Sociology of the body is a branch of sociology

Sociology

Sociology is the study of society. It is a social science—a term with which it is sometimes synonymous—which uses various methods of empirical investigation and critical analysis to develop a body of knowledge about human social activity...

 studying the representation

Social psychology

Social psychology is the scientific study of how people's thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are influenced by the actual, imagined, or implied presence of others. By this definition, scientific refers to the empirical method of investigation. The terms thoughts, feelings, and behaviors include all...

s and social uses of the human body

Human body

The human body is the entire structure of a human organism, and consists of a head, neck, torso, two arms and two legs.By the time the human reaches adulthood, the body consists of close to 100 trillion cells, the basic unit of life...

 in modern societies.

Early theories

According to Thomas Laqueur

Thomas W. Laqueur

Thomas W. Laqueur is an American sexologist and author of Solitary Sex : A Cultural History of Masturbation and Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud as well as many articles and reviews. Lacqueur is the winner of the Mellon Foundation's 2007 Distinguished Achievement Award, and is...

, prior to the eighteenth century the predominant model for a social understanding of the body was the "one sex model/one flesh model

One sex two sex theory

The one-sex and two-sex theory are two models of human anatomy or fetal development discussed in Thomas Laqueur's book Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud. He theorizes that a fundamental change in attitudes toward human sexual anatomy occurred in Europe in the 18th and 19th...

". It followed that there was one model of the body which differed between the sexes and races, for example, the vagina was simply seen as a weaker version of the penis and even thought to emit sperm.

This was changed by the Enlightenment. In the sixteenth century, Europe began to participate in the slave trade

Atlantic slave trade

The Atlantic slave trade, also known as the trans-atlantic slave trade, refers to the trade in slaves that took place across the Atlantic ocean from the sixteenth through to the nineteenth centuries...

 and in order to justify this a large quantity of literature was produced showing the deviant sexuality

Human sexual behavior

Human sexual activities or human sexual practices or human sexual behavior refers to the manner in which humans experience and express their sexuality. People engage in a variety of sexual acts from time to time, and for a wide variety of reasons...

 and savagery of the African (Fanon

Frantz Fanon

Frantz Fanon was a Martiniquo-Algerian psychiatrist, philosopher, revolutionary and writer whose work is influential in the fields of post-colonial studies, critical theory and Marxism...

, 1976). In the eighteenth century, the ideas of egalitarianism

Egalitarianism

Egalitarianism is a trend of thought that favors equality of some sort among moral agents, whether persons or animals. Emphasis is placed upon the fact that equality contains the idea of equity of quality...

 and universal and inalienable rights were becoming the intellectual norm. However, they could not justify the subordination of women within this theory.

To explain these the biology of incommensurability

Commensurability (philosophy of science)

Commensurability is a concept in the philosophy of science. Scientific theories are described as commensurable if one can compare them to determine which is more accurate; if theories are incommensurable, there is no way in which one can compare them to each other in order to determine which is...

was created. This essentially claimed that different sexes and races were better adjusted for different tasks and could therefore show the necessity of discrimination and subordination. For example, craniometry was used to show people of African descent to be less evolved than those of European descent (Gould

Stephen Jay Gould

Stephen Jay Gould was an American paleontologist, evolutionary biologist, and historian of science. He was also one of the most influential and widely read writers of popular science of his generation....

, 1981).

This was also combined with the technological developments which were taking place, leading to people seeing the body as a machine and therefore understandable, classifiable and repairable, one of the first examples of this was the work of William Harvey

William Harvey

William Harvey was an English physician who was the first person to describe completely and in detail the systemic circulation and properties of blood being pumped to the body by the heart...

 in the early seventeenth century.

Another early key area of development was the Cartesian Dichotomy

Mind-body dichotomy

The mind-body problem is a philosophical problem arising in the fields of metaphysics and philosophy of mind. The problem arises because mental phenomena appear to be qualitatively and substantially different from the physical bodies on which they appear to depend. There are a few major theories on...

