks
commonly attributed to people’s increasing girth, a “pathologizing frame”
that was further amplified early in the COVID-19 pandemic (Monaghan
et al, 2022). Men are deemed especially vulnerable in the new public health,
and there are well publicized efforts to shame male bodies into joining the
collective fight against fat, a movement that has long irked feminists and fat
activists. Echoing and expanding upon earlier politicized critiques, various
parties have systematically challenged the science, morality, and ideology of
obesity discourse or the WCHP (O’Hara and Taylor, 2018). In line with
such reasoning, I have argued that the war on obesity may be interpreted
sociologically as a corrosive body project that unfolds on an uneven field of
power. In such a context, social divisions mediate the fallout from obesity
warmongering, with masculinity providing a status shield for male body-
subjects seeking to deflect opprobrium and construct moral worth. Yet,
there are limits. Men and boys also risk getting hurt in the war on obesity
(Monaghan, 2008; 2014a).
I will now turn my attention toward a broader macro-social canvas and
offer a sociological reading of “the bigger picture,” wherein health is a
matter that extends beyond fleshy male bodies and the putative poor lifestyle
choices of people deemed overweight/obese/fat. In qualifying what follows,
the intention is not to “throw the baby out with the bathwater” and claim
behaviors and human agency are irrelevant when promoting health (as
noted earlier with critical reference to HAES®). Rather, drawing from
medical sociology and other literature on (growing) health inequalities, my
intention is to underscore how individual behaviors—and/or bodyweight
as a crude proxy for such behaviors—are much less significant for health
than is commonly assumed.
Structured health inequalities: insights from medical

sociology and men’s health
Medical sociologists, along with colleagues in epidemiology and public
health, have done an important job in documenting health inequalities and
the growth in inequity in recent decades (Scambler, 2012, 2018; Scott-
Samuel et al, 2014). The consistent observation in this literature is that there
is a social gradient for most causes of death and measures of morbidity, with
those in lower socioeconomic groups being far more likely to die younger
and experience more illness and disability than more privileged groups.
Moreover, much of this gradient cannot be explained in terms of individual
“poor behaviors” such as diet, physical inactivity, drinking alcohol above
recommended levels, or smoking tobacco (Marmot, 2004). Rather, health
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inequalities reflect socioeconomic inequalities, a point similarly articulated in

fat studies when contributors discuss linkages between lower socioeconomic
status (SES) and health problems attributed to adiposity. After stating that
“known risk factors accounted for only a small proportion of the mortality
risk of low SES,” Ernsberger (2009, p 27) adds: “Nonetheless, many experts
persist in the assumption that poor people are often unhealthy because
they are fat. Instead, fat people might be often unhealthy because they are
often poor.”
In line with such reasoning, critical literature directs attention “upstream”
toward powerful societal determinants, or the fundamental causes of health
inequalities (McCartney et al, 2021). Factors include, for instance, living
in impoverished neighborhoods and, significantly in the US context, the
obstacles faced by many people seeking to access formal medical care for
diseases such as cancer and diabetes. One might add to this the consequences
of structural racism and the attendant risk of lethal force, which young Black
men disproportionately face when confronted by police officers and which
has resulted in mass protests and reinvigorated calls for justice and civil rights,
as per the recent Black Lives Matter movement. Such arguments regarding
the structures and injurious processes of a divided society, incorporating
a repressive state apparatus, resonate with high-profile, social-scientific
literature on health inequity. For Wilkinson and Pickett (2009), if a society
is highly unequal (think of the United States compared to Sweden), there
tends to be a greater burden of public health and social problems such as
homicide and incarceration. This is an important argument, albeit one that
should be qualified when “obesity” is simply taken as a valid biomedical
construct rather than an imprecise marker for health problems and behaviors
that can be traced to the structures and processes of neoliberal capitalist
societies (Monaghan et al, 2022).
Macro-social factors impacting health include the political economy, modes
of social organization, and policies that repeatedly seek to resuscitate a highly
unstable and crisis-prone world capitalist system (eg, off-shoring labor to
more easily exploited populations and bailing out private banks at the expense
of a nation’s public finances and democratic representation). An expansive
literature underscores the salience of neoliberalism and reinvigorated class
relations when explaining social and health inequality within and between
nation states (see Coburn, 2004; Scambler, 2012, 2018; Scott-Samuel et al,
2014). Such literature maintains that it is no coincidence that there has been
a stark increase in inequality since the 1980s, for this is when elites in nations
such as Britain and the United States enthusiastically embraced neoliberalism
and its attendant ideologies of market fundamentalism, financial deregulation,
privatization, and individual responsibility (ideologies that are, of course,
contradicted in practice when capital needs to be saved from itself). To take
one particularly toxic aspect of this class project, high finance, Scott-Samuel
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et al (2014, p 53) note how the “big bang” financial deregulation of 1986
led to “substantial increases in socioeconomic and health inequalities [that]
were effectively marginalized and ignored by [Thatcher’s] government.”
Other aspects, such as the depoliticizing emphasis upon the individual
and the rolling back of the welfare state, have also had a notable impact on
UK health policy. Such policy, following US-based psychological models
of behavioral intervention, is blinkered insofar as it neglects social context.
Ong et al (2014, p 227) trace such policy making from the 1990s, adding
that from 2010 the economic rationale for the “self-management” of patients
gained momentum “against the backdrop of financial austerity and reductions
in public sector funding.” Under such conditions, politicized concerns to
address macrostructural factors affecting public health tend to be sidelined
by a myopic focus on irresponsible (overweight) neoliberal subjects who
are allegedly culpable for their own ills. This is an instance of scapegoating,
a blame game directed at multiple “soft” targets such as single mothers, the
unemployed, immigrants, and public sector workers who purportedly cost
too much for the system (O’Flynn et al, 2014). Such maneuvers have been
dissected within critical public health scholarship with reference to a “stigma
system,” wherein scapegoating works as a “divide-and-rule” strategy for the
powerful (Friedman et al, 2022).
In short, individual level approaches have ideological appeal and currency
under historically transmitted social conditions, with health policy typically
emphasizing behavioral change as an antidote to people’s presumptively
“maladaptive” activities (Ong et al, 2014, p 229), bodies, and “lack of
preparedness” for infectious pandemics. However, in siding with the Black
Report (DHSS, 1980), medical sociologists have explained health inequalities
largely in terms of people’s material conditions of existence (for cogent
analytical work that melds materialist concerns with a multidimensional
focus on the lived body, see Williams, 2003). The materialist approach draws
attention to working environments and labor markets (eg, job insecurity, low
pay, reduced pension provision, and unemployment), housing, healthcare,
social infrastructure, and related concerns such as affordable transportation
that facilitates networks of interdependency and connection. For medical
sociologists such as Scambler (2018), it is crucial to recognize the fundamental
contradictions of capitalism and antagonistic class relations when offering a
materialist explanation for health inequity. If behaviors are to be accorded
any weight, then there is a case for arguing that attention should be directed
upward. That is, rather than focusing on the behaviors of people in poorer
socioeconomic circumstances (as often happens in state-funded research),
attention needs to be directed toward the illness behaviors of the rich and
powerful whose search for profits largely takes priority over public health
and well-being. Here critics acknowledge that common cultural/behavioral
factors contribute to health inequalities, for instance, higher rates of smoking
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among lower socioeconomic groups. However, the crucial point is that such
behaviors are indebted to social structures; “personal choices” are shaped
and constrained by material circumstances. As observed in Graham’s (1994)
research on women and smoking, and in Williams et al’s (1995) study
on health beliefs in a deprived English inner city, feelings of segregation,
poverty, exclusion, hopelessness, and powerlessness influence people’s health
behaviors and outcomes.
While debates about health tend to be moralized and conflated with
individualized concerns (eg, personal failure, shame, blame, and correction),
it is clear from the foregoing discussion that hegemonic narratives are also
subject to considerable contestation and reframing. In line with the “social
justice frame” (Kwan and Graves, 2013), which is politicized and challenges
inequity, I will finish this section by making further connections with critical
perspectives on men, masculinities, and health. Scholars in this field have,
over the past two decades, made inroads on a complex and contested terrain
(Scott-Samuel et al, 2009; Gough and Robertson, 2010; Gottzén et al,
2019). Relevant themes include the differential effects of unemployment
on men’s and women’s mortality, especially for men in their early-to mid-
career, and dramatic increases in male suicide during the latter part of the
twentieth century, which has been linked to growing income inequality
and instability in heterosexual relationships (for a review, see Robertson and
Monaghan, 2012). Disability, embodiment, and masculinity also constitute
a complex matrix of investigation, with attention recently paid to themes
such as technology and neoliberal logics that render many bodies and
lives dispensable (ie, the impaired and chronically ill who are systemically
disadvantaged by a competitive work-orientated system) (Robertson et al,
2019). However, rather than detail this burgeoning literature I will limit
myself to two insightful contributions that promote critical thinking about
the material/structural conditions that shape and constrain life chances and
health. In keeping with my preceding arguments, I will flag literature that
challenges the sort of alarmism that would have us believe that individual
“laymen” are their own worst enemies and are endangering or burdening
others when, for instance, their actions result in poor health outcomes
that (purportedly) drain already overstretched health services. More
specifically, I will draw from Lohan’s (2010) and Robertson and Williams’
(2010) insights on men’s health. These writings are noteworthy because
they integrate diverse theorization and connect health problems to social
structures and processes more so than men’s individual attitudes, behaviors,
or psychological predispositions.
Lohan (2010) explains that the “critical studies on men” (CSM) literature
often prompts health service providers to simply focus on the goal of modifying
service delivery and education in an effort to change men’s attitudes, lifestyles,
their uptake of such services, and their health outcomes. Unfortunately, this
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means that health service providers often lack an “awareness of the relational
power context of gender relations” and an appreciation of “the embeddedness
of men’s gendered health practices in broader sets of structured inequalities
in society” (pp 14–15). For Lohan, “[i]‌t is precisely this embeddedness” that
necessitates CSM to engage “the broader inequalities in health literature”
(p 15). Consequently, she moves the spotlight onto power, outlining how
theories that explain material inequalities (alongside other theories, such
as cultural/behavioral and lifecourse approaches) might be integrated into
CSM in future research. For instance, while structural explanations have been
underutilized in studies on men’s health, Lohan makes a good case for redressing
that issue, not only when considering health differences between groups of
men but also when considering how materialist relations between men and
women exert their effects. Accordingly, the goal is to “tease out the interactions
between class and gender in men and women’s health” (p 17). I would also add
“children” to Lohan’s proposition in order to overcome possible accusations of
an adult-centric bias, alongside other intersecting axes of power (eg, ethnicity
and sexuality) that pattern population health (see Part 1 of Monaghan and
Gabe, 2022). Furthermore, when interrogating broader structures and their
effects on health, critical attention should be directed at forms of exploitation,
oppression, and domination as emergent properties of a historically unfolding
world-system. Whether theorized in terms of the inherent contradictions of
capitalism (Scambler, 2018) and/or masculine domination (Bourdieu, 2001;
for Bourdieu’s neglect of feminism here, see Connell, 2007), a key message is
this: real social structures matter and their effects should not be misrecognized
as individual pathology (bad behavior, fatness).
Robertson and Williams (2010) similarly advance critical knowledge
of social structures as part of an explicitly embodied approach to men’s
health and health promotion. Revisiting some of their previous qualitative
research, they challenge the media-fueled myth that “all men are irresponsible
when it comes to self-care and promoting their health” (Robertson and
Williams, 2010, p 48). Refuting essentialist constructions that locate men’s
health problems within their biology or “the male psyche” (p 49), these
authors challenge health promotion ideologies that all too easily reiterate
the centrality of individual responsibility and the need for behavioral
change. Flagging the limitations of public health and health promotion,
their contribution unpicks “normative conceptualisations of ‘health’ and
‘healthy lifestyle’” with reference to men’s own accounts. Importantly, they
retain an eye on “issues of social justice and social determinants [of health]
without denying the importance of men’s agency” (p 49). After outlining
dominant biomedical constructions of health—and the salience of “risk,”
“behaviors,” and “lifestyles” within epidemiologically inspired discourses—
Robertson and Williams urge readers to regard men’s departures from
healthist prescriptions as not necessarily acts of resistance (in the Foucauldian
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sense) but pragmatic enactments that make sense within given social contexts
(eg, smoking among stressed workers as a release from an extremely hectic
schedule). These authors, drawing from Bourdieu and other theorists (eg,
Lupton and Crawford), conceptualize men’s enactments in terms of “a logic
of practice” that is embedded within specific “social locations.” Empirically,
respondents juggled notions concerning “good citizenship” and hegemonic
masculine discourses wherein men “cannot be seen to be too concerned
about ‘health’ (feminine) issues” (Robertson and Williams, 2010, pp 54–
55). One conclusion here is that both compliance and noncompliance
to “lifestyle advice” do not occur in a social vacuum. Accordingly, such
action must be understood in terms of men’s intersubjective meanings
and, more broadly, socially structured requirements wherein control
and release are basic “requirements of contemporary capitalism” (p 57).
Attentive to the physicality of the lived body, Robertson and Williams also
underscore men’s embodiment, taking the materiality of social structures
plus human corporeality into account. And, the dialectics of such processes
are underscored in context: social agents are “corporeal, physical bodies,
which are affected within the inequitable social arrangements generated and
fostered through neo-liberal politics” (p 58).
In sum, health is affected by many factors. However, within medicalized
Western culture, there is a common emphasis on lifestyles/behaviors as
inferred from the size, shape, and weight of the physical body. While there is
no suggestion within critical weight studies that behaviors are unimportant
and all “fat people” are necessarily healthy, there is, as per some of the medical
sociology and men’s health studies literature cited earlier, recognition of the
larger context that patterns health outcomes. At a minimum, what may be
taken from such writings is that social justice (and, by implication, gender
justice), alongside embodied human agency, matters when seeking to promote
healthier societies. This realization, in turn, means grappling with the social
collectivity, co-constituted by real flesh and blood bodies that are never
merely “targets” of medicalization, surveillance, correction, and control.
By extension, policies could be formulated in a manner that connects with
everyday meanings while also seeking to redress growing inequalities (especially
accelerating inequalities in wealth). Here, overriding emphasis could be given
to respectfully advancing health equity and shared well-being regardless of the
contingencies of an individual’s size, age, ethnicity, sex, or gender.
Concluding reflections
As explained by Robertson and Williams (2010), much about contemporary
masculinity remains anecdotal or misunderstood based on stereotypes.
Indeed, it is all too easy to reproduce myths of masculinity (Monaghan and
Atkinson, 2014), which include, among other things, the view that men and
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boys are a homogenous “toxic” class rather than a diverse body politic that
incorporates intersecting relations of power tied to economic status, ethnicity,
and other divisions. Hegemonic fabrications, including the latest round of
obesity alarmism, tend to construct male bodies as essentially problematic and
in need of targeting for health promotion or, more disturbingly, potentially
lethal forms of discipline and punishment. Taking as its point of departure
various representations of male bodies as inadequate, pathological, and risky,
this chapter sought to encourage a broader community of scholars and health
researchers/workers to reinterpret the field and those bodies of knowledge
that may inform debate and action.
To avoid potential misrecognition or misunderstanding, the basic rationale
I am offering when reinterpreting male bodies is not to celebrate men’s and
boys’ lives and practices, or, as with reactionary men’s studies, tell men that
they are OK (Lohan, 2010). In many circumstances, male bodies are clearly
under assault (Kehler and Atkinson, 2010). This, it should be stressed, is
within a gender order that is irreducible to individuals and which typically
rewards aggressive competitiveness, toughness, and one-upmanship (Scott-
Samuel et al, 2009). It is also a gender order wherein forms of public health
promotion, as seen in the war on obesity, threaten embodied masculinity
while simultaneously promising to recoup it—for example, the emasculated
idle fat man who is “targeted” within a militarized discourse but who may
“save” himself by “battling the bulge” (Monaghan, 2008). Rather than naively
reassure men and boys that all is well, my intention has been somewhat
different. My aim has been to challenge cultural clichés, stereotypes, and
one-dimensional accounts that fail to capture the complexity, messiness, and
embeddedness of people’s lives in a world where gender and intersecting
axes of power are embodied and exert their effects. Arguably, such a task
is vital given the urgency often ascribed to the problem of men’s and boys’
health (behaviors), with images of issues (obesity, among others) offering
a seemingly solid rationale for well-intentioned—if often misguided,
empirically uninformed, and ethically suspect—interventions (Monaghan
and Atkinson, 2014).
In addition to reviewing research on weight-related issues, the chapter aimed
to think “big” (systemically) when advancing critical perspectives on male
bodies and health. Such an approach should remain attentive to microlevel
concerns and agency, although, as illustrated by Robertson and Williams
(2010), Lohan (2010), and others (eg, Scott-Samuel et al, 2009), attention
should also be directed at broader structures of power and inequality. At a
time when capitalism has proven itself to be highly unstable, inequitable,
exploitative, and oppressive, calls from men’s health researchers to interrogate
the material conditions of existence and the politics of neoliberalism should
be heeded. In so doing, we better situate ourselves to connect with and help
expand other bodies of literature, such as sociological writings on health
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inequalities that offer challenging explanations for observed social gradients

and the repeated failure of governments to address them (Scambler, 2012,
2018). Of course, certain audiences will remain unreceptive, especially in these
crisis times. Obesity discourse, after all, fits well with a culture of “healthism”
(Crawford, 1980) and other mechanisms that scapegoat people (O’Flynn et al,
2014; Friedman et al, 2022). Yet it is possible to challenge such mechanisms
and to do so without writing out the materiality of the body. For instance,
biomedical health may be promoted through HAES® or through more radical
approaches that are highly reflexive, topical, and sociologically imaginative
(namely, Well Now; see Aphramor, 2020; Monaghan et al, 2022).
In closing this chapter, all that remains to be added is that significant
progress is being made in the critical study of masculinities and health,
and there is an important literature that advances calls for greater gender/
social justice (Connell, 2000; Robertson et al, 2019). Such writing is
attuned to the body and bodily practices within hierarchies of hegemony
and subordination. At the same time, progress always implies that current
understandings are open to improvement, refinement, and even rejection.
Our collective knowledge remains an ongoing project. As part of that task,
let us work to advance critical thinking about the bigger context and the
fundamental causes of health inequalities (such as the strategic behaviors of
elites, especially today amid financialization, iatrocracy, and authoritarian calls
for biosecurity and pandemic preparedness). This is vital, I would argue, at a
time when it is all too easy to champion individualized bodily interventions
that are entangled with (and help to fuel) prejudice, political expediency,
and various other processes that demand sociological critique (eg, cultural
anxieties about emasculation, corrosive pandemic psychologies, the search
for class distinction, and the vested interests of the multibillion-dollar health
industrial complex that hypes “quick” technical “fixes”). Once placed in the
context of a broader gender order and capitalist world-system in structural
crisis, we may be better situated to subject hegemonic understandings and
practices to critique and ask more penetrating questions about the sort of
society we wish to live in. Such questioning will encounter resistances and
misrecognition, itself a form of violence that reproduces class privilege,
masculine domination, and so on. The personal stakes may also be high
for some, especially in contexts such as the health services and government
scientific advisory boards. However, to renege on such a commitment in
formal pedagogical settings, which are explicitly oriented to developing
critical perspectives, is irresponsible scholarship. Rather, there is a need
to collectively reinterpret the putative problems that surround our bodies
and lives and to debate, based upon what we learn, alternative visions for
macro-social change. These times of crisis demand nothing less. I therefore
call upon the community of body scholars, health researchers, and workers
more generally to help advance this politicized task by “rethinking obesity”
125
as well as the social conditions under which the war on weight/fat has
emerged and continues apace.
Acknowledgments
This chapter is a thoroughly revised and updated version of a previously
published article: Monaghan, L.F. (2015) ‘Critiquing masculinity myths:
rethinking male bodies, obesity and health in context’, International Journal of
Men’s Health, 14(3): 250–266. Monaghan would also like to thank the book’s
editors for their invitation and helpful suggestions when revising the chapter.
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6
Beauty, Breasts, and Meaning

after Mastectomy
Piper Sledge
Breast cancer is an ugly disease, visible on the surface of the body in garish
display. Yet the images we regularly see in the media are remarkably sanitized,
feminized, and beautified. In the standard imaginary, breast cancer is a
lump that you might feel but not see, an illustration of internal processes,
a highly edited image of tiny and uniform scars, or maybe an image from a
pathologist’s slide. Rarely depicted are the long (stretching from the middle
of the chest to under the armpit), jagged, or raised scars that are often the
reality of mastectomies.
The relative invisibility of mastectomy scars is part of what Dorothy Broom
(2001) refers to as the imperative of concealment. At the center of the
cultural framing of breast cancer is the notion that the disease fundamentally
disrupts femininity and ideals of feminine beauty through disfigurement of
the breasts (Potts, 2000; Broom, 2001; Crompvoets, 2003, 2006a, 2006b;
Ericksen, 2008; Sulik, 2011; Champagne, 2018). Repairing this disruption
to body and identity via attention to feminine beauty is infused in discourse
concerning breast cancer treatment, healing, and activism. Recovery
becomes linked to concealing the physical reality of breast cancer treatment
through beauty practices, including breast reconstruction. Mainstream
government programs,1 nonprofit programs, and organizations of medical
professionals provide resources and support to cisgender women as they
recover from breast cancer, with the sole focus of restoring a conventionally
feminine appearance centered on normative standards of beauty. Programs
such as the American Cancer Society’s “Reach to Recovery Program,” the
“Look Good Feel Better Program,” and BRA-Day International seek to
improve “self-image and appearance through … beauty sessions that create
a sense of support, confidence, courage, and community” (Look Good Feel
133
Better Foundation, nd) or to promote the idea that breast reconstruction

can help “women feel whole again” after breast cancer, according to singer/
songwriter and BRA-Day spokesperson Jewel (2012). These programs
align with medical research and commentary, suggesting that breast cancer
recovery is most psychosocially successful when a woman’s body regains
a normative physical appearance (Dean et al, 1983; Cunningham, 2000;
Wilkins et al, 2000; Parker, 2004; Stavrou et al, 2009; Rabinowitz, 2013;
Nahabedian, 2015).
In the mainstream discourse of breast cancer activism and recovery, breast
cancer disrupts normative femininity by attacking one of the most visible
physical markers of female embodiment and beauty, the breasts (Clarke,
2004). The appearance of beautiful breasts after breast cancer can be a
powerful semiotic means by which to mend this disruption. Beauty can be
achieved via various technologies and practices (plastic surgery, makeup,
prosthetics, etc) but necessitates presenting a particular embodiment to
the world. In the remainder of this chapter, I will show how women who
choose to live flat after mastectomies draw on this conventional system of
beliefs and reinterpret the meaning of beauty in order to make sense of their
breast cancer experiences and embodiment.2 While other studies consider
the importance of an online community of experience in shifting these
interpretations of the body (Pitts-Taylor, 2001, 2004; Doh and Pompper,
2015; La et al, 2017), the women’s stories highlighted here suggest that
the basis for acts of reinterpretation of bodies and beauty in the context of
breast cancer may also be facilitated by supportive interactions in daily life
and by life experiences prior to cancer diagnosis that situate a person on
the periphery in relation to existing discourses for understanding gender
and breast cancer. As these and other studies suggest, the influence of
ideologies of femininity is particularly powerful in the experience of breast
cancer, and largely unavoidable since patients and providers must work
within the institutional norms of the medical profession and in the context
of the gender structure. What remains to be understood are the ways that
women may reinterpret the meaning of beauty in the service of recovery.
The narratives discussed here represent an interpretive shift through which
women who live flat postmastectomy understand their breastless bodies as
beautiful in ways that disrupt and reimagine the predominant narrative of
feminine beauty and breast cancer recovery.
The meaning of beauty in breast cancer recovery

The relationship between mainstream conceptions of feminine beauty,
identity, and breast cancer is well established in feminist scholarship
(Potts, 2000; Ericksen, 2008; Doh and Pompper, 2015). The centrality
of beautiful breasted bodies to cancer recovery highlights the relationship
134
Beauty, Breasts, and Meaning after Mastectomy
between individual agency and the structure of gender that have played
out in feminist debates about beauty and cosmetic surgery (Davis, 1995,
2009; Gagné and McGaughey, 2002; Gimlin, 2002, 2013; Felski, 2006;
Furnham and Swami, 2007; Bordo, 2009; Stuart and Donaghue, 2011). In
Bordo’s (2009) assessment, all women are under a cultural imperative to be
beautiful, yet they also retain considerable agency and choice. She points
out the contradiction of the dual imperatives women experience to, on the
one hand, embrace “triumphant individualism” and, on the other hand,
conform to the normative ideologies of gender (Bordo, 2009, p 27). Even
as women who live flat insist that they make this choice in contradiction
of conventional beauty norms, these norms nevertheless remain integral to
their self-narratives.
The meaning and pursuit of beauty are at the heart of this deceptively
simplistic debate between social structures and individual agency, particularly
with respect to gender.3 The pursuit of beauty via surgery becomes a sign
of either individual autonomy or conformity to social pressure. Rita Felski
intervenes in this false dichotomy, arguing that there has been an evolution
in feminist understandings of beauty from “the rhetoric of victimization and
oppression to an alternative language of empowerment and resistance” (2006,
p 280). Beauty thus becomes a powerful discursive tool that can be deployed
in the construction of self-identity regardless of whether that identity
conforms to normative expectations or not. More specifically, attention to
beauty can make clear the complex relationship between individual agency
and the imperatives of gendered expectations. Rather than reifying a binary
debate between structure and agency where beauty can only be repressive,
the interpretation of beauty can be the path out of the dichotomy. Jennifer
Millard posits that beauty is achieved via the “manipulation of semiotic
resources, such as hair or skin to achieve desired ends” (2009, p 150).
Beauty, in this configuration, refers to practices that are informed by cultural
ideologies, a range of material resources and attributes, and personal choices
bounded by normative expectations of gender. Situating beauty at the nexus
of ideology, personal choice, and performance creates space for beauty to
encapsulate the empowerment and resistance that Felski describes.
As a dominant ideology and a discursive tool for resistance, beauty must be
decoded and reinterpreted, becoming a site for “disidentification” (Muñoz,
1999). José Esteban Muñoz defines disidentification as “descriptive of the
survival strategies” of those who do not conform to cultural norms (1999,
p 4). Importantly, he argues that disidentification “neither opts to assimilate
within such a structure nor strictly oppose it; rather, disidentification is a
strategy that works on and against dominant ideology” (p 11). Through
processes of disidentification, women who live flat are able to reinterpret
beauty in the service of resisting the pressures of cultural ideologies as well
as medical providers who may strongly promote breast reconstruction. In
135
the narratives presented by women who live flat, breasts and their removal
become a semiotic resource for reinterpreting beauty. This reinterpretation
is achieved not only via relationships with other women who live flat but
also through interactions with supportive family and friends who bolster
women’s understandings of their mastectomized bodies as beautiful.
Methods
Data for this chapter come from the narratives of 19 mastectomized
cisgender women: 15 who chose contralateral mastectomies after a single
breast cancer diagnosis and flat closure, 1 participant who had a single
mastectomy after a breast cancer diagnosis with flat closure, and 3 women
who had bilateral mastectomies and flat closure after testing positive for
one of the BReast CAncer (BRCA) gene variants. The narrative data
discussed in this chapter are part of a larger study of the ways in which
normative expectations of gendered bodies shape the experience of breast
and gynecological cancer care (Sledge, 2019, 2021).4 The women whose
stories are presented here ranged in age from 32 to 70 at the time of the
interviews (age at diagnosis ranged from 24 to 63). Some received their
diagnosis decades before the interviews took place while others had been
diagnosed within the previous year (interviews took place between 2012
and 2015). Three women were single, and the rest were married (some
married to men and others to women). Nearly all women had some
college education, and most were white. This was a group of people
with relative social privilege and resources. These women occupy social
locations from which normative standards of beauty have been historically
derived (Strings, 2019).
Participants largely learned about my project through the filter of online
communities designed to support women who live flat. Victoria Pitts-T aylor
(2001, 2004) posits that because the internet represents a disembodied
space, individuals may have greater freedom to perform their identities,
thus opening space for resistance to the common narratives of breast cancer
presented by the media and breast cancer activism. Although Pitts-Taylor
recognizes that cyberspace is not free of gender norms, the prominence of
online communities for breast cancer survivors helps to create new discursive
spaces for positively interpreting one’s body, gender, and sexuality after
mastectomy (Crompvoets, 2003; Doh and Pompper, 2015; La et al, 2017).
I began the interviews by asking women to imagine that they were
writing a story (ie, a novel or a memoir), a movie script, or a theater
script about their experience of breast cancer and then to describe the
opening scene. Interviews unfolded from this point at the direction of the
women sharing their experiences. My questions consisted of clarifying
questions about timelines, relationships to people mentioned, or for specific
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examples/details. I did not specifically ask women about their ideas about
beauty. Rather, the exploration of this topic emerged as a pattern directed
by women themselves. After transcribing the interviews and identifying
patterns in the way they spoke about beauty and aesthetics, I turned back to
feminist scholarship on beauty and cosmetic surgery, as well as to symbolic
interactionist literature, to situate these narratives in ongoing feminist
debates and begin to understand the various contexts that appear to support
women’s reinterpretations of their bodies outside of the normative frames of
“accountability” (West and Zimmerman, 1987) that typically shape behaviors
(Hsieh and Shannon, 2005).
Reinterpreting beauty
The stories in this chapter question taken-for-g ranted assumptions that
underpin breast cancer care—namely the imperative of concealment
and the belief that a singular understanding of beauty is the pinnacle of
recovery. Furthermore, these stories question our cultural conflation of
normative feminine beauty with health (Litva et al, 2001; Berlant, 2010;
Klein, 2010) and indicate that beauty has the potential for much greater
complexity and multiplicity than our rigid, gendered norms allow. Women
who live flat described two linked premises that emerged organically in
their narratives, and which represent the interpretive filters that facilitate
women’s reinterpretations of their bodies and redefinitions of beauty.
First, they rejected the predominant discourse of disfigurement. As Kate
(age 46, PhD, straight, married) stated, “I don’t go around thinking that
I am deformed. But I am not formed the way other women are, and I do
not choose what to wear or what not to wear based on trying to hide
the fact that I don’t have breasts.” Second, they rejected the notion that
reconstructed breasts were beautiful and the most appropriate pathway to
psychosocial healing. The statement of another participant, Edie (age 50,
bachelor’s degree, straight, married), is representative of the sentiment of
many women I spoke with:
The first thing I did was to go look for reconstructed boobs on the
internet. … I started looking at these things [images of postmastectomy
breast reconstruction] and I’m like, holy shit, because, to my way of
thinking, this stuff looked horrific. I mean, we cancer ladies, we like
to call them “Frankenboobies.”
As they rejected discourses of disfigurement and that reconstructed breasts

are beautiful, interview participants catalyzed three key interpretive lenses
that women used to make sense of living flat: functional bodies as beautiful,
the aesthetics of symmetry, and scars as beautiful. These lenses are key to
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the process of disidentifying with dominant narratives of breast cancer via

the reinterpretation of scarred, flat bodies as beautiful.
Form and function

The narrative put forth by mainstream breast cancer activism and plastic
surgeons suggests that reconstruction will make a woman “whole again”
(Jewel, 2012). Yet the women I interviewed who live flat see reconstruction
as “horrific.” This is a complete inversion of normative understandings of
cancer as a disease that makes “the body unclean and unruly” and thus subject
to “unrelenting potential degradation” that threatens “the accomplishment
and maintenance of dignified selfhood” (Waskul and van der Riet, 2002,
pp 487–488). Furthermore, cancer leads to “bodily anomie and loss”
(Steinberg, 2015, p 117). Women who live flat invert this narrative; they
frame reconstructed breasts as deformed and horrific, as that which leads
to what Kristeva (1982) calls an “abject body.” In the mainstream cultural
imagination, recovery from cancer occurs through a return to a visibly whole
and embodied self. This imagined pre-cancer form is normatively feminine
with visible, presumably desired, breasts. This reflects the imperative of
concealment identified by Broom (2001). By choosing to live flat, female
breast cancer survivors reject the imperative of concealment. Moreover, the
reinterpretation of reconstruction as something that is visually horrific and
poses an obstacle to physical recovery from cancer (understood in terms
of function) forms a basis from which women who live flat reinterpret the
meaning and importance of beauty to their recovery process.
Maggie (age 43, PhD, queer, married) could not understand the appeal
of reconstruction in order to have a breasted body and specifically addressed
the issue of muscle function.
You know, the sheer number of women who go through four, five, and
six surgeries, and we’re not talking minor things, just to have boobs.
It’s hard for me to relate to that. … This one friend of mine had a
meter of incisions so that she could have reconstruction from her own
body tissue. A meter! A meter of incisions. I find that unfathomable.
Maggie and Edie each commented on autologous reconstruction in which

skin, muscle, and fat are removed from one area of the body (typically the
back, abdomen, thighs, or buttocks) and used to create breast-like shapes.
These surgeries can have long recovery times, significant side effects, and
result in a loss in functionality of various muscle groups.
The loss of muscle function was as repugnant a thought for some as the
image of reconstructed breasts. Many of the women were artists, athletes,
or performers who relied on their range of motion and strength for their
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professions. Others lived alone or were primary caregivers for young

children and felt that it was imperative to physically recover from breast
cancer as quickly as possible in order to resume normal daily activities.
This focus on function was a key counter to recovery narratives prioritizing
the appearance of breasts through reconstruction. For the former group of
women, the movement of their bodies and the physical aspects of their daily
lives were the facts of beauty. For many in the latter group, the surgeries
needed to create breast shapes were more disfiguring than mastectomy scars.
I understand this reinterpretation of breast reconstruction as an affront or
disruption to the body similar to breast cancer in the dominant narrative.
In this reinterpretation, the resulting breasts themselves are ugly both in a
visual sense and in a sense of ugliness permeating beneath the skin in an
inverse of the way we might understand beauty to be more than skin deep.
Edie had an emphatic reaction to the idea of silicone implants.
I remember thinking, not on my fucking life. … I mean, the idea of

having foreign material under my skin is a hideous thought to me.
And then when I realized that, for the surgery, they actually disconnect
your pectoral muscle to stick the silicone under the muscle, I was like,
are they fucking kidding me? I mean, women do report that not only
does it hurt like hell, but they have diminished function.
Edie’s story here is instructive. Ideals of femininity do not typically involve

physical strength and the integrity of muscles,5 so form is prioritized over
function. Like Edie, Sandy (age 59, bachelor’s degree, straight, married) was
deeply concerned about the impact of various surgeries on her muscles.
I just like my muscles the way they are. Actually, that’s a huge piece
of my body image. … I am a competitive athlete. … I am scrawny
enough that the only reconstruction they could have done would’ve
been the expanders. And do not mess with my pecs, thank you very
much. You know, alternatively, if I had had the body fat, I wouldn’t
have wanted my core disturbed for a TRAM.6 I would not have wanted
someone to play with my lats. And breasts are so much less important
to me than having the integrity of my muscles.
Sandy’s comment suggests that it is more than function that is beautiful. It

is the sense of integrity that comes from returning to physical activity and
using the body in ways that integrate a person’s physical experiences before
cancer diagnosis with those following cancer treatment.
Dominant narratives of recovery from breast cancer focus on returning
to a normative appearance rather than returning to a pre-cancer state of
physical function, since breast reconstruction cannot repair loss of sensation
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or lactation (Doh and Pompper, 2015).7 A common pattern among women

who live flat was an interest in retaining muscle function and a rejection of
the notion that reconstructed breasts serve a function beyond conforming
to normative expectations for female embodiment and concealing the
embodied realities of breast cancer. Linda (age 63, some college education,
straight, single) felt that reconstructed breasts simply do not live up to the
expectation that they will look like natural breasts. “The thing is,” she said,
“these are not breasts. They do not make breasts. They make things that
kind of look like them, but they are not breasts. They are dead lumps.” The
word “lump” was also used dismissively by Sadie (age 64, master’s degree,
straight, single). These women emphasized that reconstructed breasts are
just lumps of material, whether synthetic or transplanted from other parts of
the body. Edie spoke clearly about the usefulness of breast reconstruction.
If you have an amputated leg you want a prosthetic, so that you can walk.
It’s not a question of trying to appear as if you have a leg. … I do think
breasts have a functionality, but it’s a different kind of functionality. …
If it’s simply a question of appearing as if you still have boobs, they serve
that purpose. And that’s really the only purpose they serve.
Evident in these comments is the notion that form without function, or

form only for the visual comfort of others, is not beautiful and may even be
interpreted as disfiguring. Here, function is beautiful if it encompasses more
than an aesthetic appeal to normative, cisgender, feminine beauty norms. The
point women who live flat make is that the relationship between function
and beauty must be more expansive than that normative definition allows.
Symmetry: beauty or vanity?

While function, not form, figured prominently in how women who live flat
think about recovery, appearance also mattered to them. This interpretive
frame is not entirely distinct from those used by women who choose breast
reconstruction, with symmetry being an important factor (Sledge, 2019, 2021).
The difference is that women who live flat interpret the symmetry of their
flat chests as an end in itself, not as a means to a more symmetrical and thus
more beautiful breast reconstruction, as is often the assumption by medical
professionals for why women choose bilateral mastectomy (Hawley et al, 2014).
Catherine (age 36, bachelor’s degree, bisexual, married) was unequivocal
about her decision to choose bilateral mastectomy and to have flat closure.
She explained:
Much of my decision to go bilaterally flat had to do with symmetry.

