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The body is the empirical quintessence of the self. Because selfhood is symbolic, embodiment represents the personification and materialization of otherwise invisible qualities of personhood. The body and experiences of embodiment are central to our sense of being, who we think we are, and what others attribute to us. What happens, then, when one's body is humiliating? How does the self handle the implications of a gruesome body? How do people manage selfhood in light of grotesque physical appearances? This study explores these questions in the experiences of dying cancer patients and seeks to better understand relationships among body, self, and situated social interaction.

Sensation (noun) is emergent in joint acts of sensing (verb). To sense, in other words, is to make sense, and sense making entails what we call -somatic work.‖ We investigate these dynamics in the context of olfaction, highlighting how olfaction intersects with social, cultural, and moral order-thus compelling reflexive forms of somatic work by which people manage smell (as an act) and odor (as a sign). Our data are drawn from a convenience sample of twenty-three participants who reflected on their olfactory experiences through the use of research journals. We focus on three central dynamics: participants' attribution of meaning to odors, the somatic rules that structure perception, and olfactory facework. The participants in this study attribute meaning to odor through odiferous indexes that intersect with an individual's somatic career; olfactory somatic rules entail disciplined somatic work in relation to the intensity of odor, its context, and moral/aesthetic character; because odor conveys meaning it is part of the ritualized facework of everyday life. Odor is a subtle but significant component of the culturally normative and aesthetic rituals of expressive and impressive everyday life. 1 Flesh and organs bestow the capacity to sense, but they are merely the raw materials by which somatic perception is wrought. The act of perception requires the reflexive faculty to feel or perceive.Central to the very nature of the act (Mead 1938) and to the processes of making sense of the world (Dewey 1934; Peirce 1931) somatic perception is a reflexive expression of sociality-a fundamental basis for a sensuous understanding of the social world (Stoller 1989(Stoller , 1997 and for the -possibility of a discipline of ‗sociosomatics'‖ (Berger and Luckmann 1966:208)-a dynamic in which carnal sensations -become objects to ourselves‖ (Mead 1938:429). Sensations are -both a reaching out to the world and a source of information and an understanding of that world so gathered‖ (Rodaway 1994:5).In this study we explore reflexive dimensions of somatic perception from an eclectic symbolic interactionist approach which views both the perceptive self and the signs of its perception as semiotic processes (Halton 1986;Wiley 1994). We pay attention not only to significant symbols, but also other important and much under-analyzed semiotic resources like indexes (see RochbergHalton 1982). We argue that sensation (noun) is emergent in joint acts of sensing (verb). To sense, in other words, is to make sense, and sense making entails what we call -somatic work.‖ We investigate these dynamics in the context of olfaction, and seek to contribute to sociological literatures on sensual perception¹ (also see Fine 1995) We highlight how olfaction intersects with social, cultural, and moral order thus compelling reflexive forms of somatic work by which people manage smell (as an act) and odor (as signs). We focus on three central dynamics: participants' attribution of meaning to odors, the somatic rules that structure perception, and olf...

Unlike text‐based cybersex, televideo is an embodied experience. Participants present their bodies as an object to be looked at. Through in‐depth interviews this study examines the relationships among selfhood and the body and the context in which both are located. The body, much like the self, exists as both a viewed object and an experienced subject. Televideo cybersex participants manipulate this relationship by presenting themselves as only a body, the experience of which acts back in an erotic “looking glass” affecting how the self conceives of the body. While in some cases the medium serves to create a “disembodied” context for interaction, as this study illustrates, it may also serve to fully embody. The obvious relationships among self, body, and social situation made evident in any form of sexual experience are largely unexplored in sociology, yet fully within the realm of interest and theoretical models of symbolic interaction.