. This saw the mind and the body as separated and led to the principle of interaction between the two being an accepted theory on the body until the development of the Structuralist

Structuralism (psychology)

Structuralism in psychology refers to the theory founded by Edward B. Titchener , with the goal to describe the structure of the mind in terms of the most primitive elements of mental experience...

 approach in the twentieth century.

The importance of studying the body in the Sociology of health and illness

Especially important within the sociology of the body tradition is the sociology of health and illness. This is because illness may obviously reduce the level of normal functioning of the body. Also, increasingly people in society believe that illness is prevented by fulfilling activities leading to a healthy body (thus changing one's lifestyle) such as dieting and exercise, as well as avoiding anything that can cause damage to the body, like smoking. Moreover, medical science is now able to alter our bodies through plastic surgery, transplanting organs, reproductive aids and even change in an unborn baby's genetic structure.

Historical sociology of body and physical practices

In France a lot of researchers have been working on this topic. The first one was probably Jean-Marie Brohm, writing a book titled Body and politics in 1974 (Delarge), but he has been followed by numerous authors. Georges Vigarello wrotte Le Corps redressé, in 1978, Christian Pociello Sports et Société en 1981, André Rauch Le souci du corps in 1983, Jacques Gleyse :fr:Jacques Gleyse Archéologie de l'Education physique au XXe siècle en France, in 1995 and L'Instrumentalisation du corps, in 1997. He is specially working on the topic of links between words and flesh.
Various journals are publishing papers in this domain in France : STAPS International Journal of Sport Science and Physical Education, Corps & Culture, Corps that could be consulted on the web. But quite all those works are not translated in English so they are difficult to access for the most of American and English researchers on the topic.

Two examples of how body image can become distorted and related to sociological factors

Sociology of the body has become deeply affected by society and the way in which society views one another, which in turn results in the way in which we view ourselves. At one end of the spectrum there are eating disorders such as anorexia and bulimia and on the other end there is growing epidemic of obesity especially in the US. Both ideals have increased widely over the last few decades due in part to growing mass media coverage in which there are norms within society and the always growing pressure to either look and feel a certain way.

• Anorexia, a disorder often defined as a “markedly reduced appetite or total aversion to food” (Definition of Anorexia, 2003). Often along with excessive exercise this is the one disorder that has led to the large increase in overly thin individuals. Along with anorexia, bulimia, “a disorder that can be defined as episodes of secretive excessive eating (binge-eating) followed by inappropriate methods of weight control, such as self-induced vomiting (purging), abuse of laxatives and diuretics, or excessive exercise” has also been an increased method used by individuals all over the world in the fight to remain sometimes deadly thin (Definition of Bulimia 2003). Both disorders are rooted in feelings of shame and desire to have control over one's body (Giddens,Duneier, Appelbaum, and Carr 2009). The individual feels inadequate and imperfect. They may have anxieties about how others perceive them which becomes a focus on feelings about their body. At that point, shedding weight becomes the means of making everything right in their world. The fact that we have a strong personal independence over our bodies in the past presents us with positive possibilities as well as new anxieties and problems (Giddnes,Duneier, Appelbaum, and Carr 2009).

• This idea is what sociologists call "socialization of nature", which is a phenomenon that used to be "natural", or given in nature, and have now become social and depend on our social decisions.

• Obesity, the state of being well above one's normal weight, has become the other end of the distorted ideas about body image (Definition of obesity, 2001). According to the Centers for Disease Control, roughly 60 percent of adult Americans are now over weight, and an estimated 6.5 percent of American children ages six to eleven along with 5 percent of ages twelve to nineteen are overweight (Giddens, Duneier, Appelbaum, and Carr 2009). Reasons thought to be behind obesity vary widely and are often debated. Some believe it has to do with the “population being a statistical artifact, some believe that childhood obesity is due to compositional factors, and then others believe that the problems are due to something called an "obesogenic environment." Sociologists are perplexed mostly in the persistence of negative attitudes towards overweight and obese individuals.

• From the sociological perspective the interactions that have been seen to show up between society and that of obese individuals is that persons of obesity are more likely to experience employment discrimination, discrimination by health care providers, and the daily experience of teasing, insult, and shame (Giddens, Duneier, Appelbaum, and Carr 2009).