My breasts were DD size. I mean, my chest size is a 34 and my breast
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size was DD—and I’m 5’2.” And, as an artist, I can say without qualm
that symmetry is important to me. … I would love to see the shape
of breasts on my body, but, no, I am unwilling to do what it takes
to have that. … I’m unwilling to move tissue from this place to that
in order to, I don’t know, conform. And I do feel that it is an issue
of conformity.
As Catherine decided how she wanted to proceed after her breast cancer
diagnosis, symmetry was the main consideration. This was bolstered by
her fervent resistance to undergoing lengthy surgeries to reconstruct via
autologous tissue reconstruction. Edie also rooted her aesthetic concerns
in an artistic sensibility:
I come from a long line of artisans and artists and architects. So, I’m not
an artist myself, but I am very visual. I like to draw and knit and sew
and paint and whatever. And how things look is important to me—and
not from a vanity point of view. It’s different from just vanity, okay.
You know, I don’t wear makeup. I don’t care that I have wrinkles, for
example, but certain things, especially shapes.
Ellen (age 56, bachelor’s degree, straight, married) also referenced vanity
in expressing her personal disdain for reconstructed breasts. She explains,
“There’s no feeling. They’re ugly. You don’t get your nipple, you know,
so what’s the point of having boobs for vanity purposes?” Ellen’s statement
highlights reconstructed breasts’ lack of functionality. Holding onto an
understanding of beauty that is outside the standard narrative, she refuses
the narrative that reconstruction is beautiful and suggests that adhering to
this narrative is a matter of vanity.
For Ellen and Edie, vanity means accountability to normative standards
of female beauty and to the imperative of concealment. Having aesthetic
concerns or a desire to be beautiful is understood as separate from these
norms and pressures. The distinction that these women are making centers
on their understanding that reconstruction signifies vanity and capitulation to
the normative pressures of cultural expectations (what West and Zimmerman
[1987] would attribute to “accountability”). The women who live flat
emphasize instead a commitment to matters of integrity and authenticity,
states of embodied honesty, wholeness, symmetry, and the restoration of
an embodied sense of self that could not be achieved had they undergone
breast reconstruction (see Throsby, 2008; Shildrick, 2010). These are
the characteristics that serve as the foundation for beauty in the context
of living flat. It is important to note that symmetry here is not achieved
through additive means (ie, breast reconstruction or the use of prosthetics).
Rather, women who live flat describe symmetry as inextricably linked
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to bodily integrity and authenticity that would be further disrupted via

breast reconstruction.
Beauty is symmetry, it tells a story, it is visible. By describing their
choices in terms of aesthetics, women are creating terminology that resists
and rewrites standard narratives of beauty and recovery. It is important to
note that symmetry can be specific to a single scar, as was the case for Suzy
(age 54, PhD, straight, single) who had a single mastectomy and lives flat
on one side. The focus in this instance is on the symmetry of that single
scar. After listening to the stories told by women in this study, I contend
that symmetry is useful (though not sufficient) for redefining beauty. It is
a step in the disidentification process through which women who live flat
can maneuver existing discursive tools and cultural frames to expand the
interpretive context for what kinds of bodies can be seen as beautiful.
The use of, and separation from, vanity must also be understood not as a
judgment of women who choose reconstruction but instead as a rejection of
coercive accountability to the normative expectations of female embodiment
that dominate our cultural narratives. The dominant narrative of breast cancer
is that the disease and its treatment lead to a gender nonconforming body
and social stigma (Slatman, Halsema, and Meershoek, 2016). At a time when
transgender and gender nonconforming people are becoming increasingly
visible and the proliferation of online communities allows people who may
be experiencing similar embodiment issues to find one another, women who
live flat can draw on a wider array of cultural frames with which to revise
the dominant narrative regarding the restoration of normative, feminine
beauty. In this way, beauty can be reinterpreted to include a broader set of
physical characteristics.
Scars as beautiful
The in/visibility of mastectomy scars was a crucial embodied experience
for women in this study. Within breast cancer activism culture, scars may be
emblematic of survival or may be difficult reminders of disease and mortality
(Lorde, 1997; Jain, 2007). These framings of scars are not unique to breast
cancer. Rose Weitz, for example, conceptualizes scars as a mark of bodily
vulnerability and resilience and argues that in constructing narratives about
scars, people “‘perform’ a new self ” and, in so doing, “turn first to culturally
available frames even as they may use their new embodied knowledge to
challenge or broaden those frames” (2011, pp 192–193). In this study, women
who live flat engage in precisely this type of narrative work to reinterpret
their scars and their bodies after mastectomy. As previously described, beauty
as a proxy for the restoration of femininity is a key narrative frame for breast
cancer recovery. Women who live flat adopt this frame but shift its meanings
in order to include flat, scarred chests.
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Samantha (age 57, bachelor’s degree, lesbian, married) was clear about the
aesthetics of her bilateral mastectomy:
I have beautiful scars—absolutely beautiful scars, which I think also

added to my ability to accept the surgeries better. Because I’ve looked at
pictures on the internet of other bilateral mastectomies and went, holy
crap! If I had to deal with those kinds of scars, I don’t think I would
have adapted as well. … How many things can be done to show that,
although we have these scars, there’s an incredible amount of beauty
inside of us, and that we can portray it in various ways?
Although Samantha did not elaborate on the specific characteristics of the

scars that she saw on the internet, a simple search produces a wealth of
images, most of which portray a thick, jagged, asymmetrical scar across the
chest. These are scars that surgeons expect women to hide through breast
reconstruction or to cover with clothing. The internet likewise provides
women opting to live flat access to images of transgender men after top
surgery. Although top surgery and mastectomy are different surgeries in the
degree of tissue removed, some of the women I interviewed reported seeing
surgical results from surgeons who carefully placed scars and made incisions
with the knowledge that these scars would be seen in all kinds of situations.
Additionally, new visual resources for interpreting postmastectomy bodies
were becoming available through social media groups such as “Flat and
Fabulous” and online awareness-raising campaigns such as “The Scar Project,”
which showcases a series of photographic portraits of topless breast cancer
survivors taken by fashion photographer David Jay. These were resources that
many women referenced as they described their experiences. Many participants
in this research study learned about my project and volunteered their stories after
seeing calls posted on a range of social media pages and Twitter feeds created to
build community among women who live flat. If, according to Weitz (2011),
people draw on available cultural frames to interpret their scars, these types of
internet resources are contributing to the creation of new cultural frames from
which to build recovery narratives and envision scarred bodies as beautiful.
Catherine was clear that beautiful scars were central to her recovery narrative.
My scars are absolutely beautiful. There’s nothing wrong with them.

And my thing is, how do we make this [a flat, scarred chest] beautiful?
Do you know? I would love to see a bust that just comes slightly out
and away from the body and sort of just gives it a little gentle peek of
the scars. Like there is nothing to hide here. It’s only beautiful.
She went on to distinguish the beauty of her scarred body from the image
popularized in the media and by physicians.
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It feels to me like the breast cancer engine is really just profiting on

the shape, on breasts as objects, and really taking away the ability to
really connect with self as a human, as the beautiful beings that we
are. Do you know? It sucks that I got breast cancer. It sucks. But that
doesn’t negate my beauty. … For me to put on the prosthesis and to
carry on as if nothing had happened would negate my beauty. It would
be saying I am not enough; this is not enough. I am not conforming
to an expectation.
The repetition here of the word “enough” suggests that in Catherine’s

estimation, the pressure to undergo reconstruction is not simply about beauty
but also about worth. Over and over, women who live flat indicated that
no matter how interested they were in the aesthetic outcome of their breast
surgeries, their self-worth comprised more than the degree to which their
bodies conformed to standards of feminine beauty or acts of concealment.
Kate explained the appeal of this act of conformity and her distance from
it: “You can go back to the fact that nobody who doesn’t know you can tell
that you’ve had cancer. That’s pretty important to a lot of people. It’s not of
interest to me.” The way the body appears to the self may be instrumental to
moving from a place of disruption from cancer to a place of normalcy and
recovery, but that process is not reliant upon recreating breasts as a symbol of
female value. Instead, women who live flat refuse the symbolic prominence
of breasts as central to femininity, beauty, sexiness, and self-worth.
Supports for reinterpreting beauty

Women spoke candidly about their personal sensibilities with respect to
flat closure versus breast reconstruction and the role of internet resources/
community in shaping their bodily interpretations. Still, the body and its
state of breasted or breastlessness has a mediating role in social interactions,
particularly with intimate partners. Shifting the frame for women who live
flat could not be achieved alone or only in community with other women
who live flat. Because the social framework for understanding breast cancer
incorporates normative expectations of women as heterosexual partners and
mothers, family supports and proximity to queerness/queer communities
are prominent interactive filters through which beauty can be reinterpreted
and the overall frame shifted.
Family interactions
The importance of family expectations, relationships, and support structures
is a central feature of women’s narratives. In this section, I focus specifically
on relationships to children and to intimate partners (husbands, wives,
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partners, etc), as these were the relationships most commonly described in

women’s narratives. Early in her breast cancer diagnosis, Fran (age 70, PhD,
straight, married) considered the way that her decisions about mastectomy
and recovery were situated within her family context.
A friend of a friend was saying how she hadn’t told her kids [about her
mastectomy] and was having to wear this thing [a prosthetic] all the
time so that they wouldn’t notice a difference, and I thought, that’s
not our family. [laughs] You know, that’s kind of silly.
For Fran, flat closure was an obvious choice because of her personal feelings
about her body, and because she knew that she did not need to conceal the
reality of her surgeries from her husband and son. After deciding on bilateral
mastectomy and flat closure, Fran told her husband and son (who was 12 at the
time). Her husband, Fran explains, “just decided whatever was my decision,
that’s what it should be. [And if] that would make me full of happiness,
because I would not worry any longer, then that’s what I should do. So, it
was great [laughs].” For Fran, this reaction was perfectly in character for her
family members and was exactly the kind of support she needed to live flat. In
fact, her son often asked questions that further supported her flatness. In one
example, Fran described getting dressed for a wedding and wearing prosthetic
breasts to help fill out her dress. As she was getting dressed her son asked why
she was wearing the prosthetics and she explained that it would make the
dress look better. Her son responded, “Well, it’s kind of, like, fake.” In this
example, it’s evident the ways that Fran’s family aligned with her refusal to
conceal the fact of her surgery and even, in the case of her son, encouraged
her to avoid appearing “fake” through the use of prosthetic breasts.
Judy (age 50, degree status unknown, straight, married) also found support
in her teenage daughter. “[My daughter] accepted it [her flatness], and now
… I’ll ask her opinion: ‘How do I look in this? … Can you tell I have no
boobs?’ [Her daughter replies,] ‘Mom, would you quit obsessing about your
boobs?’” Here, the imperative of concealment is apparent, but by answering
her mother’s question indirectly, Judy’s daughter not only puts the imperative
of concealment into perspective, she also dismisses it out of hand.
What is striking about the preceding parent–child exchanges is the way that
the acceptance of teenage children, as well as the ways that they interact with
parents who live flat, helps to normalize women’s postmastectomy bodies.
The support of preteen and teenage children was unique and important.
Other women who live flat described some of the difficulty younger children
had in understanding not just living flat but the realities of breast cancer
treatment. Teenagers not only have different developmental capacities for
understanding this context, they also have a cultural reputation for being a bit
critical of parents and very attuned to matters of bodily conformity. Against
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this backdrop, supportive interactions with older children can be a powerful

reinforcing context for women’s interpretations of their bodies as beautiful.
Women who live flat described their intimate partners in similar ways.
While women were careful to point out that they did not ask permission
or advice about closure decisions from their partners, the ways that partners
accepted women’s decisions mattered to the reinterpretation of bodies and
beauty after mastectomy. Edie was particularly explicit about waiting to
discuss her decision with her husband until she was certain of what she
wanted. She said:
I told him at one point, after researching, that I had more or less
decided that I probably would never get reconstruction. I asked him if
it bothered him in any way. And he said, “Oh, for God’s sakes!” And
then he said, “Look, I would prefer you don’t have reconstruction.”
He’s shit-scared of anesthesia; he doesn’t like me put under.
This experience of making an individual decision and then sharing it with an

intimate partner with the expectation of support was repeated across several
women’s stories. When talking about her experience with cancer and living
flat, Kate described an incredible support network of her husband, friends,
local family members, and graduate students. Describing her husband, she
said, “I don’t have an asshole husband who is saying to me that I need to
… get breasts, and do all these things for sexuality. … I feel like I sort of
lucked out in feeling like a healthy, sexual, active human being, whether or
not I have breasts.” This experience directly contrasts discourses promulgated
in medical research and in the narratives of women in my larger study
who chose reconstruction and also expressed that the form of breasts was
important to having successful intimate relationships (Sledge, 2021). Kate’s
comment highlights the dominance and contours of assumed heterosexuality
that women who live flat face. Namely, it underscores the assumption that
the presence of breasts is the defining feature of whether a woman will
have a healthy and satisfying sexual life with a man after mastectomy. The
women I interviewed suggested that this is not as stark, or as absolute, as
the medical literature suggests. Rejecting the medical narrative can be aided
by interactions with intimate partners who support this rejection and who
participate in recasting sexuality and sexual attractiveness in the woman’s
everyday life.
Proximity to queerness
Catherine attributed her approach to her husband and to her body after
mastectomy to her experiences dating women before meeting and marrying
her husband.
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I love being a woman. I love being female. I have always wanted to be

flat-chested. Prior to meeting my husband, I dated women. … I think
that the gay, lesbian, bisexual community are just more open and willing
to accept difference. Perhaps my ease in making this decision [to live
flat] … was influenced by my experience in relationships with women.
In Catherine’s statement are two important factors: the experience of having

dated women and her desire to have a flat chest prior to cancer. I understand
both of these factors as part of an overall orientation to queerness that allows
some women who live flat to couch their decision in a unique frame not
shared by women who are more accountable to normative expectations of
cisgender heterosexuality. Sally (age 35, master’s degree, straight, married),
a participant in a group for “previvors” (women who tested positive for one
of the BRCA genes), was particularly thoughtful about what allows some
people to “be at peace” with their diagnosis and treatment options compared
to those who struggle and try to conceal the experience. Sally wondered if
some of the difference was attributable to being a lesbian.
The only other lesbian I know who had a prophylactic surgery also
did not have reconstruction. … [S]‌o many women feel, like, the loss
of [feminine] identity when they lose their breasts. And I don’t know
if that has as much to do with them or, like, the people that they are
with—if, you know, so many women talk about being a disappointment
to their husband.
The experience of intimate relationships with women provides a

foundation from which to reinterpret sexual attractiveness beyond the
bounds of normative heterosexuality. Women who have had these kinds of
relationships with women and who choose to live flat may be less bound
by the conventions of heterosexuality embedded in mainstream frameworks
of breast cancer culture.
Intimate relationships with women were not the only queer experience
in these narratives. Many women who chose flat closure expressed either
an interest in being flat chested or explained the ways that having breasts
may disrupt their relationship to their bodies. Maggie, who identified as
queer, never liked her breasts and found them to be discordant with her
identity. As soon as she received a breast cancer diagnosis, Maggie knew she
wanted to remove both breasts and to live flat. She told me, “The second
[the doctors] told me that there would be a surgical plan, I said, ‘Well, then
I’m going to do a bilateral mastectomy.’ And to be 100 percent honest,
I never really liked my boobs anyway. Never liked having boobs, and I had
boobs!” Sally described her breasts as “just obnoxious. They were huge!” As
an athlete, Sally found her breasts constantly in the way and removing them
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via bilateral mastectomy allowed her to regain a freedom of movement she

had long missed. Linda also spoke emphatically about her frustrations with
large breasts.
I was extremely large-breasted before this. [laughs] You’re going to

think I’m lying, but the thing is, I was wearing a 40M bra, as in Mary,
and falling out of it. I had girls everywhere. … I hated these huge
breasts. … I thought about reduction every single solitary day of my life.
Neither Sally nor Linda identified as LGBT or queer; however, their

experience of breasts and their sense of breasts being out of place and/
or disruptive give them a “queered” perspective on their bodies. These
were not women who felt a disruption in their identity at the prospect of
mastectomy. Instead, like Maggie, the experience of bilateral mastectomy
and flat closure opened a path to embodied freedom and authenticity that
had not been possible before.
Samantha wondered outright about the link between women who live flat
and the LGBTQ community. Although she does not identify as LGBT or
queer, Samantha was connected to an LGBTQ group through a friend who
was an artist. This friend asked her to participate in an art installation centered
on body image and to join in some of the meetings of the LGBTQ group.
I’ve seen that there’s similarities going on [between living flat and
being LGBT]. … At one point I was asked [by a friend], after having
both breasts removed, if I would have my body painted in front of an
LGBT group because they have—that group had problems with self-
image. … [I]‌was there to show people that regardless of what your
body is going through you can still be whole. There was one [person]
who is going through all the processes to become a woman—so, [this
person] is transgender and was intrigued by looking at somebody with
no breasts and no nipples at all. And [she] said to me, “Wow! You
know, I thought being a woman really identified with breasts.” And
I said, “No, not in my case it doesn’t.”
It is important to consider what a woman’s relationship or proximity to

queerness might mean in the context of choosing flat closure. This proximity
is not just a product of intimate relationships with women; it can also include
connections to LGBT people and organizations, as well as what I consider
to be a queer orientation to the body (eg, a desire to be flat prior to a breast
cancer diagnosis).
Media and medical discourses portray breast cancer as a disruption of
normative femininity and women who live flat as gender nonconforming.
Whereas these portrayals may once have created a strong market for breast
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reconstruction, the growing visibility of transgender, gender nonconforming,

and queer people suggests that there is an increasing population of people
for whom flat closure not only aids in the breast cancer recovery process but
does so in ways that affirm an embodied identity that had been disrupted
prior to breast cancer (Brown and McElroy, 2018). Several women in this
study indicated that even before receiving a breast cancer diagnosis, having
breasts felt out of place. In these instances, mastectomy had the effect of
bringing bodies into greater alignment with identity in a social context that
allowed for a queering of beauty.
Conclusion
In this chapter, I contend that beauty is a site of disidentification through
which women who live flat can understand their mastectomized bodies in
ways that resist expectations that women should have breasted bodies, that
beauty requires breasts, and that bodies without breasts cannot be beautiful.
What these narratives leave intact is the notion that beauty is an important
part of recovering from breast cancer, although the meaning of beauty may
be subject to change.
In her review of feminist scholarship on beauty, Felski notes the common
pattern of exposing the constraining aspects of beauty, but asks, “Is there
a place in feminist thought for what we might call a positive aesthetic,
an affirmation, however conditional, of the value of beauty and aesthetic
pleasure?” (2006, pp 273–274). Beauty and aesthetics matter and can be
pleasurable but cannot only be born of individual experience. Rather, as
the women in this study indicate, new interpretations of beauty require
communities of experience and supportive daily interactions that create
pathways for new interpretations of beauty. When these lived experiences
counter normative social frameworks, new interpretations can and must
emerge through social interactions to make sense of them.
Women who live flat signal a potential expansion in the boundaries of
female embodiment and thus a possible interpretive shift for understanding
breast cancer experiences. But this shift is only as effective as it is visible.
Beauty still matters in breast cancer recovery, but its meaning is expanding.
Beauty can come through function, an embrace of bodily imperfection
(ie, scars), symmetry, and a sense of authentic embodied experience. This
expanded definition is supported not just in the minds of individual women
but also by their family members. In a cultural landscape where normative
and nonnormative genders visibly coexist, and movements to embrace bodies
and embodiments that resist hegemonic norms are on the ascendancy, breast
cancer culture must shift too. At the forefront of this shift are people like the
women in this study who refuse the normative discourse of breast cancer
recovery and recast beauty in more expansive terms.
149
Notes
1
The Women’s Health and Cancer Rights Act, passed in 1998, codified women’s right to
and material support for breast reconstruction and prosthetics following mastectomy.
2
Living flat refers to the decision not to undergo breast reconstruction following mastectomy.
3
The relationship between structure and agency often appears to be about a powerful
set of ideologies and institutions (structure) that an individual can either conform or
not with associated social privileges and sanctions (Garfinkel, 1967; Goffman, 1977;
West and Zimmerman, 1987, 2009). These structural constraints severely limit the
possibility of emergence and novelty in relating to ideologies of gender. Processes
of creative resistance have more traction in the tradition of symbolic interactionists
who focus on actions, embodiments, and interpersonal interactions (Waskul and
Vannini, 2006; Noland, 2009). Creative resistance through embodied action and
interaction represents a path beyond the somewhat intractable debate between
structure and agency.
4
In the larger project, I focus on the experiences of 57 transgender men, cisgender men,
and cisgender women who challenge the standards of care for breast and gynecological
cancers and normative expectations for gendered bodies. I specifically looked at “female
specific cancers” because normative feminine embodiment is so deeply embedded within
breast cancer culture.
5
Shilling and Bunsell argue that through development of extreme musculature, female body
builders are “gender outlaws” who transgress and threaten the “gendered foundations of
social interaction itself ” (2009, p 142). Although body building is, perhaps, an extreme
attention to female muscle and strength, this notion is reflected in other studies of women
athletes (Krane et al, 2004). Additionally, women with muscles are racially signified, and
physical strength is used to distance Black women from the normative ideals of white
femininity that are central to the gender order (Beaubouf-Lafontante, 2003, 2009;
Strings, 2019).
6
The TRAM (transverse rectus abdominus muscle) flap procedure is an autologous breast
reconstruction using muscle from the lower abdomen.
7
It is also relevant that the perceived imperative for breast reconstruction after mastectomy is
a relatively recent development, gaining popularity after the adoption of silicone implants
in the 1970s (Jacobson, 1998).
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154
7
“You Are Not the Body”:

(Re)Interpreting the Body in
and through Integral Yoga
Erin F. Johnston
From my field notes, Integral Yoga Institute, May–June 2012, lightly edited
for meaning:1
On the first Saturday of the Integral Yoga Institute’s (IYI) teacher

training program, the teacher trainees (TTs), myself included, sat on
yoga mats arranged around the edges of Ron’s living room, which
had been cleared of almost all its furniture to make room for the eight
TTs and two teachers. Ron and Aadesh,2 the program’s instructors,
sat at the front of the room beside a customary Integral Yoga altar: a
small rectangular table draped with a burgundy cloth, which held a lit
candle in a lotus flower shaped holder and two framed pictures, one
of Swami Satchidananda, the founder of Integral Yoga, and one of
his guru, Swami Sivananda. The TTs were told that we would spend
most of the day’s class on the “Sun Salutation Drill,” and there was
nervous chitchat and laughter among the students as we looked over
the handout explaining what we were about to do. The Sun Salutation
drill is a method, designed by Aadesh, to help TTs learn as quickly
as possible the verbal instructions for teaching Surya Namaskar (the
sun salutation): a series of twelve postures that the practitioner moves
through in sequence, flowing smoothly from one posture into the
next (see Figure 7.1).
Aadesh began, however, by talking about the body and our (ideal)
relationship to it. “We are not the body,” he remarked, “even though
155
newgenrtpdf
Figure 7.1: Surya Namaskar (sun salutation)

156
Source: Illustration by Ivaskes. Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

(Re)Interpreting the Body
we tend to identify with it.” During an IY (Integral Yoga) class,

he elaborated, we want to help students “feel a little free of that
[identification] … so we use the word ‘the’ in place of ‘you’ or ‘your’
when referring to students’ bodies.” Rather than say to a student “lift
your arms,” the TTs are taught to instruct the student to “lift the arms.”
Part of the goal of an Integral Yoga Hatha class, Aadesh continued, is
“to get people to become aware of their Eternal Self, their soul; to let
go of their engagement with the body, the mind, and become lucidly
aware of this Self.” Ron shook his head in agreement, adding that this
shift in language really does help students get “into that mindset,” and
ultimately will help them move closer to achieving yoga (i.e., a sense
of union with the divine).
With this objective in mind, we moved into the sun salutation
drill. Ron rolled out his mat at the center of the room. The
trainees took turns instructing each posture in the sequence. There
were a lot of pauses and do-overs as we—the fumbling novice
teachers—tried to recall and articulate the verbal instructions
necessary to guide Ron effectively and efficiently through the
sequence. Laughter erupted whenever Ron became stuck in an
awkward pretzel-like shape after taking one of the TT’s inaccurate
and sometimes physically impossible instructions literally. Aadesh
gave corrections and suggestions, offering key phrases and helpful
hints on how to instruct the movements more clearly. Getting
the instructions right was difficult for all of us, especially at
first. Each posture requires several distinct verbal cues and the
sequence moves fairly quickly. Though trainees often forgot the
order of the postures or used an incorrect cue, they were most
frequently corrected for using the word “your” instead of “the”
when referencing parts of the body. It was difficult for trainees to
overcome what seemed like a deeply ingrained habit in talking about
bodies.
We returned to this drill on several occasions over the next few
weeks. With each passing session, Aadesh’s and Ron’s patience with
trainees’ use of the words “you” and “your” waned; the exasperation
in their voices became clearer. In mid-June, about four weeks into
the 10-week program, Aadesh reiterated the importance of using this
language. He told us, “There are some things we are very demanding
about you [not] saying, including ‘your.’ If you say it every once in
a while, that’s fine. But we are trying to help people move past their
identification with the body. It’s not terrible to say it once. But if you
keep saying it, that is terrible.”
157
I start with this field note in order to highlight two points that are
important to the arguments I will be making in this chapter. First, this
field note provides a brief introduction to Integral Yoga’s “theology of the
body” (Griffith, 2004; Radermacher, 2013)—in other words, how this
community interprets the body and its relationship to the transcendent.
Most simply, Integral Yoga is rooted in a dualistic conception of the
body-mind (conceived as a single unit) and soul, where the two are said
to be wholly distinct. Integral Yoga practitioners (including the TTs)
are taught that while they have a body, they are “not the body.” Rather,
from the Integral Yoga perspective, the “True Self,” what students really
are, transcends the body. The goal of yoga practice, then, is to become
aware of, experience, and ultimately inhabit this “True Self.” Doing so, as
Aadesh argued, requires that practitioners “let go of their engagement with
the body.” In this way, practitioners’ interpretations of and relationships
to their bodies are linked to a broader process of personal spiritual
formation. More specifically, “attachment” to or identification with the
body is constructed as a barrier to spiritual progress, while “detachment”
from the body is constructed as both a goal of practice and a marker of
spiritual progress.
Second, this field note makes evident the centrality and salience of talk
and discourse as a means for cultivating bodily detachment. We see this
most explicitly in the assumed power of language—in this case, the teacher’s
verbal instructions and cues—to shape how students experience their bodies.
The correct language (ie, “the body”), Aadesh tells the TTs, can aid in the
cultivation of detachment, while the incorrect language (ie, your body) can
promote identification with the body, thus impeding spiritual progress.
Along these same lines, this field note illustrates how talk interpretively links
the practice of yoga to the Integral Yoga community’s broader symbolic
world. Using the sun salutation drill as an opportunity to do interpretive
work, Aadesh frames the Integral Yoga practice as a means to cultivate
bodily detachment, which in turn facilitates students’ spiritual formation
and transformation.
When I initially entered the field for this project, I imagined myself, like
Loïc Wacquant (2004) did in his study of becoming a boxer, as someone
participating in a kind of “apprenticeship ethnography” (Lizardo et al,
2016)—one involving the acquisition of (largely) practical and embodied
knowledge through repeated physical practice. I was surprised to find,
however, that the majority of my time in the teacher training program was
spent seated on my yoga mat, with a notebook in my lap, talking about
yoga with the other TTs and the program’s three main instructors: Aadesh,
Ron, and Ambika. This emphasis on didactic instruction and discussion
was not something I expected to encounter; it therefore became a
useful puzzle (Timmermans and Tavory, 2012), one that helped me to
158
better understand the process of “becoming” an Integral Yogi by forcing

me to attend more closely to the interplay between the symbolic and
the somatic in the process of enculturation. In this chapter, I build on
the work of scholars who have argued for the value of maintaining an
analytic distinction between the practical and discursive, experiential
and symbolic, in order to examine the dynamic relationship between
them (Pagis, 2010; McIlwain and Sutton, 2014; Griera, 2017; Vaisey and
Frye, 2019; Winchester and Green, 2019; Winchester and Pagis, 2021;
Winchester, 2022).
In the findings, I use empirical examples from my time in the field to
illustrate this symbolic–somatic interplay and its role in the transmission
and cultivation of bodily “detachment.” As my opening field note suggests,
I found that “becoming” an Integral Yoga practitioner was intimately bound
up with a cognitive and perceptual reframing of the body. This reframing
occurred across key areas of practice intended to transmit and cultivate
bodily detachment (ie, disidentification). I discuss each of these key areas
of practice in this chapter.
First, I consider vocabularies of motive (Mills, 1940)—accounts that explain
and justify individual actions and behaviors—and show how immersion
in the Integral Yoga community exposes newcomers to discourses
and narratives that downplay physical goals (eg, bodily appearance or
skill) while simultaneously emphasizing spiritual ones (eg, personal
formation, enlightenment). In doing so, vocabularies of motive reorient
practitioners’ attention away from the body and toward the transcendent
while interpretively linking the practice of yoga to a broader project
of personal spiritual formation. Second, I highlight the metaphors and
analogies through which the body is constructed as an object of care and
maintenance (separate from the “True Self ”) as well as the key practices
through which this interpretation is enacted. Finally, returning to a focus
on the verbal instructions given by teachers during Integral Yoga classes,
I consider the role that these cues play in facilitating and enabling certain
kinds of embodied experiences and, with them, the transmission of
shared interpretive frameworks for making sense of these experiences.
In particular, I focus on the practice of yoga nidra, or “deep relaxation,”
which I found to be most closely linked to the experience and cultivation
of bodily detachment. Throughout my discussion of these three key areas
of practice, I foreground the role that talk in situ—talk as it occurs in the
context of training and practice (McIlwain and Sutton, 2014)—plays in
linking embodied experience to a broader, shared “theology of the body”
and, consequently, in facilitating practitioners’ shifting interpretations. In
this way, I highlight how discourses and narratives enable reinterpretation
while also remaining attentive to the ways in which bodily practices activate
and reinforce it.
159
Making sense of embodied religious practices

The last two decades have been characterized by a broad turn within the
academic study of religion toward practice, the body, and embodiment
(Griffith, 2004; Shilling and Mellor, 2007; McGuire, 2008, 2016;
Ammerman, 2016, 2020; Wuthnow, 2020). There is, however, considerable
variation within this broad turn in how scholars have studied or “interpreted”
embodied forms of religious practice. These different analytical or interpretive
lenses draw our attention to different aspects of religious practices—their
contexts, meanings, and consequences. Early work, exemplified in the
writings of Mary Douglas (2003) and Clifford Geertz (2010), interpreted
religious practices symbolically, as texts to read and decipher. Practices were
said to convey or express religious meanings (and identities), which could
only be understood by the analyst in reference to the broader symbolic
universe within which the practices were situated. The task of the analyst,
then, was to decode the rituals and explicate their meaning. These scholars
asked: What can we learn about the symbolic worlds of different communities
by observing their ritual practice?
More recent research, however, examines what religious practices do to
the people who perform them, interpreting religious ritual as practices to
be undergone rather than merely observed (Winchester, 2022). Some of
these scholars focus squarely on phenomenological experience, describing
and analyzing the sensations, emotions, smells, and sights that characterize
different forms of practice (McGuire, 2003, 2008, 2016). These scholars
ask: How does religious ritual shape perception, affect, and sensation? Some
have shown, for instance, how religious practices such as meditation and
fasting involve a kind of somatic inversion in which the body and embodied
experience are brought to the forefront of one’s attention (Pagis, 2009,
2019; Winchester and Pagis, 2021). Others have focused on the feelings
and emotions elicited through collective worship, highlighting the role of
music and synchronized movement in shaping the emotional experience of
participants (Nelson, 1996, 2005). Much of this work draws attention to the
role of physical copresence and interaction in the production of embodied
religious experiences (Heider and Warner, 2010; Collins, 2011; Pagis, 2015).
Other scholars, building on the work of Mauss (1973) and Bourdieu
(1977), interpret religious practice as akin to “techniques of the body.”
Countering the perspective put forward by Geertz, these scholars argue
that religious practices help form and constitute, rather than merely signal,
religious habits, dispositions, beliefs, and values. Practices such as wearing
the hijab, for example, do not merely express humility, they help cultivate
it (Winchester, 2008). From this analytic perspective, religious practices are
intimately bound up with identity and subjectivity and are equally important
in both joining (Winchester, 2008; Tavory and Winchester, 2012) and leaving
160
(Davidman, 2015) religious communities. This work draws attention to the

lingering effects of practice beyond those that occur in-the-moment; which
is to say, it draws attention to the formation of a religious habitus (Mellor
and Shilling, 2010).
Finally, some scholars have focused on embodied practices and/
or bodies themselves as sites of explicit symbolism and discursive
interpretation: people not only perform religious practices, they also talk
about them (Leledaki, 2014; Winchester, 2016, 2022; Johnston, 2017;
Winchester and Green, 2019). Likewise, bodies are not only a means for
engaging in religious practice, nor are they merely the sites of practice’s
effect. They also are the subject of reflection, discussion, and interpretation.
Scholars have shown, for example, how different traditions offer distinct
“theologies of the body” (Griffith, 2004; Morley, 2008; Radermacher,
2013, 2017; Leledaki, 2014) and how seemingly mundane practices, such
as eating or exercise, are (re)interpreted as acts of religious devotion, as
a “vehicle for developing close, satisfying relationships with a beloved
whom they aim to please through obedient self-discipline” (Griffith,
2004, p 5; see also Johnston et al, 2022). While emphasizing the symbolic,
this line of work takes an “emic” (internal) versus “etic” (external)
perspective: it seeks to understand how practitioners give meaning to bodies and
embodied practices.
Each approach tends to foreground either the somatic or the symbolic,
the experiential or the discursive. There is also, however, a growing body
of work that seeks to theorize the interplay between the discursive and
the practical. This line of research asks: How do embodied practices and
experiences become linked to religious discourses and broader systems of
meaning? And how do religious beliefs and theologies become embodied
or experientially persuasive? Scholars focused on the interplay between
the somatic and symbolic “take talk seriously” (Wuthnow, 2011), seeing
it as both socially patterned and consequential, linked to experience and
action.3 Recent work, for example, has demonstrated how narratives and
discourses work to interpretively link practice to more transcendent goals
and to self-identity (Johnston, 2016; Winchester and Green, 2019) and,
in doing so, how they help motivate the continuation of practice in the
face of struggle and failure (Johnston, 2017). Researchers have also argued
that embodied practices and experiences “call out for interpretation”
(Winchester, 2022) and thus become metaphors and analogical windows
through which abstract concepts are understood and made personally
meaningful (Ignatow, 2009; Pagis, 2010; Winchester, 2016, 2022). In this
chapter, I build on these insights to “investigate the reciprocal influences
of embodiment and thought” (McIlwain and Sutton, 2014; Griera, 2017;
Winchester, 2022) in the cultivation of bodily detachment in and through
Integral Yoga.
161
Data and methods

The findings outlined in this chapter are based on fieldwork and interviews
I conducted at an Integral Yoga studio in the New York City metropolitan
area between January 2012 and May 2013. Integral Yoga was founded by
Swami Satchidananda, a disciple of Swami Sivananda and an internationally
recognized spiritual leader who came to the United States from India in
the 1960s. Satchidananda describes Integral Yoga as a synthesis of various
branches of yoga into a comprehensive system aimed at the cultivation of “an
easeful body, a peaceful mind, and a useful life.”4 Integral Yoga is a relatively
gentle and explicitly spiritual form of yogic practice. Yoga Journal, the most
widely read international yoga magazine, classifies Integral Yoga under the
“Ease into Enlightenment” category of styles alongside Sivananda, Ananda,
and Kundalini Yoga. These styles, which tend to be less physically demanding
and place greater emphasis on meditation and breathwork, are for “those
who aspire to loftier goals than simply building a hard body” (Cook, 2007).
The studio where I conducted my fieldwork, the Integral Yoga Institute
(IYI), was founded and managed by Aadesh, a practitioner and certified
teacher who trained under Swami Satchidananda at Yogaville, the Integral
Yoga community’s ashram (monastic community) in Virginia. According
to its website, the IYI’s primary goals are (1) to share and provide spiritual
support in living the teachings of Integral Yoga as taught by Sri Swami
Satchidananda Maharaj and (2) to provide a supportive environment for
those interested in spiritual development. The institute’s explicit emphasis
on spirituality and spiritual development distinguishes it from other yoga
studios in the area (Johnston, 2020).
In addition to attending Hatha Yoga classes, workshops, and special
programs offered at the IYI during this period, I also participated in a Level
1 (200-hour) teacher training program between May and August 2012.
My ethnographic approach was similar to what others have variously called
“carnal sociology” (Crossley, 1995; Wacquant, 2004; Martin, 2019), “enactive
ethnography” (Winchester, 2022), or “apprenticeship ethnography” (Lizardo
et al, 2016). I practiced alongside those I studied and attempted to maintain
a daily personal practice of Integral Yoga and meditation while participating
in the teacher training program. I completed all program requirements and
achieved certification. I kept a detailed journal reflecting on my personal
practice and experiences during this time. This approach—of “doing it”
(Winchester, 2022)—has interpretive benefits. In taking on the religious
practices of a given community, the ethnographer becomes subject to the
same corporeal effects of practice and to the interpretive processes that
surround it (Winchester and Green, 2019; Winchester, 2022).5
That being said, I was not, nor am I now, an active member of this
community or a practitioner of Integral Yoga. To understand and situate
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my experiences, I interviewed all eight participants of the teacher training

program on three separate occasions: before the training began, immediately
after it ended, and one year after training. I also conducted in-depth, semi-
structured interviews with fifteen Integral Yoga practitioners and teachers
(including Aadesh and Ron, the lead instructors for the teacher training
program). All interviews were recorded and transcribed for analysis. All class
meetings of the yoga teacher training program were audio-recorded with
the permission of the attendees.
Most of the data used in this chapter come from my time in the teacher
training program. This program offered a unique perspective on Integral
Yoga and how it is taught. As a program designed for aspiring instructors, the
usually implicit rules and norms of Integral Yoga practice and pedagogy were
made explicit. During class meetings and in assigned readings, the history,
meaning, and logic behind the class structure, specific postures and practices,
and verbal cues were the topic of discussion. Designed as a program to deepen
the TTs’ personal practice (as a foundation for successful teaching), it also
served as a site in which to observe practitioners’ ongoing apprenticeship and
formation. As a condition of participation, TTs were required to commit to
regular attendance at IYI classes and to the maintenance of a suite of daily
personal practices. As a result, the TTs occupied the dual position of being
in the midst of a personal apprenticeship while also learning how to guide
others through the same process.
Downplaying the physical: vocabularies of motive and

