Featured Article
Teaching the Body: A Gateway to the Sociological Imagination
by Katherine Mason, Miami University
As sociologists, most of us have had the experience of trying to instill what Mills called a “sociological imagination” in our students—urging them to think beyond personal virtue and individual attributes and to acknowledge the part played by larger social forces in shaping our life trajectories. Yet for many students, connecting theories about the social world to their own lives presents challenges. High-performing students from disadvantaged backgrounds may resist the claim that race or class inequalities are barriers to achievement, because their own stories are the exceptions to that rule. Young women who grew up being told they could do anything—and who now outnumber men in higher education—may deny the possibility that gender inequalities still exist. Grounding our pedagogy in the sociology of the body can help students question these assumptions.
In a mid-level class I teach, “Embodied Inequalities,” students read Iris Marion Young’s “Throwing Like a Girl” alongside Marcel Mauss’ “Techniques of the Body.” West and Zimmerman’s “Doing Gender” comes a little later. Taken together, these pieces combine sophisticated analyses of social inequalities with an approachable curiosity about the physical body, and they encourage students to ponder how their own bodies reflect their socialization as members of various social categories. When I ask students to demonstrate how to “sit like a guy” or “sit like a girl,” for example, students adopt poses that clearly show gendered differences in access to physical space, with “girls” curling up their bodies and crossing their legs, and “guys” splaying their limbs to expand into the seats around them. From there, students begin to explore other gendered differences in posture and movement, such as walking or dancing, and they discuss physical skills that may feel natural to some students and artificial to others. Young and West and Zimmerman provide a conceptual framework for students to explore why these differences crop up, and to ask what they might represent. Socially structured inequality then no longer appears as a theoretical abstraction irrelevant to high-achieving students, but as a force with the capacity to shape students’ very selves. For these students, finding ties between the truth of their own embodied experience and theories of gendered (or racialized or classed) bodies can be the bridge that leads them to their sociological imagination.
An embodied sociological approach is especially useful for teaching the concept of intersectionality. Some students mistake intersectional analysis with the practice of rattling off lists of demographic categories (race, class, gender, etc.) and stacking up those characteristics like chips in two piles: one for advantage, one for disadvantage. What these lists miss is the specificity—what Kimberle Crenshaw calls the uniqueness—of particular combinations of identity categories and the cultural resonance they carry. But an embodied sociological approach to the intersections of gender and race/ethnicity can ask students to compare the sociocultural meanings evoked, for example, by slender, white Miley Cyrus dancing at the VMAs with those attached to her dark-skinned, thicker-bodied backup dancers. Sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottom has already written a powerful essay about this particular instance of gendered and racialized embodiment on her blog; supporting readings from Patricia Hill Collins, Anne Fausto-Sterling, or Sander Gilman provide additional theoretical tools for students to perform this analysis. Moving beyond a facile summation of personal characteristics, an embodied approach to intersectionality shows how our physical bodies display many of those characteristics and, in so doing, make us legible as potential friends, threats, sex objects, citizens, or non-persons.
While I have explored these issues in classes wholly devoted to the topic of bodies in sociology, it is my hope that scholars outside our relatively small field will begin to realize the potential for using embodiment literature to teach a wide range of topics—how is social stratification embodied, for example, or national identity? To that end, the editors of the Body & Embodiment Newsletter will be soliciting further essays on the topic of teaching about the body in sociology, which will be published and made available as resources on the new Section website. How do you teach about bodies in society?
Works Cited
Collins, Patricia Hill. 2000. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (Revised Second Edition). New York: Routledge.
Cottom, Tressie McMillan. 2013. “When Your (Brown) Body Is a (White) Wonderland.” http://tressiemc.com/2013/08/27/when-your-brown-body-is-a-white-wonderland/
Crenshaw, Kimberle. 1992. “Whose Story Is It Anyway?: Feminist and Anti-Racist Appropriations of Anita Hill.” Pp. 402-436 in Race-ing Justice, En-gendering Power, edited by Kimberle Crenshaw and Toni Morrison. New York: Pantheon Books
Fausto-Sterling, Anne. 1995. “Gender, Race, and Nation: The Comparative Anatomy of ‘Hottentot’ Women in Europe, 1815-1817.” Pp. 19-48 in Deviant Bodies: Critical Perspectives on Difference in Science and Popular Culture, edited by Jennifer Terry and Jacqueline Urla. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Gilman, Sander. 1985. “Black Bodies, White Bodies: Toward an Iconography of Female Sexuality in Late Nineteenth-Century Art, Medicine, and Literature.” Critical Inquiry 12(1): 204-242.
Mauss, Marcel. 1973. “Techniques of the Body.” Economy and Society 2:1.
West, Candace and Don Zimmerman. 1987. “Doing Gender.” Gender & Society 1(2): 125-151.
