1. Cultured
Bodies

2. The Social
Construction
of
Corporeality

3. Corporeal
Physical, and not spiritual,
of the body; relating to a
person's body, which is of a
material nature or tangible,
especially as opposed to
their spirit;

4. Our bodies are most decidedly
a part of nature, subject to
natural processes such as
growth and decay, hunger and
illness, and so forth, all of
which daily remind us of our
connection to a realm outside
society and culture.

5. While the human body consists
of an indisputable natural
substratum, cultural studies
takes seriously the notion its
appearance, condition, and
activity are culturally shaped.

6. Discussion of the human body
in cultural studies often also
refer to the related terms
‗mind‘ and ‗self‘. What are the
differences and relations
between these notions?

7. At least five specific features of
the bodies of humans
distinguish humans as species:
the capacity for binocular
vision, the audio-vocalic
system, bipedalism, hands, and
expressive capacity.

8. The capacity for binocular
vision – Most social encounters
begin with an assessment of the
appearance of the other. Most
generally, vision serves as the
coordinator of the senses.

9. The audio-vocalic system
The throat, mouth, and ears
are coordinated with the brain
and the central nervous system
to enable us to speak. The use
of language is our fundamental
symbolic capacity.

10. Bipedalism
We walk upright. Even in the
West‘s automobile-dominated
culture, walking remains the
basic way of moving around in
our world. Bipedalism also
enhances the way that our
vision works.

11. Hands – The fingers and
opposing thumb of the human
hand permit the manipulation
of objects in precise and
careful way. Tool use involves
complex bodily coordination
focused around the skilled use
of the hands.

12. Expressive Capacity
Humans have a capacity for
greater gestural complexity
than other primates. The faces
of humans can express a wide
range of emotions and some
embodied gestures (laughter)
appear to be unique to humans.

13. These five features frame the
kinds of activity in which
humans can engage. Thus,
cultural studies emphasizes
that the body is not merely a
material entity, biological
datum or physiological fact but
is a social construction.

14. Mind, however, is the capacity
for reasoned thought and
reflection, carried out by the
brain but not reducible to it.
The mind is regarded as
dwelling in the human body
but remains somehow distinct
from it.

15. The mind-body split is often
linked to a number of further
contrasts:
mind – body
private – public
inner – outer
culture – nature
reason – passion

16. This schema gives prominence
to mind in defining the person.
The body is seen, at best, as the
mind‘s vehicle and, at worst, as
driven by desires and appetites
that need the mind‘s
restraining influence,
guidance, and command.

17. Body and mind are better
thought of as interdependent,
not as separate entities. It is
also important to understand
that the human body straddles
the realms of ‗nature‘ and
‗culture‘.

18. The functioning of the material
body must obey natural
processes – we all have to sleep
and eat – but how sleeping,
eating, and other bodily activity
actually occurs in inescapably
framed social and cultural
factors.

19. Consider the very noticeable
significance of age and gender
in the treatment of the human
bodies. Except for transsexuals
the assignment of ‗male‘ and
‗female‘ is a categorization that
is exhaustive of the population
and lifelong in duration.

20. Age is, in many societies, no
less significant. At every stage
of life, there are expected forms
of behavior and culturally
defined and approved
experiences.

21. Shakespeare‘s 7 Ages of Man

22. Shakespeare‘s 7 Ages of Man
1. Infancy
In this stage he is a helpless
baby and knows little.

23. 2. Childhood – It is that stage
of life that he begins to go to
school. He is unwilling to leave
the protected environment of
his home as he is still not
confident enough to exercise
his own judgment.

24. 3. The lover – In this stage he
is always remorseful due to
some reason or other,
especially the loss of love. He
tries to express feelings
through song or some other
cultural activity.

25. 4. The Soldier – It is in this age that
he thinks less of himself and begins to
think more of others. He is very easily
aroused and is hot headed. He is
always working towards making a
reputation for himself and gaining
recognition, however short-lived it
may be, even at the cost of his own
life.

26. 5. The Justice - In this stage he has
acquired wisdom through the many
experiences he has had in life. He
has reached a stage where he has
gained prosperity and social status.
He becomes very attentive of his
looks and begins to enjoy the finer
things of life.

27. 6. Old Age – He begins to lose
his charm — both physical and
mental. He begins to become
the butt of others' jokes. He
loses his firmness and
assertiveness, and shrinks in
stature and personality.