transcendent goals
One evening in July, toward the end of the teacher training program,
the TTs along with other Integral Yoga students were gathered for
a satsang (or “spiritual dialogue”) with Aadesh. His talk, titled “A
New World Order through Yoga,” began by addressing a foundational
question: “Really, what is yoga?” Aadesh asked, rhetorically. He
continued, “In this country … Hatha Yoga is mostly just asanas
[physical postures] and most of the people doing it are not awakened
to their spiritual path.” Inferring the motivations and intentions of
the “average” yoga practitioner, Aadesh told the gathered students,
“People get into it because they want to look good, lose weight, [or]
their friends are doing it.” He added, “Those of you that are Integral
Yogis know that this is only a small part of yoga.” Aadesh went on to
explain that yoga puts “you on a spiritual path” even “without any
awareness that it does.” However, awareness, he noted, “pumps up
the volume,” enabling growth and development to happen “much
more quickly.” The ticket, he told us, is in knowing that you are on
a spiritual path.6
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This field note highlights the role that vocabularies of motive play in
reinterpreting and reexperiencing the body. Aadesh first describes the
motivations of the “average” yoga practitioner and then places these
motivations in opposition to those of “Integral Yogis.” Integral Yogis, he
argues, are seeking spiritual formation. Implied in this opposition is that
Integral Yoga practitioners are not motivated by the more mundane bodily
goals that drive exercise-oriented yogis (Johnston, 2020). In this way, Aadesh
interpretively links the Integral yoga practice and the Integral Yogi identity
to a shared set of explicitly spiritual aspirations (see Johnston, 2016).
Aadesh is not wrong in his assessment of yoga practitioners’ motivations.
Many people, including the students I met at the IYI, initially take up the
practice of yoga with decidedly physical goals—for example, to lose weight,
to become stronger or more flexible, to counter the effects of aging, or
to manage anxiety and stress (Yoga Alliance, 2016). Teachers at the IYI,
however, offered alternative accounts of the effects of the practice and its
ultimate ends. Through immersion in the IYI community, newcomers are
repeatedly exposed to discourses—including narratives, personal accounts,
and verbal instruction—that interpretively decouple practical ability from
spiritual progress by emphasizing the spiritual nature and motivations for
practice while simultaneously downplaying the importance of physical
appearance and bodily skill. Becoming an Integral Yogi, then, involves a
reorientation of motivation and aspiration, one that (re)directs attention
away from the body and toward the “soul.”
Vocabularies of motive, I found, were transmitted and enacted in a number
of different spaces, including Integral Yoga Hatha classes. In a typical class,
teachers start by asking students to sit cross-legged with their eyes closed.
The instructor then leads students in several rounds of deep breathing
(deergha swasam). These opening minutes were used to “set intentions” for
the practice, and teachers played an active role in guiding students toward
establishing the “correct” attitude and set of motivations. While each teacher
had a unique style, nearly all took this time to remind students of why they
came and how they should approach the practice. The goals were related to
connecting to “what matters”: leaving behind the concerns of the mundane
world (of work, family, etc) and focusing on personal spiritual formation.
This vocabulary of motive was also evident in the biographical accounts of
Integral Yoga instructors. Unlike comparable studios in the area, instructors
at the IYI were not pictured performing difficult asanas in their online
bios. Rather, the studio preferred to use standard headshots, effectively
cutting off the instructors’ bodies from display. The biographical text that
accompanied these pictures explicitly highlighted the spiritual nature of
yoga and downplayed physical goals. One bio read: “Although originally
seeking yoga as a means to maintain and improve optimal physical health,
she [the instructor] has since realized that yoga is so much more than
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physical postures.” And another read: “What initiated as a fitness practice has
evolved into a way of being.” By downplaying physical aspirations, teacher
bios modeled for students the ideal motivations for practice. Through their
narrative emphasis on personal evolution, they also described this new
perspective as the “logical endpoint on a continuum” of identity development
(Brekhus, 2003, p 126), interpretively linking it to ideas of “progress” and
“maturity” on a longer journey of spiritual formation.
I heard similar narratives in my interviews with the TTs. Julia, a teacher
trainee in her mid-30s, told me that she started practicing yoga at age 16
as “part of an exercise program” primarily aimed at improving her physical
health. It was only after taking her first formal yoga class eight years later
that she “really started to understand more about the other side of yoga; that
it wasn’t just postures and asanas and breathing and sweating.” Julia told me
that, over time, yoga “turned from a purely physical practice to, now, what
[she] think[s]‌has become a deeply spiritual practice.” Lynn, a 61-year-old TT
and practicing Catholic, had been doing yoga for more than 20 years when
we spoke at the start of the teacher training program. She told me that she
practiced in order to maintain flexibility, strength, and physical health as she
aged. By the end of her teacher training, however, Lynn had experienced an
important shift in her orientation toward practice. Though she was initially
embarrassed to admit it, Lynn confided that she used to leave classes at the
IYI after the asanas, skipping the second half of the class, which included
the deep relaxation, breathing exercises, and meditation. She recalled,
Some of that stuff just felt like, “Okay, we’re just filling time here.” But
now, I feel like it’s a good practice. I have a different appreciation for it
now, so I enjoy it. It just helps to, like, go inward a little bit more. …
I think I get that now. Where before, when we did yoga nidra, I felt a
little agitated: I’m like, “Okay, like, let’s go.” You know? Where, now,
this is like, “I’m relaxed, so we can do whatever.” That’s helped.
After the training, Lynn told me that she always stays for and enjoys the entire
class, viewing the practices she used to skip as equally, if not more, important.
These examples make clear that talk about motives and intentions can have
real consequences. Discourses and narrative accounts serve as “hermeneutic
hooks that interpretively link [social] actors’ present actions with elements
of their more temporally extended self-narratives, conjoining their practices
in the here and now with a motivational project of identity exploration and
development that extends far beyond the boundaries of the present moment”
(Winchester and Green, 2019, p 258) into the longer durée. Discourses that
link practice to other, less tangible, goals provide a way for practitioners and
teachers to encourage adherents to persist in the face of feelings of failure
(Johnston, 2017). Adherents often experience plateaus in their practical
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progress: physically, in their asana practice (eg, an inability to perform a

specific posture), or mentally and emotionally, in their meditation practice
(eg, an inability to quiet the mind).
We can see evidence of this “hermeneutic hooking” in both Julia’s and
Lynn’s accounts. The dominant narrative template at the IYI becomes a useful
tool for interpreting their own past experience and charting their personal
progress and development. Notably, this interpretive work also changes their
experience of the practice. Lynn, for example, reports that she used to find the
less physically intensive parts of the Integral Yoga classes frustrating because
she interpreted them as “a waste of time.” Since completing/beginning the
teacher training program, however, Lynn now interprets these practices as
important and impactful, and this new interpretation shapes her experience
of the practice (eg, now feeling “relaxed” rather than “agitated” during yoga
nidra). Importantly, this interpretive framework positions the bodily effects
of practice as a means to an end, effectively backgrounding the body while
foregrounding the spiritual. As Anthony, a teacher trainee and former high
school teacher in his early 60s, described it in the post-training interview:
It [yoga] is inherently a spiritual practice, so the only reason why we

do Hatha Yoga is to make our body ready … so it [the body] can stop
thinking about or be led by the imperfections. Then, once your body
is in [a]‌slightly better, fitter, healthier place and all those distractions
fall away, that then takes you to the next level.
The body as object: metaphor, analogy, and practical

enactment
Just because you aspire to these high aspirations [i.e., Enlightenment],
don’t begin to ignore the physical body. You must tend to it … even
though “I am not this body,” you can’t disregard it and not eat healthy
or worry about it. [Two former students] came up with this: “The
body is the Tupperware of the soul.” It carries around your little piece
of this oneness. Make sure that it is healthy and well-maintained. (Ron,
Integral Yoga teacher)
While Integral Yoga practitioners learn to emphasize and prioritize spiritual

motivations and aspirations, they also learn, as the quote from Ron above
makes clear, that they should not ignore the body completely. Practices
aimed at managing and caring for the body, such as the asanas (physical
postures) and pranayama (breath work), were described as a necessary part of
the broader spiritual journey. Beyond these, the TTs were also encouraged
to perform and maintain two additional forms of practice—the shat kriyas,
or six cleansing processes, and a “yogic diet”—as part of a comprehensive
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routine of bodily maintenance. These practices reflected and constituted an

understanding of the body as both a potential impediment to and a vehicle
for spiritual progress. Cleansing and purifying the body was thought to help
to prepare the practitioner for extended periods of meditation. As Aadesh
told the TTs, “Until the body is cleaned, the kriyas are a top priority.
You should do them regularly until you get cleaned up. Then, your asana,
meditation, and pranayama are improved. Your consciousness is heightened.”
When talking about the body, teachers frequently used metaphors and
analogies, like the “Tupperware of the Soul,” that constructed the body
as an object requiring attention, care, and management. During the satsang
described earlier, Aadesh offered another analogy for understanding bodies and
illustrating how practitioners should treat them. Scanning the group with his
piercing blue eyes, Aadesh asked the audience, “So, we have this body-mind,
how should we view it?” Answering his own question, he responded: “I view
it as a pet. And you see how I treat pets.” His dog, Patty, was present at the
time, and he gently stroked her head as he continued, “So I treat myself that
way, too. I get lots of treats. I get disciplined sometimes but not too much.
Loved a lot and played with.” These metaphors and analogies help facilitate
the cultivation of detachment by constructing the body as separate from the
Self and by framing practice as a form of care aimed at broader goals. It is in
and through “work” on the body that this interpretation—of the body as an
object separate from the Self—is then reinforced and enacted (Winchester,
2008; Johnston, 2016). I will use the example of the kriyas to further illustrate
this interplay between talk and experience.
A few weeks into the teacher training program, Ramdas, an Integral
Yoga practitioner and certified instructor, led an introductory workshop
on the kriyas for the TTs. He described each of the six areas that require
cleansing, including the stomach, colon, and lungs, and reviewed the range
of techniques available for doing so. In framing these practices, Ramdas
explained that the shat kriyas not only purify the body but also help alter our
view of and relationship to it. We would, he argued, “come to see the body
in a different way. It is an organic piece of machinery. [The kriyas] open
up your conception of what this body is—you become less attached to or
identified with it while simultaneously taking care of it and respecting it.”
During the class, Ramdas demonstrated several techniques, including
sutra neti, or nasal flossing, walking the TTs through the steps required to
successfully perform the practice.7 Sutra neti requires inserting a piece of
“floss,” usually made of cotton or rubber, up the nose through the throat and
out the mouth. The practitioner then “flosses” the nasal cavity by moving
the sutra back and forth. Ramdas began by dipping his sutra into a bowl of
water and then attempted to thread it through his nasal cavity as the TTs
watched in a mix of anticipation and horror. On the first three attempts,
Ramdas triggered his gag reflex and had to pull the sutra out, coughing
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and spitting into the water bowl at his side. Finally, on the fourth attempt,
he was able to get the sutra through and grab the threaded end with his
fingers. After doing so, he advised the TTs that it can be helpful to flick
the sutra forward with the tongue in order to grab it with your fingers—to
avoid stimulating the gag reflex.
The need for detachment from the body was evident in watching Ramdas
perform these practices but even more evident in doing them. Successfully
threading the floss through one’s nasal passage and “flossing” requires the
practitioners to overcome automatic bodily responses including the gag
reflex. Other shat kriyas required similar mastering and management of
bodily responses. In another practice, the practitioner drinks water until
they vomit in an effort to cleanse the stomach. More often than not, this
practice involved considerable discomfort. To complete the practice, the
individual must continue in the face of considerable resistance from the
body. The tension between the individual’s intentions and desires (to do
the practice) and the body’s response (of rejecting the attempt) provides a
tangible experience of the disconnect between the Self and body. In this way,
the discourse “you are not the body” is felt, experienced, and reinforced.
A similar interpretive logic was applied to the practice of maintaining “a
yogic diet.” Regarding diet, the Integral Yoga Basic Teacher’s Manual (1983,
p 255) specifies:
Our main object is to keep the mind and body in a tranquil condition.
Therefore, our food must be taken into serious consideration. … The
quality of the food, the quantity, the way of eating it, all should be
considered in order to get the maximum benefit.
Once again, we see body-focused yoga practices interpreted as preparatory

work. In this case, eating in line with yogic guidelines was said to produce
the “tranquil condition” necessary for more advanced spiritual work. This
perspective was reinforced at a three-hour workshop on yoga and diet held
at the IYI as part of the teacher training program. The workshop was led
by Manu, an Integral Yoga practitioner, master teacher, and a Certified
Yoga Nutrition Therapist. Manu described the basic principles behind
the yogic diet: it is primarily satvic (light), easy to digest, and full of good
prana (energy). Practically speaking, the yogic diet translates into a series of
prohibitions: avoiding chemicals and sugar as well as most processed, refined,
and packaged foods. It also prescribes a particular way of eating: chewing
slowly and carefully, and eating moderately, in small quantities and only
when truly hungry. Practitioners are told to avoid watching TV, reading,
and talking while eating, and they are encouraged to direct their attention
fully to the act of eating. Adhering to these dietary rules transforms the
mundane practice of eating into an act of bodily care oriented toward spiritual
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formation (Griffith, 2004; Radermacher, 2017). Similar to the interpretation

of the shat kriyas offered by Ramdas, the yogic diet was said to have more
than physical effects; it would also transform how practitioners understand
and experience their bodies. Practitioners were encouraged to view the act
of eating as a means to nourish the body and maintain their “machinery,”
cultivating a sense of detachment from the body by treating it as an object,
one wholly distinct from the Self, that requires maintenance.
In each of these cases, whether performing the shat kriyas or adhering to
the yogic diet, practitioners must work against their bodies, managing and
controlling the automatic or habitual responses of the body. When taught
to observe these responses from the detached position of a disinterested
observer, physical sensations of resistance and emotional experiences such
as frustration or anger are allowed to bubble up and pass through the body.
Rather than becoming attached to the body (its feelings, sensations, or
abilities) or letting it fade into the background (à la corporeal absence [Leder,
1990]), practitioners learn to observe and manage their bodies. In doing
so, the Self qua witness and caretaker is enacted as distinct from the body qua
container or pet, resulting in a reinterpretation of the body accomplished
through an interplay between discourse and practice.
Facilitating embodied experiences: verbal instruction

in practice
The field note that appears at the beginning of this chapter highlights the
belief that language plays an important role in the cultivation of detachment
among students of Integral Yoga. TTs were taught that the language they
use to talk about and reference the body has real consequences—it could
help promote or, alternatively, hinder bodily disidentification. This was
not the only time the importance of verbal instruction was emphasized.
During my time in the field, I was repeatedly struck by how much weight
instructors placed on the precise wording of verbal cues. In fact, learning to
teach an Integral Hatha Yoga class often felt like memorizing a script. TTs
were provided with direct transcripts and audio recordings of several classes
taught by seasoned instructors. They also were given a teacher training
manual, which included sample language for instructing each posture and
practice. TTs were repeatedly encouraged to use this exact language. They
were corrected when they failed to do so and rewarded when they stuck
to the script.
Looking closely at the class transcripts and suggested instructions, it is
clear that verbal instructions do more than help practitioners move their
bodies into different positions. They also aim to facilitate and shape students’
embodied experience in class. Instructions for where and how to move the
body are, perhaps not surprisingly, the most common form of instruction: for
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example, “stretch the arms toward the ceiling, take hold of one wrist, and
pull up.” Alongside these, however, are three other forms of instruction. First,
there are instructions that direct students’ attention: “notice how the breath
takes shape as you position the body and work with it”; “focus awareness
on the small of the back region, between the small of the back and the
abdomen”; “note how the energy is flowing at this point … just take a
look.” Second, there are instructions that describe and specify the (ideal-
typical) content of experience at different points of the practice: “you’ll
find that as you do that, the body becomes light and energized [and] the
mind becomes still and centered—relaxed”; “you’ll notice the heart rate has
picked up”; “you feel a very powerful surge of energy.” And finally, there
are instructions that interpretively link practices to the longer-term effects
and outcomes of practice: “the eye movements tone up the muscles and
nerves of the eyes … they also help to develop the mind’s ability to focus
and concentrate very effectively”; “you’re squeezing the thyroid gland at the
base of the throat, giving the body an efficient, balance[d]‌metabolism.” All
four instructional forms—instructions directed toward bodily movement,
attention, experience, and longer-term effects—were considered essential
components of successful teaching.
While the content of verbal instruction was considered important in all
postures, there were a few places in which it was considered particularly
impactful, even crucial, that teachers use the “correct” language. Yoga nidra,
or the “deep relaxation” (also “yogic sleep”), was one such place. The
practice of yoga nidra begins with students in savasana (or corpse pose, see
Figure 7.2). Students are then guided by the instructor through a process of
“physical relaxation” involving the tensing and releasing of different parts
of the body, beginning one limb at a time, followed by the pelvis, chest,
neck, shoulders, and face. Students are then guided through a process of
“mental relaxation” in which they are instructed to bring their attention to
different parts of their body in sequence, from their toes to their heads, and
Figure 7.2: Savasana (corpse pose)
Source: Illustration by HEB Streits. Image courtesy of Shutterstock.
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to imagine their bodies filling with “a beautiful relaxation.” In the Integral

Yoga Basic Teacher’s Manual, instructors are advised that “release, relax and
soften are key words” and to “use them over and over again” (1983, p 84).
Next, the teacher instructs students to “witness,” first, the body, then the
breath, and then the mind. Finally, the student is told to notice and “witness”
the “peace within.” Written instructions for this part of the practice were
provided to all trainees:
As you witness the body, you see it is totally at ease. [10-second pause]
The breath is flowing easefully as well—relaxed, not requiring any
effort at all. Just observe the breath. [1-minute pause] You can even
let go of the mind and just watch it—just witness the mind. The
mind too has become quite calm and still. It’s becoming more and
more placid. Sure, you may notice some movement, some thoughts,
but you don’t have to be involved in them. Just let them roll on and
let them go … just let the mind be. [30-second pause] Focus all of
your awareness now at this place from which you’re witnessing—the
knower, the seer—this is the seat of your True Self. Notice how
peaceful it is here. This is your true nature—this peace that’s unlimited
and ever-present. You’re never apart from this. This is your very
nature. … Allow yourself to experience without any reservation at
all, without any restrictions, the fullness of your being. Total peace,
total bliss. Total love.
Students are left in this position, in complete silence for five minutes, to
“observe the peace within” (Integral Yoga Basic Teacher’s Manual, 1983, p 85).
At the end of this period, teachers are instructed to “bring students back” to
their minds and bodies with an “om” or by ringing a small gong. Students
are then directed to bring attention back to the body—to breathe and then
slowly bring movement back to their bodies—before coming to a seated
position for the remainder of the class.
According to authoritative sources (eg, teachers, texts), the practice of yoga
nidra is intended to provide students with an embodied experience of their True,
Eternal Self and to help cultivate the disposition of “detachment” (Johnston,
2016). By asking students to let go of physical movement and effort and
then move into the act of “witnessing,” yoga nidra encourages practitioners
to dissociate from their bodies and minds and to view the mind-body as an
object from the perspective of an external observer. The training manual
(1983, p 86) offers a list of phrases teachers can use to help students cultivate
this sense of detachment during yoga nidra, including, among others:
• “Begin to witness the body and just see, like a vapor pouring out of the
body, all the tension being completely released and the body becoming
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clear and open. Just free floating. … Let the head be centered as you
witness the body.”
• “Watch your mind as though it belonged to someone else. Regard any
thoughts as apart from who you really are.”
• “What is in your mind now?” And again, a few moments later, “And
now, what has changed, what thoughts are there? Separate yourself from
your thoughts.”
While it was suggested that the practice of yoga nidra itself enables this
experience and transmits practical (experiential, embodied) knowledge
of the “True Self,” it was also clear from the training program and the
manual that the teacher’s verbal instructions are an important component
of the practice. The teacher’s verbal instructions direct students’ attention
to specific parts of their bodies and particular embodied experiences. In
doing so, the verbal instructions facilitate a particular embodied experience
and provide a shared interpretive lens through which to interpret its
meaning. Through the practice of yoga nidra, the embodied experience of
relaxation is interpretively linked to the practitioner’s “true nature” and
“True Self.” This talk is itself a social practice, one that TTs are required to
master in order to graduate. In order to become a certified Integral Yoga
instructor, a TT also had to successfully lead a full Hatha Yoga class under
the observation of an Integral Yoga instructor who would evaluate the
aspiring teacher’s performance. Of the many requirements that determined
an aspiring teacher’s “success,” similar to the use of “the” rather than
“your” in referring to students’ bodies (see introductory fieldnote at the
beginning of this chapter), proper instruction during yoga nidra was given
particular importance. As models of shared practices, including discursive
practices, Integral Yoga teachers were required to use proper cues.
Reflections and conclusions

On my very first visit to the IYI in January 2012, I took a Mixed-Level
Integral Yoga Hatha class with Aadesh. Afterward, I waited to thank him
for allowing me to join the upcoming teacher training program. “Did you
enjoy the class?” he asked as I approached the front of the room, cutting
my way across yoga mats, blankets, and blocks that were still scattered
across the floor. I told him that I had, commenting on how it differed
from other yoga classes I had taken. He agreed, with an air of pride in
his voice. This practice, he told me, was designed by “a great yogi” and a
“truly enlightened being” (referring to Swami Satchidananda, the founder
of Integral Yoga). “Did you feel it?” he asked. I was caught off guard. I had
no idea what he was referring to. What was the “it” I was supposed to
have felt? I stammered and managed to say something about how relaxed
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I felt, but I could tell from Aadesh’s body language and facial expression
that I was not quite getting it.8
It was only after spending more time in the field that I realized the
error I had made. The “it” that Aadesh was referring to was not a bodily
sensation (relaxation) or state of mind (calmness) per se but rather a spiritual
experience: it was “cosmic consciousness,” “Samadhi,” or “enlightenment,”
the taste of my “true nature” or “True Self ” that the practice was said
to provide.
Looking back now, I think I did feel “it” during that initial class—in the
sense that I had an embodied experience I would later come to suspect was
similar to what others at the IYI labeled experiences of the “True Self.”
However, I was not equipped at the time to use the correct language to
describe that experience—to articulate it in and through the interpretive
frameworks of the Integral Yoga community. I felt immersed in the
practice and fully present that day—an experience similar to what Mihaly
Csikszentmihalyi (2009) has called “flow.” I also felt a deep sense of peace
and calm during yoga nidra. I have had these kinds of experiences both before
and since my time at the IYI. It was only during my time there, however,
that I would find myself making sense of those embodied experiences
through the community’s interpretive frameworks—for example, framing
absorption in practice as a “moving meditation” or interpreting the relaxed
state experienced in yoga nidra as evidence of my “true nature.”
These frameworks provided a language with which I could articulate to
myself and others what these experiences are, what they mean, and how they
relate to the practices of yoga and meditation and to a broader trajectory of
spiritual and personal formation (Konecki, 2016; Griera, 2017). During that
first class, however, my inability to describe my embodied experience in ways
that made sense to Aadesh marked me as an outsider, or at least as a novice
practitioner with much to learn. Like Howard Becker’s analysis of becoming
a marijuana user, I found that for Integral Yoga practice and discourse to
become personally meaningful (and for the individual to become invested
in the practice), they must first learn to notice the effects of practice on the
body, interpret those effects as enjoyable and beneficial, and connect those
effects to the practice (Becker, 1953). The verbal instructions of teachers
model and facilitate these interpretive links between practice, experience,
and spiritual progress.
In this chapter, I have tried to show how those interpretive frameworks are
transmitted and to highlight the role they play in facilitating the cultivation
of bodily detachment (or disidentification). More broadly, this chapter
suggests that religious subjectivities and identities cannot be located clearly
in either the mind (explicit, discursive knowledge) or the body (implicit,
practical knowledge). Rather, lived experience and self-understanding are
emergent phenomena constituted through the complex interrelations of
173
the somatic and the symbolic. It is for this reason that a study of the lived,
embodied character of religious life must be just as attentive to the textual,
conceptual, and symbolic aspects of religious life as it is to the practical,
experiential, and performative dimensions. This chapter highlights the
importance, in particular, of looking at talk and discourse in situ if we
want to better understand how religious practices and discourses become
personally meaningful.
Notes
1
All meetings of the 200-hour teacher training program were audio recorded with
permission from attendees. Quotes included are direct quotes transcribed from the audio
recording with light editing. This example combines material from field notes and audio
recordings across several meetings held between May and June 2012.
2
All individual names are pseudonyms to protect confidentiality, except where participants
requested to have their real names used.
3
Some scholars in cultural sociology have interpreted narratives and accounts as
epiphenomenal—post-hoc justifications for action driven by unconscious habit and deeply
ingrained dispositions (Vaisey, 2009; Swidler, 2013). In this chapter, I align myself with
scholars who “take talk seriously” (Wuthnow, 2011)—those who interpret the symbolic as
an important means through which religious practices and discourses become personally
meaningful and persuasive (Winchester and Green, 2019; Winchester, 2022).
4
Integral Yoga Fact Sheet (https:/i ntegr alyo
ga.org/w
p-content/uploads/2016/02/IY-Fact-
Sheet.pdf).
5
Researchers have shown that the corporeal effects of practice may change over time as
practices become routine and habitual (Tavory and Winchester, 2012). As a result, this
approach is best suited to understanding the experience of novices—as both novices and
the researcher are new to the practice and social world.
6
This summary description is based on the author’s audio recordings and field notes from
July 2012.
7
For more information on the practice of Sutra Neti, see https://www.yogicwayoflife.
com/sutra-neti-nasal-cleaning-in-hatha-yoga/.
8
Author’s field notes, January 2012.
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177
8
Black Girls’ Bodies and Belonging

in the Classroom
Brittney Miles
Bodies carry us through the world and influence all our social interactions
(Story, 2010). Our experiences are mitigated by the politics surrounding our
corporeal form. For example, in the shared space of a train, surrounded by
strangers, some bodies are marked as outsiders because of skin color, spoken
language, clothing, or smell—characteristics to which passengers may
impute abject meanings, such as disgust (Miller, 1997), which then serve as
personal moral justifications for avoiding bodily interaction (Ahmed, 2000).
Black girls experience a form of this outsider status in classrooms. They are
cast in the margins of educational spaces based on multiple factors related
to their bodies: Black girls experience subjugation for their race, in their
Blackness; for their gender, in their girlness; and for their developmental
status, in their youthfulness. Many adults view and treat Black girls as older
and more mature than their actual age (Epstein et al, 2017). Relatedly, Black
girls receive more referrals, are punished more harshly, and are more likely
to be removed from school than their non-Black classmates for the same
infractions (Blake et al, 2011; Morris and Perry, 2017; Gibson et al, 2019).
What is more, they are disciplined more frequently for subjective actions,
such as disobedience, than objective violations, such as drug or alcohol
possession (Annamma et al, 2016). The misogynoir of these intersectional
subjugations—racism, sexism, and ageism—is linked to racial disparities
in how social actors interpret Black girls’ bodies.1 In school settings, this
misogynoir carries negative implications for Black girls’ sense of belonging,
exacerbating disparities in educational equality, widening opportunity
gaps, and reinforcing performance variances around race (Gregory et al,
2010). Previous research has found, for instance, that experiences with
school discipline and constant surveillance lead Black girls to feel devalued
178
Black Girls’ Bodies and Belonging in the Classroom
in schools (Wun, 2016a). Beyond broader beliefs about the value of their
lives, these embodied intersectional subjugations impede healthy identity
development and academic performance among Black girls (Hines-Datiri
and Carter Andrews, 2017). They also center Black girls’ educational
lives around the burden of hypersurveillance, exclusionary notions of
femininity, and relationships characterized by antiblackness (Carter Andrews
et al, 2019).
Moving beyond conversations that tailor educational policy around
macrostructural issues, such as technology gaps or testing outcomes,
I propose that the consideration of Black girls’ embodied subjectivity in the
classroom, and the significance of their microlevel interactions, can help
illuminate some of the anti-Black messages shaping their corporeal realities
in schools. Specifically, examining and reflecting upon the corporeal politics
of how Black girls’ bodies are read and misread in the interactional context
of school allows us to consider how Black girls’ bodily negotiations may be
understood differently when interpreted from their own perspective. While
it may be the case that all face-to-face interactions between teachers and
students constitute a mutual exchange of embodied messages between an
initiator and a receiver (Goffman, 1963, p 16),2 in the context of classrooms,
it is also the case that the teacher’s interpretation will generally be invested
with greater authority. Given that Black girls’ bodies are often mis/read
through racist and sexist frames (López, 2002; Ridgeway, 2009), to resist
these misinterpretations, Black girls must strategically rewrite their bodily
form—their aesthetic and performance—to reclaim their bodily narratives
in an otherwise disempowering school environment.
In this chapter, I argue that Black girls’ bodies are mis/read, disciplined,
and othered in school settings by way of microlevel interactions that are
structured and interpreted through an inherited, transhistorical macrolevel
repertoire of misogynoir and anti-Black discursive frames. Particular to the
focus of this chapter, these frames comprise the unconscious “discursive,
[interpretive] rules” inherited from history, law, and science that teachers
carry into the classroom, and which constitute the “nexus[es] of [interpretive]
power” between teacher and student (Foucault, 1970; see Shiner, 1982 p
389). After elucidating how these discursive frames shape the way that people
“read” and interact with Black girls, and inform their understandings of what
being a Black girl means, I examine some of the discursive reversals that
Black girls employ to subvert these racist frames in school. More specifically,
I explore how the discursive yet corporeal codification of race, gender, age,
and the policing of Black girls’ bodies (namely, their talk, volume, and dress)
manifests in their school interactions.
To illustrate how Black bodies are mis/read by teachers and school policies
through an intersectional lens, I present my analytical argument vis-à-vis a
curated selection of ethnographic and other empirical examples drawn from
179
over 20 qualitative social-scientific research articles on Black girls’ experiences

in schools. I first came across this body of scholarship while reviewing
literature for a research project I was conducting on Black girls’ experiences
of school discipline (Miles, 2020). At that time, I detected an oversight in
the literature: most studies focused on academic and disciplinary outcomes
regarding how Black girls navigate the education system in the United States
rather than the role that corporeal politics and bodily interpretation play in
shaping their educational lives. There was a clear need for research, and a
standpoint, that engaged with Black girls’ embodied realities as the central
focus. To address this need, I theorize in this chapter the implications of
policing Black girl talk, backtalk and sass, volume, and dress for Black girls’
notions of belonging in schools. I additionally highlight how misogynoir
uniquely emerges in interactional contexts through Black girls’ dress code
violations, as they are defined by educators.
Misogynoir and anti-Black discursive frameworks

Throughout history, the problematic—often violent—frames of anti-
Black discourses have shaped how people see, interpret, and interact with
Black people. Approaching “[d]‌iscourse as a system of representation,” and
understanding language to be one layer of representation within that system,
we begin to glean how discursive “knowledge” of Black bodies produced in
popular culture, science, and law limits our notions of how and who Black
people can and “ought” to be (Hall, 2001, p 72). The use of discursive power
in the United States to construct and define citizenship through the inherent
othering and exclusion of Black people from American identity is woven
into the nation’s history (Goodwin, 2003). We see it wielded, for instance,
in the word “nigger,” which, evoking the painful history of enslavement,
lynchings, and subordination, is weaponized against Black people.
Discursive power is by no means restricted to speech alone, however.
Negative, racialized constructions of Blackness, the Black body, and Black
subjectivity have been propagated and maintained by discursive technologies
such as the printing press, racist political leaders maintaining the status quo,
and discriminatory policies (Kendi, 2017). Racist tropes such as the “deadbeat
dad,” found in legal discourses, and the “welfare queen,” in political rhetoric,
have been used to vilify Black parents in welfare policies (Cassiman, 2008;
Cammett, 2014). Distorted and demeaning depictions of Black people in
America’s first popular entertainment, minstrel shows (Lemons, 1977), were
foundational to the formation of Black stereotypes in America. Guided
by constructed images of Black people as subhuman and criminal, racist
policies and rhetoric were bolstered by racist representations in science, law,
and media that equated Black people with apes and thugs (Welch, 2007;
Goff et al, 2008; Goff et al, 2014). Historically, casual discourses such as
180
jokes that depicted Black people as primates grew in popularity during

times of progress, as they did, for example, during Reconstruction and
the Obama era (Apel, 2009). These harmful, racializing representations of
Black people were, and continue to be, used to justify their oppression and
political exclusion (Addis, 1993). Racialized notions of class, sexuality, and
gender differences are also discursively embedded in how we have come to
understand Blackness throughout history (Higginbotham, 1992).
With respect to school settings, racialized discourses regarding student
progress and achievement, which frame Black students as a problem requiring
control, infiltrated educational policy initiatives throughout the supposedly
“progressive” desegregation era (Dumas, 2016). Steeped in the “color-blind”
neoliberal racism of the post–civil rights era, these discourses continue to
perpetuate race-based inequalities. For example, in the context of school
discipline, narratives about children who misbehave frame Black children as
“problem children” (Howard, 2013) and white children as “children with
problems” (Freidus, 2020). In school spaces, white children, especially girls,
are afforded a reputational “innocence” on the basis of their whiteness (and
white femininity), whereas Black children face “Black culpability” and deficit
logics (Freidus, 2020). In educational settings, all students are discursively
defined by racial and gender frames, but for Black girls these frames are
shaped furthermore by misogynoir.
Misogynoir discourses, in the form of the controlling images of the
Mammy, Mule, Sapphire, and Jezebel (images that comprise one of the many
remaining holdovers of chattel slavery),3 and in the linguistic use of the term
“bitch,” have shaped embodied associations and expectations of Black female
identity, femininity, and sexuality in the United States (Bucholtz and Hall,
2016).4 Simultaneously framing Black women as subhuman and superhuman
(Ammons, 1995), the controlling images of the Mammy, Mule, Sapphire,
and Jezebel regulate Black women’s political maneuverability (Harris-Perry,
2011). Deployed in the law, science, and literature of the antebellum period
to justify the rape, abuse, and dehumanization of Black women (Simms,
2001), these stereotypes persist in courts of law today and continue to prevent
Black women from getting justice in cases of domestic violence and rape
(Ammons, 1995). Additionally, the term “bitch” is uniquely used against
Black girls and women via the notions of the “Black bitch” or “nigger bitch”
(Gross, 1994; Freeman, 2000). For Black women the dehumanizing “nigger
bitch” connotation perpetually disassociates them from the possibility of
womanhood and femininity (Goodwin, 2003).
As I will argue in this chapter, Black girls’ body work in school settings
resists and shifts these discourses, subverting anti-Black representations
through a form of embodied reverse discourse that makes conceptual
space for the production of discursive counternarratives.5 Black people
have frequently used reverse discourse to positively recast the disparaging
181
collective image of the Black self that is dominant within the public
consciousness. Examples of reverse discourse include efforts to redefine
social citizenship by reclaiming and giving new meanings to formerly
cruel words. The words “nigga” and “bitch,” for instance, have risen in
popularity both as colloquial and familial words between Black people
and in modern popular culture and music. Black people’s use of “nigga”
establishes in-g roup membership around who can and cannot say it (only
Black people can say it [Goodwin, 2003]).6 And Black women uniquely
use the word “bitch” among themselves as a demeaning comparison to a
female dog or as a celebratory proclamation, such as being a “bad bitch”
or the “head bitch in charge” (Abrahams, 1976).
In the legal realm, the National Association for the Advancement of
Colored People (NAACP) used various legislative strategies to perform
discursive reversals (Meier and Bracey, 1993; Watson, 1993). For example,
when D.W. Griffith’s film The Birth of a Nation was released in 1915, the
NAACP protested and fought to have it legally censored in response to the
problematic depiction of Black people (Weinberger, 2011). The Boston
branch of the NAACP described the film as prejudiced, immoral propaganda
that assassinated the character of Black people by portraying them as beasts
(NAACP, 1915). In popular culture, Black people worked to mitigate some
of the stereotypical elements in minstrel shows, such as Sambo yelps (Lemons,
1977). Each of these reclamations reflects a relational reversal in the exercise
of discursive power (Weedon, 1987).
Like reverse discourses centered in language use, embodied reverse
discourses give new semantic meaning to preexisting representations through
bodily modification, or body work. Body work, a term popularized by
sociologist Debra Gimlin (2007), “refers to the unpaid work individuals
do to modify their own bodies” (Mears, 2014, p 1332). The bodily
management and modification work done by Black girls is grounded in
the corporal performances and emotional labor they undertake to navigate
school settings, which, as sites of institutionalized knowledge managed by
disciplinary discourse, (re)produce the misogynoir stereotypes that have
shaped them and the interactions that take place within them (Gimlin, 2007;
Shange, 2019). If, as Arthur Frank posits, “‘the body’ is constituted in the
intersection of an equilateral triangle, the points of which are institutions,
discourses, and corporeality” (1991, p 49), then “[d]‌iscourses do not just
reveal corporeality but create it” (Shilling, 2012, p 83), and the body itself
learns what it is and means from the institutional, discursive landscapes within
which it is relationally embedded. It is within such a landscape that Black
girls find themselves navigating the institutionality of schools, the discourses
of controlling images about Black women and girls, and the politics of
their bodies. What is more, the fraught relational interdependency of this
landscape raises two important points of understanding frequently missing
182
from educational studies, which tend to portray this interdependency in

terms of interpersonal interactions between people in schools without
attending to their macro-sociological dynamics (Dennis and Martin, 2005).
First, the tenuous relationship between discourses and reverse discourses
impacts how subjects are policed and governed as long as the dominant
discourse holds social power and authority (Weedon, 1987). And second,
macro frameworks of institutionalized discourses work their way through
microlevel interactions, given that the meanings of the body are produced and
constituted contextually. Making sense of how macrostructural constraints,
such as controlling images, shape the narratives and processes that guide the
reading and rewriting of Black girls’ bodies provides necessary theoretical
grounding for conceptualizing the significance of microlevel interactions
occurring within schools.
Symbolic interactionism and bodies: a

discursive-interactionist frame
To the extent that the macrolevel discourses I presented in the previous
section inform social actions, expectations, appraisals, and beliefs, they
function as frames for experience; that is, they are social frameworks or
cognitive schemas developed from past experiences, which, according to
Erving Goffman (1974, p 22), “provide background understanding” and
“standards” for contextualizing and interpreting events as well as individual
actors’ actions and bodies. Concerned with the interpretive frames and
subjective meanings ascertained from a person’s previous experiences in
the world, symbolic interactionism offers a method for theorizing the body
in terms of both the collective, macrolevel social meanings that attach “to
particular bodily forms and performances” and the microlevel social actions
through which they “become internalized, shaping an individual’s sense
of self-identity” (Shilling, 2012, p 86). While acknowledging the framing
influence of institutionalized discourses, symbolic interactionism also
acknowledges the contingency of individual agency; for example, “Goffman
argues that individuals can control and monitor their intercorporeal
performances” (Shilling, 2012, p 85).
Bringing in a symbolic interactionist perspective allows us to examine the
discursive connections that exist between individualist logics and structural
forces. It also shines a light on the interactional maneuverability of Black
girls in face-to-face encounters in the classroom and their attempts to reverse
dominant discourses through body work. While considering the politics
of these interactions and ethnographic accounts, it is important to keep
in mind that Black girls’ bodies are always in conversation with a broader,
historically and socially situated archive of discourses. Black girls may exert
agency through their own interactional maneuverability, but since their
183
bodies are “produced by social force” (Shilling, 2012, p 85), their meanings
are “determined by shared vocabularies of body idiom that exceed individual
control” (Goffman, 1963, in Shilling, 2012, p 85).
In the sections that follow, I analyze discursive excerpts taken from
various qualitative studies of, as well as a few news articles on, Black girls’
embodied experiences in schools to explore how Black girls’ bodies—as
expressed and experienced through the relational, corporeal elements of
Black talk, backtalk, volume, and Black girl dress aesthetics—are mis/read
and policed in school spaces. Throughout my examination of the discursive
representations of Black girl students’ interactions found in these studies and
reports, I define what mis/readings of Black girls’ bodies are and explain
how, filtered through misogynoir discourse, they structure face-to-face
interactions between teacher and student and affect Black girls’ experiences of
belonging in schools. The empirical examples that follow are not exhaustive.
Representing a select assortment of teacher–student interactions drawn from
a set of cross-disciplinary studies, they are meant to be taken as an illustrative
starting point for further analysis and exploration.
The mis/reading of Black girls’ bodies in schools

Being responsible for leading and guiding daily classroom activities, teachers
sustain order and shape the emotional structure of the classroom through the
power dynamics of teacher–student and adult–child relationships that call
these respective roles to the forefront (Goffman, 1963). The intersectional
discursive frames concerning race, gender, and age that teachers and students
bring with them into classrooms, and through which Black girls’ bodies are
mis/read, become especially apparent during teacher–student interactions.
In what follows, I explore these interactions and mis/readings of Black girls’
bodies as they relate to Black talk, backtalk and sass, volume, and dress.
Black talk, backtalk, and sass