Young, Iris Marion. 2005. “Throwing Like a Girl.” Pp. 141-156 in Throwing Like a Girl and Other Essays. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
by Katherine Mason, Miami University
As sociologists, most of us have had the experience of trying to instill what Mills called a “sociological imagination” in our students—urging them to think beyond personal virtue and individual attributes and to acknowledge the part played by larger social forces in shaping our life trajectories. Yet for many students, connecting theories about the social world to their own lives presents challenges. High-performing students from disadvantaged backgrounds may resist the claim that race or class inequalities are barriers to achievement, because their own stories are the exceptions to that rule. Young women who grew up being told they could do anything—and who now outnumber men in higher education—may deny the possibility that gender inequalities still exist. Grounding our pedagogy in the sociology of the body can help students question these assumptions.
In a mid-level class I teach, “Embodied Inequalities,” students read Iris Marion Young’s “Throwing Like a Girl” alongside Marcel Mauss’ “Techniques of the Body.” West and Zimmerman’s “Doing Gender” comes a little later. Taken together, these pieces combine sophisticated analyses of social inequalities with an approachable curiosity about the physical body, and they encourage students to ponder how their own bodies reflect their socialization as members of various social categories. When I ask students to demonstrate how to “sit like a guy” or “sit like a girl,” for example, students adopt poses that clearly show gendered differences in access to physical space, with “girls” curling up their bodies and crossing their legs, and “guys” splaying their limbs to expand into the seats around them. From there, students begin to explore other gendered differences in posture and movement, such as walking or dancing, and they discuss physical skills that may feel natural to some students and artificial to others. Young and West and Zimmerman provide a conceptual framework for students to explore why these differences crop up, and to ask what they might represent. Socially structured inequality then no longer appears as a theoretical abstraction irrelevant to high-achieving students, but as a force with the capacity to shape students’ very selves. For these students, finding ties between the truth of their own embodied experience and theories of gendered (or racialized or classed) bodies can be the bridge that leads them to their sociological imagination.
An embodied sociological approach is especially useful for teaching the concept of intersectionality. Some students mistake intersectional analysis with the practice of rattling off lists of demographic categories (race, class, gender, etc.) and stacking up those characteristics like chips in two piles: one for advantage, one for disadvantage. What these lists miss is the specificity—what Kimberle Crenshaw calls the uniqueness—of particular combinations of identity categories and the cultural resonance they carry. But an embodied sociological approach to the intersections of gender and race/ethnicity can ask students to compare the sociocultural meanings evoked, for example, by slender, white Miley Cyrus dancing at the VMAs with those attached to her dark-skinned, thicker-bodied backup dancers. Sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottom has already written a powerful essay about this particular instance of gendered and racialized embodiment on her blog; supporting readings from Patricia Hill Collins, Anne Fausto-Sterling, or Sander Gilman provide additional theoretical tools for students to perform this analysis. Moving beyond a facile summation of personal characteristics, an embodied approach to intersectionality shows how our physical bodies display many of those characteristics and, in so doing, make us legible as potential friends, threats, sex objects, citizens, or non-persons.
While I have explored these issues in classes wholly devoted to the topic of bodies in sociology, it is my hope that scholars outside our relatively small field will begin to realize the potential for using embodiment literature to teach a wide range of topics—how is social stratification embodied, for example, or national identity? To that end, the editors of the Body & Embodiment Newsletter will be soliciting further essays on the topic of teaching about the body in sociology, which will be published and made available as resources on the new Section website. How do you teach about bodies in society?
Works Cited
Collins, Patricia Hill. 2000. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (Revised Second Edition). New York: Routledge.
Cottom, Tressie McMillan. 2013. “When Your (Brown) Body Is a (White) Wonderland.” http://tressiemc.com/2013/08/27/when-your-brown-body-is-a-white-wonderland/
Crenshaw, Kimberle. 1992. “Whose Story Is It Anyway?: Feminist and Anti-Racist Appropriations of Anita Hill.” Pp. 402-436 in Race-ing Justice, En-gendering Power, edited by Kimberle Crenshaw and Toni Morrison. New York: Pantheon Books
Fausto-Sterling, Anne. 1995. “Gender, Race, and Nation: The Comparative Anatomy of ‘Hottentot’ Women in Europe, 1815-1817.” Pp. 19-48 in Deviant Bodies: Critical Perspectives on Difference in Science and Popular Culture, edited by Jennifer Terry and Jacqueline Urla. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Gilman, Sander. 1985. “Black Bodies, White Bodies: Toward an Iconography of Female Sexuality in Late Nineteenth-Century Art, Medicine, and Literature.” Critical Inquiry 12(1): 204-242.
Mauss, Marcel. 1973. “Techniques of the Body.” Economy and Society 2:1.
West, Candace and Don Zimmerman. 1987. “Doing Gender.” Gender & Society 1(2): 125-151.
Young, Iris Marion. 2005. “Throwing Like a Girl.” Pp. 141-156 in Throwing Like a Girl and Other Essays. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Course Syllabi
| Sociology of the Body, Joanna Kempner, Rutgers University |
| Body and Health, Joanna Kempner, Rutgers University |
| Gender and Embodiment, Kemi Balogun, University of Oregon |
| Sociology of the Body (Graduate), Ceron-Anaya, Lehigh University |
Sociology of the Body, Elroi Windor, Salem College syllabus published by TRAILS here.
