Sociology of the Body: The Incarcerated Body
June 22nd, 2009 by SocProf and tagged Human Rights, Social Deviance, Social Institutions, Social Interactions, Social Research, Social Stigma, Social Theory, Sociology, surveillance society
Le Monde has a very interesting (and interactive) feature on the impact of incarceration on inmates’ perception of (and relationship to) their body along with the bodily transformations that incarceration involves.
The corporal trajectory, as described by men and women inmates, includes several broad categories of bodily treatment based on institutional and systemic actions that impact individual behavior:
- The searched body:
- The Other’s body: pornography, frigidity, forced intimacy
- The sick body: vision, teeth, hair loss, rotting
- The reclaimed body: self-mutilations, torture, the thick skin developed through intense exercise
- The liberated body: suicide, death, liberation
The article also includes interviews with two sociologists: Arnaud Gaillard who wrote his thesis on sexuality in prison and Laurent Gras who wrote Le Sport en Prison (if this brief interview is any indication, this looks like a really interesting book).
Physicians and psychiatrists have tried to raise the alarm on the sorry state of French prisons without much being done. I am quite sure that the sociologists will have no impact as they are seen as even less legitimate scientists and researchers and more as social workers.
It never fails to amaze me how much Foucault’s Discipline and Punish and Goffman’s Asylums, despite their flaws, have relevance when it comes to analyzing the relationship between the body and social (and total) institutions. And also how much total institutions have the capacity to generate precisely the type of (socially defined) deviant behavior they claim to neutralize.
Posted in Human Rights, Social Deviance, Social Institutions, Social Interaction, Social Research, Social Stigma, Social Theory, Sociology, Surveillance Society | No Comments »