28. 7. Extreme Old Age
He loses his status and he
becomes an insignificant
person. He becomes
dependent on others.

29. Therefore, gender, in
tandem with age, provides
two of the deepest
determinants of the cultural
and social shaping of the
human body.

30. Techniques
of the
Body

31. Very obviously, the body is the
means or instrument for carrying
out all the practical action through
which people engage the world.
Marcel Mauss devised the concept
of ‗body techniques‘ to describe the
ways in which society to men know
how to use their bodies.

32. There is no ‗natural‘ form to bodily
actions, no pan-human, pre-
cultural, universal or inherent
shape to actions such as walking,
swimming, spitting, digging,
marching, even staring or giving
birth. Rather, bodily actions are
historically and culturally variable.

33. However, body techniques are
vary quite conspicuously
according to gender and age
differences, the effects of
training, and the transmission
and acquisition of these
techniques.

34. For example, women deliver weak
punches in part because they
usually clasp their thumbs inside
their fingers; women throw
differently from men; children can
squat with ease while most adult
Westerners cannot.

35. Young:
Throwing
like a girl

36. Young identify differences in
Western industrial societies in how
women ‗hold‘ themselves
(comportment), their manner of
moving (motility), and their
relation to space (spatiality) which
are more limited and circumscribed
than the behaviors of men.

37. ―Girls don‘t bring their whole
bodies into the motion as much as
the boys. They don‘t reach back,
twist, move backward, step and
lean forward. Rather, the girls tend
to remain relatively immobile
except for their arms and even the
arm isn‘t extended as far as it can.‖

38. Feminine comportment and
movement is characteristically
marked by a failure to use the
body‘s full potential range of
motion. Some examples:
Women are generally not as open
with their bodies as men in their
gait and stride.

39. Typically, the masculine stride is
longer proportional to a man‘s
body than is the feminine stride to
a woman‘s. The man typically
swings his arms in a more open
and loose fashion than does a
woman typically more up and down
rhythm in his steps.

40. When simply standing or
leaning, men tend to keep their
feet further apart than do
women, and women tend more
to keep their hands and arms
touching or shielding their
bodies.

41. The origins of this characteristic
features of feminine comportment
and movement are not innate, but
currently dominant forms of
feminine motility serve to restrict
and inhibit the realization of
women‘s intentionality.

42. Goffman:
Body Idioms
&
Body Gloss

43. During social encounters, such as
when we are engaged in a
conversation with a friend or are
travelling on public transport, we
feel the need to acquire
information about others – their
status and identity, mood and
orientation towards us and so on.

44. •Facial expression
•Stance
•Limbs disposition
•Tone of speech
These are ‗body idioms‘ which
describes ‗dress, bearing,
movements and position, sound
level, physical & facial gestures
and broad emotional expressions

45. For example, Goffman shows how
walking involves a range of
cultural understandings about
types of people:
1. who may have to be managed
or avoided
(beggars, market researchers,
pamphleteers)

46. 2. Those to whom special care
must be exercised (the frail,
people with canes or guide
dogs, toddlers)
3. Those who can be turned to
for reliable directions (traffic
wardens, police)

47. 4. Those who want us to
stop and listen and watch
(buskers, mime artists)
5. Those who look likely to
threaten our persons and
property.

48. In walking down a street, we
constantly monitor our own bodies
and those of others to avoid
collisions – less complicated when
we are ‗single‘ (solitary walker)
than if we are ‗with‘ (accompanied
by others with whom we must
coordinate our progress.

49. This involves scanning upcoming
pedestrians but doing so in an
unobtrusive and non-threatening
way. Goffman calls this the norm
of ‗civil inattention‘. The
orderliness of many public places
depends on people following this
rule.

50. Representations
of
Embodiment

51. Representing
Masculinity

52. One element of hegemonic
masculinity involves bodily
displays of aggression and
violence. This is often regarded
as facilitated, if not actually
caused by male masculature
and chromosomal heritage.

53. Among teenage working-
class boys, for example, a
certain amount of pushing
and punching, playfully
framed, can function as
signifier of friendship.

54. Sometimes, this aggressive
behavior can be personal (e.g.
assault, fist fights, etc.) or
institutionalized (e.g. wars, etc)
and one of the best specific
institutionalized examples is
the fascist ideologies.