Black talk and Black voice have been associated with white racist
constructions of Black speech reified in America’s first form of popular
culture, minstrel shows. Although Black speech depicted in minstrel shows
was a bastardization of what Black people sounded like at one point in time,
the co-opted language performed on stage should not cast shame upon the
actual spoken language (Mahar, 1985). Rebecca Carroll intentionally used
the cultural richness of Black language and talk to depict the realities of
Black girlhood with authenticity and reverence. Carroll (2011, p 15) writes:
Black vernacular has been our rightful voice throughout history, and
it has, in many ways, survived our souls when we have needed it most.
184
It is not slang, and it is not improper use of the English language, it is

black vernacular, and we are the only ones who know how to speak it.
Black talk captures the cadences, vernacular, and essence of the diverse ways
Black people communicate with one another, and it is irreducible to slang
(Smitherman, 1986). (Even the use of slang by a non-Black person will not
necessarily make them “sound” Black.) Related to Black talk, Black voice
describes what we hear when Black people speak; it is part of the essence of
sounding Black. According to McWhorter (2017), hearing Blackness involves
a racialized understanding of accented speech that is situated in an associative
sonic process made up of, independent of language use, “sonic flutters” that
are “part of the black American cultural tool kit. Five little frills, one could
call them, that immediately say black to an American listener even when
someone is speaking standard English” (McWhorter, 2017, p 70). What is
problematic about this association is not the identification of a “blaccent”
(McWhorter, 2017) but the comparative devaluation of a whole people
that accompanies it.
Racialized constructions of Black performances and history have attached
an anti-Black stigma to the speech and sound of Black girls using their voice
in classrooms. In April Baker-Bell’s (2020) ethnographic research on Black
high school students in Detroit, a Black girl named Janel described how
she felt about teachers policing her use of local Black vernacular: “When
I came to school and was speaking like that when I was younger, all my
teachers would tell me that’s not the right way to talk. I just started crying
… it took me down. I thought they were trying to scrutinize me!” (p 39).
Baker-Bell theorizes a linguistic double consciousness and explains that the
anti-Black linguistic racism in schools generated a conflict in Janel toward
Black speech. Janel experienced her teachers’ response as criticism and
extended policing of how she and other Black children spoke outside of
school. For Janel, her teachers’ scrutinization of the latter in the classroom
felt like a critique of who she was and what she knew. In classrooms, the
expected dialect is Standard American English; Black English and slang are
marked as inappropriate (Mordaunt, 2011; Wheeler, 2016). In this example,
I note how it is not only Black talk and voice that are discursively misread
but also what it means for Black people, particularly young Black people,
to use their voices.
While racialized sonic associations broadly shape perceptions of what
Black talk is and means, the senior–subordinate hierarchical relationship
of the teacher to the student, which is reinforced by differences in social
position and age, influences how disrespect and disruption are perceived
in student–teacher interactions. This is something that carries potentially
greater consequences for the policing of Black girls, for whom perceptions
of inappropriate talk are intensified as they are interpreted through the
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lenses of gendered macro-discourses that equate feminine, or “ladylike,”

behavior with being demure and dependent and therefore silent and
invisible (Morris, 2005, 2007; M. Morris, 2016). We see this dynamic at
work when Black girl students are considered to be using backtalk. As a
form of reverse discourse, backtalk, or talking back, involves “speaking as
an equal to an authority figure,” and it is frequently followed by punishment
intended to silence the person talking back (hooks, 1986, pp 123–124).
It is within the constraints of this gendered interpretive framework and
its consequent policing that Black girls develop bodily communication
strategies characterized “by speaking little with the mouth and a great
deal with the eyes, the arms and shoulders, the whole set of the body”
(Abrahams, 1976, p 70). This is Black girl sass.
By employing Black talk and sass, Black girls proclaim their presence
and value in the classroom irrespective of their age and gender, and in so
doing confidently affirm their cultural body politic while simultaneously
challenging dominant discourses about how Black girls are supposed to act
and sound in school spaces. This self-assurance is also a feature of talking
with attitude (TWA), another form of sass that Black girls sometimes utilize
to resist oppressive situations and respond to feelings of mistreatment and
misunderstanding from others (Koonce, 2012). Stephanie, one of several
adolescent Black girls interviewed by Jacqueline Koonce at a Midwestern
Boys and Girls Club, described how she forgot that instead of saying “Okay,
you don’t have to get loud with me” (Koonce, 2012, p 42) to teachers who
are being disrespectful toward her, she should show them respect. Unfair
treatment and disrespect from teachers are just two of the challenges Black
girls describe experiencing in schools (Joseph et al, 2016; Wun, 2016b).
Framing Stephanie’s response as indication of her confusion with her
teachers’ immature behavior, Koonce (2012) considers TWA to be a type
of cultural capital that is knowledge-generating and empowering for Black
girls. To this I would add that in the face of deciding whether to tolerate
their teachers’ disrespect and remain silent or talk back, Black girls risk being
read through the controlling image of the “loud Black girl,” the assertive,
unruly, and thus “unladylike” Sapphire (hooks, 1986; Morris, 2007; Collins,
2009; Joseph et al, 2016; Wun, 2016b). Exacerbating this particular struggle,
the confidence and self-esteem that are part of Black girl sass and TWA are
often misread as disrespect, even in the context of affectionate play or when
speaking little with the mouth (Abrahams, 1976), and consequently are met
with disciplinary action (Koonce, 2012).
In a study of Black girls and school disciplinary policies, Connie Wun
(2016a) reports that Black girls “most often got into trouble for having
attitudes or being disrespectful to their teachers or other staff” (p 191).
In another study by Wun (2016b) on Black girls and anti-Black racism
186
in schools, Victoria, a Black Puerto Rican ninth grader, confided that, in

addition to rarely treating her with respect, her teachers, especially her white
teachers, were “more likely to incessantly police and punish her” (p 744).
In response to a teacher disciplining her for what are normally considered
innocuous activities, Victoria reported:
He gets mad for everything like if you’re drinking Gatorade he yells,

“Put that away!” [I say,] “What do you mean?” “I’m thirsty.” You have
out ChapStick, he yells, “Put that away!” [I think], “Whatchu mean?
You want my lips to be chapped? I’m not gonna be crusty like yours
[sic].” (Wun, 2016b, pp 743–744)
Wun (2016b) situates Victoria’s account as an example of white teachers

policing and disrespecting her in ways that disassociate Black children
with innocence. I suggest that this disassociation emerges not only from
the teacher’s verbal exchange with the student but also from a racially
primed interpretation of the student’s corporeality. Racial bias in schools
and pedagogical practices intended to prepare Black students “for a critical
White society” can “reinforce dominant representations” (Morris, 2007, p
509) such as the perception that Black children can rarely do right and will
often do wrong. Hemmed in by this double-edged stereotype, Black girls
may opt to be loud or sassy in order to alternately “play[ ] to or counter[ ]
stereotypes and labels,” resist “personal and institutional acts of racism in
their schools,” and defend themselves against the subordinate positions to
which they have been relegated (Joseph et al, 2016, p 19). We can see the
strategy of choosing whether to be loud or sassy serving this very purpose
in the personal accounts of Monica and Kishana. Monica, who is 15 years
old, cares for her younger siblings while her mother works the nightshift,
a responsibility that sometimes interferes with her school attendance. As
Wun reports (2016a, p 186):
Although Monica previously explained to her teacher [that] she

had extenuating circumstances at home, her teacher offered little
sympathy but did give her several tardy referrals. Once during an
argument with her teacher over a tardy referral, Monica expressed
her resentment and hurt by blurting out, “whatever makes you sleep
at night.” Retrospectively, she thought that her outburst would have
alerted the teacher to her desperate frustrations about school and her
life at home.
When Monica yelled “Whatever makes you sleep at night,” she was
using sassy and loud talk to defend herself. I would argue that she was
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also using backtalk to loudly call someone out so others could hear the
commotion, since speaking loudly about information usually thought of
as private can be a way to generate witnesses through testimony (Toliver,
2020). Speaking loudly out of turn can empower a student to control the
narrative of their supposed misbehavior. It also can bolster the student’s
reputation among peers and shield them against unfavorable perceptions
(Neal-Jackson, 2020). In refusing silence, Monica employed loud sassiness
not only as a method for reversing patriarchal and anti-Black discourses
that frame acceptable Black femininity in terms of deference, passivity,
and invisibility (hooks, 1986; Morris, 2007, pp 21–22) but also as a means
for inducing her teachers to regard her more closely and extend greater
consideration (and compassion) for the ways she must adapt and endure
(Abrahams, 1976).
In contrast to Monica, Kishana, a high school junior, suppresses her
loudness to play against and reverse racial stereotypes. In Nicole Joseph
et al’s (2016) study of Black female adolescents’ experiences and definitions
of racism in schools, Kishana reports that teachers in the International
Baccalaureate program at her school assume, due to their racially biased
lower expectations, that she will not succeed. She explains, “[Just] because
I’m Black doesn’t mean I can’t learn” (Joseph et al, 2016, p 18). To mitigate
their misperceptions, helping “the teachers come around and view her as a
smart, capable student,” Kishana says, “[I’m] not playing into the stereotype
of I’m going to be ghetto and loud and disrespectful” (p 18). Joseph et al
(2016) frames Kishana’s acknowledgement of stereotypes in schools as
racism in the form of judgment and disrespect rather than recognizing the
violent, insidious, othering discourse of the “loud and angry” Sapphire
at work. Further, I consider Kishana’s experience as indicative of the
legacy of racist discourses popularized in minstrel shows that associate
Black people with lower intelligence and smaller brains (Mahar, 1985).
Keeping these embodied background discourses in mind, we can see that
Kishana suppresses her loudness to avoid being framed as a loud, angry, and
unintelligent Black girl.
These examples of teacher–student interactions depict Black girls’ critical
reflections on the discriminatory exchanges they experience at school.
Together these experiences and reflections comprise powerful catalysts for
responding loudly to unfairness and for transforming misconceptions of
Black girls’ embodiment and educational potential. To further illuminate
how alternation between silence and loudness can forge powerful reverse
discourses that subvert negative ideas about Black bodies, in the following
sections I draw on examples of Black girls’ use of silence and laughter to
explore how these forms of resistance and survival unfold in the midst
of anti-Black background discourses that frame teachers’ perceptions of
Black talk.
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Quiet Black girls and silence as resolve

As Kishana’s account (introduced in the previous section) attests, quiet Black
girls exist. For some Black girls, quietness is a matter of disposition. For others,
like Kishana, it is a matter of strategy. Quiet Black girls in classrooms are often
viewed as exhibiting appropriate bodily control and docility, behaviors which,
from the teacher’s perspective, meet the situational expectations of the school
setting and therefore do not warrant policing to maintain notions of how
students should behave. Guided by this positive reception, some Black girls
view silence—or the absence of extemporaneous conversation and speech—as
central to their academic success, and they use it to avoid bringing attention to
various aspects of their identity, such as their girlness or Blackness, which may
be devalued or come under surveillance in the classroom (Fordham, 1993).
As a chosen performative strategy for navigating and negotiating behavioral
expectations during teacher–student interactions, Black girls’ quietness serves
as an embodied politic of survival. It is at once a communication style that
coddles the egos and assuages the potential violence of those in positions
of power and a strategic maneuver that protects and sustains Black girls’
inner lives (Quashie, 2012). Indeed, as reported by Wun (2016a, p 192), in
response to feeling trapped, “misunderstood, and despised as they [and their
voices] are subject to constant surveillance and control,” Black girl students
consider silence a feasible way to protect themselves while performing both
Blackness and dignity.
The strategic implementation of quiet empowers Black girls to negotiate
their presence in the classroom through the deafening withdrawal of their
vocal contribution. In Monique Morris’ exploration of the criminalization of
Black girls in schools in her book Pushout, 18-year-old Leila, who describes
herself as “one of the ones that talk too much,” explains what happens when
she chooses to be quiet: “When I do be quiet, couldn’t nobody speak up.
The teacher didn’t encourage them to speak up. Instead, he took me in the
hallway and asked if I was okay, even though he just asked me to be quiet the
day before!” (Morris, 2016, p 79). Morris highlights the potential misreading
of Leila’s expressivity as problematic, but she also offers that Leila’s loudness
can also be helpful and worthy of celebration. From Leila’s example, I glean
how opting out of her typical communication style completely changed
the classroom environment, prompting the teacher to reframe her quietness
as a problem, even though it was a direct result of having been previously
censured by her teacher for being loud. What might not be so obvious is
that in refusing to be her talkative self, she was in actuality adopting a very
“loud,” conspicuous, peace-preserving strategy that acknowledged the value
of her voice in the classroom, even by the person who regularly silences
her—her teacher. In quietness Leila recognized the strength of her voice
and, simultaneously, the value and power of its absence, which did, after
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all, compel the teacher to contradict his prior condemnation. In this way,
quietness can become a reclamation of unapologetic Blackness (Allen and
Miles, 2020): it challenges the typified, expressively outward and public
performance of the Black subject by centering the equally expressive inward
Black self (Quashie, 2012).
As a performative strategy, silence is not without its drawbacks. The silence
of high-achieving Black girls is sometimes mirrored by the silence of their
teachers and school administrators, who neglect to acknowledge the student’s
achievements (Fordham, 1993). Quietness can also reinforce racialized
gendered stereotypes that associate silence with “ladylike” passivity labeled
“good” and loudness with “unladylike” assertiveness labeled “bad” (Fordham,
1993; Lei, 2003; Morris, 2007). Nevertheless, Black girls’ silence does not
guarantee them protection from the potential negative perceptions of their
peers and teachers, especially when Black girlhood is read as inherently
resistive (Fordham, 1993) and resistance is primarily associated with loudness.
Though Black girls recognize the false dichotomy that teachers draw between
silence and loudness during their interactions, given the unlikelihood that
either response will change the circumstances of their oppression, they do
what is necessary to survive as wholly as possible.
The supposed counternarrative to loud Black girls would be quiet girls
who are believed to perform well in school, and who are, therefore, exempt
from discipline or antagonism because quietness is interpreted as antithetical
to Blackness. Whether loud or quiet, all Black girls suffer the misreading of
their bodies in schools. A Black girl who has chosen quiet, or who is quiet,
may be rendered invisible because quietness does not fit the “loud Black
girl” or Sapphire frame. And yet this damaging invisibility is not always easily
perceived by others, since Blackness itself—and thus its hypervisibility and
misreading as inherently resistive—is often framed as bold and loud. Hence,
to make this plight visible, a student may resort to backtalk, as Monica did
when she blurted out to her teacher “Whatever makes you sleep at night”
(Wun, 2016a, p 186), while still choosing quiet by not revealing the details
of her home life. What is important to keep in mind here is that both quiet
and loud strategies of resistance and survival emerge from the tension born
out of Black girl students’ situated need to, on the one hand, defend and
visibilize themselves and their dignity and, on the other hand, preserve the
peace, particularly their inner peace and integrity. Black girls are, therefore,
positioned between and against loud and quiet performances, where neither is
acceptable because both will be misread, policed, and framed as “a problem.”
Loud, laughing Black girls

To be loud is to be un-American. It is to be nonnormative (read: non-white),
unpleasant, and unprofessional. As part of the National Council of Teachers
190
of English’s pledge distributed to students in 1917 to honor National Speech

Week, students pledged commitment to nationalistic notions of appropriate
language use: “I love the United States of America. I love my country’s flag.
I love my country’s language. I promise … that I will do my best to improve
American speech by avoiding loud rough tones, by enunciating distinctly,
and by speaking pleasantly, clearly, and sincerely” (Delpit and Dowdy, 2008,
p 29). This historical discursive association of standardized grammar and soft
vocal tone with nationalism, belonging, whiteness, and civility situates Black
speech and Black volume (or perceptions of it) as being unruly, that is, outside
the realm of that which is considered acceptable in school spaces. Combined
with the racialized and gendered controlling images of the Sapphire and
Jezebel, these associations similarly frame the sonic performances of Black
girls as wayward, insofar as they view them as violating social expectations
that females and children are to be seen, not heard.
As the teacher–student interactions discussed in this chapter suggest,
educators actively police Black girls’ loudness, which they interpret as
disruptive and unfeminine. Said plainly, Black girls are disciplined for having
and manipulating their bodies in ways that are discomforting to whiteness.
What is more, these interpretations and disciplinary efforts frame, and
thereby influence in turn, Black girls’ play and laughter. Comprising a
delicate dance between affection and aggression, Black children’s play may
appear confrontational to teachers. Black play is about performatively being
bad, smooth, and provocative—all positive characteristics in Black culture
of the dopeness that is part of the performance of Blackness (Abrahams,
1976). Teachers, however, might misread these characteristics as disrespect,
especially given that play is also about emulating adults and “asserting self-
reliance” (Abrahams, 1976, p 71).7
The uninhibited loudness of Black play is also a feature of Black girls’
laughter, which teachers may frame as loud, ghetto, or transgressive, violating
the gendered norms of quiet “feminine” respectability. Thus, even when
Black girls are not breaking any particular rules, many educators will police
and discipline them for their laughter. High school educator Diedre Houchen
describes a conversation she had with Janissa, a Black high school junior she
was disciplining for behaving “unacceptably” and “disruptively” with a male
student. In the middle of class, Ms. Houchen asked Janissa to step into the
hall, offering her the option to change her behavior and stay or not return.
She told Janissa, “You are so capable of doing [well in school], but you waste
your time, joking and laughing and being rude in class. That’s your choice.
But you are not going to waste my time anymore” (Houchen, 2013, p 107).
Framed as a barrier to learning, the laughter of a Black girl, but not of the
male student with whom she was laughing, is considered unacceptable and
grounds for removal from class. Calling out Janissa’s, but not her male peer’s,
laughter conveys the idea that it is specifically Black girls’ laughter that is
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not in keeping with the seriousness that classroom learning requires. Yet
studies show that student laughter can carry positive educative and social
benefits. Tied to physical and emotional relief, and therefore inseparable
from pleasure, laughter in classrooms can reduce anxiety, boost psychological
well-being, improve student engagement and motivation, and foster close,
trusting connections between teachers and students (Lujan and DiCarlo,
2016; Savage et al, 2017). Given this, it is especially important for teachers to
think about the implications of how they police Black emotions, particularly
Black joy. As a critical praxis against respectability politics, Black girls may
employ laughter to subvert the power dynamics of classroom interactions
(Waller, 1932), neutralize the teacher’s suppressive control, and reclaim
learning spaces as sites of pleasure and joy (Garner et al, 2019). Permitting
boisterous sonic performances in classes disrupts rigid and anti-Black body
policing in schools.
The preceding examples of Black girls’ use of backtalk, sass, loudness,
quietness, and laughter demonstrate how the macrolevel discourses that shape
perceptions of Black talk can produce a combination of racialized age-and
gender-based mis/readings that lead to the overpolicing of Black girls in
classrooms via their embodiment. The “controlling images” (Collins, 2009),
antiblackness, misogynoir, and hegemonic notions of gender and femininity
that guide the discursive oppression that Black girls face in classrooms denote
the ways they are construed as outsiders on a sonic level. Yet the discourses
that frame and filter mis/readings of Black girls’ vocal performances are also
imposed upon their bodies more tangibly, notably through the policing of
their dress.
Dress code violations when wearing and styling Black girlhood

The racialized and gendered tropes of respectability associated with Black girls’
volume that mark them as outsiders likewise extend, through the sexualized
controlling images of the Sapphire and Jezebel, to negative stereotypes about
Black girls’ “inappropriate” bodies, sexuality, and dress. Moving beyond
the voice and vocal performances, in this section I examine how other
corporeal politics of self-presentation are policed through discriminatory
policies that disproportionately target aesthetic features, styles, and fashion
coded as Black. As a means for making oneself visible (or invisible) in social
spaces, clothing, hair, and other beautification practices become focal sites
of surveillance and accountability for interpreting appropriate (normative)
behavior and belonging in the classroom.
Black girls have long reported differential treatment they receive compared
to their non-Black peers in schools, including as it applies to enforcing and
policing dress codes (Joseph et al, 2016). Recently, an increasing number
of students have spoken out about the ways schools have policed students’
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naturally occurring and traditionally Afrocentric features. The American

Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts filed a complaint against Malden’s
Mystic Valley Regional Charter School after two female students reported
that the school suspended them for wearing braids (Edwards, 2017), a Black
style that helps maintain and protect their hair but violates the dress code.
Stemming from the legacy of slavery and a preference for European beauty
aesthetics, “school dress codes that prohibit afros, afro-puffs, dreadlocks,
small twisted braids, and other culturally Black styles imply that the Black
body is unacceptable, unruly, and unprofessional” (Macon, 2014, p 1281).
When educators create and enforce culturally insensitive policies targeting
Black hairstyles such as the afro, which educators sometimes interpret as
unkempt or indicative of personal neglect (Essien and Wood, 2021), they turn
a personal aesthetic preference into anti-Black institutional discrimination
against Black bodies in their natural state. Discriminatory policies such as
these, which associate naturalness with “laxity of control over the self ”
(Goffman, 1963, p 27) and thereby devalue and stigmatize Black girls’ hair,
are one way that schools institutionalize anti-Black discourses of what a
“beautiful,” “feminine,” “tidy,” “controlled,” “productive” body is supposed
to look like. They also embolden the notion that “those in positions of
authority at these schools think it is their right to swap one environment
for another and pick on Black girls because of their ‘unnatural natural hair’”
(Burton, 2017). Those with power and authority to write and enforce dress
codes are key contributors to the proliferation of anti-Black discourses.
The trickle-down impact of anti-Black policies is that Black children are
singled out, marked as outsiders via their embodiment, and then gaslit by
explanations that contend the policies are neutral or about “professionalism”
(Macon, 2014).
In addition to the racialized policing of hairstyles, schools enact
discriminatory policies that sexualize the female student body and frame
it as a threat. By suggesting that feminine bodies and fashion styles “will
distract their male classmates or make male teachers feel uncomfortable,” these
policies “communicate that girls’ bodies are inherently sexual, provocative,
dangerous, and that harassment is inevitable” (Harbach, 2015, p 1044). The
notion embedded within dress codes of an inherent, potentially uninhibited
feminine sexuality uniquely targets Black girls through the controlling
image of the Jezebel, which promotes negative assumptions about Black
girl students’ character and behavior. According to Lisette, a Black high
school senior, the teachers and most of the students at her school think of
Black girls as “negative, loud-talking, pregnant,” wearing ill-fitting bras,
and dressed inappropriately regardless of what they are actually wearing
(Lei, 2003, p 167). Joy L. Lei (2003) highlights these tensions and the
resulting negotiations Black girls are forced to make about whether to play
into or against stereotypes. No matter which choice they make, Black girls
193
are constrained by the gendered and racial assumptions and disparaging

stereotypes that frame them as hypersexual and unbelonging in schools based
on their corporeal politics. In a study by Nia Michelle Nunn (2018) on
gendered racism in Black girls’ educational experiences, one eighth-grade
female student reported that “if you’re Black AND a girl, the dress code is
different for you … even though our bodies are not all the same … it feels
like a dress code for Black girl bodies” (p 252). Nunn’s study positions Black
girls as experts in their experiences of inequality and violence in schools,
while also validating the trauma that results from these experiences. These
layers of violence in schools mark Black girls as Sapphires and Jezebels who
are loud and sexual, and whose inappropriate embodiment is reinforced
in their clothing. The misogynoir in school dress code policies draws on
hypersexual and anti-Black discursive frames that institutionalize deficit-
oriented ideas about Black girls’ bodies, how they should be read, and what
their bodies mean in school settings.
Sexist dress code policies enforced by teachers put the onus on female
students to police and desexualize their bodies, regardless of how they
perceive their own self-presentation. Black girls have to “negotiate
between what is acceptable, expected, and attractive and what is seen to
go too far” (Raby, 2010, p 349). Yet, as Rebecca Raby (2010) points out,
distinguishing between acceptable and unacceptable dress is challenging
because the distinction is “constantly in flux, based on specific contexts,
changing fashions, girls’ own changing ages, and definitions of taste that
vary by culture and class” (p 349). The burden of navigating normative ideas
about appropriate dress, hair, and style that are determined by adults of a
different generation (and possibly different race) alongside school policies
that uniquely target Black girls creates a hostile educational experience. The
quotes offered from diverse Black girls indicate that they disagree with the
stereotypical discursive images teachers and school policies perpetuate—as
too sexual or unattended to. What is more, the misreading of Black girls’
dress can result in school sanctions such as detention, suspension, or, worse,
child welfare investigations of the student’s family.
Conclusion
In their school-based interactions, Black girls navigate discursive stereotypes
related to their gender, race, and age. Playing into these narratives and
sometimes resisting them, Black girls aim to write their own narratives
through their bodies. They recognize the politics surrounding their bodies
in schools and actively negotiate the politics of their interactions. They shift
their behaviors in response to the interpersonal dynamics at play. Black girls
work to assert their presence in classrooms and manipulate their behavior and
bodies to challenge rules, change the planned itinerary, and reclaim some
194
bodily power in their interactions. Nonetheless, the negative perceptions

held by adults against Black girls are guided by stereotypes of race and
femininity, as well as auditory factors in sounding and being Black. When
articulating how they are policed differently, Black girls highlight the ways
that Black talk, Black sass, Black volume, Black laughter, and Black dress
are the target of anti-Black and misogynoir disciplining. Yet, they also use
these embodied strategies as tools to reclaim their voice. Teacher–student
interactions establish a conceptual space within which Black girls identify
and challenge these expectations through embodied reclamation and
counternarrative. By utilizing the reverse discourses of backtalk, volume,
and dress, Black girl students demand respect, fight to freely display their
personalities, and effectively refuse to become passive victims of misogynoir.
Black girls are experts on their educational experiences; they use that
expertise to maneuver as part of a politic of survival and belonging, and this
tells us a lot about schools as institutions. As Frank (1991, p 49) reminds us,
“The point of a sociology of the body is not to theorize institutions prior
to bodies, but to theorize institutions from the body up.” In the institutional
context of the school setting, Black girls’ bodies are interpreted through
misogynoir discourses. Analyzing Black girls’ experience of belonging in this
space from the body up contributes to literature on education by prioritizing
and identifying the Black body as a notable mechanism for disparate forms
of discipline, policing, and resistance. It is from the embodied experiences
of Black girls in schools that we can better understand the persistence of
antiblackness and misogynoir in school-based interactions. Furthermore, this
chapter offers an intersectional interrogation of the relationship between
micro–macro and agency–structure in schools, encouraging educators to
adopt alternative approaches to student management and student–teacher
relationships and to consider more carefully how they empower and recognize
the humanity of young people, especially Black girls (Jennings et al, 2006;
Gervais, 2011; Khatib et al, 2013).
Notes
1
Misogynoir is the perpetuation of violent compounded sexism and racism that Black
women and girls navigate (Bailey, 2010; Bailey and Trudy, 2018).
2
This is true regardless of whether they speak to one another. All linguistic exchanges
feature embodied messages, but not all embodied messages include or necessitate spoken
language (Goffman, 1963).
3
Controlling images are stereotypes and biased depictions used by those in positions of
power to oppress and degrade a group of people and rationalize their marginalization
(Collins, 2009).
4
The Mammy is usually depicted as a desexualized, domestic housemaid or caretaker who
has left her family to serve a white family. The Jezebel is a hypersexual, promiscuous, and
sexually insatiable woman (Simms, 2001; Collins, 2009). The Sapphire is an aggressive,
intimidating, matriarchal figure who is usually associated with the angry Black woman
stereotype (Stephens and Phillips, 2003).
195
5
A reverse discourse uses the signifiers of an earlier, usually dominant, discourse but employs
these signifiers in a way that gives them an alternate interpretation (Weaver, 2010).
6
It is important to note that the word “[n]‌igga is not simply nigger pronounced ‘blackly’”
(McWhorter, 2017, p 164).
7
In Black communities, the mixing of affectionate play, backtalk, cursing, and even fake-
hitting (or threatening to hit) are necessary defensive survival tools and performance
of street smarts that help Black folks to navigate challenges of inequality and systemic
silencing (Abrahams, 1976; Anderson, 1999; Hatt, 2007).
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9
Embodied Vulnerability
and Sensemaking
with Solidarity Activists
Chandra Russo
I sit down to write about the embodiment of solidarity activism during the
early days of the 2020 coronavirus pandemic. I work from home because
the university campus where I work has recently closed, the vast majority
of our students sent home for the semester. My toddler squeals in the
background; daycares and schools have been shuttered. State leaders beg for
more medical infrastructure, and public health experts attempt to explain
the rationale for what some are terming “the new normal.” For many of
us living comfortable lives in the Global North, the human body, with all
of its vitality and vulnerability, has not in our lifetimes seemed so central
to matters political, social, ethical, and epistemological. Nor, perhaps, has
our interdependence as a global community ever been so stark.
For nearly a decade, I have been studying, and at points collaborating
with, a cohort of activists whose work foregrounds this fundamental
interdependence as well as the shared, if unequally allotted, vulnerability
of the human body. These predominately white, middle-class activists
from the Christian Left protest the racialized violence of US security
policies against Latinx migrants, Muslim detainees, and workers in the
Global South. These groups include: (1) School of the Americas Watch,
which endeavors to close the military training facility at Fort Benning,
Georgia; (2) the Migrant Trail Walk, part of the US/Mexico border justice
movement; and (3) Witness Against Torture, a grassroots effort to close the
Guantánamo Prison. Through “observant participation” (Vargas, 2006),
interviews, and archival analysis, I explore how these groups engage in
embodied practices of solidarity with the state’s targets while contesting
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Embodied Vulnerability and Sensemaking
US policies of militarism, torture, indefinite detention, and immigration

enforcement (Russo, 2018).
Through a political practice I term solidarity witnessing, these activists
work to see violence that dominant perspectives occlude and then reveal
such violence to broader audiences. Physically demanding and sometimes
high-r isk tactics, such as fasting, desert pilgrimage, and civil disobedience,
play a central role in these groups’ practices of solidarity, allowing them to
draw attention to state violence while forging community and long-term
commitment to a cause. Their bodily practices of solidarity, intended to
generate moral outrage among their audiences, also spur a range of powerful
embodied feelings of solidarity, including a sense of close community among
activists, deep empathy with the state’s targets, and renewed commitment to
a struggle for justice. This interpretive pathway that yokes bodily practices to
felt orientations depends upon sense experiences of, as well as sensemaking
about, embodied vulnerability.
This chapter points to embodied vulnerability as a multivalent access point
for making bodily experience more present in social movement study. Social
movement scholars suggest that we know very little about how activists’
embodied experiences impact them and the movements they join (Sutton,
2010; Maor, 2013; Van Ness and Summers-Effler, 2018). More broadly across
the social sciences, scholars have struggled to identify the “methodological
and analytic tools with which to do research about embodied experience”
(Chadwick, 2017, p 71). This chapter tacks back and forth between myself as a
researcher and the activists I study to demonstrate how embodied vulnerability
becomes meaningful both to the task of research and to solidarity activism itself.
More broadly, the chapter suggests that social movements might fruitfully be
considered as sensemaking projects as a way to capture the embodied dynamics
shaping activists and their movements as well as the cultural tools movements
provide their participants for interpreting and directing felt experiences.
In what follows, I outline my approach for theorizing how embodied
vulnerability works for the activists in this study and how social movements
serve as sensemaking projects. I then turn to three explorations of how
embodied vulnerability worked methodologically and analytically to
shape sensemaking over the course of my research. In the first section,
I consider how my own experiences of embodied vulnerability, and the
meanings I attached to these, fundamentally shaped my methodological
considerations. I then pivot to analyze participant accounts, which
reveal how affective experiences of embodied vulnerability come to be
interpreted as instantiations of solidarity.1 In the last section, I return to
consider the methodological implications of embodied vulnerability by
way of an accidental encounter in the field that availed me of unexpected
insights into my sociological study. I suggest that our bodies themselves are
up for interpretation in ways that have important epistemological stakes.
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Making sense of embodied vulnerability

My approach to theorizing embodied vulnerability draws upon the
phenomenology of perception and more recent findings in the science of
embodied cognition that emphasize the primacy of embodied experience
in shaping consciousness and behavior (Crossley, 1995; Jasper, 2018; Van
Ness and Summers-Effler, 2018). Sociological treatments of Merleau-Ponty’s
phenomenology of perception highlight the interplay between the body’s
“object side” and its “subject side” (Crossley, 1995, p 47) and how our bodies
are inscribed by social forces in ways that impact our life experiences and
interpretive horizons (Alcoff, 2005). This is distinct from broad trends in the
social sciences, replicated in social movement scholarship, which have often
treated the human body as a socially significant object while ignoring how the
body is itself the very ground of social experience and consciousness (Lyon,
1997; Chadwick, 2017). Most studies of the body in social movements, for
instance, emphasize the protesting body and its behaviors as a conduit of
meaning for public consumption (Sasson-Levy and Rapoport, 2003; Hohle,
2009). While a focus on the semiotics of bodily performance is important in
its own right, few studies examine activists’ embodied experiences, their
efforts to assign meaning to these experiences, or what such interpretive
work means for their movements (for notable exceptions see Sutton, 2010;
Adler, 2019; Fiorito, 2019).
A phenomenological account holds the potential to bring this range of
insights together in order to examine how social forces operate on and
through the human body, how bodily experience shapes human consciousness
and agency, and how social movements provide resources for interpreting
embodied experiences. While not focused on the body per se, Florence Passy
and Marco Giugni (2000) suggest that in the study of social movements “a
phenomenological perspective … looks at the constant work of definition
and redefinition of the social world by participants in social movements and
at their self-positioning within this world” (p 119). A phenomenological
approach to embodied vulnerability in social movements thus examines
how participants continually and collectively make sense both through and
about their embodied experiences, structured as these are by social forces,
culture, and history.
My conceptualization of embodied vulnerability is itself multidimensional.
I consider embodied vulnerability as an ontological given, an always present
condition of the human organism. A number of scholars posit bodily
vulnerability as the one human universal across our innumerable differences,
a commonality that should obligate us toward forms of care and solidarity
across these differences (Butler, 2004; Turner, 2006). Certainly, bodily
vulnerability is unequally allotted; reigning power dynamics mean that some
bodies are rendered much more vulnerable than others. We are not all alike
204
in the sense of being equally vulnerable. Rather, we hold in common our

dependence on others as well as our need for basic supports, such as food,
water, and shelter.
In line with this, I would suggest that awareness of one’s own and others’
embodied vulnerability, and its unequal allotment, is also structured in part by
dynamics of social power. A number of phenomenological thinkers suggest
that the very fact of our embodiment can and often does become invisible
to us (Leder, 1990; Bendelow and Williams, 1995). Most people do not
think about their eyes as they look out on the world or concentrate on their
hand before picking up an object. In the accrual of practical knowledge, one
learns by doing, not by cognitive reflection on the fact of one’s embodiment
(Crossley, 1995). For many, this argument goes, embodiment is not front of
mind. This is so until one is confronted with experiences that unsettle or
disorient habituated embodiments or, put otherwise, that force an awareness
of the vulnerability of the body. The discomfort and pain that accompany
injury, for instance, generate powerful affect that directs one to pay attention
to the fact of one’s embodiment in new, if often unwelcome, ways.
Yet to have one’s body, and its attendant vulnerabilities, recede from ever-
present consciousness is surely also a product of privilege and protection.
Arguably the majority of the world’s people are in fact forced to pay some
regular attention to their bodily vulnerability, whether this be for reasons of
hunger and endemic disease or other forms of social stigma, oppression, and
violence. Awareness of one’s own and others’ embodied vulnerability, and its
unequal allotment, then, can come from many epistemological resources.
One’s lived experience may be more than sufficient. At the other end of the
spectrum, one could hear a news story or learn in a class about a kind of
suffering that one has not personally experienced. For the activists I study,
who have a great deal of privilege in comparison to the state’s targets,
experiences of bodily vulnerability that accompany physically demanding,
high-risk protest tactics amplify other ways of coming to know the US
security state, such as reading a book or hearing a speech.
The interpretive mechanisms that we as social beings have for making sense
of experiences of embodied vulnerability are multiple, and our manner of
making sense often impacts our sense experience. Ample evidence suggests,
for example, that different cultural schemas work not just to offer distinct
explanations for, but also to shift the felt experience of, bodily pain (Bendelow
and Williams, 1995; Norris, 2009). Here, I borrow from movement scholar
Deborah Gould’s (2009) notion of affect as a kind of sense experience that
makes itself apparent to us viscerally, as distinct from “an emotion [which]
is one’s personal expression of what one is feeling in a given moment, an
expression that is structured by convention, by culture” (p 20). Affect exerts
a force; it is what gives emotion its sensory intensity. Categories of emotion
provide the means for communicating affect, generally through speech or
205
gesture. We might be moved to the physiological response of tears for reasons

of pain, joy, anger, or fear. Our bodily experience and display are not always
transparent to others, and sometimes not even to ourselves. Emotions provide
the systems of signification that allow us to communicate affect. Put otherwise,
emotions play an interpretive role for the bodily experience of affect, making
something that often feels deeply interior, and possibly ambiguous, available
for social communication and action. Yet in this interpretive maneuver,
emotions also do something to the affective experience, fixing and delimiting
the fluid and often ineffable quality of affect.
Gould (2009) suggests that social beings are disposed toward being able
to both interpret and express experiences to others such that “affect can
generate a strong desire to make sense of itself ” (p 38). Social movement
groups often provide their participants with the language to name affect and
the tools to direct such emotions toward social systemic change. In this way,
social movements might be conceptualized as sensemaking projects, in both
aspects of that phrase. Movements generate new encounters, such as protest
actions, that both ignite and are mediated by activists’ sense experiences, the
range of embodied, affective, and emotional responses to the social world.
Movements also provide the cultural tools to make sense, that is to interpret
and direct affect and emotion. For the solidarity activists I study, desert
pilgrimage, fasting, arrests, and jail time generate unsettling felt experiences,
a confrontation with both personal and collective bodily vulnerability. When
undertaken intentionally and in communities of protest that maintain rich
cultural resources for making sense of such sense experiences, the affective
experiences of embodied vulnerability are interpreted and mobilized toward
(re)new(ed) and resistant ways of seeing, knowing, and being.
Since this chapter considers both the theoretical and methodological
implications of experiences of embodied vulnerability, a note on my research
approach seems in order. I am guided by the insights of Ron Eyerman and
Andrew Jamison (1991), later taken up by Dylan Rodriguez (2006), who
theorize social movements as knowledge projects. Their assertion is that social
movement is itself the generation, modification, articulation, indeed movement,
of new ideas, identities, and modes of praxis within groups and across society.
What this means for scholars, as Rodriguez (2006) aptly observes, is that
social movements can be learned from and with; they are not mere social
units to be empirically assessed or taken as objects of scholarly knowledge.
I have suggested that social movements be conceptualized as sensemaking
projects as a way to get at the embodied, affective, and emotional dynamics
of social movements that an overly cognitive approach might flatten. I too am
interested in learning from and with the movements in my study. I suggest
that this learning required co-participation in some aspects of physically
demanding protest, paying attention to what my experiences of bodily
vulnerability helped me to know.
206
In order to best learn from and with my research participants, my approach

to fieldwork is adopted from João Costa Vargas’ (2006) notion of “observant
participation.” Distinct from the “participant observation” central to most
ethnographic endeavors (Emerson et al, 1995), observant participation
emphasizes participation as the central method by which the social world is
interpreted. Observant participation is not just an ethical or political move
but centrally an epistemological one as well. It centers on the premise that
there is more to be gleaned from active participation in the social world than
from merely watching others do what they do. At the very least, the insights
will be different. Had I not approached my research through observant
participation, I likely would not have experienced embodied vulnerability
and its attendant affect, emotions, and resources for sensemaking in the
same way as I did alongside my research participants. I now turn to explore
some of the ways in which my experiences of bodily vulnerability during
physically demanding solidarity activism motivated and shaped the task of
data collection.
Embodied vulnerability and the shape of research

