BODY POLITICS BY ROBERTA SASSA TELLI
was created by Max Weber.Rationalization refers
Intro:
- Sociology has questioned the epistemological status
of the scientific study of the body
Rather than formulating
encompassing body typologies (Turner 1984; O'Neill 1985),
sociological theory
has questioned the epistemological assumptions involved in
the production of
natural facts, decentering the physical body of the bio-
medical sciences and
exploring the political implications of body representations
and practices
- There is a need to explore the political implications
of bodily representations and practices
They have
become political not only because they are shaped by
productive requirements or constrained by moral rules, but
also because their ``naturality'' is traced back to claims to
truth reflecting power differences.
What contributed to the concept
1. The body is seen as transformed into an instrument
- Marx: labor as a corporeal process
What is Corporeality?
-something that has physical form, it is physical, it is bodily
or bodied..
- having a material or substance
Marx’s lament on the “loss of corporeality
Capitalism thus
steals corporeality its meaning: the worker ``only feels
himself freely active in his
animal function ± eating, drinking, procreating, or at most
in his dwelling and
dressing-up, etc.; in his human functions he no longer feels
himself to be anything but an animal''
- Weber: on Discipline
“rational conditioning of work performances”
- Weber considers the modern factory as an
example of the rational conditioning of work
performances.
- Bureaucracy :
- Weber s interest in the nature of power and
authority and his realisation of the inevitability of
rationalisation in the operation of large scale
modern organisation -led home to establish a
theory on Bureaucracy.
- He felt that the operation of modern organisation in
any field would be impossible without Bureaucracy.
It's the coordination of activities of modern era.
1
- The rationalization of society is a concept that
to the process by which modern society has
increasingly become concerned with: Efficiency:
achieving the maximum results with a minimum
amount of effort
- Weber, bureaucracy is the basis for the systematic
formation of any organisation and is designed to
ensure efficiency and economic effectiveness. It is
an ideal model for management and its
administration to bring an organisation's power
structure into focus.
- Rationalization = development
- SOCIAL LIFE IS MORE AND MORE SUBJECTED
TO CALCULATION AND PREDICITON.
2. The body is the paramount symbol of the subject’s
self-possession and degree of civilization
- Elias: work on body rationalization (Civilizing
Proces)
Body government is explicitly linked to the political by
Norbert Elias
- as nations stabilized in the Wests after the 1500s,
power was centralized and became the preserve of a
small number of people
- these people were no longer revered for their
physical strength, but for their social standing
reflected in their courtly manners
- to be identified with power, people are encouraged
to display the same “civilized behaviour” as a
nation’s governing elite
- people and nations lacking the right behaviour are
seen as inferior and need “civilizing” into following
the rules of the powerful.
- Elias in his book “The Civilizing Process”
concludes that the way in which Western society
believes itself to be superior to others is summed
up by the concept of civilization.
- It can refer to all sorts of facts about nations: from
general ones such as lifestyles, values, customs,
religions.. to eprosnal ones, levels of bodily hygiene,
ways of preparing food,
- The rise of manners and etiquettes
- TRANSFORMATION in attitudes toward bodily
behaviours was key to this sense of civilization
- CONDUCT
An unconsciously
operating ``repulsion of the vulgar'' an ``increasing
sensibility to anything
corresponding to a lesser sensibility of lower-ranking
classes'' permeates
the conduct of life of the courtly upper class, and this ``good
taste'' also represents
a prestige value for such circles
- a particular ``civilized'' bodily conduct has become
widespread
HOWEVER,
The rules about what constitutes “good manners” have
always been dictated by the upper classes so as civilization
moves forward, it is furthering the interests of the powerful
elites
- Goffman: symbolic functions of bodily
comportment (The Performative Body)
- No true self
- All the world’s a stage and all the men and women
merely play..
- On human interactions he argued that people
display series of masks to others, controlling and
staging how we appear based on the situation adn
who we are interacting with
- “we play diff parts determined by the situations we
take ourselves in”
- "dramaturgy" to portray people as actors, whose
actions are shaped by the type of interaction they
make with others.
- challenged common assumptions about the nature
of identity. By conceptualising the most mundane
social interactions in terms of theatrical
performances, Goffman shows how even the most
sincere presentations of the self are marked by
affectation and posturing, which are both habitual
and quite deliberate at the same time.
- In daily interaction, actors skilfully craft their
performances in ways that conceal undesirable
aspects, while accentuating favourable ones,
tailored to the particular audience and context.
- Identity, then, emerges from the contrasts between
the many roles that are acted out and the self that
experiences them: the self is ‘situationally defined’
(Elliott, 2014: 44). In this way, Goffman’s theory of
identity challenges what is still a dominant view,
which is that identity is somehow innate, formed
prior to social experiences, and that individuals are
guided by their ‘true’ identity throughout social life.
For Goffman, the reverse is true, with identity being
the effect of particular social interactions rather
than their cause.
- Bourdieu: theory of embodiment and mimesis
Mimesis: habitually practicing, process of imitation
Bourdieu’s concept of cultural capital refers to the
collection of symbolic elements such as skills, tastes,
posture, clothing, mannerisms, material belongings,
credentials, etc. that one acquires through being part of a
particular social class.
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Habitus is one of Bourdieu’s most influential yet ambiguous
concepts. It refers to the physical embodiment of cultural
capital, to the deeply ingrained habits, skills, and
dispositions that we possess due to our life experiences.
HABITUS are the resources or the combination of the
amount and type of capital the individual has. Not only
economic,
Social – who u know social networks