57. Fascist
a political system based on a
very powerful leader, state
control and being extremely
proud of country and race, and
in which political opposition is
not allowed.

60. This warrior mentality sharply
polarizes bodily characteristics
along gender lines. Women are
regarded as soft, fluid, a subversive
source of pleasure or pain who
must be contained and negative
‗other‘ to be hived off from
authentic masculine existence.

61. Men therefore need to police
the boundaries of their bodies
carefully, and through drills
and exercises develop a
machine-like, organized, and
hard body that can resist
merger or fusion with others,
and that is reliably autonomous

62. In this belief system, the
pleasure of combat is highly
praised and killing comes to be
seen as a means of affirming a
man‘s wholeness, a way of
asserting coherence of his body
and self by invading the bodily
boundaries of others.

63. The movie industry, now just a
century years old, has proved to
be a potent source of
representations of masculinity.
Arguably, there is a greater
range of masculinities on offer
in popular films than
femininities.

65. It needs to be emphasized that
male bodily power is evident in
many, very much more
mundane settings, such as
angling on a river or canal
bank.

67. Representing
Sexuality

68. The representations of the
human body, in particular by
postmodern technologies of
photography and film, has
stimulated a range of debates
about the limits of acceptable
images of the human body.

69. The representations of the
human body, in particular by
postmodern technologies of
photography and film, has
stimulated a range of debates
about the limits of acceptable
images of the human body.

72. We must realize that there is a
distinction between ‗erotica‘
and ‗pornography‘. Erotica has
its roots in the Greek word for
‗love‘, and generally connotes
a diffuse source of sexual
stimulation.

74. Pornography, however, pushes
sexual explicitness to the
extreme. It is a form of
representation that graphically
depicts sexuality in order to
stimulate its consumers.

75. It is also important to
distinguish between
‗offence‘ and ‗harm‘. What
persons and groups find
offensive varies and is a
matter of taste and moral
conviction.

76. When we claim that some
object or arrangement is
harmful, we are
maintaining that it has
measurable deleterious
effects on people‘s attitudes
and behavior.

77. For example, we may well
find offensive the cartoons
that children watch on TV,
but it is different matter
entirely to hold that these
cartoons are harmful.

78. Manifestly, there are many
sexualized images that give offence
to individuals or groups, but to
claim that pornography is harmful
is to propose that negative, anti-
social consequences can be proven
to follow from its existence and
consumption.

79. Cyborgism,
Fragmentation,
and the End of the
Body?

80. Fragmentation
The act or process of
breaking down something
into small pieces.

81. The human body is
increasingly coming to be
treated not as a unitary
whole but a differentiated
entity requiring specialized
treatment.

82. Consumer culture
fragments the body into a
series of body parts to be
maintained through diet,
cosmetics, exercise,
vitamins, etc.

84. Also, there are a wide range of
cosmetics to be applied to the
many different parts of the
body: mouth, hair, skin, eyes,
lips, teeth, legs, feet – and
products and applications
continue to diversify

87. Health care is provided
by medical specialisms
which divide the body up
into specific regions and
functions.

89. The fragmentation of the
body into a collection of
body parts can be regarded
as implicated in the larger
process of fragmentation in
the contemporary world.

90. The concept of cybernetic
organism or ‗cyborg‘ is
another challenge to
conventional essentialist
understanding of the
human body.

91. The cyborg was originally
conceived as neuro-
physiologically modified
human body that could
withstand the demands of
space journeys.

93. In reality, however, the
cyborg combination of the
mechanical with human is
already with us, evident in
the extensive use of simple
prosthetic devices.

95. It is also apparent in the wide
acceptance of cosmetic surgery,
biotechnological devices like
pacemakers, the use of
vaccination to program the
immune system to destroy
viruses and advances in genetic
engineering.

98. Humans are immersed in the
world, producing their
humanness in relationships
with each other and with
objects. We exercise in the gym,
play sports in specialist shoes,
and contact people by mobile
phones.

99. These routine interactions with
machines and technology draw
us into increasingly
international technocultural
networks – bringing an
important sense that we are all
cyborgs now.

100. For Haraway, the cyborg
notion refers to the hybrid
networks that arise from the
incorporations of humans
into technologies designed
to assist human projects.

101. The enormous impact of
techno-science on the home,
market, workplace, school, and
hospitals offer the potential to
override the old determinations
of class, race, and gender and
establish new modes of human
being.