It is the most threatening hour of the day. At just 10 am, we plod on
in 100-degree heat under a vicious sun. Even the desert insects have
stopped their rattling below the dry burn. I sip at my water bottle. I find
it difficult to quench my thirst without filling my belly to sloshing. My
lips are chapped. My joints ache as we continue into our fourth day.
About 50 people are making this 75-mile trek over the course of a week
through Arizona’s borderlands, following the general path taken by so
many migrants forced into this remote, brutal desert. We begin in Sasabe,
Sonora, Mexico, a mile south of the border, and head north toward
Tucson, traveling just east of the Baboquivari range and the Tohono
O’odham nation. Despite the discomfort, I recognize the immense
beauty of this place, stark peaks, fierce but glorious cacti flowering
everywhere. The land is saturated with the rich history of peoples and
fragile ecosystems that have made this place home for centuries.
After being out here myself with all the comforts we are afforded
as walkers, what is surprising to me is not that people have died.
It is that anyone makes it at all. I note this as we pass abandoned
backpacks along Route 286, signs of migrants who likely survived
many days in the desert to be picked up by vehicles. (Adapted from
the author’s fieldnotes)
The Migrant Trail Walk is one of a number of collective actions planned by

the US–Mexico border justice movement to protest thousands of migrant
deaths. These fatalities are the result of a US border enforcement strategy
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inaugurated in the mid-1990s intended to curb illicit migration from south

of the border by pushing migrants into ever more desolate and dangerous
crossings (Sheridan and McGuire, 2019). The annual Migrant Trail Walk
began in 2004 with about 20 participants from different border justice
organizations in and around Tucson, Arizona. After years of setting out
water in an attempt to save lives and having recovered far too many human
remains, these 20 wanted to experience a piece of the journey and draw
public attention to the daily reality facing migrants at the border.
I first learned of the Migrant Trail Walk in 2007 while volunteering with
immigrant rights efforts in my home state of Colorado. At the time, I had
never been to the US–Mexico border and believed the walk, as daunting as it
sounded, would be an important way to learn more about US border policy
while connecting with others who had been doing this work for longer than
I had. My first time walking and living in close community as a form of
political protest overflowed with the ineffable. It provided a set of affective
and what I (at the time) termed “spiritual” experiences distinct from much
that I had encountered in my daily advocacy work and far removed from my
own nonreligious, apolitical, white, bourgeois upbringing. In subsequent
years, I returned to the Migrant Trail every May to remember and mourn
the dead, reconnect with the border justice movement, and nourish myself
for the social justice struggles ahead.
In this section, I consider how experiences of bodily vulnerability on the
Migrant Trail shaped the motivation for as well as the task of data collection.
While not the first to suggest as much, I appreciate Paaige Turner and
Kristen Norwood’s (2013) insight that in interpretive inquiry the researcher’s
embodiment “[serves] as impetus, instrument, and impediment for, in, and to
qualitative research” (p 700). My early experiences of embodied vulnerability
on the Migrant Trail Walk served as both impetus for and instrument in what
would become more formal research. As my project progressed, my bodily
history and capacities, both shaped by instances of vulnerability, permitted
me access to data I might not otherwise secure, while creating impediments
to the research process. I treat these in turn.
During my early years on the Migrant Trail Walk, I did not think of
myself as doing research. I was not engaged in what sociologists generally
recognize as the methods of proper data collection, such as administering
surveys, conducting interviews, and collecting field notes. Yet I had begun
to compile an embodied archive, rich with affective and cultural evidence,
that would motivate my more formal research pursuits. What began as a
profound sense of camaraderie and political conviction ultimately morphed
into an intellectual project as well. I wanted to understand why the Migrant
Trail Walk felt so much more sustaining and transformative than other kinds
of political engagement, at least by my own barometer. In 2011, as a then-
early graduate student, I set out to understand the meanings Migrant Trail
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participants attach to their weeklong journey and the impacts of this kind
of activism.
There is a vast literature on the challenges of gaining access to and trust
from research participants, the ethics of navigating power differentials
between the researcher and researched, and the complex obligations of those
doing research with activist groups with whom they are aligned (Geertz,
1974; Naples, 2003; Hale, 2008). Migrant Trail participants tend to be
highly educated, with many participants in any given year being students in
college and graduate programs, K–12 educators, and college professors. Some
border activists are nevertheless skeptical of researchers, journalists, and even
politicians who they have seen “parachute” into border communities, pursue
their respective projects, and leave without reciprocity or accountability to
those from whom they have extracted time and resources. I was well aware
of this dynamic when I requested permission from organizers to administer
surveys and conduct interviews during the 2011 Migrant Trail Walk, which
would be my fourth time doing the walk.
I had likely earned organizers’ trust in a number of ways. We had common
experiences and memories from prior walks, increasingly overlapping social
networks, and I had taken on greater leadership over the years, allowing me
to demonstrate competence and care. I would suggest that shared experiences
of embodied vulnerability on the walk enhanced a sense of mutual trust.
Indeed, one of my central research findings would ultimately point to the
role of shared physicality on the Migrant Trail as helping participants to forge
a sense of solidarity with each other (Russo, 2014). Having been sweaty
and dirty, shared blisters and discomfort in the heat, slept and attended to
bodily functions in close proximity with each other swiftly builds a sense of
intimacy and close connection. Some participants even pointed to a kind
of dissolution of the self as being part and parcel of sharing in the affective
experiences of embodied vulnerability in close community over time. As
Susan, a longtime Migrant Trail participant observed,
The desert wears you down and this experience kind of breaks away
at those barriers that we hold up in our regular lives. We’re able to
feel things just being out here in the context of this community; we’re
having a shared experience. And so we kind of have a little bit of an
idea of what we’re all experiencing. That creates a space for being
open and for those emotional things to happen.
A number of sociological thinkers have found that shared physical

duress, especially when undertaken in contexts of common intention,
often religious ones, can strengthen social bonds between practitioners
(Durkheim, 1912; Glucklich, 2003). Some movement research points to
a similar dynamic in situations of high-r isk activism, though the role of
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shared embodiment has not been explicitly addressed (McAdam, 1988;

Jasper, 2018). What was ultimately a research finding—that the shared
embodiment of protest helps to forge intragroup solidarity—was also
methodologically significant as I asked for permission to begin the formal
research phase of my work.
The impacts of my bodily vulnerability emerged as both help and
hindrance during the first year of data collection on the Migrant Trail,
when I administered surveys to nearly all participants and conducted hours
of interviews in addition to the modality of observant participation (Vargas,
2006). Though I had earned participants’ trust, sheer physical exhaustion
limited my ability to pitch in as I had done in previous years. I endeavored
to contribute to the daily tasks of the walk, such as setting up camp and
helping newer participants, just as I had in previous years. Yet with my new
obligations as a researcher, I found my energy taxed in ways that it had not
been before. After hours of walking, chatting with participants, and taking
field notes during breaks, I often doubted my ability to finish the final
portion of each day’s walk. When we reached our destination, I would
often sit in private silence for an extended time rather than helping to set
up shade or dig commodes. After an afternoon of conducting interviews
or administering surveys, hours when most participants are napping and
recovering from the morning walk, I wanted nothing more than to lie down
on my sleeping pad. Attending a group meeting at the end of a long day is
rarely appealing, even if it is necessary for group communication and basic
logistics planning. Having spent the day both walking and collecting data
made our evening gatherings especially challenging. During one meeting,
I simply dodged my obligations, settling onto my sleeping bag in the still
hot dusk and guiltily drifting into unconsciousness.
The researcher’s embodied self is on display and up for scrutiny in
ways that shape the task of data collection (Turner and Norwood, 2013).
Many remarked on the way my fatigue showed up throughout the week.
Participants are instructed to partake in a collective care practice by regularly
checking for the early signs of heat fatigue and dehydration that many walkers
experience. Those who knew me well from prior years continually asked if
I was okay and, once reassured that I was not sick, noted that I seemed to be
more distant than usual. My affective display was made socially meaningful
in ways that I wished to disguise. I felt disappointed by my limitations as
both participant and researcher, worrying that my low energy and frequent
absences risked eroding trust among the long-term organizers who had
invited me in to do research. I also was aware that my physiological limits
narrowed the scope of my daily attention, making it impossible to engage in
the range of conversations and spaces for observation that I believed I should.
My body, it seemed, constrained my ability to be as fully observant and fully
participatory as I had wished (Vargas, 2006).
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Such limitations could in some ways be mitigated by the fact that I was
able to return to the walk over subsequent years, engaging more fully in
observant participation without also conducting interviews and surveys
in the desert. The point remains, however, that engaging in physically
demanding activities as an observant participant can interrupt the kinds of
habituated embodiment, themselves structured by social power, that might
allow some researchers to ignore the methodological ramifications of their
particular embodiment.
The affective experience of unsettled embodiment forced me to
acknowledge my body’s role in the research enterprise, even when doing
so was not my preference. Yet such affective experiences also motivated me
to explore how participants discern meaning from physically demanding
protest. I now pivot from methodological considerations to an analysis
of just this, exploring how Migrant Trail participants make sense of
their affective experiences of embodied vulnerability as instantiations
of solidarity.
Interpreting labors
I began my first Migrant Trail Walk with a head cold. I had been so physically
miserable the week prior that I considered foregoing the walk altogether.
I was undeniably anxious about spending a week with a group of strangers
in an activity intended to be uncomfortable. When the 50 of us walkers
arrived at our first campsite on the Buenos Aires National Wildlife Reserve,
I struggled alone to erect the tent my friend had lent me, warning that
I needed such a thing to guard against scorpions and venomous snakes. It was
near sunset and still 90 degrees. Having been up since dawn packing trailers,
caravanning to the border, walking through the heat of the day, missing a
turn, and taking in everything new and tragic about migrant deaths, I was
exhausted, hungry, and disoriented. As it turned out, I also was completely
unable to pitch a tent. I struggled with my one-person shelter for several
minutes, too embarrassed to admit I did not know how it worked or to
seek help. I sat in the shambles of nylon, metal posts, and stakes, facing away
from the group, sobbing silently. I hoped, correctly as it turned out, that
between my sunglasses and huge hat brim, and the fact that everyone else
was too busy setting up their own tents, that no one would notice the new
girl weeping at the edge of camp.
By the end of that week, I would feel intense camaraderie with other
walk participants, and a deep sense of purpose, reflecting on the absurdity
that during my first evening a misbehaving tent had brought me to tears.
How did I move from a sense of isolation, focused on my petty discomforts
in the desert, to a profound sense of connection with my fellow travelers
and a deepened commitment to a cause?
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I begin with my tent story to demonstrate that there is nothing inherent

in experiences of bodily vulnerability that makes uncomfortable affect
somehow destined to blossom into feelings of solidarity. Indeed, at the
height of my own experiences of bodily vulnerability on the Migrant Trail
Walk, I have sometimes felt isolated, self-conscious, and despairing. This
was true when I struggled with a tent and, years later, at the height of data
collection. At the same time, those undertaking the solidarity practices I study
are not blank slates; the affective experiences of embodied vulnerability that
accompany their activism are not “up for interpretive grabs.” Most of the
activists in my study, myself included, embark on physically demanding and
sometimes high-r isk practices of solidarity with well-considered intentions
rooted in rich cultural systems of meaning. These activists turn to a set of
commonly held interpretive resources to make sense of the sense experiences
of bodily vulnerability within a practice of solidarity. Yet these frameworks
for sensemaking need to be continually and collectively mobilized. In this
section, I consider accounts from Migrant Trail participants that demonstrate
the interpretive maneuvers by which participants understand the affective
experiences of embodied vulnerability as instantiations of solidarity. These
accounts are selected for the interpretive labor they reveal, not because they
are exemplary of participant accounts, most of which reveal much less of
activists’ interpretive efforts.
I think I kind of got it when my feet hurt so badly and knowing that
it’s like this but just a gazillion times worse is how migrants feel at night
when it’s dark and hiding out, walking on bare flesh. I’m walking and
hurting and I have the words in my head, like Teresa said, “For every
step you hurt, think of your brothers and sisters.” (Adelheid, first-time
Migrant Trail Walk participant)
Adelheid gives a fairly explicit account of how she gets from the sense
experiences of embodied vulnerability—“feet hurt so badly,” “I’m walking
and hurting”—to a feeling of solidarity with crossing migrants. Key to
Adelheid’s interpretive pathway are the words of one of the walk’s longtime
participants, Teresa. During an Indigenous blessing ceremony at the Migrant
Trail’s beginning, Teresa unravels a string of hundreds of handmade prayer
ties. Each tie symbolizes a life lost in the Arizona desert that year. As Teresa
wraps the string of prayer ties around its stick so that we can carry it through
the desert, she reminds us to think of our migrant “brothers and sisters” for
every step that we hurt.
Across the groups that I study, there is a common acknowledgment that
insofar as we are all vulnerable we have a common obligation to protect and
care for others across the stratification of such vulnerability. Teresa’s language
of “brothers and sisters,” a familial lexicon that is used across these groups,
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evinces such an understanding. These groups believe that the US security

state’s policies violate our obligation to care for one another, predicating the
supposed security of some on the annihilation and abandonment of others.
In their efforts to bear witness to this violence, these groups use embodied
tactics that permit them to better see and feel violence and then expose such
injustices to others. When they give up food, physical comfort, and in some
cases their own safety, these activists find that unsettling affect can feel like
a collective force, a bodily insistence to pay attention to injustice. As one
Witness Against Torture participant explained the impact of fasting, “I cannot
look away.” In this way, embodied vulnerability becomes a mechanism to
forge what Asia Friedman (2011) terms, albeit in a very different context,
“perceptual communities” (p 188). These activists work collectively in order
to perceive and then resist the narrow ways of seeing and knowing that
constitute the dominant sociopolitical order. Yet, as Adelheid reveals, each
movement context also provides important tools for interpreting bodily
discomfort as a way of perceiving state violence and enacting solidarity with
the state’s targets. For Adelheid, these tools include the collective ritual of
an Indigenous blessing ceremony, the symbolism of prayer ties, and Teresa’s
words, as but three specific examples.
Many participants in these groups, though certainly not all, draw on
religious frameworks in assigning value and meaning to solidarity tactics.
Various faith traditions pursue bodily mortification as a pathway toward
sacred experience (Glucklich, 2003). Where an onlooker might see blisters,
headaches, hunger, and jail time as barriers to collective action, participants
in these groups find such experiences to be socially and often spiritually
empowering. Yet, not all participants found the process of attaching this
meaning system to physically demanding solidarity activism to be a seamless
one. For instance, longtime Migrant Trail participant Molly noted,
We’re all from different backgrounds and varied levels of faith or

spirituality and so it can’t be at the forefront. But for me what it’s
become very personally—I use this word pilgrimage. I used it at first a
little strangely, like it didn’t fit well. But I now claim that as what I do.
I think it’s a pilgrimage of sorts for the betterment of humanity and
then there’s a whole kind of interior spiritual thing that happens for me.
Molly’s account of coming to call the Migrant Trail Walk a “pilgrimage”

is notable on a few levels. First, Molly reveals the complex interpretive
work that happens around religion in movement contexts that maintain
interfaith roots and traditions while also endeavoring to be religiously
open. None of the groups I studied espouse an official religious orientation,
though many have origins in radical Christian traditions. Across these
groups, atheists get arrested alongside nuns; Muslims fast and protest next
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to Jews. Thus, at one level, Molly was reticent to ascribe a religious intent
to her desert protest in a movement context that downplays religiosity
in an effort to be inclusive. At another level, Molly also seems to give
voice to the uneasy work of interpreting affect; she struggles over some
years to capture the complex affective experiences of the desert journey
with a single term. This seems to mirror Gould’s (2009) insight that in
the effort to capture that which eludes language, to bring affect into
the realm of social meaning, the affect itself is necessarily bounded and
turned into something else. On a third level, it is noteworthy that Molly
seems to understand her attribution of meaning to the walk as deeply
personal, intimate, and interior. This experience is, of course, true in
every sense, in that it is what she feels. At the same time, her profound
sense of this “interior spiritual thing that happens for me” is in fact a
common, patterned one for Migrant Trail participants, especially those
who have some familiarity with religious practices. In this way we see
how the energetic force of affect, and the spiritual meaning attributed
to it, feels interior and unique even though much of this experience is
shared by others in the same movement context.
The walking itself has taken a profound physical and emotional toll on
me. Seeing the climate, the border patrol driving by and just rounding
up people, loading them up on buses. Then you just see stuff on the
road—a bottle, footprints. You just take a step back and think, “They’re
probably making this passage right now, in our midst.” And they don’t
have the luxuries that we have. They probably have like a four-liter
jug of water or whatever, but it’s desperate compared to our situation.
(Rory, first-time Migrant Trail Walk participant)
Hailing from the much cooler territory of Manitoba, Canada, Rory was
one of the walk participants who struggled the most with the desert heat.
He also misplaced his eyeglasses on the first night of the walk. During a
dinner conversation, Rory admitted that he had, at first, felt sorry for himself
when confronted with the walk’s discomforts. He noted, however, that in
being surrounded by others that shared the intention of enacting solidarity
with migrants, he was able to reconsider his own struggle and instead pay
attention to those forced into the desert. Sitting, head bowed, recovered
glasses smudged with the ubiquitous Sonoran dust, he reflected, “I mean,
it’s not about me, right?”
Perhaps the most significant interpretive frame for the groups in my study
is how participants identify their social privilege. These activists emphasize
that their efforts are a mere token or gesture in the face of the incomparable
violence faced by the tortured, disappeared, and sequestered. While there is
important social diversity in each group, nearly all acknowledge that their
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choice to bear witness through physically demanding and high-r isk tactics is
predicated on how their own bodies are protected by race, class, and often
able-bodied privilege. These activists understand bodily discomfort and risk
as a way to divest from their embodied privileges. By forcing themselves to
pay attention to their own and others’ embodied vulnerability, they resist the
seductions of the dominant order that would have us ignore or be apathetic
in the face of the US security state’s unequal and racialized exercise of
violence (Russo, 2018).2
Yet, akin to my experience with erecting my tent, Rory’s account reveals
how the affect that accompanies embodied vulnerability can engender a sense
of self-focus and even self-pity. Having one’s physical comforts withdrawn can
induce the human organism to pay full and immediate attention to the self.
Part of the power of physically demanding, high-r isk solidarity activism is that
it is part of a communal practice to forge counterhegemonic commitments
and interpretations that might otherwise feel counterintuitive. By identifying
moments of interpretive labor whereby participants endeavor to make sense
of their sense experiences, connecting the affective experiences of embodied
vulnerability to the work of solidarity, we glimpse how movements serve
as sensemaking projects.
Interpreting raced and gendered bodies

“I need you to stay right there,” the officer announced. My shock
quickly dissolved into an understanding of my predicament. My
stomach dropped, and I froze in place.
“Wait! Can I explain?” I tried to hide my growing anxiety with a
diplomatic measure of calm.
It was November 2013, my first visit to the annual School of the
Americas (SOA) Watch vigil, and I had in no way intended to trespass
onto the Fort Benning military base.
I knew that the military had erected new fencing after the attacks of
September 11, 2001, in order to clearly delineate the permitted space
of the vigil from the base. Activists now needed to climb over a fence
or go well around it if they wished to engage in civil disobedience by
“crossing the line.” The cost of crossing had increased significantly as
well. First-time crossers now received between three and six months
of prison time whereas a mere citation was common in the past. The
new procedures sounded ominous, and so I had assumed that the
infamous gates of Fort Benning where the protesters had gathered for
years would be architecturally obvious. It turns out they are a mere
chain link installation at the end of what seems to be a side street. It
is quite easy to accidentally end up on military property if coming
from another direction.
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The well-known chain hotel where I along with many other

anti-SOA activists were staying for the weekend is separated from
the Fort Benning base by an unmarked road. It is easy to walk across
the street. There are no signs, little traffic, grass on either side. I had
unintentionally wandered onto the base and approached the two traffic
cops to inquire which was the permitted route to meet the protesters.
The two officers, young Black men with the police department of
Columbus, Georgia, Fort Benning’s adjacent town, did not seem to
know what to do with me when I first approached.
“Um, Ma’am? What are you doing here? Are you a protester?”
“I’m trying to meet the protesters,” I responded. That’s when I had
been instructed to stay put.
I tried to speak to the officers, but they showed no interest in
engagement, pulling out their radios instead. Less than a minute ensued
before another officer in riot gear came roaring up the grassy median on
his black ATV, where he stayed seated, engine idling. Another vehicle
arrived seconds later, its driver wearing military fatigues and also not
exiting the vehicle. By the time the sheriff’s department’s white sedan
pulled up, and this driver, a white middle-aged man, approached me,
I was undone.
“Ma’am, what’s wrong?” the approaching officer inquired with
apparent concern.
I stuttered out what had happened, that I was just a mistaken
researcher. “There’s just so many of you,” I hiccupped through tears. It
was a spectacle of police power, and I had been reduced to a terrified,
small version of myself.
“We just want to make sure people don’t get lost,” the officer placated.
I did not dare to question the pitiful logic of this explanation. Four
vehicles, six officers, and at least three branches of law enforcement
deployed to ensure I was not “lost”?
Versed in the legal parameters of a police stop, I gathered myself
enough to ask if I was free to leave.
“Yes ma’am,” the officer from the sheriff’s department nodded.
I hurried back across the road to my hotel, adrenaline pumping,
my relief flooding in, wits beginning to return. (Adapted from the
author’s fieldnotes)
Most ethnographers have moments such as these, though maybe not always
so dramatic: experiences that reveal something about the social world into
which the researcher has ventured but are not the most exemplary of the
phenomena they wish to explore and explain. My encounter with the
disproportionate power of the US security state—with the complex identities
and tactics of its officers and the dynamics of my own raced and gendered
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embodiment, which likely protected me from force—seemed potentially

trivial and distracting for the purposes of presenting my research. I set out
to examine activists that have committed their lives to a certain high-r isk
practice. Their efforts, in turn, are meant to lift up the realities faced by
those who experience the most draconian manifestations of state violence.
My initial, thwarted, attempt to make it bodily to the Fort Benning vigil as
a lost researcher seemed to distract from both of these projects.
I introduce this story now, however, because it serves as a richly social,
affective, and embodied experience that no doubt impacted my understanding
of state violence as well as my resistance to it. Previous sections explored
how bodily vulnerability shaped my research interest and process as well as
how activists attach meanings to their affective experiences. This section
foregrounds how our bodies themselves are up for interpretation. Social forces
that operate on and through the human body mark us as raced, gendered,
and classed, with significant implications for how we will experience bodily
vulnerability and what sense we will make of such experiences.
While the social identities into which we will be categorized or choose
to belong predate the birth of any individual, our bodies render us legible
as certain kinds of social subjects from the moment we are physically
constituted. Some critical race feminists have adopted a phenomenological
account to demonstrate how this is meaningful for forging consciousness.
Linda Martín Alcoff (2005), for instance, explains how the identity categories
of race and gender, as they are socially enacted, “are most definitely physical,
marked on and through the body, lived as a material experience, visible
as surface phenomena, and determinant of economic and political status”
(p 102). A particular phenotypic presentation denotes race. A way of dressing,
moving, speaking is interpreted as gender. Such categorization, in turn,
informs how people, institutions, and policies interact with different bodies.3
Our lived experiences and the insights they make possible are fundamentally
shaped by the way our bodies are socially perceived. When I accidentally
trespassed onto the base, I did so as a body that presents as white and as a
woman. The situation that ensued and the ways I have come to make sense
of it were largely predicated on how raced and gendered, and perhaps also
classed, embodiments interacted to shape my sense of embodied vulnerability.
As one example, the privileges that usually accompany my lived
experience of whiteness seemed as if they could be withheld, albeit only
momentarily. One of these privileges is not having to pay attention to my
body’s vulnerability in the majority of my lived environments. Building on
the work of Frantz Fanon to consider a racial phenomenology, Sara Ahmed
(2007) suggests that one way that racism works is through a differential in
how bodies access a sense of comfort in their environment. The experience
of whiteness, Ahmed suggests, is such that one’s body is “so at ease with
one’s environment that it is hard to distinguish where one’s body ends and
217
the world begins” (p 158). A heightened awareness of the body’s boundaries,

its surface and skin as the site where the self ends and the world begins, is
a form of racial consciousness insofar as it is disproportionately borne by
people of color. One obvious way that racism works, and reinforces such
racial consciousness, is by forcing certain social subjects into a pressing
awareness of their embodied vulnerability through “a differential economy of
stopping” (Ahmed, 2007, p 161). Ahmed gives the example of Black people
disproportionately targeted for police stops. The activists in my research align
themselves with the targets of state violence who are similarly racialized
through immobility regimes. The policing of human movement looks very
different at the US border with Mexico, for example, than it does at other
ports of entry where brown bodies are not the assumed border-crosser.
When I was stopped and asked to account for the why of my whereabouts,
I had a momentary glimpse of what it might mean to be a body “out of
place” (Ahmed, 2007) as well as one exposed to the state’s frightening display
of potential force. My gendered embodiment compounded my sense of
vulnerability. I was “caught” as a woman, morphologically smaller than the
six men marshalled to interrupt my movement, alone without a witness or
a weapon, and confronted by different iterations of masculine armor. The
state’s paraphernalia of power included guns, batons, and riot gear. It is
notable that the only people that presented as not white in this encounter
were the two traffic police that appeared to be the least powerful officers at
the scene. They ended up playing “bad cops” as juxtaposed to the “good
cop” with the sheriff’s department. Gender and race intersected in ways that
continue to make me uncomfortable upon reflection, though I was grateful
at the time to be so easily released. My white womanness, complete with
the gendered spectacle of tears, provided a platform for a kind of rescue. Was
I merely being saved from my own mistake? Was I somehow being protected,
whether consciously or not, from two Black officers following orders who
found themselves physically proximate to a frightened, crying white woman?
The analysis of social, embodied entanglements here could go on.
The point I wish to highlight is that our bodies themselves are up for
interpretation as structured by the legacies of violence and inequality
that delineate race, gender, and so on. This shapes our social encounters,
and the way we will both experience and attach meaning to moments of
embodied vulnerability. My encounter at Fort Benning might not map
cleanly onto my research endeavor; it was not purposeful co-engagement
with solidarity activists but rather an adjacent accident. Yet this experience,
no doubt, gave me certain kinds of insight that helped me to sense and
make sense of my object of study. I sensed what it could mean to have
my bodily vulnerability exploited, but then I swiftly found my embodied
privilege reinstated. I had the affective reaction of bodily shaking and tears,
which I interpreted and communicated to others as fear and later also
218
understood to be anger and subsequent relief. All of this was structured

by my own race and gender as well as the race and gender of those with
whom I interacted. More obliquely, it seems I may have also glimpsed
how the agents of state power are themselves caught within systems not
of their making. Did I witness legacies of racial inequality showing up in
the state’s ranks, with white male officers holding more prestigious stations
with greater authority and a wider range of permissions than Black male
officers? The solidarity activists in my study have complex assessments of
the officers of the state, seeking to acknowledge their complex humanity
as tied into a larger, venal system.
My own encounter had little in common with the carefully planned civil
disobedience that routinely brings the groups I study into contact with
arresting officers. In this sense, my encounter evoked an affective experience
of embodied vulnerability without the same interpretive resources by which
solidarity activists make collective sense of their high-r isk activism. Yet my
unintentional trespass gave me a sliver of insight into the experience of being
rendered vulnerable through state force. This allowed me to see and sense
contours of the US security state that figured centrally in my study insofar
as this state is the target of the activists I research. Given the fact that I have
never engaged in civil disobedience as an act of solidarity with the state’s
targets, my brief encounter perhaps enhanced my ability not just to report
on but also to feel with those who tell of their horrifying encounters with
state force—both the activists I study and the people for whom they bear
witness. This feeling with, I suggest, can be an important means of learning
both from and with social movements as sensemaking projects.
Conclusion
This chapter argues for the methodological as well as analytic importance
of examining felt, embodied experience in social movement research.
Reflecting on ethnographic work with solidarity activists contesting the
US security state, I explore how embodied vulnerability shapes the research
enterprise and how activists work collectively and continuously to make
sense of their embodied vulnerability as instantiations of solidarity. As
movement scholars move away from predominately structural and historical
explanations for protest to emphasize instead the complexities of human
agency (Jasper, 2018; Van Ness and Summers-Effler, 2018), there is an
increasing need to consider the experiential, and specifically embodied, basis
of meaning-making and motivation. By suggesting that social movements
might fruitfully be considered as sensemaking projects, this chapter proposes
a broadly phenomenological approach for capturing the embodied and
affective dynamics as well as the interpretive maneuvers shaping activists
and their movements.
219
Acknowledgments
The author is deeply grateful to the book’s editors, Anne Marie Champagne
and Asia Friedman, who provided generous and incisive feedback on earlier
drafts of this manuscript.
Notes
1
In line with the definition offered by Deborah Gould (2009), I use the term “affect” to
mean the range of “nonconscious and unnamed, but nevertheless registered, experiences
of bodily energy and intensity that arise in response to stimuli impinging on the body”
(p 19).
2
I want to be careful not to exaggerate the role of embodied privilege in the face of state
violence during high-r isk activism, or even protest events, that do not intend to be high
risk at all. During the writing of this chapter, one of the participants in my study was
seriously injured by the Buffalo, NY, police force during a racial justice protest, a story
that earned national and ultimately global attention (Vigdor et al, 2020).
3
Alcoff (2005) observes how bodies that are not so easily categorized have long been
deeply unsettling to social institutions and liable to draw strong cultural responses of fear
and disgust. In US society there are elaborate rules and sometimes medical procedures
to reconcile such ambiguity. Consider centuries of legal battles around hypodescent and
racial mixing (Harris, 1993) or the assumed necessity of surgery for infants with ambiguous
genitalia (see, for example, Fausto-Sterling, 2000).
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222
10
Our Bodies, Our Disciplines,

Our Selves
Annemarie Jutel
Where do our choices of disciplines come from? How do we embody our

papers or our papers embody us? Rare is the scholar with no embodied
connection to their work. We all look at ourselves when we look at
something else; that we should look at our bodies is part and parcel of critical
thinking about our worlds.
My contribution to this volume is going to be a reflection on how our
bodies (often) take us to our disciplines, both consciously and not. I provide
this reflection via a retrospective of my own disciplinary work in the sociology
of diagnosis.
The sociology of diagnosis is a relatively recent subdiscipline of sociology.
It was first suggested as a point of potential interest by Mildred Blaxter
in 1978, and then again by Phil Brown in 1990. It started taking off, not
unexpectedly, in the era of diagnosis or about 2010. Just as diagnoses were
proliferating in number in the International Classification of Diseases (World
Health Organization, 2009), as self-diagnosis and crowdsourcing diagnosis
started mesmerizing the masses, sociologists also started acknowledging what
Blaxter had brought to their attention two decades earlier: that diagnosis
was too glibly taken as a simple label for natural facts of disease.
The sociology of diagnosis explores diagnosis as a reflection of social
values, beliefs, and power in relation to the material facts of disease. It
focuses on understanding how assigning labels to disorders in particular
ways affects our experience of disease. While many scholars had focused
on what it was like to have a given diagnosis (say, the stigmatizing effect of
HIV, the varying identities associated with cancer [Klawiter, 2004], or the
bewildering and marginalizing experience of illness for which no diagnosis
seems available [Dumit, 2006]), there was little focus on diagnosis itself, not
223
only as a structure in medicine but also as a place at which power converges

and social roles are created. Yet diagnosis had, and continues to have, an
important definitional role in medicine as well as in social life. More than
an object of study, the sociology of diagnosis provides an approach to studying
matters of medical and sociologic concern.
My last book, Diagnosis: Truths and Tales (Jutel, 2019), was written
to reflect on diagnosis stories. What is the story we tell ourselves, our
patients, and the outside world about a serious diagnosis? “It is through
stories of diagnosis that we can both understand our reactions and
reclaim them,” I wrote, noting that “shifting the balance away from the
destructive transformative power of the diagnosis requires re-narration
and introspection” (Jutel, 2019, p 139). Among other things, I assembled
in Diagnosis a bouquet of “intellectual documentaries,” papers by scholars
reflecting on their own serious diagnoses via the disciplines they had at
their disposal: linguistics (Fleischman, 1999), sociology (Blaxter, 2009),
philosophy (Carel, 2015), and literary criticism (Stoddard Holmes,
2006). What does a linguist write about when she becomes gravely ill?
A philosopher? A sociologist? They turn toward their disciplines to reflect
on their bodies, as these authors have (most eloquently).
Fleischman (1999) wrote about the language of diagnosis: how the very
utterance of the diagnosis had transformative power to divide life into a
“before” and an “after,” how different registers (professional vs. lay) made
different use of the same terms, and how a “metonymic contamination”
transfers characteristics of the disease to the affected individual (p 20).
According to Fleischman, language both punctuated and transformed the
experience of illness and the ability to discuss it. Carel (2015) offered a
phenomenological analysis of her own illness, notably using her writing
to underline how one can be well in the presence of disease and also how
the notion of finitude shapes, rather than undermines, our life. While the
way we live today tends to avoid confronting our own death, diagnosis
puts it firmly in view and provides, according to Carel, an opportunity to
live reflectively.
Awaiting a diagnosis, Blaxter (2009) pondered the stories she told herself
and then her doctors about how she understood her problematic X-ray.
Paradoxically, as she exposed, her story would be trumped by that of the
MRI, “the nature of ‘evidence’ in a world where neither the individual
doctor nor the patient, but rather the measurement and the image, were
increasingly becoming the vehicle of decisions” (Blaxter, 2009, p 774). And
finally, Stoddard Holmes discussed how not really knowing where an ovary
sat, or what it might look like, other than in a kind of Tinkertoy infogram,
meant that she could not even consider the possibility of ovarian cancer in
relation to her own abdominal symptoms. The absence of ovarian cancer
in popular culture, she mused, constitutes an obstacle to early diagnosis.
224
Our Bodies, Our Disciplines, Our Selves
Maybe these authors would argue that their discipline never had anything
to do with their personal embodiment, but they would have to agree that
they used their disciplines to understand their embodied quandaries.
But it can be the other way too. From a particular embodied stance
(illness, diagnosis, catharsis), the scholar finds their discipline: locating it as
a way of understanding, celebrating, or theorizing their physical existence
in the world.
That is where I started. My scholarly direction owes much to my own
experience of my body. How does my own discipline start from an embodied
experience? Discretely, you might be thinking about turning the page,
anticipating an episode of oversharing in which I reveal some intimate detail
of my life or some past illness. You may already be worrying about my use
of the first person, a sign of anti-scholarship: too personal, too subjective.
Maybe you prefer the passive voice, where the subject is absent. You
would have liked the editorial guidelines on good scientific writing in Nature
Immunology in 2005 (hopefully, now the “old days”), which specified that the
passive voice “emphasizes the important ‘actor’ of the manuscript, namely,
biology” (“Good data need good writing,” 2005). Donna Haraway (1991)
refers to this as “disembodied scientific objectivity” (p 185), a way of writing
that infers but in no way ensures the neutral positioning of the observer.
But this chapter is “light touch” embodiment. You will not be subjected
to stories of pathology but to stories of how I came to my understanding
about the location of power and the social generation of values. And, to be
clear, even while I landed in diagnosis, my embodied story of the sociology
of diagnosis does not start in disease, it starts in gender.
In 1995, I learned what “gender” meant, as distinct from biological “sex.”
I had used the word previously. I was 34 years old, and while I had not spent
my life under a rock, I did not really know what it was until I went back
to university, primed to do a degree in physical education. I had decided
to return to study after 15 years of nursing. While I was a nurse, I was also
an elite runner, and I was a member of the temple of running. At the time,
I thought that everyone could benefit from a bit of a jog.
One might imagine my choice of nursing as one connected to a pious
altruism, when it was really a misplaced belief that nursing was a health-
oriented profession somehow related to running. I had never been in a
hospital, or been ill in my life, so there was little experiential (and I now
know, theoretical) evidence to support this connection. Neither nursing
nor running is, in fact, health oriented, and yet both would uncritically
claim to be so. Running: Sport. Nursing: Sickness. Either one of these
analogies would deserve an entire chapter. I will leave that as is, other than
to comment on the number of surgeries I have had to keep me running
and the number of my running friends who died in middle age. Running
was not the cardiovascular panacea we had believed it to be.
225
When I returned to university to study, I felt certain that I would be

able to find ways of encouraging more women to join this cult of running.
These “ways,” I also was certain, would be anchored in science. The word
“women” could have been a clue that my work needed to be about gender,
but until then, I understood gender to be the M/F on an application form.
It was a label affixed uncritically to dichotomous biological facts. I was to
learn more about it from my lecturer in PHSE204: History of Sport.
Starting in the second year of the program, having gotten credit for
courses I had taken in nursing school, and amid the long list of required
courses, I reluctantly settled in to courses, such as PHSE204: History of
Sport, on subjects I presumed totally irrelevant to my missionary project of
developing women runners. What I did not realize was that understanding
the various ways in which women engaged (or didn’t) in physical activity at
different points in modern history—as well as how the notion of “woman”
was both unitary and not—would shine a very different light on what I had
understood to be a scientific problem.
Examining the social roles assigned to women with the critical distance
that history can provide revealed an explanation, which science could not
have brought to light, for how women engage (or not) in physical activity.
My lecturer, Douglas Booth, who would become my doctoral supervisor,
assigned a chapter from Patricia Vertinsky’s (1994) The Eternally Wounded
Woman about Victorian attitudes to menstruation in the middle classes.
I hastily ordered the book, proudly told Doug that I had bought it and
read it cover to cover. I will not embarrass myself or my readers with
stories of my own menstruation, other than to say that I had not previously
considered how menstruation contributed to anything other than a need
to plan and hide: Would anything show when I was running? Did I need
to slip a pad in my purse? Understanding menstruation as a contributing
factor toward women’s nonengagement in physical activity was revelatory
in surprising ways.
Vertinsky described a Newtonian approach to menstruation. Since energy
could neither be created nor destroyed, each menstrual cycle was seen as an
important depletion of women’s physical reserves, rendering them feeble and
“eternally wounded,” a stance aptly captured by the words of the president
of the American Gynecological Association in 1900:
Many a young life is battered and forever crippled in the breakers of

puberty; if it cross [sic] these unharmed and is not dashed to pieces on
the rock of childbirth, it may still ground on the ever-recurring shallows
of menstruation, and, lastly, upon the final bar of the menopause ere
protection is found in the unruffled waters of the harbor beyond the
reach of the sexual storms. (Engelmann, 1900, pp 9–10)
226
In learning about gender, I learned about critical reflection: the same critical
reflection that I try to instill in my students when they walk in the door at
university. Things are not as they seem. Scratch the surface. What is going
on? What forces are at play? Where is power located?
Motivated by Vertinsky’s interest in the historical construction of female
frailty, which I could understand, I decided to expand on Vertinsky’s work
by exploring menstrual product advertising in historical copies of New
Zealand women’s magazines. This was my honors research project. I spent the
summer in library stacks breathing in the dust of the decades and collecting
gems like “Poise at trying times is easily attained through using Santex or
Sannette” and “Modess, because …”
So, I had discovered the social construction of gender, but I had not yet
understood what theoretical framing was or how to find a theoretical frame.
Sure, gender was one, but it was not specific enough. And—as I support
students to find their own theoretical frames today—I realize that my
problem was that I had not yet read enough. I can remember asking my
husband, a film and media studies lecturer, “So how do you find one [a
theoretical frame]?”—“It’s not like you can just pull one off of the shelf!”
I interjected, indignant. As students, our shelves are too bare, and it is only
as they progressively become populated (volumated?) that we have theories
upon which to draw.
I found my theory when I stumbled across Iris Marion Young’s (1980)
“Throwing Like a Girl,” in which she described a kind of “feminine
movement” in line with the constructed frailty that Vertinsky wrote
about. Feminine movement, as she described it, included three typical
stances: restricting the amount of space available for engagement in the
world; fragmenting the body, rather than experiencing it as a transcendent
whole; and treating the body like a fragile object. What she brought en sus
was a philosophical reflection regarding the effects this constructed frailty
has on the experience of the subject and her engagement with the world.
The theoretical framework I put together from Young and Vertinsky found
additional support in Drew Leder’s (1990) arguments on the phenomenon
of disappearance: the body of the transcendent subject is not perceived, for
it disappears in favor of subjective intentions. Presto!
What this meant to me was that everything that brought the female body
forward in the consciousness of the subject also somehow constrained it.
How can a young girl engage freely and unreservedly in physical activity if
she is always at the same time protecting herself like a fragile object? The
“presencing” of the body is a barrier to its fulfilment. These advertisements—
advocating a need for extraneous support for normal biological function,
referring to menstruation as dangerous or trying, and presenting the woman
as always poised and pretty—were all presencing discourses.
227
I could see this directly in my own experience as a runner. This

