The rise of the body and the development of sociology

Studies of embodiment have occupied an increasingly important role in sociology

and across the social sciences and humanities since the 1980s. This ‘rise of the body’

has led not only to the establishment of a vibrant interdisciplinary area of ‘body

studies’, but has also prompted an ongoing reconstruction of disciplinary and subdisciplinary

areas seeking to account more adequately for the embodied nature and

consequences of their subject matter. It has also been responsible for a shift in mainstream

social theory. A growing number of works concerned with performativity,

structuration theory, nature, realism, feminism, and human creativity, for example,

are illustrative of an increasingly widespread recognition that the embodied subject

needs to be central to any comprehensive understanding of social life.