Introduction: Embodying Gender

Bodies are constructed. They take on form as our lives and relations develop, we model them actively in our everyday choices, while institutions mould them by their demands, whether tacit or overbearing. Yet our bodies also strike us as an essential given, something unchosen preceding us, something 'natural', prior to human will or decision. On closer inspection, however, that natural body turns out to be made up of many conflicting truths, played out in our bodily practices and social relations. Thus when, in some trepidation, we scan our medical tests, the values may read like so many obscure signals needing a professional to interpret them, whereas how we feel tells us how we are, and how we look will convey to other people the image of what we are. Medical know-how, embodied feelings, our management of impressions are, alike, truths about our body linking to various dimensions of social existence: interaction, culture, institutions. Navigating through constructionist approaches from classic to contemporary sociology, this book will investigate how the body is moulded by all these dimensions and how in turn it contributes to modify them.

This is not to claim there is no materiality situated in time and space. Yet we only have access to materiality insofar as we are social beings, and society inevitably unfolds through the work we do on our bodies. Interaction, culture and institutions demand that different individuals show emotions in different ways according to the situation, or expect differing degrees of body control, or again use differentiated and highly normative codes to represent body images. In so doing, society makes some processes meaningful and others trite, some experiences imbued with authenticity and difference and others banal or indistinguishable. To our human species materiality is never immediate nor inert. Phenomenologically, it exists and becomes active insofar as we understand and feel it, but our understanding and feeling are mired in social practices. The human being is a social and political animal right to the inner depths of its bodily experience. Even when on our own, face to face with our own material being, we observe it with eyes that culture has fashioned for us, we move in ways we have absorbed in the ordinary rounds of our existence, and we feel by emotional codes that we have been learning since the first day of our lives. By its gestures, movements and make-up, our body acts upon and reflects the pattern our life has taken, stamped in its turn by the web of relations in which we are immersed.

The body thus stands as not just a legitimate, but a necessary object of sociological analysis. As the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1962 [1945]) points out, the body's anatomical organization leaves a great deal of scope open; the way it is used is not something laid down once and for all; its meanings and reactions always need interpreting. For humans one cannot imagine a bedrock of natural behaviour onto which a social or cultural superstructure then gets grafted. Nature and culture are inextricably bound up in our species. One might say that the body's various ways of deployment are both natural - in being made possible by physiological mechanisms - and social - in that they are arbitrary and conventional.

The kind of approach we shall be adopting - sociological yet also materialistic, phenomenological and critical - investigates the social construction of the body or embodiment in its concrete, historically situated, culturally defined processes. Considering the body as a social construct does not mean that the individual or subject can act upon it at will. Nor that it can be reduced to a text. What it does mean is that embodied subjects living in space and time come about in a diverse, unequal, social manner. They play their part in the social world by consolidating or altering the practical regulations and classification schemas that initially defined their embodied subjectivity. When we come to look at certain features of embodiment as a social process, we shall see that it is scalar, circular, active, incessant and contested.

• Scalar, in that our bodies are forged by social relations at different scales pertaining to appearance and posture, ability and limitations, emotions and physique itself.
• Circular, since in being human we tend to incorporate the differences fostered by interaction, culture and institutions and then act upon those differences beginning with our embodied feelings and experiences.
• Active, because we are fully the subjects of that embodiment - hence not just bound by the power of social organization and classification, but capable of a subjective role upon our own skins when it comes to reproducing, altering or defying the social norms.
• Incessant, since we are not only constantly constructing our body for ourselves and others, but also because it is itself incapable of playing dumb: it will speak for us even when we don't seem to be saying anything.
• Contested, given that our own ways of experiencing our body are fundamental, if tacit, modes of expressing our identities which in turn are set within hierarchical systems allowing for power and conflict.

A crucial dimension of embodiment is gender. In this book we shall be using gender to reveal the features of embodiment as a social process. The richness of a focus on the embodiment of gender is twofold: it both illuminates the process of embodiment, and it also helps in understanding the deep workings of gender differences, shedding light on invisible hierarchies and power effects in social interaction, culture and institutions that unmask the neutrality of subjectivity. In so doing, we will rely extensively on feminist studies of the past fifty years.

We thus will focus on the phenomenon of naturalization that makes gender both taken-for-granted and powerful. One small experiment suffices: close your eyes and imagine a human body. You may have succeeded in imagining one without a specific race or age, but is it possible to imagine one that is not identifiable with a sexual category? In everyday life, whenever we fill in a form, need a lavatory or even are working out on a treadmill, our eye will be caught, implicitly or explicitly, by an image referring to gender. The boxes on a standard form, the symbols on the toilet doors, the stylized body on a fitness machine depict a human shape that is posited as fundamentally and naturally gendered. Such signs may typically be identifiably male or female, or apparently neuter (tending to take the male to represent the species); or again other categories may be admitted, and left to us to specify, in recognition of the idea that gender identity may nowadays be multiple. But bodies only exist when they measure up to the cultural categorizations of 'female' or 'male', or such other sexual categories as a society may define. A gender approach to the social construction of the body thus leaves room for the gamut of forms in which gender is expressed, and at the same time highlights its filigree character, now visible, now hidden, in relationships and social structures. As we shall see, then, being a man or a woman is not to do with a natural quality but a constantly enacted taking place or positioning: via the slightest gesture of interaction, by long-established meanings in culture, and according to role and function at an institutional level. Feminist thought and gender studies first challenged the idea that the different social conditions of men and women were based on their biology. They thereby foregrounded the issue of the social construction of the body, although with a variety of different emphases, each pondering on a fundamental question: where does nature end and where does culture begin? In other words, to what extent are the differences (and, as we shall see, the inequalities) between men and women down to biological bodies, and how much does society not only elaborate the biological body but contribute to creating it?

As we shall see in the first chapter, considering the body as socially constructed and embodiment as a social process opens the way to a reappraisal of many aspects of social life. Western modernity itself is not just about large institutions and broad social dynamics, but also about how our gendered bodies have been forged and transformed by the process of rationalization. Historically, body rationalization has been most evident in the sphere of production which has been dominated by men, while women have often been confined to the domain of consumption and reproduction. Raewyn Connell (2021), one of the authors who inform this book, indeed defines gender as a practice of constant positioning within the 'reproductive arena' - that is, the field in which embodied individuals take their stand according to their relation to human reproduction. So, in this perspective gender is a 'doing' (West & Zimmerman 1987) and intersects other social forms of being in the body, such as race, class and age, to realize a complex process of embodiment which produces a multifaceted landscape of embodied difference and inequality (West & Ferstermaker 1995). As Judith Lorber (2021) underlines in her The New Gender Paradox, we are now witnessing both the fragmentation of the gender binary and its persistence. Gender is not as such a binary status. However, despite the multiplicity of intersections and the fragmentation of gender at individual level, at the social level, in legal arrangements and social practices,...