“feminine movement” was typical of even ferocious cross c ountry
runners like myself. Here is one example. At about the same time as I was
getting ready to explore this question further, I was also competing on
a national stage and coaching the cross country teams at both the Otago
Boys’ High School (OBHS) and the Otago Girls’ High School (OGHS).
Both teams were preparing to run the national high school cross country
championships. This event, unlike the provincial races to which they
were accustomed, required them to jump steeple chase hurdles. So, I had
to teach the runners how to “take the hurdles.” I invited my husband to
give the demonstration.
“Why not me?” You may be asking. “Weren’t YOU the coach?”
You would be right. It was my job, but I could not do it. “I can’t take the
hurdles!” I would have wailed, slightly embarrassed, had you asked me at
the time. My husband was a former steeple chase runner; I knew he would
not hesitate to do it.
Come demonstration day, both teams—OBHS and OGHS—came to
the track to watch my husband hurdle and then try hurdling themselves.
We set up two hurdles in different locations, one for the boys and one for
the girls so they did not have to watch one another. The boys just ran up
to the hurdle and “took” the hurdle. I was not even sure why training was
necessary. They just hurdled.
The girls universally baulked and squealed, as I would have myself. Not
one made it over at her first attempt. That evening, I asked my then-gangly
13-year-old son, a member of the boys’ team, how it was that he knew how
to take the hurdle. “I just had to,” he said.
The girls were nervous. They saw their bodies as fragile and vulnerable,
just as I did. They were capable runners, taller for the most part than their
just-pubescent male counterparts, and more experienced on a competitive
stage, but they protected themselves. Instead of disappearing in favor of
their subjective intention to hurdle, the girls’ bodies came forward in their
consciousness. This is the presencing body that Leder’s (1990) theoretical
work enabled me to “see.”
Fast forward a year or so: honors project completed (title: “‘I Can’t! I’ve
Got My Period!’ Menstrual Mythology: The Link between Disappearance
and Feminine Movement”); I have been invited to write about it for a
collection (a big deal for a simple honors graduate) (see Jutel, 2004); and
I am getting ready to do a PhD. I am not quite sure what my topic will be,
but I am confident that the way is going to become clear. I am still doing
a few nursing shifts a week. I am in the dressing room of the neonatal ICU
putting on my scrubs, ready to do my shift. My colleague Lesley is in the
room with me, getting ready to go home. I am a few years younger than
her, but I am almost 40. I am still a competitive runner and probably ran
228
to work that day (it was all downhill from the house, as well as quicker and
smarter than using the car). As I pulled off my top, Lesley looked at my
skinny, muscled body and commented:
“You’re so good!”
“Hunh?” I must have mumbled.
“Look!” she replied, as she pinched her own tummy, showing a modest
amount of subcutaneous adipose tissue. “I’m BAD!”
That was it. Riding on the back of Young’s (1980) feminine movement, and
Leder’s (1990) disappearing body, I had an aha moment about the subject
of my PhD thesis. I would explore feminine self-scrutiny, that practice of
carefully examining the body, of pinching, prodding, and stretching to
discover and then presumably redress a continual parade of flaws: pluck your
eyebrows, rouge your lips, do your steps, sit up straight!
But here I am also asking: How do we as women (in particular) come to
see “truths” about our inner selves inscribed upon our bodies? Of course,
the critical scholar should start by querying whether or not there even is
an inner and an outer. But in this case, the idea that our respective moral
qualities should inscribe themselves upon our abdomens was an irresistible
matter to explore. My PhD was to be entitled “Visions of Vice: Appearance
and Policy in Feminine Self-Scrutiny.”
I undertook this study using a mishmash of cultural history, sociology,
philosophy, and any other available technique I could get my hands on that
could help me demonstrate how we saw correspondence between “inside”
and “outside.” I learned, for example, about the physiognomists who thought
they could determine things like character, criminality, mental illness, and
racial purity on the basis of the size of different body parts. Lavater (1855)
generated a massive catalog in which he assigned personality traits to physical
signs. “Can any benevolent, wise, or virtuous man, look, or walk, thus?”
he wrote in his Essays on Physiognomy (plate IX), to caption an etching of a
man of medium build, hands in pockets, tricorne under his arm, receding
hairline and chin.
The phrenologists were drawn to the skull as their means for accessing
inner truth. A prominent occipital bone might be, for example, a sign of
“philoprogenitiveness (the capacity to love and care for children and small
animals)” (Fowler and Fowler, 1857, p 54), while self-esteem would be
evidenced by a prominent, rather than sloping, crown (p 81).
From the physiognomists to the phrenologists, as well as from the
Renaissance portrait artists arranging marriages to the Victorians trying
to irradicate the scourge of onanism (because masturbation “shows” in
the complexion and in the shadows under the self-abuser’s eyes), I sought
to identify the (gendered) “duty to beauty” as a moral endeavor. Even
229
advertisements for beauty products or exercises to “get that healthy glow!”

caught my attention.
As I got close to submitting my thesis, my supervisor had some doubts
about my approach. He wavered over the technique. “It’s not really cultural
history. You don’t give enough context,” he fretted. I was his first PhD
student; this was my first PhD. Neither of us really knew. I wrote it like a
book. (I had written books before: how-to running books.)
I would be nervous today if one of my students was as methodologically
unspecific as I was at the time. Thank heavens MY supervisor was brave
enough to let me forge ahead. I did have a sort of instinctive idea about what
I was doing, or how it could be justified, that I called, probably incorrectly,
genealogy. There was something about things that were done before and
things that were done today that needed revealing. It was in line with the
Māori whakapapa (Taonui, 2011), and slightly Foucauldian, but really it
was something else.1
I had an exchange with Joan Brumberg, whose Fasting Girls (2000) was
one of my secondary sources. I cannot remember exactly what I asked
her, probably something about did she think that there was something in
anorexia mirabilis that she saw reflected in contemporary eating disorders.
She answered, “You DO know that my work is historical, right?” as if
I were a journalist looking for a bite, having only read the back cover. Of
course, I did, and I thought that made it still relevant today, but clearly
not everyone did.
What was my sample? My population? Irrelevant, I thought. I was working
with ideas, not “cases.” The importance was in revealing how the inner–outer
equation pervaded discourses, eras, and media. I would realize, almost a
decade later, that I was looking for social patterns (Zerubavel, 2007). “Social
pattern analysts,” Zerubavel (2007) wrote, “are thus purposefully oblivious
to the idiosyncratic features of the communities, events, or situations they
study, looking for general patterns that transcend the specific instantiations”
(p 133). It was Tom DeGloma, editor of this series (and a “Zerubavelian”
like me), who sent me Zerubavel’s article on social patterns. “We needed
a way to describe this rich way of thinking about social phenomenon,” he
wrote. “Trust Eviatar to give us a methodological defense!” (T. DeGloma,
personal communication, March 12, 2013).
Zerubavel’s interpretive approach assembles pieces from broad-ranging
sources and eras. “It is the search for cross-contextual similarity across
seemingly dissimilar phenomena that so distinctly characterizes the formal
sociological imagination” (2007, p 136), he explained in his article on social
pattern analysis. It echoes, to my ears, the admonition of C. Wright Mills
(1970), who wrote that “no social study that does not come back to the
problems of biography, of history and of their intersections within a society
has completed its intellectual journey” (p 6).
230
In addition to working with ideas, I also was using an interpretive, non-

positivist methodology to overturn what I saw as a dogmatic overreliance
on empirical method over interpretation in nursing scholarship, an aim
that was progressively and irreversibly alienating me from my former
colleagues (Jutel, 2008, 2012). Further, I was appalled at some of the
highly celebrated empirical work I saw presented at American Sociological
Association (ASA) conferences. The uncritical use of categories such as
“race” to reveal social “problems” presented the same (worse) challenge
that Blaxter (1978) brought to our attention in her article “Diagnosis as
Category and Process,” notably, that the “examination of the relevant
systems of categorization and how they are used, or tolerated, or
circumvented, may well demonstrate something of the nature of the
practical activity concerned” (p 17). There is a long story behind race
categories that bears telling.
Robin Wall Kimmerer (2021), member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation,
underlined this same conundrum, “between systems of categorization and
how they are used” (Blaxter, 1978, p 17), when she commented that English
is noun-rather than verb-based. Unlike many Indigenous languages, the
speakers I saw at ASA conferences were sociologically resigned to using
non-Indigenous, noun-based idioms that include taxonomic references
to “race.” Kimmerer imagined what an encounter between Linnaeus, the
father of Western taxonomy, and Nanabozho, the great “namer” of the
Potawatomi people, might look like. It probably looked something like a
meeting between many of those empirical sociologists I am calling out and
an aboriginal member of [fill in the blank with the precolonized name of
any nation]. Awkward? Or mutually curious?
Rooted as they were in positivist epistemology, the disciplinary norms of
nursing, which eschewed interpretive methods, and the uncritical empiricism
of mainstream sociology too often put forth simplistic understandings of
objectivity and validity premised on eliminating the researcher’s subjective
perspective (and embodied experience and location) from the research
process. Feminist epistemologies (Smith, 1987; Collins, 1990; Haraway,
1991; Harding, 1991, 1993) as well as broader post-positivist interpretive
and critical traditions in social theory (eg, Weber, 1949; Kuhn, 1962; see
also Agger, 2013) have long problematized the possibility and desirability of
evacuating the researcher’s social location and experience—which arguably
always begins from their embodiment—from the research process. Both the
research methodology of my thesis and my guiding claim in this chapter
that, whether we realize it or not, as scholars our embodied experience is
at the root of our academic disciplines join in this tradition of challenging
disembodied positivist epistemologies.
To finish the story of my own embodied journey to sociology, however,
I must return to the PhD.
231
I did try to conform a little bit to what I thought a PhD must be about,
and I wrote a concluding chapter that was a kind of policy review. I tried
to pick out the enduring patterns from my big, trans-epochal, trans-
media, trans-disciplinary project on the aesthetics of vice to see how they
imprinted contemporary health policies concerned with weight. Probably
the most important thing to come out of that in relation to the sociology
of diagnosis (not yet a field, by the way) was how “overweight” was
discursively constructed as a “thing” with its own symptoms, warning signs,
and consequences, rather than simply, as my historical work had shown, a
measure of deviation from a normative weight value.
Why it had become a diagnosis, I argued, had to do with the convergence
of two important phenomena. As I wrote in my 2006 article in Social Science
and Medicine, “the first is the belief in the neutrality of quantification, and
the objectivity that measurement brings to qualitative description. The
second is the importance attributed to normative appearance in health”
(Jutel, 2006a, p 2268).
I came to realize that “thingness,” which was at the root of the emergence
of overweight as a category of disease, underpinned all diagnoses. I
wondered: How do we come to see something as worthy of thingness and
of assigning it a concordant label? I was drawn to this question of thingness
by virtue of my curiosity and my job history. My first postdoc job was as a
research fellow on a project relating to stillbirth in the pediatrics department.
As I did the literature review for the primary investigator, I was struck by
the fact that stillbirth was an almost meaningless term, given the variety of
definitions across nations, and even states (Jutel, 2006b). Another historical
diagnosis I stumbled across, drapetomania, categorizes a disease that causes
slaves to run away. Both of these diagnoses (stillbirth and drapetomania)
are examples of the political and cultural context in which diagnoses are
conceptualized. The former underscores the fraught nature of pregnancy
amid the pro-life/pro-choice movements, and the latter illustrates how
diagnosis enacts and reinforces social power.
Thingness was also the basis for my reflection on Female Hypoactive
Sexual Desire Disorder whose ontological status owed much to the
pharmaceutical industry (Jutel, 2010). It was the perfect heuristic for
revealing this encroachment of industry marketing on disease creation. I was
looking for a way of revealing how the pharmaceutical industry messes with
popular definitions of health and disease. I do not actually remember how
I stumbled across this as an example, but it was powerful. In this case, an
industry craving a pink Viagra and the potential windfall it could provide
for shareholders was aggressively casting low libido as illness and pills as a
solution (Jutel and Mintzes, 2017).
At this point, reader, if you believe my point of departure, in which
I maintained that I would not embarrass you with intimate detail, you may
232
surmise (or hope) that I am drifting away from my own embodied departure
as I recount the range of conditions, experienced by other embodied beings,
that were to become the focus of my scholarship. You would not be mistaken.
I did not need to experience stillbirth or low libido to find the direction in
which my focus on diagnoses would lead me. Indeed, even overweight was
not a diagnosis I had ever confronted, yet it was my experience of running
and my runner’s body that led me to its discovery as more-than-a-label.
And, once discovered as an important point of critical reflection, diagnosis
led me into the bodies of others: into the bodies of those who were
stigmatized, effaced, categorized, and prioritized as a result of their diagnoses.
Suzanne Fleischman (1999, p 6) wrote of and through her own diagnosis that
“when a person suffers from a major illness, the affected organ or body part is
never just a body part. Illnesses serve to activate the metaphoric and symbolic
meanings that body parts take on in every culture.” As a linguist facing her
own, ultimately terminal, illness, she mused about the lexical resources for
understanding disease. As she offered up her own body, discipline, and self,
my own discipline found new branches.
Diagnosis is everywhere. It is the title, as well as topic, of a Netflix
series, one that follows the trajectory of people without diagnoses for
debilitating conditions, crowdsourcing candidate diagnoses to help. It
is a narrative trope in fiction (Jutel, 2016). It is the focus of films and
television shows (Jutel and Jutel, 2017). It infuses graphic novels and
cartoons (Morrison et al, 2011). I read about “sick” buildings and bumble
bees with Alzheimer’s-like disease. Regular emotions are assigned disease
labels (Horwitz and Wakefield, 2007), as are what we might have once
considered “normal” behaviors (Conrad, 2007). Of course, at the same
time, diseased states are also finding their way into normality (Scott, 1990;
Kirk and Kutchins, 1992), as psychiatry, serving as the guardian of deviance
and normality, defines both what is “bad” and what is “sick” (Conrad and
Schneider, 1980; Rosenberg, 2006).
And as this takes place, I find myself returning to Drew Leder’s work
on the absent body. He writes, “While in one sense the body is the most
abiding and inescapable presence in our lives, it is also characterised by its
absence,” and further, that “‘freeing oneself ’ from the body takes on a positive
valuation” (Leder, 1990, pp 1, 69).
I think about his theory through my own body. As a much older woman,
I am now a cyclist rather than a runner. I call my mountain bike my
“wheel chair”; it has wheels and I mainly sit on it. Thinking about the
acquisition of any skill in cycling, say, taking a corner on a mountain trail,
to start with, it is all in the body. I think about where I am going: I shift
down well ahead of time, roll out around the corner, then bank around
the turn, shoulder down, knee up. Whew! Made it. So many thoughts
and bodily positions to keep in my mind. It is difficult. But, once the skill
233
is acquired, I simply “take the corner.” I lose my awareness of my knee,

of the lines. I just ride.
And so it is in our disciplines as well. It is not that our embodied
experiences are any less important. They remain pivotal, but they become,
once more, experiences qua experiences as we use our disciplinary perspec
tives to open us to greater understandings of experiences beyond our
personal reference.
This is how I understand the absent body. It is the focus on the intention
(get around the corner) rather than on my body’s stance in relation to the
corner that allows me to boldly pursue my intentions. The same is true in
academe. We start with ourselves and learn about what greater truths we
can acquire beyond ourselves, our bodies, and then our disciplines. We riff
off of the former to get to the latter. Then, and thenceforth, we have a solid
frame for understanding myriad other conundrums.
The body is there, and then it vanishes. It was necessary, as it was on the
bike, to have awareness in order to land, for many of us, on the scholarly
direction that suits us. But, at the same time, we somehow have to shed that
body and ride the bike with biking rather than body in the foreground. We
have to get away from our bodies to do something even better.
At first glance, this idea of leaving the body behind might appear to
replicate sociology’s historically disembodied approach (Turner, 1984;
Shilling, 2012). But I am arguing for something quite different from a
totally missing body, or even the body as an unacknowledged “absent
presence” (Shilling, 2012). I am asserting that we are embodied, but that we
have to leave our own personalized space of embodiment to reap broader
understandings of bodies at large. My uneventful menstrual history has,
at the same time, little and everything to do with the fragilized female
described historically by Vertinsky, explained by Young, theorized by me
(using Leder), and witnessed at the track where my husband and I set up
the steeple chase hurdles.
I do not think that my work has anything to do with my personalized
embodiment any more. I hope it stays that way. Writing my last book on
the diagnostic moment, I went through periods of magical thinking when
I hoped that writing about serious diagnoses would not mean I would then
have one. There. I have written that down. So far, so good. Have I jinxed
anything? Yikes! And, de nouveau, I have critical distance that my departure
from my own experience of myself allows me. I can go beyond my personal
experience now that I have theorized it, transposed it, reshaped it, and
taken it back.
Oh, and yes, at age 60-mumble, I can pinch my tummy fat; and because
I am a sociologist, I can remember why I have to fight to remind myself
that it does not mean I am bad.
234
Note
1
This is a traditional genealogical framework that “links all animate and inanimate, known
and unknown phenomena in the terrestrial and spiritual worlds. Whakapapa therefore
binds all things. It maps relationships so that mythology, legend, history, knowledge,
tikanga (custom), philosophies and spiritualities are organised, preserved and transmitted
from one generation to the next” (Taonui, 2011).
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237
Index
A inactivity 118
academic disciplines instrumental 21, 38n3, 125
anthropology, disciplinary roots in cultural interpersonal dynamics and 194
appropriation and othering 75 interpretation and x, 105, 124, 134,
biographical account of development of research 161, 183
field 13, 225–34 intra-action, physicalist concept of 62n2
conceptual, epistemic, or interpretive shifts in 2, “ladylike” 186
3, 19, 23–5, 44, 61, 160–1 lines/poles of action 27, 29, 31
embodied experience and 13, 223–6, lived body and 2
228–9, 231–4 meaning and 2, 5, 6, 28, 31, 33, 37, 123
emergence of during the Industrial Revolution 1 Migrant Trail Walk 211
epistemic authority, dominance, and “molecular action of art” 62n10
legitimacy 49, 90, 93, 113, 231 moralizing 109
historical development of 1–5, 21–6, 45, 160–1, narrative, power to direct action 38n3
223–4 Nervous Conditions 96, 99
interdisciplinarity 48–50, 52, 55, 61, 62n6, 70 obesity and corrective/preventative action 111
positivism, in relation to ix–x, 2, 13, 21–2, 24, 231 as object of sociological study 1, 2
see also anthropology; Black studies; economics; as objective, observable behavior and practices 7,
medicine; psychology; public health; quantum 22, 27, 33, 35–6, 66, 78–9, 97, 110
physics; sociology; sociology of diagnosis; performative 3, 36
theoretical traditions physical activity 139, 211, 226, 227
accountability 25, 137, 141, 142, 147, 192, 209 pragmatic 123, 231
see also gender, accountability to normative pragmatist perspectives on 7, 33
standards; self, as achievement praxis see praxeological approaches
action protest 206
acts of resistance 122, 150n3 racism, institutional acts of 187
biological conditions of 2 rational 22
the body and xix, 1, 2, 5, 20, 31, 168 religious devotion 161
capitalism and 123 routinized, everyday 6, 27, 139
civil disobedience 203, 215, 219 sensible 72
collective action 1, 26, 36, 99, 123, 207, 213 social construction and 24–5
conforming/disconforming 101, 144, 186, 219 solidarity 219
culture as epiphenomenon/condition of 22 song, embodied in action 62n8
dance 99 speech acts 3
disciplinary 161, 178, 183, 186, 187 subjective 178
discourse and narrative serve as “hermeneutic talk and 161
hooks” for 165 uncomfortable 211
disobedience 178 vocabularies of motive and 159
dispositions and 78, 121, 171, 174n3, 189 “vulnerability” and 111
eating 168–9 “witnessing” 171
embodied experience and 204 see also behavior; interaction; intersubjectivity;
emotions and 184, 206 motifaction; phenomenology; social action;
habitus and 69, 78–9 symbolic interactionism
health outcomes and 121 activism
human 21, 22 activists, white, middle-class, from the Christian
identity and 3, 61, 165 left 202
as improvisational response 69 anti-SOA 216
238
INDEX
breast cancer activism 11, 133, 134, 136, 138, 142 “neo-liberal politics” and 123
comfort/discomfort 213 Nervous Conditions 91, 95, 97, 103, 104
cultural tools 203 “presence”/“dys-appearance” and 103
embodied dynamics 203, 204 structure/agency relationship 135, 150n3, 195
embodied tactics, to see/feel violence and expose Ahmed, Sara 59, 178, 217–18
injustices 213 Alcoff, Linda Martín 204, 217, 220n3
embodied vulnerability and 203, 205, 206, 212, Alexander, Jeffrey C. 2, 6, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 25,
213, 215, 219 26, 27, 28, 29, 31, 37, 38n7, 39n11
fat activism 113, 118 American pragmatism xviii, 6
high-r isk 203, 205, 209, 212, 215, 217, see also theoretical traditions, pragmatism
219, 220n2 Anlo-Ewe people (southeastern Ghana) 9, 10, 66,
interpretive effort and 212, 213, 214, 217, 219 67, 68, 69, 75, 76, 78, 79–80, 84
Migrant Trail Walk and 209 caricatured as having an “uber sense” 76
“perceptual communities,” activism, unsettling sensorium 69–70
affect and the forging of 213 ways of knowing 10
privilege, social and embodied 205, 214–15, 217, see also language, Anlo-Ewe (language community
218, 220n2 in Ghana); seselelãme
sense experiences, mediated by 206 anthropology
US–Mexico border activism 209, 218 approach to the molecular 48
see also social movements; solidarity activism critique of 75
aesthetics xii, 3, 33, 45, 68, 84, 113, 137, disciplinary roots in cultural appropriation and
140–4, 179 othering 75
artistic sensibility and 141 psychological anthropology 68
Black girl dress aesthetics 184, 192–3 psychology, disciplinary distinction from 83
pleasure and 149 sensory anthropology 69–70
symmetry 137, 142 sociology, disciplinary distinction from 22
vice, aesthetics of 232 Aphramor, Lucy 114, 115, 125
see also beauty; the senses Aposhyan, Susan 66
affect xi, 12, 13, 27, 37, 160, 206–7, 208, 211, 219 Aristotle 47
attention, directed by affective experience 205 artistic research
bodily, sense experience and 205, 206–7 biomythographics of 48
definition 220n1 embodied 9, 44, 48, 49, 60–1, 62n3
embodied display of 210 arts
embodied vulnerability and 203, 206–7, 209, artistic sensibility 141
211–12, 215, 219 capitalism and 60
emotion, interpretive and signifying system of decolonial art and the visibilization of molecular
affect 205, 206–7 violence 48
interaffectivity 6 “duty to beauty” and 229
modal thinking and sensitivity to 70, 79 humanities and 57
physiological examples of 218 installation art centered on body image 148
postmodernism and 24 “molecular action of art” 62n10
power of 205, 214 molecularity of identity evident in art 60
sensemaking and 206–7, 214–15, 217 performative arts project and seselelãme 77
social meaning of 214 ASA (American Sociological Association) xviii, 231
uncomfortable and unsettling 212, 213 Atkinson, Michael 110
see also emotion attention
Agawu, Kofi 75, 76, 83 agency and 124
agency 3–4, 31, 204, 219 analytical 5, 6
appearance/disappearance of the body and 104 attentional topography 5
beauty and 135 beauty and 133, 135, 230
Black bodies, colonialism and 91, 95, 104 biographical disruption/repair 133, 170
Black girls’ bodies and 183–4, 195, 104 Black girls and 189
bodily agency, constraining forces 31 bodily insistence and 213
bodily experience and 204 bodily vulnerability and 205–6, 215, 217
contingency of 183, 219 the body, attentiveness and inattentiveness to 75,
gender and 97–8, 104, 122, 135 79, 123, 159, 164, 167, 171–2
health and 118, 122, 123, 124 breathing and 170, 171
individual agency, post-structuralist, defamiliarized 95
deconstructionist, and postmodern desire and 99
emphasis of 4 disattention/inattention 5, 111, 159
mastectomy and 135 eating and 168
material agency 4 embodied experience and 160
239
INTERPRETING THE BODY
emotions, degree of attention to 73, 80 natural/unnatural 193

interpretive process and xii, 1, 5, 6, 7, 13, 69, 160 norms 11, 30, 111, 133, 134, 135, 136, 137, 139,
materiality and xviii, 5 140, 141, 144, 149, 192, 193, 227
meaning and xii, xviii, 6 pedagogies of “beauty”/“disgust” 30, 109
music, attention to and increased bodily queering of 149
sensation 98 race and 30, 31, 192, 193
perceptual filtering and 95 scars and 137, 142–3
physiological limits of 210 symmetry and 137, 140–2
power and 12, 119, 124 talk, narratives of 137, 141, 142
presencing/copresencing 13, 160 ugliness and 138, 139
as process of selection xviii vanity 140–1
in religious life 160, 174 visibility and 192
salience 5, 111 yoga practice and feeling of 171
selective attention as cultural cognitive process see also aesthetics
linking meaning with materiality xviii Becker, Howard 173
solidarity and 214 behavior
somatic 69, 80–1, 160 assignation of disease labels and 233
soul, attentional redirection to 164 behavioral approach/intervention 27, 113, 114,
yoga and 159, 164, 167, 168, 170–2 120, 122, 191
belonging in the classroom and 192
B bodyweight as proxy for 118, 119
Baker, Cynthia M. 62n14 defamiliarization and 97
Baker-Bell, April 185 embodied experience, influence on 204
Ball, Philip 58 Euro-American ways of being and 66
Banting, William 112 feelings, emotions as predisposition to
Barthes, Roland 31, 39n10, 39n11 behavior 78, 79
beauty instrumentalism, strategies of 21, 125, 189, 194
in advertising 227 Jezebel, controlling image and assumptions about
agency, individual autonomy and 135 Black girls’ behavior 193
anti-Black discourses and 193 “ladylike” behavior 186
the beautiful and the sublime 30 meaning construction: behavior as a conduit
Black girls’ bodies and 192 for 204; influence on behavior ix; as objective
Black hair 30, 31, 193, 194 behavioral relation 33, 35, 36
bodily form and function, in relation to normative frames of “accountability” and 137
138–40, 144 obesity alarmism and healthism, focus on
bodily movement, as fact of 139 individual behavior 10, 110, 113, 114,
body projects and practices 30, 133, 134, 118, 123
135, 192 situational expectations of the educational setting
breast cancer activism and 11 and 189
breast cancer as disruption of ideals of feminine social structures and 121–2
beauty 133, 134, 139, 148, 149 TWA (talking with attitude) 186
breast cancer recovery, meaning of beauty see also action; interaction
in 134–6, 137, 138, 142, 144, 149 Bell, Kristen 112
breastedness/breastlessness and 134, 137, 138, Bendelow, Gillian A. 19, 205
140, 141, 143, 144, 149 binary hierarchies 4
civility/incivility and 30 binary cultural codes 28, 29
consumer culture and 2 binary sex-gender order 3, 4, 29, 32, 38–9n8, 51
disfigurement and 133, 137, 138, 139, 140 challenges to 4
“duty to beauty” as moral endeavor 229–30 critique of 38n7
fashion-beauty complex 111 ideality/materiality binary 8, 20, 22, 25, 49
feminist perspectives on 111, 134, 135, 137, 149 male/female binary coded as objectivity/
gender and 11, 30, 133–50 passim, 192, 193, 227 subjectivity binary 38n6
health and beauty industries 2 mind/matter 22
identity and 134, 135, 142 moral valence, power of 29
interpretation and 11, 134, 135, 136, 137, 139, naturalization of 4
142, 144, 146, 149, 193 nature/culture 4, 21, 25
mastectomy and beauty reinterpretation 11, 134, nature/history 25, 78
135–6, 137–44, 149 nature/mind 21
mastectomy and support for beauty nonbinary 58
reinterpretation 136, 144–9 objectivity/subjectivity 7, 8, 13, 20, 22–5, 27,
media 133, 143 33, 36, 38n6, 231
in medicine 11, 133 social construction of 29
240
INDEX
structure/agency 124, 135, 150n3, 195, 219 body work 12, 181, 183
subjectivity-idealism vs reason-society 22 colonialism and 104
in Western philosophy 4 controlling images and 181, 182, 183, 186, 191,
see also body/mind dichotomy 192, 193, 194, 195nn3–4
biology/physiology discrimination 193
biochemistry 44–50 disrespect towards Black girls 186–7
biological conditions of action 2, 100 dress code and appearance 12, 179, 180, 184,
biological sex 22, 33, 225, 226 192–4, 195
biotic qualities of seselelãme 67 embodied reverse discourse 12, 181–3, 186,
cells 44, 45, 49 188, 196n5
essentialism 90, 122 loudness and laughter 12, 179, 180, 184, 186,
eyes 8, 28, 30, 82, 164, 167, 170, 186, 205, 229 187–8, 189, 190–2, 195
feminist materialisms and 4 macrostructural constraints and microlevel
frameworks of meaning and 7 interactions 183, 186, 192, 195
hair 30, 31, 72–3, 135, 192, 193, 194 misogynoir 178, 179, 180–3, 184, 192, 194,
hormones 47, 50 195, 195n1
lived body, in relation to 22 mis/reading of Black girls’ bodies in educational
men’s health and 122 settings 179, 184–94
menstruation 227 othering of 179, 180, 188
molecular 45, 48 outsider status in classrooms 178, 192, 194
morphology 73–4, 218 policing of Black girls 179, 180, 185–6, 187,
muscle 81, 103, 138–40, 150n5–6, 170, 229 191–3, 195
Nervous Conditions 100 quietness and silence 12, 102, 186, 188,
neurobiology, neurosciences and 45, 66, 85n11 189–90, 192
physiognomy 22, 229 racism 187, 188
physiology 45, 83, 115 school discipline and 178–9, 191, 195
piloerection (goosebumps) 73 sexuality 88, 98, 100, 102, 193, 194
racism and 91, 92 stereotypes 187, 188, 190, 193–4, 195
as raw material 22 symbolic interactionism 12, 183–4
skin 30, 34, 39n9, 48, 51, 68, 72, 80, 81, 91, 98, teachers/students interactions 12, 179, 184, 185,
102, 135, 138, 139, 178, 218 186–8, 189–90, 191, 192, 194, 195
stuff of life 64 TWA (talking with attitude) 186
testosterone 46–7 see also Black bodies; Blackness; race and racism
as unsociological matter 2 Black Lives Matter 104, 119
see also body; breasts; DNA; materiality/ Black studies 52, 57, 60, 62n8
materialism/matter Blackness 60, 180
Black bodies 88 anti-Black discourses/practices 12, 60, 179,
Black hair 30, 31, 192, 193, 194 180–3, 188, 191, 192, 193, 194, 195
Black men’s bodies 10, 88, 89, 91–2, 94, 95, 104 anti-Black linguistic racism 185
Black women’s bodies 10, 31, 34, 48, “blaccent” 185
88–90, 92–4, 104, 150n5 “Black bitch”/“nigger bitch” 181, 182
colonialism and 10, 48, 89–105 passim Black girls’ bodies in educational settings 178,
docility, strategy and refusal 100, 189 189, 190, 191
female strength 93, 150n5 Black play 191, 196n7
Floyd, George 88 Black speech and Black volume as being
passivity, framing and resistance to 188, 190, 195 unruly 191
skin 30, 34, 39n9, 48, 97, 178, 218 female controlling images 181, 182, 183, 186,
targeted by police 88, 119, 218 191, 192, 193, 194, 195nn3–4
see also Black girls’ bodies in educational settings; indigo and 48
Blackness; race and racism misogynoir 178, 179, 180–3, 184, 192, 194,
Black, David 38n3 195, 195n1
see also motifaction the molecular and 55, 56, 57
Black girls’ bodies in educational settings 12, 95–6, “nigga” 182, 196n6
100, 102–3, 178–95 passim performance of 191
agency 97, 104, 183–4, 195 phenomenology of Blackness 89, 90–2, 104, 105
anti-Black discourses/practices 12, 179, 180–3, racializing representations of Black people 180–1
188, 191, 192, 193, 194, 195 sound of 185, 191
Black talk, backtalk, sass 12, 179, 180, US 180–1
184–8, 190, 192, 195 see also Black bodies; Black girls’ bodies in
Blackness 178, 189, 190, 191 educational settings; race and racism
bodily negotiations interpreted from Black girls’ Blaxter, Mildred 223, 224, 231
own perspective 12, 179 Blumer, Herbert 2, 6
241
body sociology of the body 20, 23, 27–8, 33, 37–8, 195
abject, deviant, unruly 10, 110, 112, 138, 178, 193 stigmatized 142, 193, 205, 233
absence from sociological theory/disembodied as symbol 1, 3, 20, 31, 144, 167, 233
approach 1, 19, 21–3, 234 symbolic dimensions of 9, 11, 12, 22,
absencing/presencing and appearance/ 26–7, 35–7, 159, 161, 183
disappearance of the body 10, 13, 32, 88, taken-for-granted medium 1
94, 99, 101, 103–5, 169, 189, 205, 227, 228, as text 31, 32
229, 233–4 white bodies 31, 88, 92, 94, 104, 105, 115, 217
agency and 3, 4, 31, 91, 95, 103, 104, 123, 204 see also biology/physiology; Black bodies; Black
biological perspectives 2, 4, 7, 22, 33, 48, 90, 92, girls’ bodies in educational settings; body
122, 225–6 projects; embodiment; female bodies; gender,
brown bodies 59, 94, 218 gendered body/embodiment; lived body; male
classed bodies 13, 125, 217 bodies; materiality/materialism/matter
commodification of 2, 92, 113 body/mind dichotomy 4, 66, 83, 90
corporeal schemas and 68, 81, 89, 91 Integral Yoga 158, 167, 171
see also bodily ways of knowing; habitus mind–body connection 37, 70, 73
discipline and control 2, 9, 10, 38n2, 92, 100, “mind–body problem” 80, 85n8
101, 124, 161, 179, 182, 191, 195 mind as embodied 73
in early sociology 1–2, 19, 21–3 mind versus matter 22, 49
“ecstatic” and “recessive” body 99, 103 rational mind over the emotional body 112
see also Leder, Drew see also binary hierarchies; Cartesian dualism;
food, diet, and the body 116, 166, Descartes, René; Integral Yoga, body/
168–9, 213 mind dualism
gender nonconforming 142, 148–9 body politic 1, 2, 124, 186
as ground of social experience and body projects 3, 25, 30, 31, 110
consciousness 204 “beautifying” body projects 30
as ideality–materiality 8, 20, 37 male obesity and gendered “body project” 110,
identity and 3, 9, 13, 53, 56, 92, 133, 149, 112, 118
183, 217 physical body as project or work 31
illness, disease and 100–3, 112, 133, 138, 142, see also body work; Shilling, Chris
229, 233 body studies 19, 89, 90–1
Indigenous bodies 70, 89 body work
as inscriptive surface 13, 21 Black girls 12, 181, 183
institutional, discursive, corporeal definition 3, 182
constitution 182 embodied reverse discourse and 182
interpreting the body 7–14 male bodies 112, 113
see also interpretation moral aspects of 3, 13
interpretive “grasp on the world” 26 see also body projects
malleability of 2, 25 Booth, Douglas 226
material agency 4, 32 Bordo, Susan 24, 30, 31, 32, 39n9, 111, 135
as material-semiotic xviii, 9, 55 Bourdieu, Pierre 6, 20, 29, 62n7, 90, 110, 122,
materiality of xviii, 2, 3, 4–5, 7, 8, 9, 10, 22, 25, 123, 160
26, 27, 30, 31, 34, 36, 37, 53, 55, 56, 58, 84, see also habitus; theoretical traditions,
85n8, 89, 114, 123, 125, 140, 217 Bourdieusian/practice theory
meaning and matter 8 breast cancer 33, 133, 150n4
medicalization of 113, 116, 123 1998 Women’s Health and Cancer Rights
modification 8, 28, 35, 36, 182 Act 150n1
mortification 213 American Cancer Society, “Reach to Recovery
mutability of 2, 3, 54 Program” 133–4
as object separate from self 167 BRA-Day international 133–4
ontology of 3–4, 19–20, 25, 48 BRCA gene variants (BReast CAncer) 136, 147
pleasure 89, 98, 99, 192 breast cancer activism 11, 133–4, 136, 138
self, body’s role in construction of 8, 19, 25, breast cancer culture 147, 149, 150n4
27, 33 disruption of femininity and ideals of feminine
as situation 20, 26, 28, 37 beauty 33, 133, 134, 139, 148, 149
social collectivity, co-constituted by flesh and embodiment of 33–4, 134, 142, 149, 150n4
blood bodies 123 ideologies of femininity and 134
as social fact worthy of study 25 imperative of concealment 133, 137, 138, 141, 145
social movements and 149, 203–4, 213, 218 “Look Good Feel Better Program” 133–4
social and symbolic construction of xviii, 3, 4, 7, narratives of recovery 11, 133–6, 137,
9, 14, 25, 27, 36–7, 88, 89, 90, 105, 112, 124, 139–40, 142, 149
159, 180, 182, 183 previvors 147
242
INDEX
restoration of femininity 33, 34, 133–4, 142, architectures of power 10, 90, 92, 93
144, 148 British 93
survivors 34, 136, 138, 143 Canada 115
see also breast reconstruction; breasts; mastectomy colonial education 95–7, 103–5
breast reconstruction 34, 133–44, 137, decolonial art 48
138–40, 141, 148–9, 150n1, 150nn6–7 gender and 10, 57, 89, 91–3, 103, 105
autologous reconstruction 138, 139, 141, 150n6 genocide 53
cosmetic surgery 134, 135, 138, 139 Indigenous 53, 89, 115
as deformed and horrific 137, 138, 139, 141 neocolonialism 67
flat closure and living flat 11, 34, 134, 135–6, 137, norms 98, 100, 101, 104
138, 140, 141, 143, 144, 145, 147–9, 150n2 patriarchy 89, 96, 100
pressure to undergo reconstruction 144 postcolonial analytic perspectives xii, 10
queerness and flat closure 148 postcolonial modernity 104
silicone implants 139, 150n7 precolonial Nigeria 93
see also breast cancer; breasts; mastectomy race and 53, 58, 67, 88, 91–7, 99, 102, 103
breasts regimes of knowledge 48, 52
femininity and 32, 33, 34, 133, 134, 138, 144, 147 Sartre, theories of 95 see also Sartre, Jean-Paul
“Frankenboobies” 137 settler society 53
material feeling and meaning 34 see also decolonization; gender, as colonial
prosthetic 134, 140, 141, 145, 150n1 construct; gender on the post-colony;
sexuality and 98, 146–7 Nervous Conditions
as symbol 32, 33, 34, 133–4, 136, 137, 138, 144, Columbia University 38n4
147, 148 commodification and commoditization see
symmetry 137, 140–2, 149 body, commodification of; capitalism,
see also breast cancer; breast reconstruction; commodification and commoditization;
mastectomy globalization; male bodies, commodification of;
Broom, Dorothy 133, 138 seselelãme, commodification of
Brown, Phil 223 Conrad, Peter 113, 233
Brumberg, Joan 230 constructionism xiin5, 4, 5, 90
Bull, Michael 70 cultural construction of technoscientific
Bunsell, Tanya 150n5 knowledge 45
Butler, Judith 3, 25, 36, 37, 62n7, 204 deconstructionism 4
Byrd, Jodi 53 dematerialized 4
gendered 44, 112, 122, 227
C hermeneutic 31–3
Campos, Paul 114, 115, 116–17 material-semiotic construction of the body 9
capitalism 1, 2, 23, 124 materialization of “social facts” 25
art production and 60 molecular 44, 46
commodification and commoditization 2, 9, 67, racialized 44, 180, 184, 185
73, 77, 83, 84, 92, 113 strong constructionist perspectives, critique
consumer culture 2 of 4–5, 9
health inequities and 119–25 see also social constructionism
industrial capitalism 1 Cook, Jennifer 162
macro-social factors impacting health 119 cosmetic surgery 3, 135, 137
markets 67, 77, 119, 120, 148, 232 see also beauty; body projects; body work
neoliberal capitalism 11, 119 COVID-19 pandemic xix, 62n4, 202
race and 57, 59, 92 “dual COVID-19/obesity crisis frame” 109, 111,
see also economics; Marxian perspectives 113, 115, 118
Carel, Havi 224 Crawford, Robert 2, 114, 123, 125
Carroll, Rebecca 184–5 critical race studies 9, 44–5, 55, 88, 217
Cartesian dualism 21, 83, 90, 99 critical studies 223, 227
see also Descartes, René CSM (critical studies on men) 110, 121–3, 124, 125
Champagne, Anne Marie xii, xviii, 1–18, 19–43, on health inequalities 119–20, 125
67, 133 on obesity 112, 113–15, 123, 125–6
Chen, Mel Y. 47–8, 50, 62n4 Crossley, Nick 27, 90, 91, 162, 204, 205
Cheng, Anne Anlin 59 Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly 173
Chentsova-Dutton, Yulia E. 80–1 Csordas, Thomas 2, 31, 69
Cheyne, George 112 Culp, Andrew 55
Chicago School 38n4 cultural sociology 6, 19, 20, 23, 26, 27–8, 30, 31,
Classen, Constance 69 32, 33, 35, 37, 38, 174n3
collective consciousness 36 cultural and cognitive sociology xviii, 6, 85n9
colonialism 48, 53, 58, 89, 91–2, 100, 105 Yale University’s Center for Cultural Sociology xviii
243
see also SPCS (Strong Program cultural sociology); weight-loss culture 111
theoretical traditions, cultural sociology Western culture 123
cultural studies 48, 55 Cyr, Monica 115
culture 19–20
“absent presence” of culture and the body in early D
sociology 21–3 Damasio, Antonio 66, 85n11
body and society, as constitutive of 8, 26 D’Andrade, Roy 68
collective-formative interpretive framework and 5–6 Dangarembga, Tsitsi 10, 89, 92, 94–8
collective representations and 8, 21 see also Nervous Conditions
cultural analysis definition 34 Dash, Julie 48
cultural analysis and perspective xii, 8, 27, 34– Davis, Kathy 3
5, 55 decolonization 57
cultural appropriation 9, 67, 73, 75–6, 80, 83, decolonial art 48
84, 85n10 decolonial grammar of colors 60
cultural codes 6, 8, 20, 28–31, 32, 33, 37 decolonial scholars 93
cultural and cognitive schema 29, 68, 183, 205 decolonial thought 61
cultural discourse 9, 48, 111, 125, 180 see also colonialism; postcolonialism
cultural forms 21, 31 deconstructionism see theoretical traditions:
cultural history 229, 230 deconstructionism, literary criticism
cultural meaning 29, 30 DeFrantz, Thomas 54
cultural model 68 DeGloma, Thomas ix–xiii, xviii, xix, 5–6, 230
cultural phenomenology 69, 204 Deleuze, Gilles 24, 44, 50–5, 56, 62n10
cultural pragmatics 19, 38n1 A Thousand Plateaus 51–2
cultural psychology 80–1, 83 Descartes, René 84n2, 90
cultural script 29 see also Cartesian dualism
cultural turn in sociology 25 deviance 112–113
culture structures x, 25, 31, 32, 37 deviant bodies 10, 100, 110
cultures 53, 75, 90, 112, 115 in diagnosis 233
Durkheim’s conception of 26 weight/fat and 112–13
emotion, cultural foundations of 6, 12–13, 37, see also body: abject, deviant, unruly;
80, 205–6 disability; othering
interpretation, signification and xii, 12–13, 26, Dewey, John 37
32, 68, 142 diagnosis 13, 71, 134, 223–5, 232–3
The Interpretation of Cultures 34 breast cancer 134, 136, 139, 141, 145, 147, 149
interpretive traditions, cultural approaches x, 6, of colonialism’s effect 104
28, 31, 33, 68 embodiment and 233, 234
material culture 68 overweight as a diagnostic category 232, 233
matter, distinct from 2, 3, 4, 48, 49 racial categories and 231
matter/meaning and xii, xviii, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 9, stories of 224
14, 20, 21, 23, 25–7, 30, 31, 44, 45, 48, 49, 56, “thingness” and the emergence of diagnoses 232
57, 84, 135 see also sociology of diagnosis
as “motifactional” force 20, 22, 36–7, 38 Dilthey, Wilhelm 24, 32
postmodern crisis of meaning and cultural disability 60, 79, 82, 118, 121
thematization of materiality and the able-bodied privilege 215
body 23–6 disabilities, persons with 2, 79, 82
SPCS (Strong Program cultural sociology) and seselelãme and 79, 82
relative autonomy of culture 20, 28–31, 38 discourse
as symbolic dimension of the body and social analytic perspective xii, 4–5, 24, 232
life 8, 19, 25, 27, 38 anti-Black 12, 179, 180, 188, 193, 194
visual culture 68 biochemical discourse 48
see also anthropology; cultural sociology; cultural Black talk and voice, discursive misreading 185
studies; meaning; ritual; SPCS (Strong bodily detachment, as a means of cultivating 158,
Program cultural sociology); SPCS of the body 164, 168
and embodiment body as “discursive tabula rasa” 27
culture, types of body, presencing discourses of 227
Black culture 191 body, as productive of 182
body-oriented consumer culture 112 body as site of discursive interpretation 161
breast cancer culture 147, 149, 150n4 breast cancer discourse 133, 134, 146, 148, 149
gendered culture of slenderness 116 collective sentiment, social force and (discursive
“healthism” 125 depth) 26, 35
late-capitalist consumer culture 2 counternarrative and 12, 181
popular culture 180, 182, 184, 224 cultural discourse 9, 48
244
INDEX
discourse–practice interpretive interplay 161, race and “differential economy” of police