Cultural capital – knowing the right cultural codes, knowing
how to behave and what works in various settings and
contexts
All these forms of capital are transformed into symbolic
capital, the indiv brings these with him whe he enters into
the society
Each field has its own rules/DOX.
Bourdieu proposes that those with a high volume of cultural
capital — non-financial social assets, such as education,
which promote social mobility beyond economic means —
are most likely to be able to determine what
constitutes taste within society.
- That is, the naturalization of this distinction of
taste and its misrecognition as necessary denies
the dominated classes the means of defining their
own world, which leads to the disadvantage of
those with less overall capital
- In sociology, taste is an individual's personal and
cultural patterns of choice and preference. Taste is
drawing distinctions between things such as styles,
manners, consumer goods, and works of art and
relating to these. Social inquiry of taste is about the
human ability to judge what is beautiful, good, and
proper.
(Post-structuralist)
- Foucault’s poststructuralist conceptions of
discipline, (governmentality), surveillance,
medicalization, and confession
DISCIPLINE
by Foucault's description of discipline as coordinating
people's movements and functions through time and space.
BIOPOWER
(“power over life”)
-refers to new mechanisms and tactics of power
focused in controlling life itself
- extended political control and power over all major
processes of life itself, through a transferral of
sovereign power into “biopower”- that is,
technologies and techniques which govern human
social and biological processes.
 - biopolitics can be understood as a political
rationality which takes the administration of life
and populations as its subject: ‘to ensure, sustain,
and multiply life, to put this life in
order’.9 Biopower thus names the way in which
biopolitics is put to work in society
- a practice of governing as focused on population
control
- control norms, body size, gender presentations,
stats, infant mortality rates
SURVEILLANCE
- the penal system, the policing and surveillance
exists not to prevent crime but to defend the power
of the ruling class
- the concept of panopticon by bentham
- regardless if the prisoners are being watched or
not, the mere visibility or appearance of the tower is
enough to control the behaviour of the prisoners
- whips and chains are not needed
- Foucault said we can make a panoptic school,
panoptic hospital, or even a panoptic country
- Surveillance serves the purpose of expanding power
- impression of being a man or a woman
MEDICALIZATION
- medical dominance
- an analysis on the ways where key features of
medicine shows that there is capacity to control
their work which gave doctors enormous power in
relation to health and illness.
medical truths implicated in a network of power
relations
ex: medical
``gaze that dominates'' the body by rendering its depth a
visible object, with the
anatomy lesson becoming itself a powerful representation of
political power
GOVERNMENTALITY
- the way in which people are instructed to govern
themselves
-power is distributed among the people
- people conduct themselves
Neoliberalism taught to govern themselves
People control their actions for the benefit of the state
- willing participation of the government which
consist the consent of the populace
- Judith Butler’s “gender as performative” :*Note:
use the vid for ppt
Gender: is a set of expectations or standards that society
defines for you
Ex: women and men are supposed to act this way
There is an assumption that if you are born female, you are
going to be a woman. And so u will be feminine and u will
get attracted to the opposite sex.
But this is how Judith Butler defines GENDER:
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“Gender is the repeated stylisation of the body, a set of
repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame that
congeal over time to produce the appearance of substance”
proposes to deconstruct the system of signs
through which feminine identity has been linked to the
heterosexual matrix
Butler argues that masculinity and feminity are not
inherent.
gender is not the
cultural representation of biological sex, but rather the
process that produces
the possibility of two distinct sexes.
Nobody is born one gender or the other, says the
philosopher. "We act and walk and speak and talk in ways
that consolidate an impression of being a man or being a
woman.
PERFORMATIVE – means it produces a series of effects. We
act and walk and speak in ways that consolidate an
Bec we act as if being a man or a woman is an internal
reality. But actually it is phenomenon that is ebing
produced and reproduced all the time.
Nobody is a gender from the start
GENDER IS PERFORMATIVE which means that it is real
only to the extent that it is performed. If we choose not to
perform the gender script then gender ceases to exist.
Notes:
The body has been a central theme of the world, it has been
seen and used as a STRUCTURE - and has been exploited to
evoke “notions’ to standardized and normalize the difference
within the society. Where it is not seen as a mere biological
structure, but a sociological one, surrounded with norms
and codes. From time to time this particular aspect has
dominated the worldly politics of empires and kingdoms.
The body has remained a pivotal point of gender difference.
The Body Politique is a performance art comprising
actuated body monologues. Springing from Marx’s lament
on the “loss of corporeality” and Weber’s “rational
conditioning of work performances” to Bourdieu’s
“embodiment and mimesis,” Foucault’s poststructuralist
conceptions of discipline, governmentality, surveillance,
medicalization, and Judith Butler’s “gender as
performative”, the presentation aims to problematize the
deep-seated concepts and “truths” that people have come to
assume and accept about the human body.
The human body is more than just the material
flesh, -- it is a political arena and a landscape of the
struggles and conflicts of power, subjugation and
domination in varied forms. The human body is a text upon
which is written the histories of resistance, and voices of
dissent muffled they maybe by legitimization and
pacification, yet nevertheless existent as scars, bruises and
fractures aching for articulation and recognition.
Militaries and insurgents groups there is a brutalizing
process. There is a standard process to brutalize children
who then became child soldiers. By traumatizing people,
you enable them to do violence. The link between trauma
and violence is a continuous cycle.

