The Body in Psychology: Biological Entity or Social Construction?

Abstract

`The body', long a practical and theoretical focus in disciplines such as anthropology and sociology, has gradually emerged as a problem for psychology. The volumes by Harré, Radley and Ussher exemplify this trend-not only in their rejection of understandings of the body as entirely and implicitly biological, but also in their use of the body as a medium through which human experience may be articulated and socially grounded. This review considers the ways in which each author understands embodiment and suggests that these works are tied together by a desire to bridge individual/biological and social conceptions in such a way that an element of lived experience remains as a focus of their analyses. Nevertheless, tensions within these works as well as variations between them point to the (perhaps inevitable) lack of a consensual way of talking about bodies.

Heading South! Importing Discourse Analysis

“…The body might be an object of discourse and a site of material oppression and regulation, but it can have no real experiential currency: in Foucauldian ( 1977) terms the body is docile, a carrier of meanings rather than itself involved in the production and circulation of meaning (Sampson. 1996;Scott & Starn. 1996;Voestermans, 1995).…”

Bodies that speak: examining the dialogues in research interactions

“…Although an appropriate language for theorizing the body beyond the materialÁ/ discursive divide remains elusive (Barnard, 2000;Scott and Stam, 1996), I argue that progressing beyond this debate is important for achieving qualitative psychological research that is ethically based, innovative and feminist. Despite the explosion of theoretical scholarship concerning the constitution of subjectivities/bodies (eg, Birke, 2000;Davis, 1997;Holliday and Hassard, 2001;Price and Shildrick, 1999;Shildrick and Price, 1998), and the importance of reflexivity in research (eg, Etherington, 2004;Finlay and Gough, 2003), I believe the implications of this scholarship have been neither adequately addressed nor adopted in practice within the field of qualitative psychology.…”