Interpreting the Body: Between Meaning and Matter

Description

Written by leading social scientists working in and across a variety of analytic traditions, this ambitious, insightful volume explores interpretation as a focal metaphor for understanding the body’s influence, meaning, and matter in society. Interpreting body and embodiment in social movements, health and medicine, race, sex and gender, globalization, colonialism, education, and other contexts, the book’s chapters call into question taken-for-granted ideas of where the self, the social world, and the body begin and end. Encouraging reflection and opening new perspectives on theories of the body that cut through the classic mind/body divide, this is an important contribution to the literature on the body. Friont Cover Series page Interpreting The Body: Between Meaning and Matter Copyright information Dedication Table of Contents Series Editors’ Preface: Interpretive Lenses in Sociology—On the Multidimensional Foundations of Meaning in Social Life Notes on Contributors Preface and Acknowledgments Introduction References 1 Toward a Strong Cultural Sociology of the Body and Embodiment Culture and the body: modern, postmodern, and contemporary themes The “absent presence” of culture and the body in early sociology Interpreting modernity: the postmodern crisis of meaning and cultural thematization of materiality and the body Toward a strong cultural sociology of the body and embodiment The interpretive methodology of a strong cultural sociology of the body and embodiment Cultural codes and the relative autonomy of culture The hermeneutic reconstruction of meaning Maximal interpretation: theory, description, and explanation Conclusion Notes References 2 Thinking the Molecular Hard and soft molecules The romance of the molecular Radical asymmetry Notes References 3 Interpreting Africa’s Seselelãme Seselelãme in African everyday terms and in academic parlance Seselelãme and globalization Ewe speakers interpret seselelãme Psychology, possessive individualism, and seselelãme’s intersubjectivity Concluding remarks Notes References 4 Gender on the Post-Colony: Phenomenology, Race, and the Body in Nervous Conditions Phenomenology of Blackness Gendering the colonial body Literature as organic theory Setting the scene: Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions A colonial education Regulating “good native girls” Sick bodies: hunger, longing, and wasting away Ambivalence and arrival An end to nervous conditions? Note References 5 Reinterpreting Male Bodies and Health in Crisis Times: From “Obesity” to Bigger Matters The “problem” of men’s and boys’ weight/fatness: things are not what they seem Structured health inequalities: insights from medical sociology and men’s health Concluding reflections Acknowledgments References 6 Beauty, Breasts, and Meaning after Mastectomy The meaning of beauty in breast cancer recovery Methods Reinterpreting beauty Form and function Symmetry: beauty or vanity? Scars as beautiful Supports for reinterpreting beauty Family interactions Proximity to queerness Conclusion Notes References 7 “You Are Not the Body”: (Re)Interpreting the Body in and through Integral Yoga Making sense of embodied religious practices Data and methods Downplaying the physical: vocabularies of motive and transcendent goals The body as object: metaphor, analogy, and practical enactment Facilitating embodied experiences: verbal instruction in practice Reflections and conclusions Notes References 8 Black Girls’ Bodies and Belonging in the Classroom Misogynoir and anti-Black discursive frameworks Symbolic interactionism and bodies: a discursive-interactionist frame The mis/reading of Black girls’ bodies in schools Black talk, backtalk, and sass Quiet Black girls and silence as resolve Loud, laughing Black girls Dress code violations when wearing and styling Black girlhood Conclusion Notes References 9 Embodied Vulnerability and Sensemaking with Solidarity Activists Making sense of embodied vulnerability Embodied vulnerability and the shape of research Interpreting labors Interpreting raced and gendered bodies Conclusion Acknowledgments Notes References 10 Our Bodies, Our Disciplines, Our Selves Note References Index