Through acted embodiments the Body Politique RH BILL and Biopower

Performance brings to fore and dramatizes the present day
forms and instances of the encroachment of society and
politics upon the body, -- the false consciousness of the
society of the spectacle, the delights of slow sweet death, the When a group is enmeshed in it’s own Habitus it sees no
plasticity of cyborg kind of life, the banality of evil, and the reason to change. If it encounters people who do not share
hyperrealities of power play as they operate in contemporary the Habitus, it will marginalize or exclude them.
society.
If the others are sufficiently powerful and/or numerous,
It is hoped that the presentation will not only give they can trigger change in the original group. This may
voice to these deep silent social human issues but also shed require economic and political upheaval, even revolution.
light towards possible alternatives and ways for deeper
understanding of the complexities of contemporary political
life, and then perhaps advocate for a life that is “fully
human, fully alive,” not just for oneself, but for others and
the greater common good.
The Panopticon was a metaphor that allowed Foucaultto
explore the relationship between 1.) systems of social
control and people in a disciplinary situation and, 2.) the
According to Foucault, the human body is the targeted power-knowledge concept.
object of modern power systems. In his genealogical studies,
Foucault describes the manner in which these power Panoptic power is a process of social regulation and
systems leave an imprint on the body and utilize knowledge organizations.
of the body as an indirect means of exercising subtle forms
of control. In recent years, several researchers have claimed
that the status of the body, subsumed as it is by modern
power networks, has become a means for conducting a
unique political critique in which the human being is viewed
as an agent of oppression and freedom. This article takes a
fresh look at Foucault’s notions of life and death that
underpin the critical understanding the body–power
relationship. While this approach recognizes the
completeness of subjective structuring processes, it also
enables the formulation of new insights regarding the status
of the modern individual as the subject of separate and
independent modes of speech and action.

EXAMPLES AND APPLICATIONS

Gender Difference

Communication scholar Julia Wood (2005) noted that while

biological differences between men and women exist, there
are far more similarities between the two groups than there
are differences. Why, then, do cultures around the world
persist in marking and performing gender difference and
constructing rigid divisions between the categories of men
and women? Why are third gender people so demonized and
erased? What social, political, and economic purposes are
served by constructing and performing differences between
men and women and reinforcing a two-gender system?
Lorber and Farrell (1991) stated the following: The reason
for gender categories and the constant construction and
reconstruction of differences between them is that gender is
an integral part of any social group’s structure of
domination and subordination and division of labor in the
family and the economy. (p. 2)

Child Soldiers

Rights of the Child – Rites of the Child?

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