164, 165, 169, 173 intervention 218
discursive codification of race 179 race and gender as determinants of economic
discursive frameworks 5, 179 status 217
discursive knowledge 173, 180 social action and 23, 25
discursive power 3, 6, 179, 180, 182, 183, 186, 192 socioeconomic status (SES) and health 118–21
discursive technologies 180 sociology, interaction with 38n5
disfigurement, discourse of and reinterpretation as value 96
beautiful 137–8 see also capitalism
dominant, hegemonic 12 education
embodied reverse discourse 12, 179, 181, 182, belonging/nonbelonging 97, 178, 179, 195
183, 186, 195 Brown v. the Board of Education 39n9
feminine embodiment and beauty colonialism and 93, 95–6, 103–4, 105
discourses 11, 135 dissident body, production of 100
health discourse 10, 122 equality, disparities in 178, 179, 188, 193
as hermeneutic hooks 165 as freedom 93, 96–7, 100, 104, 105
internet, online community as discursive space 136 gender-based oppression and 93, 98
interpretation/reinterpretation, as resource health outcomes and 121
for 135, 142, 159 higher education, sociology departments
masculine discourse 123 and programs 2
militarized discourse 124 hostile educational experience 194
misogynoir 180, 181, 182, 184, 192, 195 as opportunity 95
modernity, discourses of 93 physical education 110, 111, 225
obesity and fat-phobic discourses 10, 11, 111, socioeconomic mobility and 96–7, 98
112, 113, 114, 118, 125 as transformation 96–7
as object of interpretive study/scholarship ix Western education 93, 96
post-structuralism and 3, 4, 24 see also Black girls’ bodies in educational settings;
practice, distinction between 159 Nervous Conditions, colonial education
racialized and gendered 12, 181, 183, 184, Elias, Norbert 6
185–6, 187, 188, 191, 192, 194, 195 embodied vulnerability see activism, embodied
racist discourses 92, 180–1, 188 vulnerability and; attention, embodied vulnerability
sexist discourse 92 and; embodiment: embodied vulnerability,
symbolic system and 27, 31, 37, 39n10, 55, 161 vulnerability and embodied awareness; solidarity
talk and 11, 172, 174n3 activism, embodied vulnerability of
weaponization against Black people 180 embodiment
“you are not the body” discourse 168 academic disciplines, research methods, and
see also language; theoretical traditions, researcher embodiment 13, 47, 60, 114, 122,
Foucauldian/discourse analysis 208, 210, 211, 225, 231, 233–4
disidentification 135, 142, 149, 159, 169, 173 anti-Black policies, singling out Black
Douglas, Mary 1, 95, 160 embodiment 193
Durkheim, Emile 2, 6, 25–6, 37 beauty and 134
The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life 21, Black embodiment in relation to indigo plant 48
26, 35–6 Black girls’ embodiment 179, 180, 181, 184, 188,
see also collective consciousness; SPCS (Strong 189, 192, 194
Program cultural sociology); theoretical Black presencing and 95
traditions, Durkheimian; totemism, body qua embodied situation 28
totemic principle colonialism as embodied memory/history 58
Dzokoto, Vivian 80–1 colonization, embodied practices 93
embodied artistic research see artistic
E research, embodied
economics 2, 23, 25, 36, 61, 75, 109, 118–21 embodied belonging 89
Africa, economic extractive practices 84 embodied cognition 204
bodies within economies 96 embodied consequences of trauma 114
capital 36 embodied difference 44
class analysis and economic theory 57 embodied discourse 188
economic determinism 25 embodied disposition 90
health systems and 109 embodied erasure 89, 99
homo economicus 22 embodied experience 11, 13, 34, 99, 102, 142,
Global North contexts 67, 84 149, 159, 169, 171, 172, 173, 203, 204, 217,
neoliberal capitalism and 11 219, 231
political economy 119 embodied feeling, as predisposition to
power and 84, 124 behavior 79
245
embodied human agency and healthier embodied way of knowing, sensory-emotional

societies 123 form 9, 66
embodied knowledge 49, 142, 158, 172 “emotional labor” 6, 182
embodied politic of survival 189 emotional meltdown 82–3
embodied practices of gender and sexuality 47 emotional rapture 82–3
embodied privilege 215, 218, 220n2 emotional structure of classrooms 184
embodied religious practices 160–1, 174 feelings of 70, 72, 79
embodied reverse discourse 12, 181–2, 195 feminine, coded as 38n6
embodied social phenomena/structures 30, 110 interactive-emergent interpretive framework and 13
embodied tactics for bearing witness to intuition and 78–9
violence 213 meaning-making and 22, 27, 205–6, 214
embodied versus spoken messages 195n2 as phenomenological experience of practice 160,
embodied vulnerability 12, 13, 202–20 passim 166, 169
embodied ways of knowing 9, 66 as predispositions to behavior 78
female/feminine and women’s embodiment 11, psychosocial interpretive framework and 6
13, 134, 140, 141, 142, 149, 150n4, 181, 188, rational/emotional binary 4, 112
192, 194, 218 rhythm and 9, 70, 160
grid/spectrum models of identity and sensible life of the body and 67, 72, 78, 82, 214
embodiment 58 seselelãme, as an emotional expression of self 72
as hermeneutical situation 37 shame 70, 115
invested with living value 32 social movements and 206
as lived: lived experience, lived body, lived socio-emotional relationship 82, 83, 209
corporeality 27, 31, 36 structures of feeling 27
living flat: embodied honesty, freedom, and as system of signification 206
authenticity 141, 148 TMMS (Trait Meta-Mood Scale Attention to
living flat, extension of normative boundaries of Emotion) 80
female embodiment 149 valence 27
male/masculine and men’s embodiment 115, see also affect; the senses; seselelãme
117, 123, 124 Engelmann, George J. 226
materiality and 45, 49, 56, 62n8, 123 epistemology
meaning and 26, 27, 31, 33, 36, 37, 93, 219 Anlo epistemologies 70
mind as “inherently embodied” 73 anthropological 52
racial and gender identities and 55, 216 the body as epistemological resource 203, 205
recovery from breast cancer, restorations of civilizational difference 84
embodied self 138, 141 colonial sources of knowledge 52
reversible relation with body 8 constructionist tradition, epistemic challenge to
scientific understanding of 45 essentialist thought 90
self-care, late-capitalist consumer culture and disciplinary boundary work and 22
embodied practices of 2 disembodied 231
self and the social world, embodiment of 19, 25, embodied technique as epistemic 62n7
27, 37 epistemic legitimacy, relation to ontological
solidarity, shared embodiment through force 49
activism 203, 209–10 epistemic modes xiiin2
strong cultural sociology of 8, 27–8, 31, 37, 38 epistemic positionality 60
study of religion and 160 epistemic shifts in understandings of the body 19
technique, identity, molecularity and 9, 47, 49, epistemic technique 51
57, 59, 62n8 feminist epistemologies 88, 231
TEPP (The Embodied Present Process™) 76 interpretation and xiiin2, 7, 203
thought, reciprocal relation to embodiment 161 matter, onto-epistemologies of 48, 50
vulnerability and embodied awareness 13, 205, 218 medicine, epistemic authority 113
wheelchair as extension of 79 the molecular and 58, 60
women of color, embodied histories absent from observant participation as epistemological
white feminist scholarship 89 method 207
see also biology/physiology; body; materiality/ onto-epistemic cut separating technique and
materialism/matter; seselelãme identity, knowledge and power 61
emotion positivist epistemology 22, 231
Black emotions 192 postmodern vs modern 24
Black joy 192 quantitative methods, epistemic primacy of 44
collective-formative interpretive framework and 6, 13 social epistemology 45
as connection between culture and sensuous Western epistemologies 89, 93
form 37 see also interpretation; knowledge production;
embodied vulnerability and 207 ways of knowing
246
INDEX
Ernsberger, Paul 119 speaking through the body 100–1, 186

Eyerman, Ron 206 vulnerability 115, 142, 218
white women’s bodies 92, 94, 104, 217, 218
F see also beauty; Black girls’ bodies in educational
Fanon, Frantz 10, 89, 91–2, 94–5, 217 settings; breast reconstruction; breasts; gender;
Black Skin, White Masks 91 mastectomy; Nervous Conditions; transgender
The Wretched of the Earth 94–5 femininity
Featherstone, Mike 23, 24 Black femininity 181, 186, 188, 191, 193
Felski, Rita 135, 149 breast cancer, disruption/restoration of femininity
female bodies and ideals of feminine beauty 33, 34, 133–4,
athleticism 13, 138, 139, 147, 150n5, 225–6, 139, 142, 144, 148, 149
228, 233 breast cancer and ideologies of femininity 134
“being a good native girl,” effect on body 105 breasts as most visible physical marker of 134
binary sex-gender order and 29, 39n8, 51, 56, fat, feminization of 116, 117
91, 93 feminine movement 227, 228, 229
biological sex 22, 29, 33, 225, 226 gender discourse and 11, 192, 193
Black female bodies 10, 12, 31, 34, 48, 79, health: perceived as feminine issue 123;
88–105 passim, 150n5, 178–96 passim conflation with normative feminine beauty 137
cisgender 29, 133, 140, 147, 150n4, 236 heterosexuality and 147
colonialism and 10, 48, 92–5, 99, 100, 104–5 homosexuality and 147
construction of 12, 33, 38n6, 92, 93, 100, 134, 144 LGBTQ and queer perspectives 148
cosmetic modification 8, 30, 135, 137, 229 masculinity, in relation to 29, 116, 117, 123
damage 105, 190 normative feminine embodiment 11, 134, 142,
dancing 98–100 144, 150n4
disappearance of 10, 89, 94, 96, 99, 101, 103–5, norms 31, 32, 133, 134, 137–40, 142, 144, 148,
190, 192, 227, 228, 229 150n5, 181, 186, 188, 191, 195
discourse and 11, 12, 92, 93, 111, 133, 134, 137, symbolic constructions of 13, 33–4, 38, 116,
146, 148, 149, 180–6, 188, 192, 193, 195 117, 123, 227
disfigurement 133, 137, 138, 139, 140 white femininity 181
feminist thought and 89, 93–4, 105, 105n1, 110, see also beauty; Black girls’ bodies in educational
111, 112, 117, 134–5, 137 settings; breast cancer; breast reconstruction;
form vs function, prioritization of 138–40 breasts; female bodies; gender; mastectomy
frailty 13, 92, 226–8, 234 feminism 3, 88
gendering of 12, 30, 55, 89, 92–5, 105, 117, on beauty 135, 149
136, 150nn4–5, 186, 192, 194, 217 Black feminism 89
hysteria 100 Bourdieu’s neglect of 122
illness 100–3, 121, 232 critical race feminism 217
interpretation of 32, 34, 79, 89, 94, 105, 134, Deleuzian feminism 51
137, 139–40, 142–6, 149, 166, 178–80, 190–3, feminist epistemologies 231
195, 212–14, 217–18 feminist materialisms/neomaterialisms 4, 5
male bodies, in relation to 11, 29, 47, 91, 94, feminist scholarship 4, 110, 111, 112, 113, 117,
96, 97, 110, 115, 121, 122, 143, 150n4, 134–5, 137, 149
217–18, 228 Lacanian and Freudian feminism 7
menstruation 226–7, 234 postcolonial feminism 10, 92
molar/molecular and 51–2 second-wave feminism 23
movement 139, 226, 227, 228, 229 Western feminism 93
muscle and strength 93, 138, 139, 140, white feminism 88–9, 94, 105
150n5, 229 see also theoretical traditions: Black feminism,
normative/nonnormative 11, 31, 32, 89, 98, 111, feminist/gender theory, feminist materialism
134, 136, 137, 138, 142, 144, 145, 148, 149, fitness 3, 164
150n4–5, 227 male bodies and 110, 112
obesity 11, 110, 116, 117 medicine, biomedical gaze and fitness
organic theory of native woman’s body 94 regimes 82, 110
pleasure and enjoyment in 10, 98, 99, 103, obesity and 110, 112, 115, 117
105, 149 seselelãme and 9, 73, 74, 76, 82
presencing of, making visible 13, 89, 94, 95, 96, social fitness, civilizing bodies 112, 115, 123
103–5, 142, 188, 190, 192, 227, 228, 234 in yoga as “way of being” 164
queer 138, 147–8 see also body projects; health
self-scrutiny of 229 Fleischman, Suzanne 224, 233
sexuality 89, 98, 144, 146–7, 192 Floyd, George 88
slenderness, tyranny of 111 Foucault, Michel 3, 6, 29, 37, 62n7, 90, 230
smell of 97 The History of Sexuality 29
247
Fowler, Lorenzo N. 229 Goffman, Erving 2, 3, 6, 25, 27, 29, 36, 116, 179,
Fowler, Orson S. 229 183, 184, 195n2
Frank, Arthur W. 2, 23, 36, 182, 195 Gordon, James S. 66
Friedman, Asia xii, xviii, 1–18, 29, 67, 213 Gough, Brendan 112, 113, 116
Friedman, Samuel R. 120 Gould, Deborah 205–6,
214, 220n1
G Graham, Hilary 121
Gard, Michael 109, 111, 113 Greedharry, Mrinalini 10, 88–108
Geertz, Clifford xiiinn, 4–5, 20, 31, 34–5, 36, 68, Green, Kyle D. 162, 165, 174n3
160, 209 Greene, Kevin J. 75
Interpretation of Cultures 34–5 Griffith, R. Marie 158, 161
gender 3, 5, 10 Grosz, Elizabeth 38n6, 51
accountability to 137, 141, 142, 147, 192 Guattari, Félix 44, 50–5, 56, 62n10
binary sex-gender order 3, 4, 29, 32, 38–9n8, 47,
51, 92–3, 124 H
as colonial construct 89, 105 habitus 6, 55, 62n8, 69, 78
doing gender 6 definition 69, 78
gender justice 88, 123, 125 religious habitus 161
gender nonconforming body 142, 148–9 see also Bourdieu, Pierre
gender performance 3, 191, 192 HAES® (Health-At-Every-Size) 114, 118, 125
gendered body/embodiment 3, 9, 10, 55, 61, 89, Haraway, Donna 225
92, 94, 100, 105, 110, 111, 115, 116, 117, 136,
Hardey, Michael 112
137, 150nn4–5, 186, 193, 215–17, 218
Haupt, Adam 84, 85n10
male/female binary coded as objectivity/
subjectivity binary 38n6 health
norms/ideologies of 3, 11, 31, 32, 89, 99, 111, 1980 Black Report 120
133, 134, 135, 136, 137, 140, 142, 147, 148, agency and 118, 122, 123, 124
149, 150nn3–4, 150n9, 191 behavioral focus 110, 113, 114, 118,
race and gender as material and substantial 120–3, 124, 125
identities 55–6 breasts, softness and meanings of wellness 34
social construction of 3, 88, 89, 90, 116, capitalism and 2, 11, 119, 120, 122, 123,
135, 227 124, 125
testosterone, gender, and sexuality diagnosis 224, 232–3
46–7, 50 health inequalities 10–11, 118–23, 124–5
see also femininity; gender on the importance of normative appearance 232
post-colony; masculinity; transgender individual responsibility and 119, 120, 121,
gender on the post-colony 10, 89, 105
122, 125
British colonialism 93
inequity 111, 114, 117, 118–22, 123, 124, 125
colonial patriarchy 89, 95, 96, 100, 102
macro-social factors impacting health 119, 120
gendering the colonial body 92–4
gendering operates in parallel ways to medicalization of 11, 113, 116, 123
racialization 92–3 men, masculinities, and health 10,
intersectional phenomenological approach 10 109–26 passim
literature as organic theory 94–5 morality and 109, 113, 118, 121, 229
see also Nervous Conditions neoliberalism and health inequalities 119–20, 121,
genealogy 7, 91, 230, 235n1 123, 124–5
Germov, John 116 social justice and 119, 121, 122, 123, 125
Geurts, Kathryn Linn 9–10, 66–87 UK 120, 121
Culture and the Senses 75 US 111, 119, 120
Ghanaian see Anlo-Ewe people yoga and 164, 165, 166, 192
(southeastern Ghana) welfare state and 120
Giddens, Anthony 2, 3 see also breast cancer; diagnosis; obesity; obesity
Gimlin, Debra 3, 25, 182
and male bodies; public health; sociology
Gingras, Jacqui 115
of diagnosis
Giugni, Marco 204
globalization 23 healthism 114, 122, 125
seselelãme and 67, 69, 73–7 Heidegger, Martin 90
Global North 9, 66, 67, 73, 75, 77, 80, 82, 83, hermeneutics 8, 24, 33–4
84, 202 body as hermeneutical situation 20, 37
see also colonialism; globalization; postcolonialism hermeneutic reconstruction of meaning 20, 28,
Global South 67, 88, 202 30, 31–4, 38
see also colonialism; globalization; postcolonialism Integral Yoga, “hermeneutic hooking” 165–6
248
INDEX
maximal/minimal interpretation and 35 transgender identity 47 see also transgender

see also interpretation; meaning; research see also the molecular
methods, critical hermeneutic; SPCS (Strong Integral Yoga 11–12, 172–4
Program cultural sociology); theoretical attachment to/identification with the
approaches, hermeneutic body 157, 158
Hochschild, Arlie 6 bodily detachment/disidentification 11–12, 157,
Holmes, Stoddard 224 158, 159, 161, 168, 169, 171–2, 173
body/mind dualism 158, 167, 171–2, 173
homo economicus 22
body as object: metaphor, analogy, and practical
hooks, bell 186, 188
enactment 159, 166–9
Houchen, Diedre 191
description of 162
Howes, David 68, 69, 70, 78–9, 85
Eternal Self 157, 171
Husserl, Edmund 90
Hatha Yoga 157, 162, 163, 164, 166, 169, 172–3
“hermeneutic hooking” 165–6
I instructors 154, 158, 163–5, 167, 169–72
identity language, power of 157, 158, 165, 169–70,
asymmetry, identity as incommensurable 172–3
substance 58, 61 primary goals of 162
beauty and 133, 134, 135, 136 reciprocal influences of embodiment and
body and 3, 9, 55, 56, 61, 149, 173, 183, 217 thought 161
categorical vs modal thought and 9, 70, 78–9 satsang (“spiritual dialogue”) 163, 167
categories of 3, 46, 52, 56–7, 217 savasana (corpse pose) 170
collective, shared identity 6, 36, 46, 206 Self/“True Self ” 12, 158, 159, 167, 168, 169
cultural forces and xi, 23 Self/“True Self,” embodied experience of 171–2,
disidentification 135, 138, 142, 149 173
disruption and loss of 133, 147, 148, 149 shat kriyas 166–9
DNA as “molecule of identity” 46 spiritual formation and progress 158, 159, 163–7,
embodied xviii, 13, 59, 149 168–9, 173
gendered 13, 47, 50, 55–7, 60, 116, 134, 147, Surya Namaskar (sun salutation) 155, 156,
181, 189, 217 157, 158
identity politics 52, 54, 56, 60, 89 sutra neti 167–8, 174n7
Indigenous identity 53, 56 symbolic–somatic interplay 11, 159, 161, 173–4
Integral Yoga, bodily detachment/ talk in situ 12, 159, 174
disidentification 11–12, 157, 158, 159, 161, “theology of the body” 12, 158, 159
168, 169, 171–2, 173 verbal instruction and cues 12, 157, 158, 159,
internet and 136 164, 169–72, 173
interpretation and xviii, 51, 89, 137–8, 142, 149 vocabularies of motive and transcendent
intersectionality 50, 57, 60, 179 goals 159, 163–6
Jewish 56, 60, 61n1 “We are not the body” 155, 158, 168
mastectomy, disidentification processes 135, 138, yoga nidra (“deep relaxation”) 159, 165, 166,
142, 149 170–2, 173
material basis 9, 46, 47, 51, 55–6, 58, 59, 61, 217 yogic diet 166, 168–9
“material-semiotic” 9, 46, 47, 50, 55 see also Integral Yoga Institute
molar 52 Integral Yoga Institute 162, 163, 164, 166, 168,
mutability 47, 51, 54, 55, 58, 59, 61 172, 173
nonbinary, non-gridded 58 goals of 162, 164
onto-epistemic relation between knowledge, Integral Yoga altar 155
power, identity, and technique 59, 60, 61 teacher training manual 168, 169, 171–2
power and 3, 52, 54, 57, 60, 61, 135, 180 teacher training program 155, 157, 158, 162–3,
race and gender as material and substantial 165–6, 167, 172, 174n1
identities 9, 46, 47, 51, 53, 55–6, 58, 61 TTs (teacher trainees) 155, 157, 158, 163,
racial identities 9, 46, 47–8, 51, 55–62, 92, 96, 165–6, 167, 169, 172
180, 181 see also Integral Yoga
religious, spiritual, yogic practices and 160, 164, interpretation
165, 173 academic disciplines as interpretive
seselelãme and Anlo-Ewe identity formation 69 frameworks 13
social movements and 206 affect and emotion, interpretive relationship 12,
spectrum, continuum, and grid models of 13, 206, 218
identity 56, 60, 61, 165 Arunta rite of passage, interpretation of 35–6
symbolic basis ix, 9, 36, 56, 60, 92, 135, 181, 183 beautification practices as focal sites for
technique/identity, mutual construction 9, 46, interpretation 192
50, 51, 53–4, 57–9, 61 bodies up for interpretation 203, 217, 218
249
bodily practices and 11, 13, 158, 159, 161, 166, schemas 183, 205
168, 172, 173, 203 scholars’ interpretive approaches:
body as interpretive medium, conduit, to narratives 174n3; to religious
resource 37, 136, 144, 161, 204, 213 practices 160–1
body’s dependency on 8, 20 seselelãme, as an interpretive template 68
collective/shared 25, 159, 172 see also seselelãme, interpretive distortion of
as concept for thinking about the body 5, 7 social interaction and 11, 12, 134, 146, 149, 179,
culture structures and 32, 33 183, 191
as description/explanation x, 1, 34–6 social movements as resource for interpreting
discourse as interpretive space/framework 5, 10, embodied experience 203, 204
27, 136, 149, 179, 180, 185–6 social privilege as interpretive framework 214
discursive–interactionist interpretive sociology as interpretive science ix, 1, 2, 5, 23, 26,
framework 183–4 31, 36, 37
ethnography: interpretive benefits 162; solidarity, interpretive instantiations of 203, 212
participant observation and interpretive systems of xii, 12, 27, 32, 134
inquiry 207, 208 talk as interpretive link between yoga practice and
European beauty aesthetics and interpretation of Integral Yoga’s symbolic world 158, 167
Black styles 193 thick description 35
as focal metaphor 5 vocabularies of motive and 159, 163–5
fuses matter with meaning 21 war on obesity, weight/fatness and 110, 111, 114,
gendered bodies and 10, 29, 89, 94, 124, 136, 118, 124
137, 144, 178, 185, 186, 191, 215–18 Zerubavel, Eviatar, interpretive approach 230
hermeneutics 24, 31–4, 165, 166 see also attention, interpretive process and;
historical contingency and 74, 179, 183 epistemology; Interpretive Lenses in Sociology;
interpreting the body 7–14 knowledge production; meaning; SPCS
interpretive authority, positionality, and (Strong Program cultural sociology); theoretical
validity 10, 12, 23, 24, 37, 179, 191, 231 traditions; ways of knowing
interpretive communities: Integral Yoga 158, Interpretive Lenses in Sociology 5–7
162, 164, 173; online 136, 143–4; protest 206 collective-formative 5–6, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13
“interpretive epistemic mode” xiiin2 interactive-emergent 6, 8, 10, 11, 12, 13
interpretive filters 11, 137 psychosocial 6–7, 8, 10
interpretive frameworks 6, 143, 173, 183, 186, intersectional analysis 10, 89, 179, 195
191, 212 interdisciplinary intersectionality 48–9, 52, 55,
interpretive labor 13, 212, 215 61, 62n6, 62n9
language and the interpretation of somatic intersectional discursive frames 184
experience 12, 173 intersectional subjugations 178, 179
literary form and 94 see also theoretical traditions, intersectional
meaning-making and xi, xii, xiiin2, 5, 6, 7, 8, intersubjectivity
12, 24, 28, 30, 31, 34, 160–1, 204, 213–14 individualism, in contrast to 82, 83, 84
minimal/maximal interpretation see interactive-emergent interpretive lens 6, 8, 10, 11,
maximal interpretation 12, 13
misinterpretation of Black girls and Blackness 12, interaffectivity 6
179, 185, 186, 189–91, 194 intercorporeality 6, 13, 183
misogynoir as anti-Black interpretive as interpretive process by which the body comes
repertoire 179, 195 to know itself 90–1
nonpositivist 231 interrelationality 26, 173
oppression and victimhood, interpretive lens 89 men’s intersubjective meanings 123
phenomenology and 13, 105, 160 seselelãme’s intersubjectivity 9, 80–3, 84, 85nn8–9
postmodernism and 4, 23–4 see also social interaction; symbolic interactionism
power/powerful contexts and 5, 7, 10, 29, 30,
118, 146, 179, 191, 215 J
as process involving: classification 20; interplay Jamison, Andrew 206
between discourse and practice 161, 169; Jay, David 143
selection/deselection 1, 5; signification 32; Jewel (singer/songwriter) 134, 138
technique and identity 9 Jewishness 56, 57, 60
raced bodies and 10, 89, 94, 178, 187, 190, 193, Johnson, Boris 109–10, 113
215–18 Johnson, Mark 66, 73–4
reflexive engagement with xi, 8 Johnston, Erin F. 11–12, 155–77
reinterpretation 12, 23, 89, 105, 110, 124, 125, Joseph, Nicole 186, 187, 188, 192
159, 163–5, 166, 196n5, 215 Jude, Julia 67, 76–7
reinterpreting beauty 11, 134–8, 140–9 Jutel, Annemarie 13, 223–37
relationality and 90 Diagnosis: Truths and Tales 224
250
INDEX
K Lavater, Johann Caspar 229

Kimmerer, Robin Wall 231 Leder, Drew 32, 234
King, Tiffany Lethabo 48, 62n8 Lei, Joy L. 190, 193
Knorr Cetina, Karin 49, 61n2 LGBTQ community 147–8
knowledge production 9, 13, 45, 46, 58, 142, 158, lived body 2, 22, 27, 33, 36, 37, 88, 120, 123
172, 180, 182 lived experience 4, 9, 13, 27, 30, 31, 94, 173,
see also epistemology; ways of knowing 205, 217
Komabu-Pomeyie, Sefakor 9–10, 66–87 somatic inversion and 160
Koonce, Jacqueline 186 see also affect; body; embodiment;
Kristeva, Julia 138 phenomenology; the senses
Lizardo, Omar 6–7, 158, 162
L Lohan, Maria 110, 121–2, 124
Lupton, Deborah 109, 113, 115, 123
Lakoff, George 66, 73–4
Lyotard, Jean-François 23, 60
language
affect, emotions and 205–6
Akan (language community in Ghana) 71 M
Anlo-Ewe (language community in Ghana) 66, Macon, Anna-Lisa F. 193
68, 75, 77, 82 male bodies
anti-Black linguistic racism 185 Black men’s bodies 10, 89, 91, 94, 95, 104
backtalk, as embodied reverse discourse 186 commodification of 113
“blaccent” 185 deviant 110, 113, 124
Black voice and vernacular 184–5, “health” discourse and 112–13, 124
188–9, 191 as machines 112
body idiom, shared vocabularies and meanings of white male bodies 115
the body 184 see also masculinity; obesity and male bodies
chemistry, language of 54, 58, 59 Marxian perspectives
conceptual framework for interpreting somatic Marxist formulations of class 57
experience 12 materialist critique of ideology 23
embodied messages 195n2 masculinity
Integral Yoga, power of language 157, 158, 165, discredited masculinities 110, 112, 116
169–70, 172–3 masculine domination 110, 116, 117, 122,
language of diagnosis 224, 233 125, 218
linguistic double consciousness 185 men, masculinities, and health 121–3
linguistic model, verbocentrism of 68 norms, myths, and symbols of 11, 112, 123–4
linguistic orientation and “brown” privilege of 38n6
racialization 59 social construction of masculinities 116–17
linguistic turn in sociology 23 as status shield 11, 118
linguistics 3, 23, 224 toxic masculinity 52
materialization of social facts and 25 as unmarked category 29
misogynoir, linguistic use and Black female see also male bodies; obesity and male bodies
identity 180–1 mastectomy 8, 11, 28, 33–4, 133–4, 136, 137, 142,
non-Indigenous idioms 231 145–6, 149
rhetoric 30, 46, 109, 112, 135, 180 agency 135
seselelãme, linguistic interpretation, translation, and beauty reinterpretation 11, 134, 135–6, 137–
appropriation of 68, 73, 74, 78, 80, 82 44, 149
Shona (language community in bilateral 136, 140, 143, 145, 147–8
Zimbabwe) 97 communities of experience and supportive daily
silence: as an embodied politic of survival interactions 11, 134, 136, 142–3, 149
for Black girls 188–90; making the body contralateral 136
speak 100, 102–3, 186; refusal 188 disfigurement discourse 133, 137
social construction of the body/identity and 3, 4, disidentification, processes of 135, 138, 142, 149
7, 57, 184, 217 family interactions 34, 136, 144–6, 149
talk, cultural sociological approaches to 174n3 “Flat and Fabulous” 143
talk in situ 12, 159, 174 form and function 137, 138–40, 149
talking about the body, interpretive salience gender nonconforming body and social
of 155, 157, 158, 161, 167, 169, 172 stigma 142, 148–9
Twi (language community in Ghana) 71 imperative of concealment 133, 137, 138, 140,
see also discourse; semiotics; signification; 141, 144, 145
symbols/symbolization LGBTQ community 148
Laplantine, François 67, 70, 72, 84, 84n2 living flat after 11, 34, 134–49, 150n2
Life of the Senses 70 meaning of beauty in breast cancer
Latour, Bruno 6, 26 recovery 134–6
251
normative beauty 11, 133, 134, 135, 137, 141, Mbembe, Achille 92
144, 149 McCulley, Susan 73–4, 76, 77
normative feminine embodiment 11, 134, 142, McNaughton, Darlene 112
144, 150n4 McWhorter, John 185, 196n6
normative ideologies of gender 135, 150n3 Mead, George Herbert 2, 6, 21, 22
prosthetics 134, 141, 145, 150n1 meaning
queerness, proximity to 144, 146–9 activation of meaning through illness 233
“Scar Project” 143 affect and 27, 210, 211, 214, 217
scars 133, 137, 139, 142–4, 149 approaches to xi, xviii, 6, 8, 10, 19, 20, 27, 31–5,
sexuality and sexual attractiveness 146, 147 68, 160–1, 203–4
symmetry aesthetics 137, 140–2, 149 beauty, meaning of the breast in cancer
unilateral 136, 142 recovery 134–5, 138, 149
see also breast cancer; breast reconstruction; behavior as a conduit of meaning 204
breasts behavioral relation between objectivities 33
materiality/materialism/matter binaries, relations of difference/opposition and 3,
academic disciplines and approaches to 2, 4–5, 12, 29, 38n7, 51
13, 21–3, 45, 48–9, 69–70, 223, 224–5, 234 body idiom 184
binary oppositions and see binary hierarchies; body work and 182
body/mind dichotomy collective, shared systems of ix, xi, 5, 6, 11, 19,
body, materiality of 2, 4–5 22, 24, 25, 26, 32, 33, 36, 37, 161, 183, 172,
boundaries between meaning and matter 3 184, 212–14
breast reconstruction and 33–4 collective representations and 8, 29, 36, 37, 38
constructionism and 3, 4, 5, 9 as core structures of self and identity ix
definition of 49 cultural codes and 6, 8, 30, 32
embodied technique 49, 62nn7–8 culture and 19, 22, 25, 29, 30, 31, 32, 36, 37,
as essence or substance 3, 9, 44 38n7, 55
feminist materialisms/neomaterialisms 4 discourse and ix, 11, 12, 27, 37, 55, 161, 173,
fusion of meaning and matter 8, 27, 31, 37 174, 174n3, 182, 183
material affordance 30, 37 embodiment, embodied experiences/practices
material agency 4 and 12, 20, 27, 31, 32, 33, 34, 37, 59, 93, 161,
material conditions of power and inequality 7, 172, 173, 182, 203, 204, 218
10, 30, 57–8 gender/race and 7, 10, 11, 12, 29, 32, 47, 55, 89,
material-cultural fasciae/webs of meaning 26, 32 93, 111, 123, 134, 135, 217
material determinism 5 hermeneutic reconstruction of 20, 24, 28, 30,
material-semiotic and material-symbolic 31–4, 38
perspectives 9, 27, 46, 47, 50, 55 history of slavery and the meaning of
material specificity 4, 10, 57–8 blackness 60
materialist explanation for health how bodies take on meaning xii, 3–4, 8, 12,
inequity 120, 122 19–21, 27, 30–3, 36–7, 142, 161, 178, 182–4,
meaning and matter see meaning, meaning 213, 217, 233
and matter imagination and 37
new materialisms 6, 45, 53, 55, 62n8 indican, biochemical molecule and the meaning
as passive 9, 22, 47, 90 of blackness 48
physical character of thought 67 “landscapes of meaning” 20, 28, 35 see also Reed,
pleasures of 10, 24, 57, 98–9 Isaac Ariail
postmodern crisis of meaning and 23–6 meaning and matter xii, xviii, 3–4, 5, 7, 8, 9, 20,
post-structuralism, matter as an effect of power 3 21, 25, 27, 30–4, 37, 47, 48, 55, 59, 89, 111,
prostheses (prosthetics) 134, 141, 145, 150n1 161, 174
race and gender as material and substantial meaninglessness: free play/experimentation,
identities 55–6 variety, and the flattening of meaning 24, 30,
the senses and sensation 24, 26, 27, 38, 66, 68, 59, 232
69–70, 72, 78, 79, 82, 90–1, 98, 100, 139, 160, moles, meaning of 51
169, 173 objective/subjective ix, 24, 25, 33, 36, 69, 70,
song, materiality of 49, 62n8 78, 123, 161, 173, 174, 183, 214
see also biology/physiology; body; poles of meaning delimit lines or poles of
body/mind dichotomy potential action 31
Mauss, Marcel 62nn7–8, 90, 160 postmodern crisis of meaning 23–6
maximal interpretation 20, 28, 34–7, 38 power and 3, 5, 6, 7, 10, 27, 29, 30–1, 32, 51,
definition 35 60, 182, 183, 218
minimal/maximal interpretations, process of signification 26
difference 35–6 as psychic structures 6
see also Reed, Isaac Ariail religious frameworks and 213–14
252
INDEX
religious practice and 160, 174, 174n3 molecules of technique-identity 9, 46, 47, 55–
seselelãme: distortions of its organic meanings 67; 7, 58–9
meaning of 78 performance studies 9, 44, 58
sign and 32, 38n7, 135 quantitative methods, epistemic primacy of 44
as social force 23, 184 race as concept of technique/identity 57
social meanings 34, 35, 183 race and gender as material and substantial
sociophysiological 10 identities 55–6
SPCS (Strong Program cultural sociology), radical asymmetry of 9, 44–5, 54–61
meaning-centered approach to body and romance of the molecular 50–5
embodiment 20, 22, 33, 36, 37 as technique and identity 9, 46, 51, 53–4, 57,
symbolic interaction and 12, 183 59, 61
symbols and 3, 7, 8, 19, 20, 21, 27, 30, 31, 34, technique as knowledge 9, 44, 46, 47, 50
36, 37, 38, 55, 160, 161, 174n3, 233 technoscientific knowledge/practices 9, 44, 45–
thick description cultural analysis and 34, 35 50, 53, 57
ubiquity of 30, 32 technoscientific knowledge, racial and gender
webs of meaning 32, 33, 36, 68, 111 hierarchies behind 45–8, 50, 55
wellness, meanings of 34 testosterone 46–7, 50
see also interpretation; signification Monaghan, Lee F. 10–11, 109–32
meaning-making ix, 6, 7, 14, 20, 25, 28, 30, 34, morality 5, 9, 25–6
37, 38n2, 219 body, meaning and moral valence 5, 30–1,
medicine xii, 11, 22, 66, 82 36, 38n6
critiques of 113, 118 body work and 3, 13
epistemic authority of 113 Christian morality 98
surveillance medicine 113, 117 “duty to beauty” as moral endeavor 229–30
see also diagnosis; health; public health; sociology health and 118, 121
of diagnosis interpretation/meaning and ix, 5, 20, 31
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 19, 25, 62n8, 69, 90–1, 204 moral significance of the molecular 9
Phenomenology of Perception 91 motifaction and 20, 38n3
metaphor 5, 22, 33, 38n3, 50, 51, 82, 84, 118, SPCS of the body and embodiment, moral
159, 161, 166–9, 233 aspects 26, 27, 29, 31, 36–7, 38
Miles, Brittney 12, 178–201 Morris, Edward W. 186, 187
Millard, Jennifer 135 Morris, Monique 189
Miller, Christopher 52–3, 54, 60 motifaction 20, 22, 36–7, 38, 38n3
Miller, William Ian 178 motif and 22, 38n3
Mills, C. Wright 159, 230 power of 36, 38n3
mind–body dualism see binary hierarchies; body/ see also Black, David
mind dichotomy; Descartes, René; Integral Muñoz, José Esteban 59, 135
Yoga, body/mind dualism Myers, Natasha 44, 45
misogynoir 178, 179, 180–3, 184, 192, 194, myth 22, 31, 36, 37, 235n1
195, 195n1 “biomythography” 48, 60, 62n5
modernity 1, 2, 23–4, 69, 89, 92, 93, 96, 104, 118 myths of masculinity 123–4
the molecular
“biomythography” of racialized molecules 48, 60 N
Blackness and 55, 56, 57 NAACP (National Association for the
critical race theory 9, 44–5, 55 Advancement of Colored People) 182
Deleuzo–Guattarian concept of the Nair, Supriya 96
molecular 50–4 neoliberalism 67, 119–20
DNA 45–7, 50 “color-blind” neoliberal racism 181
embodied artistic research see artistic health inequalities and 119–20, 121, 123
research, embodied neoliberal capitalism 11
embodied technique 49, 57, 62nn7–8 patriarchy and 110
hard and soft molecules 45–50 Nervous Conditions (Tsitsi Dangarembga) 10, 89,
interdisciplinary intersectionality 48–9, 52, 55, 95–6, 104–5
61, 62n6 agency 97, 103, 104
knowledge production processes, circular 9, 46 ambivalence 96, 103–4
lead and mercury (metals) 47–8 Anna 97
material-semiotic perspective 9, 46, 47, 50, 55 Babamukuru 95, 96, 97, 98, 100–4, 105
molecular theory of identity 44, 46, 47, 54, Black Zimbabwean women 89, 94
58–60 Blackness, phenomenology of 89, 90–2, 104, 105
molecularization of race and identity 51–5 Chido 95, 97, 99, 105
molecules as materially and socioculturally colonial Christianity 95, 98, 100, 102
constructed 9, 44, 45–8, 50 colonial education 96–8, 100, 102–5
253
dancing and pleasure 98–100 social construction of masculinities and 116–17

