Social Stratification
The Classed Body in the Sociological Imagination
By , Hamilton College (August 2008)
Section: Social Stratification
Subjects: Sociology of the Body, Sociology, Stratification and Inequality, Sociology of Sex, Gender, and Sexuality.
People: Foucault, Michel.
Key Topic: welfare.
Abstract
Class theorists of embodiment in Sociology point to and illuminate both an over- and an under-exposed body and experience that ultimately mark the bodies of the poor as ideologically, discursively and materially abject. In this essay, I map out theories of the bodies of the poor, including those of Marx, Engels, Elias, Bourdieu, Foucault, Donzelot and Adair. I suggest that an understanding of the ways in which the bodies of the poor are positioned as abject can facilitate a flexible and reflexive heuristic through which we can negotiate epistemic shifts between material and discursive categories, as well as providing us with a template through which we can come to understand even the most profoundly abject bodies, those of poor women in a welfare state, as potential sites of embodied agency and resistance, all central to the ethical and holistic study of sociology.
DOI: 10.1111/j.1751-9020.2008.00135.x
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