• DOI:10.1080/1475382042000272256
• Corpus ID: 143076783

Making sense of the body: anarchism, nudism and subjective experience

@article{Cleminson2004MakingSO,
  title={Making sense of the body: anarchism, nudism and subjective experience},
  author={Richard Cleminson},
  journal={Bulletin of Spanish Studies},
  year={2004},
  volume={81},
  pages={697 - 716}
}

• R. Cleminson
• Published 1 January 2004
• Sociology
• Bulletin of Spanish Studies

In contrast to the emphasis placed in some studies on language and text as the principal lens through which to understand the body, recent accounts have argued that it is necessary to see the body not just as an entity formed and acted upon by discourse alone, but as something which is ‘made’ by a conjunction, or an interaction of discursive and material influences. Rather than leaving the physical body out of the equation, some theorists such as Bryan Turner have called for a ‘foundationalist approach’ to studies of the body. Such an approach would enable us ‘to understand how culture and social practices elaborate and construct the human body through endless social relations based on reciprocity’.1 Along similar lines, Ian Burkitt has argued for a relational approach that assesses how bodies are ‘made’ in discursive and physical contact with other bodies. These kinds of theoretical frameworks allow for a discursive and material account of the body, without essentializing the body as unchanging and without necessarily suggesting the primacy of either discourse or materiality.2 Why should an approach to the body which combines discursivity and materiality be desirable? In her critique of mainstream sociology’s emphasis on language and discourse, Hilary Rose has pointed to the very impossibility of not recognizing the materiality of the body as a functioning or malfunctioning organism. For Rose, the body as a product of language