defamiliarization 95 stigma 116
Fanon, Frantz and 10, 89, 91–2, 94–5 surveillance medicine 113, 117
girls’ bodies and colonial power 10, 90 symbolic violence 110, 117
Maiguru 95, 97–8, 100–1, 103 war on obesity as expression of masculine
Ma’Shingayi 95, 100, 104 domination 110, 116, 117, 124
mission school 95–7, 101, 102 see also health; masculinity; obesity; public health
nervous condition 94–5, 96, 100, 104–5 Olssen, Mark 3
Nhamo 95, 97, 105 Ong, Bie Nio 120
Nyasha 10, 89, 95–6, 97, 98, 99–102, 103, ontology 25, 28, 48, 49, 59, 62n9, 84, 232
104, 105 biomythographic ontology 60
as organic theory of the native woman’s culture and matter, ontological distinction
body 10, 94 between 48
physical body’s disappearance and colonized deontologisation/reontologisation of race 50–1,
womanhood 10, 94, 99, 101, 103–5 57–8
postcolonial awareness 104 embodied vulnerability as an ontological
regulating “good native girls” 98–100, 103, 105 given 204
sexuality 89, 91, 92, 98, 100 movement as ontological ground of the body 3–4
sick bodies: hunger, longing, and wasting “object-oriented ontology” 62n9
away 100–3 ontological force 49
Tambu 10, 89, 95–101, 102–4, 105 ontological traditions 66
see also gender on the post-colony ontological uncertainty 24
Norwood, Kristen 208 “ontological wonder” 53
Nunn, Nia Michelle 194 social ontology of the body 19–20
technoscientific ontologies 45, 50
O othering 75, 179, 180, 188
obesity in-groups vs out-g roups 7
2008 great Financial Crisis and 109 nonbelonging 97
BMI 111, 113, 116–17 outsider 173, 178, 192, 193
childhood obesity 111–12, 113, 116, 117 stigmatized 193
crises and 109, 111 Oyewùmí, Oyèrónké 92, 93
critical studies on 112, 113–15, 119, 120,
123, 125–6 P
as discursively constructed rather than deviation Parsons, Talcott 2, 22, 38n5
from normative weight values 232 Passy, Florence 204
“dual COVID-19/obesity crisis frame” 109, 111, Patchay, Sheena 100
113, 115, 118 patriarchy 3, 89, 110, 188
fitness and 110, 117 colonial patriarchy 89, 95, 96, 98, 100, 102
framing of obesity as epidemic/public health neoliberalism and 110
crisis 10, 109, 111–15 perception xviii, 6, 66, 69, 81, 84n2, 98, 99, 204
gender inequality in body norms 116, 117 of Black children 187
obesity alarmism 10, 124 bodily discomfort as way of perceiving state
“obesity-survival paradox” 113 violence 213
overweight as category of disease 113, 232 breast reconstruction, perceived imperative 150n7
sociology of diagnosis on overweight 232, 233 disappearance of the body and 227
stigma and discrimination related to 114, disrespect and disruption, perceptions of 185
115, 116 gendered perceptions of overweight/obesity 117
war on obesity 109, 110, 111, 118 interoception 80, 81, 83
war on obesity, critique of 114–15, 118 intuition 79
see also health; obesity and male bodies; invisibility and 190
public health lived body/experience and 37, 217
obesity and male bodies 10–11, 110, 123–6 material specificity of the body and 10
discredited masculinities 110, 112, 116 Merleau-Ponty and the phenomenology of 91, 204
gendered “body project” 110, 112, 118 “perceptual communities” 213
“health” discourse as means of controlling socially perceptual filters 6, 29
deviant bodies 10, 110, 112 perceptual reframing of the body 159
medicalization of men’s bodies as perceptual selection 1
“overweight” 112–13, 115–16 proprioception 81
medicalized calls to fight fat/weight 111–13 recessive body and 99
men, masculinities, and health 121–3 ritual and 160
obesity epidemic rhetoric 112–13 self-presentation, self-perception of 194
obesity warmongering 110, 115–16, 118 sensation and 69, 90
254
INDEX
social values and 69 molar/molecular distinction and power 52, 54

“visceral perception” 85n8 reverse discourse 188
visceroception 81 social research and power 209
see also epistemology; interpretation; knowledge subject as an effect of power 3
production; phenomenology; the senses; ways symbolic relations of power 30
of knowing teacher/student power dynamics 179, 184
performance studies 9, 44, 58, 60 ubiquity of 29–30, 32
Petersen, Alan 115 pragmatism see American pragmatism; theoretical
phenomenology 7, 10, 19, 24, 95, 105n1 traditions, pragmatism
Blackness, phenomenology of 10, 89, praxeological approaches 19, 24, 33, 38n2
90–2, 94, 104, 105, 217 see also American pragmatism; pragmatism;
body studies, phenomenological tradition of 19, theoretical traditions: Bourdieusian/practice
89, 90–1, 205, 217 theory, performance studies, performativity
corporeal schema 89, 91 Preciado, Paul 47, 63n3
cultural phenomenology 69 psychology 68, 69, 80–3, 84, 84n2, 85nn8–9
Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of experimental psychology 81
perception 90–1, 204 “mind–body problem” 80, 85n8
phenomenological ground of seselelãme 9 psychoanalysis xiii, 91, 92
phenomenology of illness 224 psychoanalytic perspectives xviii, 6, 22, 91, 92
phenomenology of race and racism 89, psychological anthropology 68
90–4, 104–5, 217 seselelãme, in academic psychology 80
poles of action 29, 31 therapy 66, 76, 84
religious practices as phenomenological social psychology 80
experience 160 sociology, in contradistinction to 22, 83
reversibility, phenomenology of 31, 34 public health
social movements, phenomenological framing of “excess” weight/fat as public health
approach 13, 204, 219 crisis 111–12, 113, 114–15
sociogeny 91 “stigma system” 120
see also theoretical traditions, phenomenology see also health
Pickett, Kate 119
Pitts-Taylor, Victoria 3, 4, 7, Q
134, 136 quantum physics 4–5
positivism ix, 1–2, 21, 24, 50 queer 60, 138, 144, 146–9
critique of 13, 50, 231
positivist epistemology 22, 231 R
postcolonialism xii Raby, Rebecca 194
postcolonial awareness 104 race and racism
postcolonial criticism 92 anti-Black discourses 12, 179–80, 185–6,
postcolonial feminism 10, 92 188, 193–4
postcolonial literature 89, 96 “color-blind” neoliberal racism 181
postcolonial modernity 104–5 deontologisation/reontologisation of race 50–1,
see also decolonization; gender on the 57–8
post-colony; Nervous Conditions DNA and 45–6
postmodernism 4, 23–4
ethnicons 57, 60, 62n14
postmodern crisis of meaning 23–6
gendering operates in parallel ways to
postmodern egalité 24
racialization 92–3
theorization of the body and 20, 25–6
see also theoretical traditions, postmodernism metal lead and 47–8
post-structuralism 3, 4, 24, 26, 50, 56 molecularization of race and identity 51–5
power 27 phenomenology of race and racism 89, 90–4,
body/materiality and power 4, 5, 9, 10 104–5, 217
colonial power 89, 92–3 race categories 3, 50, 55–6, 60, 89, 231
diagnosis and power 223–4 race and gender as material and substantial
discursive power 3, 180, 182, 183 identities 55–6
embodied vulnerability and social power 205, race as technique/identity 46, 51, 53–4, 57
211, 215 racial consciousness 10, 91, 185, 218
Foucault, Michel on 3, 6, 29 racial differences 5
institutional power 7, 216–17 racial discrimination and cultural signification 30
intersectionality and power 52, 55, 122, 124, racial identities 46, 47–8, 51, 57, 92
178, 179, 216–19 the racial as molecular materiality of technique/
meaning/language and 7, 29, 30–1, 49, 50, 55, identity 51–7
59–61, 67, 135–6, 142, 149 racial normalization 31
255
racialization 3, 9, 12, 30, 46, 47–8, 55, 59, 62, technoscientific 50, 57
75, 84, 88, 89, 91, 92, 94, 100, 104, 180–1, thick description 35
185, 190–3, 202, 215 reverse discourse 181–2, 196n5
racialized bodies 10, 55, 57, 88, 89, 91, 92, 95, Black girls’ bodies, embodied reverse discourse 12,
104, 105, 180, 188, 192, 193, 195 181–3, 186, 188, 195, 196n5
racist tropes 180, 192 body work and 182
school discipline and 181 definition 196n5
structural racism 11, 119 Riediger, Natalie 115
see also Black bodies; Black girls’ bodies ritual 8, 21, 28, 34, 36, 93, 160, 213
in educational settings; Blackness, the Robertson, Roland 21, 22, 23, 25
molecular and Robertson, Steve 110, 121, 122, 123, 124
Rajan-Rankin, Sweta 10, 88–108 Rodriguez, Dylan 206
rational choice 2 Rosenberg, Charles 233
rational actor 21, 22, 23 Rosenberg, Jordy 53
rationality 1, 4, 21, 22, 23, 38n6, 67, 69, 77, 83, Russo, Chandra 12–13, 202–22
90, 91, 92, 112
Reed, Isaac Ariail x, xiiinn2–3, xiiin5, 20, 28, 32 S
Rehabilitation Act (1973) 2 Saldanha, Arun 50–1
relationality 68, 82 Sartre, Jean-Paul 91, 94–5
gender relations, relational power context of 122 Satchidananda, Swami 155, 162, 172
identity formation and 69, 116 Scambler, Graham 118, 119, 120, 122, 125
knowing the self and 90 Schneider, Joseph W. 113, 233
relational approach to the study of the body 70 Scott-Samuel, Alex 110, 119–20
socialization, relational selves 70 self
see also intersubjectivity; social interaction; agency and 3–4, 183, 204
symbolic interaction as an achievement 25
religion and spirituality beauty and 135
colonial Christianity 95, 98, 100, 102 biographical disruption of 33, 133–4, 147–8
embodied religious practices 160–1, 173, 174 body as mutable outer representation of 3
solidarity activism and 209, 212, 213–14 embodied self 25, 31–2, 33, 36, 138, 210
the symbolic in religious practices 37, 160, 174n3 Integral Yoga, eternal/“True Self ” 12, 157, 158,
symbolic/somatic interplay in religious 167, 168, 169, 171–2, 173
practice 11, 161, 174 inward Black self 190
“theologies of the body” 161 narrative, discourse, meaning and the self ix,
see also Integral Yoga 161, 183
research methods power and the self 3
biomythography as 62n5 protean reinvention of 24
critical hermeneutic 57 race, heightened awareness and 218
embodied 203, 211, 219 as rational actor 22
embodied artistic 60–1 religious practices and 160
embodied vulnerability and 13, 203, 206, self-actualization 3
207–11 self-care 2
empiricism of mainstream sociology 231 self-expression 3
ethnography 13, 45, 75, 111, 116, 158, 162, 207, see also SPCS of the body and embodiment, self
208, 216, 219 and society as reciprocally constituted through
experimental 44, 60 the physical body; subjectivity
historical development of semiotics xi, xii, 3
sociological methodologies 2 affordances of the physical body and 30, 31, 34,
interviews 34, 116, 136, 162–3 37, 135
narrative analysis xi material-semiotic perspective 5, 6, 9, 31, 46, 47,
“observant participation” 207 50, 55
participant observation 162–3, 207 mimesis 34
positivism 2, 22, 230–1 see also language; signification; symbols/
“practice as research” 60 symbolization
psychological 80–2 the senses
qualitative ix, x, 208 aesthetic experience and 33, 141–3
quantitative ix, 55 Culture and the Senses 75
research ethics 209 the five-senses model 70
semiotics xi Life of the Senses 70
social pattern analysis 230 mind/body dualism and 90
Strong Program cultural sociology methodological Phenomenology of Perception 91
commitments 20, 28 pleasure and 24, 78, 98
256
INDEX
sensation/sensory experience 24, 27, 68, 69, 70, Shore, Brad 68

78, 79, 98, 139, 160, 169 sight see the senses; vision
sensemaking 12–13, 203, 206–7, 212, 219 signification 20, 26, 30, 32, 39n11
sense/sensory studies 69–70, 85n5 emotions as system of signification 206
sensibility and 31, 32 form/content 32, 36
the sensible 67, 72, 74, 83 frailty, Falstaff’s flesh in Shakespeare’s Henry IV as
sensible objects 69 signifier of 112
sensorium 69–70 interpretation and 32
sensory-emotional 9, 66, 82 materiality of 39n10
smell 160, 178 muscles, racially signified 150n5
touch 31–2, 34, 72 reverse discourse, use of dominant discourse
see also aesthetics; embodiment; signifiers in 196n5
materiality/materialism/matter, the senses and sign 20, 24, 26, 32, 35, 36, 38n7, 39nn10–11,
sensation; sound; vision; voice 44, 50, 53
seselelãme 9, 10, 66–7, 83–4, 85n6 significant gestures 30
in academic parlance 68–70, 83 signified 31, 32
in African everyday terms 67–8, 70–3, 82 signifier 32, 36, 39n10, 196n5
Anlo-Ewe speakers’ interpretation of “signifyin(g)” 68
78–80, 82 signifying structures 35
Anlo-Ewe ways of knowing 10, 66 surface/depth 26, 31, 32
in Black Atlantic worlds 68 vanity, breast reconstruction as signifier of 141
as bodily ways of knowing 9, 67, 68, 69, 70, 74, see also interpretation; meaning; semiotics;
79–80 symbols/symbolization
Bourdieu’s habitus and 69, 78 Simmel, Georg 2, 21–2
categorical thinking and 70, 72, 76, 77, 84 Sivananda, Swami 155, 162
commodification of 9, 67, 73, 77, 83, 84 Sledge, Piper 11, 133–54
as concept “everything is connected” 67, 77 Smith, Philip 6, 20, 23, 25, 26, 27, 28, 31, 38n7
cultural appropriation of 9, 67, 73, 75–6, 80, social action ix, 2, 20, 22, 24, 38, 183
83, 84 the body, in theories of 22
emotional dimensions of 9, 66–7, 72–3, 78, 82–3 cultural codes and 30
fitness and 73, 74, 76, 82 as cultural performance 38n1
Global North use of 9, 66–7, 73–7, 80, 82, economic-cum-social action 23, 25
83, 84 meaning, power and 31
globalization and 67, 69, 73–7 “motifactional” force and 20, 22, 36–7
as globally reaching “family of related cultural postmodernism and 24
models” 68 semiotic significance of ix
interpretive distortion of 9, 67, 73–7, 80, 82, see also action; behavior; social interaction;
83, 84 symbolic interactionism
intersubjectivity and 9, 82–3, 84 social constructionism
modal thinking and 70–3, 77, 78–9, 84 body, social construction of 7, 14, 88, 90, 117,
New Age and 67, 74 124, 134
as opposed to euro-American ways of being 66 Cartesian dualism and 90
as pan-African foundational schema 68 childhood 111
psychology and 80–3, 85nn8–9 gender, social construction of 31, 33, 46–7, 105,
sensory studies 70, 85n5 117, 133, 139, 144, 148–9, 150n5, 179, 181,
see also Anlo-Ewe people (southeastern 192, 227
Ghana) masculinities, social construction of 11,
sexuality 46–7, 116–17, 124
Black girls’ bodies 98, 193, 194 molecules as materially and socioculturally
Christian morality and 98 constructed 9, 44, 45–8, 49, 50
colonialism and 89, 91, 92, 100 obesity 119–20
as cultural category 7, 52, 56 race 31, 48, 180, 181, 192, 195
Female Hypoactive Sexual Desire Disorder 232 social constructionism/phenomenology
mastectomy and 146, 147 comparison 105n1
misogynoir discourses and black female see also theoretical traditions,
sexuality 181, 192 social constructionism
Nervous Conditions 98, 100 social interaction ix, 11, 20, 21, 144, 149,
testosterone, gender and 47 150n5, 178
Shepherd, Philip 67, 74, 75–6, 77 avoidance of 178
Radical Wholeness 74, 75 creative resistance through 150n3
Shilling, Chris 2, 3, 5, 19, 22, 160, 161, 182, family/parent–child interactions 10, 34, 136,
183–4, 234 144, 146
257
interpersonal “communities of experience” postmodern 4, 23–6, 37

and 11, 149 postwar sociology 21
“maneuverability” and bodily negotiation 12, 183 process, attention to 5–7
mediating role of breastedness/breastlessness in professionalization of 21, 38n4
intimate social interactions 144, 146 psychoanalytic sociology xviii
microlevel 11, 12, 179, 183 as scientific discipline 21–3
misogynoir, interactional contexts 180, 182 semiotic turn in 3
reassembling the social and 26 sociological critique 125
teachers/students interactions 12, 179, 184, 185, sociological imagination 230
186–8, 189–90, 191, 192, 194, 195 sociological models of identities as labels or
see also intersubjectivity; relationality; social axes 58
action; symbolic interactionism sociology of the body 20, 23, 27–8, 33, 37–8, 195
social justice 121, 123, 125, 208 see also Interpretive Lenses in Sociology;
social movements research methods; sociology of diagnosis;
affect/emotion in 205–6, 209, 214, 219 SPCS (Strong Program cultural sociology);
Black Lives Matter 104, 119 theoretical traditions
the body in 13, 203, 204 sociology of diagnosis 13, 223–5, 232–4
civil rights and 2, 119 crowdsourcing diagnosis 223, 233
civil rights movement 2, 181 diagnosis is everywhere 233
disability rights 2 drapetomania 232
feminist/women’s movements 2, 23, 88, 93, 105, Female Hypoactive Desire Disorder 232
110–11, 113, 117, 118, 232 gender and 225–30
as knowledge projects 206 language of diagnosis 224, 233
religion in 213–14 low libido as illness 232
School of the Americas Watch 202 overweight 232, 233
social movements as sensemaking projects 13, 203, pharmaceutical industry marketing and disease
204, 206, 215, 219 creation 232
social movement studies 203, 204, 206, 209, 210 self-diagnosis 223
US/Mexico border justice movement 202, 207–8 social patterns 230
Witness Against Torture 202 stillbirth 232
see also activism; solidarity activism “thingness” and diagnosis 232
sociology see also diagnosis; health; sociology,
American Sociological Association medical sociology
(ASA) xviii, 231 solidarity activism 12–13, 202–3, 207, 213, 215,
body and 1–7, 21–3 218, 219
body, absence from sociological theory/ affect and emotion 12–13, 205–6, 214
disembodied approach 1, 19, 21–3, 234 arrests and jail time 206, 213, 215
“carnal sociology” 162 see also Crossley, Nick civil disobedience 203, 215, 219
classical and early sociology 1–2, 4, 6, 20, contesting US policies 202–3, 207–8, 213
21–3, 25 desert pilgrimage 203, 206, 207, 213–14
cognitive sociology/approaches xviii, 6, embodied practices and feelings of solidarity 203,
85n9, 206 212–13, 219
contemporary sociology 20, 23, 38 embodied vulnerability 12–13, 203, 204–7, 212,
corporeal turn in 2–3, 19, 23 215, 219
cultural sociology xviii, 6, 8, 19–38 passim, 174 embodiment of 202, 203
distinction from other scientific disciplines 1–2, fasting 203, 206, 213–14
22–3, 83 high-r isk activism 203, 205, 209, 212, 215, 217,
embodied/disembodied sociological 219, 220n2
approach 114, 208, 231, 234 interpreting labors 13, 211–15
interpretation/interpretive endeavor ix–xii, 1, 2, interpreting raced and gendered bodies 215–19
27, 28, 31, 37, 118, 208 Migrant Trail Walk 13, 202, 207–15
macro-sociology/macro-social perspectives 25, observant participation 202, 207, 210–11
38n1, 116, 118, 119, 125, 183 phenomenological approach 13, 204–205
medical sociology 10–11, 110, 118–23 physically demanding protest 203, 205, 206, 207,
micro-sociology/micro-social 211, 212, 213, 215
perspectives 25, 124 privilege based on race, gender, class 13, 205,
modern sociology 22–3, 24, 37, 70 214–15, 217, 218, 220n2
neo-modern context 25, 38 religious and spiritual practices 209, 212, 213–14
phenomenology, sociological treatments of 204 School of the Americas Watch 202, 215–16
physical duress, sociological perspective on 209 social movements as sensemaking projects 13, 203,
physical matter and 2 206, 212–15, 219
positivism and 1–2, 21, 22, 231 solidarity witnessing 12, 13, 203, 219
258
INDEX
US security state 205, 215, 216, 219 Strong Program in cultural sociology see SPCS
US state violence 203, 213, 215, 217, 218, 220n2 (Strong Program cultural sociology)
Witness Against Torture 202, 213 structuralism 3, 53, 56, 62n13
see also activism; research methods, embodied subjectivity
vulnerability and; social movements academic disciplines, biographical account 13,
Solomon Linda, “Mbube” song 85n10 225–34
sound Black subjectivities 179–80
Black girls’ sonic performances 191, 192 body and self 3, 13, 22, 23, 25, 179
laughter 155, 157, 188, 190–2, 195 postmodernism and 24–5
quiet 189–90, 191 religious practices and 160
as signifier 39n10 researcher’s embodied subjectivity 13
silence 171, 188–90, 210 seselelãme, intersubjectivity 9, 82–3, 84
soft vocal tone, association with whiteness 191 subject formation 24–5, 38n2, 92
“sonic flutters” and racialized understandings of subjectivity-idealism vs reason-society 22
accented speech 185 subjectivity/objectivity binary 8, 20, 22, 25
sounding Black 185, 195 see also intersubjectivity; self
volume/loudness, gendered and racialized symbolic interactionism 6, 12, 22, 137, 150n3
stereotypes 186–8, 190–2, 194 Black girls’ bodies in educational
see also the senses; voice settings 12, 183–4
Spatz, Ben 9, 44–65 Society for the Study of Symbolic
Blue Sky Body 62n6 Interaction xviii
What a Body Can Do 62n7 see also Blumer, Herbert; Mead, George
SPCS (Strong Program cultural sociology) 6, 8, 27, Herbert; theoretical traditions,
28, 29, 31, 36–8 symbolic interactionism
critique of 28–9, 38n7 symbols/symbolization 8, 11, 19, 30, 34
cultural sociologist, task of 26 as background against which bodies and social
Durkheim, Emile and 26 action are observed 35
see also SPCS, methodological commitments; body as material/natural symbol 1, 3, 8, 11
SPCS of the body and embodiment body as site of explicit symbolism 161
SPCS, methodological commitments breasts as symbol of female value 144
hermeneutic reconstruction of meaning 20, 28, collective-formative interpretive framework
30, 31–4, 35, 37, 38 and 5–6
maximal interpretation 20, 28, 34–7, 38 emblematization 21, 36, 142
relative autonomy of culture 6, 8, 20, icons and 36, 39n10
28–31, 38 as ideal vs instrumental resource 20, 38
see also SPCS (Strong Program cultural sociology); identity and 55
SPCS of the body and embodiment illness, activation of symbolic meanings of the
SPCS of the body and embodiment 8, 20–1, 23, body 233
26, 27, 37–8 Integral Yoga and symbolic/somatic interplay in
breast cancer-related mastectomy (example) 8, religious practice 11, 159, 161, 173–4
28, 33–4 interpretive sociology and 2
changing brown eyes to blue with contact lenses intuitive symbolic reality 39n11
(example) 8, 28, 30 living reality and 25–26
cultural codes 6, 8, 20, 32, 33, 37 masculinized symbols 112
ideality/materiality binary 8, 20, 22, 25, 37 prayer ties, symbolism of 212, 213
interpretive methodology of 28–37 religious practices understood
meaning and 19–20, 27–38 symbolically 160, 174n3
meaning-centered approach to body and reversibility with matter 31
embodiment 20, 22, 33, 36, 37 social-symbolic field, symbolic “distinctions”
moral aspects 26, 27, 29, 31, 36–7, 38 within 29
ritualized tooth extraction (example) 8, 28, subjective matter, symbolic foundations of 22
35–6 symbolic asymmetries, power, and violence 7,
self and society as reciprocally constituted through 67, 84, 110, 117
the physical body 8, 27, 37, 38 symbolic basis of economic-cum-social
structuration of bodily meaning 8, 27 action 23
subjectivity/objectivity binary 8, 20, 22, 25 symbolic dimensions of the body 3, 7, 8, 9, 11,
symbolic dimension of the corporeal and lived 12, 14, 19, 20, 25, 26, 27, 30, 31, 35, 36–7, 88,
body 19, 25, 26, 27, 30, 31, 35, 36–7 89, 90, 105, 112, 124, 144, 159, 161, 180, 182,
see also SPCS (Strong Program cultural 183, 184
sociology) symbolic dimensions of social life 8, 25–6, 31
Stoltz, Dustin S. 38n7 symbolic relations of power, reciprocal relation to
Strauss, Claudia 68 meaning 7, 30
259
symbolic–somatic interplay 11, 159, 161 psychoanalysis xiii, 6, 10, 91–2

symbolic system 11, 12, 27, 37, 117 social constructionism 7, 88, 90, 105n1, 227
symbolic webs, fasciae, ligatures, connective subaltern studies 93
tissues 21, 27, 32, 35, 68 symbolic interactionism 6, 12, 19, 22, 137,
symbolic worlds 158, 160 150n3, 183–4
symbolization and meaning-making 30 Weberian 2, 6, 21, 22, 38n5, 231
see also semiotics; signification; symbolic see also Interpretive Lenses in Sociology
interactionism; totemism totemism 21, 36
totemic principle 36
T transgender 47, 60, 142, 143, 148,
TallBear, Kim 45–6, 50 149, 150n4
Taonui, Rāwiri 230, 235n1 Turner, Bryan 2, 20, 38n5, 85n9, 234
technique 9, 27, 44, 47, 58, 167 Turner, Paaige 208
technique/technology and identity 47 Turner, Terence 23
academic disciplinary technique 229, 230
embodied 49, 62nn7–8 V
epistemic technique 51 van der Riet, Pamela 138
gender as technique 62n3 Vannini, Phillip 3, 6, 138, 150n3
identity and 46, 47, 50, 51, 53–4, 56–61 Vargas, João Costa 202, 207
Indigenous technique (knowledge and ways of Vertinsky, Patricia A. 226–7, 234
being) 53 vision
literary 95 embodied disposition as a way of seeing
molecules of 9, 46, 54 experience 90
representational techniques 1 scars, seeing surgical results 143
techniques of the body 90, 160 seeing, socially patterned by experience and
“techniques of the self ” 47 action 161
technology 1, 2, 23, 31, 45, 49, 121, 134, seselelãme as an emotional expression of
179, 180 seeing 72
theoretical traditions x–xii, xviii, 5–8, 9 see also the senses
Black feminism 89, 105n1, 181, 188 voice 12, 172, 184, 185, 189, 195, 225
Bourdieusian/practice theory 6, 19, 20, 29, 33, see also the senses; sound
36, 69, 78, 90, 122, 123, 160 vulnerability see solidarity activism
classical sociological 1, 2, 4, 6, 21, 22
cognitive sociology 6, 85n9 W
critical race theory 9, 44, 55, 88, 217 Wacquant, Loïc 158, 162
cultural sociology 6, 8, 20, 26, 27–38, Waskul, Dennis 3, 6, 138, 150n3
85n9, 174n3 ways of knowing 45, 90
deconstructionism 4 protest tactics, affect, embodied vulnerability
Durkheimian 1, 2, 6, 21, 25–6, 35–7, 209 and 205–6, 213
embodied artistic research 9, 44, 48, 49, seselelãme as bodily way of knowing 9, 10, 66–8,
60–1, 62n3 70, 74, 76, 79, 80, 82, 84
feminist/gender theory 3–5, 6, 10, 51, 57, 62n3, see also epistemology; interpretation; knowledge
76, 88–9, 90, 92–4, 105, 110, 111, 112, 134–5, production; perception
137, 149, 217, 225–6, 231 WCHP (Weight-Centered Health Paradigm) 112,
feminist materialism 4–5 113, 114, 118
Foucauldian/discourse analysis 3, 6, 29, 62n7, Weber, Max 2, 6, 21, 22
90, 122–3, 179, 230 Weinberg, Darin 90
hermeneutic 20, 24, 28, 31–4, 37 Weitz, Rose 142, 143
intersectional 10, 49–50, 52, 55, 62n6, 62n9, 89, Well Now project 114, 125
178–9, 184, 195, 217–18 West, Candace 6, 137, 141
literary criticism 224 whakapapa 230, 235n1
Marxian 23, 57 Wiest, Julie B. ix–xiii, xviii, xix, 5–6
modern 23–5, 37, 38, 69, 70 Wilderson, Frank 56, 62n13
performance studies 9, 44, 58, 60 Wilkinson, Richard 119
performativity xii, 3, 8, 22, 36, 45, 62n8 Williams, Gareth H. 121
phenomenology 7, 10, 13, 19, 24, 69, 76, Williams, Lauren 116
85n7, 89, 90–2, 94, 105, 105n1, 204–5, 217, Williams, Robert 110, 121, 122,
219, 224 123, 124
postcolonial xii, 10, 89, 92 Williams, Simon 19, 205
postmodernism 4, 20, 23–6, 37 Winchester, Daniel 160, 161, 162, 165, 167,
post-structuralism 3–4, 24, 26, 50, 56 174n3, 174n5
pragmatism 6 Winfrey, Oprah 31
260
INDEX
Wolfe, Patrick 58 Yogaville 162

Wright, Jan 111, 113 see also Integral Yoga
Wun, Connie 179, 186–7, 189, 190 Young, Iris Marion 227,
Wuthnow, Robert 161, 174n3 229, 234
Y Z
yoga see Integral Yoga Zerubavel, Eviatar 6, 230
Yoga Journal 162 Zimmerman, Don H. 6, 137, 141
261

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INTERPRETIVE

The Interpretive Lenses in Sociology series provides a unique forum for

Forthcoming in the series:

Interpreting Contentious Memory

Out now in the series:

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Bristol University Press

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Cover design: blu inc

Series Editors’ Preface: Interpretive Lenses in Sociology— ix

Introduction: Between Meaning and Matter 1

1 Toward a Strong Cultural Sociology of the Body 19

8 Black Girls’ Bodies and Belonging in the Classroom 178

use various approaches and draw on different interpretive traditions to

In this volume, Anne Marie Champagne and Asia Friedman present

Anne Marie Champagne is a doctoral candidate in sociology at Yale

Asia Friedman is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of

Kathryn Linn Geurts is Professor of Anthropology and Chair of the

Mrinalini Greedharry is an associate professor in the English Literature,

Erin F. Johnston is a senior research associate in the Department of

Annemarie Jutel is Professor of Health at Te Herenga Waka—​Victoria

Sefakor Komabu-​Pomeyie holds a PhD in educational leadership and

abuses in schools. She has held a Ford Foundation Fellowship in addition to

Brittney Miles is a PhD candidate in sociology at the University of

Lee F. Monaghan is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of

Sweta Rajan-Rankin is Reader (Associate Professor) in Sociology and Social

Chandra Russo is Associate Professor of Sociology at Colgate University,

Piper Sledge is Associate Professor of Sociology at Bryn Mawr College. Her

Ben Spatz is a nonbinary scholar-​practitioner working at the intersections

Preface and Acknowledgments

While none of the contributions to this volume specifically originated

Anne Marie Champagne

At minimum, sociological interpretation engages processes of analytical

self-​expression, and self-​actualization (Featherstone, 1982; Foucault, 1988;

physics (Barad, 2007), to move beyond discourse while also avoiding

1) Collective-​formative framework: The focal angle of this mode of interpretation

conceives of meaning as inhering in dominant cultural codes that pattern

memory, thinking, and acting. Phenomenology is a prominent theoretical

These three distinct orientations to meaning have at times resulted in

asked contributing scholars to explore how the subjects of their studies,

Looking to what bodies and consequently identities are made of, in

symbolic systems of gender, medicalization, and neoliberal capitalism (with

research” and to social movements as “sensemaking projects.” Interview and

The contributions curated and juxtaposed in this volume are intended to

Crawford, R. (1984) ‘A cultural account of “health”: control, release and

Pitts-​Taylor, V. (2008) ‘Introduction’, in V. Pitts-​Taylor (ed) The Cultural

Toward a Strong Cultural Sociology

emergent property of social interaction?), where it is located (in the mind or

Culture and the body: modern, postmodern, and

distinctive bodies and embodiments. One glimpses, as Chris Shilling (2012)

Interpreting modernity: the postmodern crisis of meaning and cultural

Susen, 2015). Privileging the ever-​fleeting present over historical continuity,

Toward a strong cultural sociology of the body and

The interpretive methodology of a strong cultural sociology of the body and

Introduction: Between Meaning and Matter 1

8 Black Girls’ Bodies and Belonging in the Classroom 178

Annemarie Jutel is Professor of Health at Te Herenga Waka—Victoria

Sefakor Komabu-Pomeyie holds a PhD in educational leadership and

Ben Spatz is a nonbinary scholar-practitioner working at the intersections

self-expression, and self-actualization (Featherstone, 1982; Foucault, 1988;

1) Collective-formative framework: The focal angle of this mode of interpretation

Pitts-Taylor, V. (2008) ‘Introduction’, in V. Pitts-Taylor (ed) The Cultural

Susen, 2015). Privileging the ever-fleeting present over historical continuity,

Take, for instance, this account of a daily parent–child interaction ritual

With my son, because he was breastfed and he was still co-sleeping

Latour, B. (1996) ‘On actor-network theory: a few clarifications’, Soziale

again in Jean-François Lyotard’s lowercasing of “jews” as a figural position,

West Africans enjoy a sensory-emotional, embodied way of knowing that

This early twenty-first century spread of seselelãme raises thorny questions.

Another respondent, Mawuli, a 40-year-old male attorney, succinctly

Indeed, context is important. Seselelãme emerges from Ewe-language

We are initially told of emotional dimensions of seselelãme—sorrow,