Five Bodies: Re-figuring RelationshipsFive Bodies offers an introduction to some of the most urgent contemporary concerns within the sociology of the body. The book was first published in 1985 in the USA by Cornell University Press, and was nominated for the John Porter Award (sponsored by the Canadian Sociology and Anthropology Association). A path breaking book, it offered a framework for the growing field of the sociology of the body and opened up 'the body' for sociological research. This new edition (the previous edition was published by Cornell University Press (1985) has been substantially revised and updated to address today's issues of the body in modern life, community and politics. John O'Neill examines how embodied selves and relationships are being re-shaped and re-figured and how the embodied figures of the polity, economy and society represent the contested notions of identity, desire, wholeness and fragmentation. He focuses upon those cultural practices through which we map our macro-micro worlds: · articulating a cosmology · a body politic · a productivensumptive economy · a bio-technological frontier of human design and transplantation |
From inside the book
Results 1-3 of 21
... chapters . Thus I have recon- structed this history in terms of what I call the shift from history as biotext to history as sociotext ( see the Conclusion ) , and this provides the frame upon which the following chapters hang . At the ...
... chapter ) . Likewise , we are aware of society's rule over us . But we prefer to think that society operates upon us intellectually and con- sensually rather than directly upon our bodies , which suggests a more slav- ish relation ...
... Chapter 5 when we consider the technologies of medicalized power that characterize the therapeutic state . Leonard Barkan ( 1975 : 62 ) has suggested that we can trace roughly three stages in the development of the anthropomorphic image ...