Introduction
The body holds an esteemed position today among American social scientists and humanists. Embodiment underwrites several fields, including sexuality studies, queer studies, sports studies, ethnic studies, and performance studies. This scholarship mirrors the academy’s identity politics. Scholars write about black bodies, queer bodies, fat bodies, transgender bodies, Latino/Latina bodies, Indigenous/Native bodies, disabled/abled bodies, and Asian bodies.Footnote 1 It has become commonplace for American intellectuals to define gender and race as processes—medical, political, social, cultural—that attach meanings to a fleshy chassis.
These are the echoes of a period when the body became an intense object of focus in the American academy. There is a strong case to be made that “the body”—here I mean an explicit articulation of “the body,” as distinguished from body politics of the 1960s—became one of the late twentieth century’s most important concepts, alongside language, power, the cultural turn, postmodernism, and text. American intellectuals churned out an astounding number of publications on the topic in the 1980s and 1990s. The somatic became a major theme in theology, American studies, rhetoric, philosophy, geography, political theory, sociology, anthropology, law, history, literature, communications, and religious studies. The literary theorist Terry Eagleton joked in 1993 that “there will soon be more bodies in contemporary criticism than on the fields of Waterloo.”Footnote 2 Yet Eagleton, a critic, proved to be merely watching from the shore as this intellectual tidal wave reached land. In 1995, as a sure sign of its arrival, the body headlined its own journal, The Body and Society—a publication founded to meet the “expanding interest in the body as a topic of teaching and research in the academy.”Footnote 3 By the late 1990s corporeality graced multivolume historical anthologies, edited volumes of essays, extensive bibliographies, keynote addresses, inquisitive literature reviews, and hundreds of scholarly articles and books.Footnote 4 A wide variety of intellectuals, across the disciplinary and political spectrum, took up the somatic as a major theme. In 1997, an editor called the outpouring a “startling feature of the literature of the social sciences and humanities in recent years.”Footnote 5 A historian, assessing the scholarship in 1999, described a “veritable flood.”Footnote 6
The literature had become so vast by the early 1990s that researchers, intrigued or alarmed, paused frequently to offer explanations about the literary deluge. The constant interrogation itself became part of the corporeal awakening. Literature reviews and historiographical essays appeared in publications such as Critical Inquiry, the London Review of Books, the Times Higher Education Supplement, Theological Studies, Environment and Planning, and Gender, Place and Culture.Footnote 7 Each of these explanations has insights to offer the intellectual historian, yet each, from our perspective, remains a prisoner of the times. Several scholars pointed out that the interest in the body coincided with the arrival of Michel Foucault’s books in America in the 1970s—particularly Discipline and Punish, which made the persuasive case that modernity comprised a series of institutions (the barracks, the school, the prison, the factory) concerned with the maintenance and governance of bodies.Footnote 8 For others, the body appeared as the ivory tower absorbed lessons from the social movements of the 1960s. Political theorist Iris Marion Young and philosopher Susan Bordo—protagonists in our story below—located the women’s movement, with its interests in “systemic reflection on socialized bodies” and “political understanding of bodily practice,” at ground zero of the corporeal turn.Footnote 9 According to this narrative, feminists introduced critical theory to the body. The aforementioned Terry Eagleton viewed the 1960s in a more negative light, and argued that the body became salient as the more radical goals of the sexual revolution faded and the socialist left replaced “production with perversion.” He called the rise of interest in the body a “desperate displacement” of revolutionary energy.Footnote 10 The intellectual legacy of the 1960s hangs heavily on body scholarship but is far from the only ideational inheritance brought into question by late modern corporealists. Oxford don Valentine Cunningham (like Eagleton, a professor of literature) agreed with Eagleton that body scholars found a fetish, and he attributed the turn toward a sudden sado-masochistic streak among academics to a feeling of dissatisfaction with Enlightenment rationality. “We are concerned above all with bodies gone wrong, bad bodies, sick bodies, bodies harmed, messed about, disempowered, tortured, mutilated, done to death and otherwise estranged from normal pursuits and happy purposes,” he wrote.Footnote 11 The anthropologist Emily Martin opened a 1990 keynote address to the American Ethnological Society with the question “Why is the body such an intense focus in the academy today?” and went on to suggest that the transformation of Fordist economics into an era of flexible accumulation fundamentally changed how people, including academics, experienced the body.Footnote 12 Bodies organized by the timetables of the factory gave way to a body constantly pummeled by economic innovation in a global system. Here a change in the lived experience of time produced a scholarly interest in fleshiness. The eminent medieval historian Carolyn Bynum (another character in our story below) argued in an influential 1995 article for Critical Inquiry that the interest in the somatic came from the repeated juxtaposition of the flesh’s limits (biological, physical, mortal) with its supposed limitlessness (desire, potentiality, sexuality).Footnote 13 According to Bynum, this enchanting sphinx of corporeality captured the imaginations of a generation of philosophers, historians, theologians, biologists, and ethicists. A final explanation, offered in the 1990s and recently, returns us to where we started this paragraph: the influence of French theory. Another line of thought, stretching from feminist philosopher Elizabeth Grosz to scholar of religious studies Constance Furey, found that the body solidified as a category when scholars, influenced by Foucault and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, came to understand subjectivity as produced by external forces and social processes (not simply consciousness).Footnote 14
We have so far traced two distinct intellectual phenomena: an intellectual trend (the corporeal turn itself of the 1980s and 1990s) and the sudden need to understand the craze. I imagine that graduate training in any number of fields in the last thirty years has brought readers into contact with the vogue of embodiment and that many of the above explanations for this intellectual bandwagon—the thumbs up or thumbs down to the 1960s, the crashing out of the Enlightenment, the allure of a charming riddle, and the specter of Foucault—would prove nominally acceptable to readers, as all are familiar. The initial challenge to moving beyond these horizons is figuring out how to retell this story about the body. Given the sheer quantity of publications on the topic, it is crucial to find a strategy to represent this overwhelming literary windfall. The present article interrogates nine of the texts that put the body at the center of late twentieth-century American intellectual life. I analyze Protestant theologian James Nelson’s Embodiment (1979), Pope John Paul II’s Theology of the Body (1979–84), political philosopher Iris Marion Young’s “Throwing like a Girl: A Phenomenology of Feminine Body Comportment Motility and Spatiality” (1984), sociologist Bryan Turner’s The Body and Society (1984), historian Carolyn Walker Bynum’s Holy Feast, Holy Fast (1987), literary critic Hortense J. Spiller’s “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book” (1987), analytical philosopher Mark Johnson’s The Body in the Mind (1987), anthropologist Thomas Csordas’s “Embodiment as a Paradigm for Anthropology” (1990), and philosopher Susan Bordo’s Unbearable Weight (1993). A commitment to representing each academic discipline and charting the rise of the concept across time guided my choices. While many approaches could have been taken to represent this phenomenon, my methodology demonstrates the simultaneous appearance of the body in multiple fields of scholarly inquiry between 1979 and 1993. Most importantly, these articles and books are foundational. They were read, reviewed, short-listed for awards, anthologized, cited, footnoted, endnoted, parroted, debated, parsed, and probed. These books launched careers. Their words secured tenure, and, in some cases, became a passport for promotion up the academic hierarchy.
To revisit this intellectual history archive just over three decades after many scholars attempted to explain its appearance is to acquaint ourselves with how a generation of American intellectuals suddenly became preoccupied with an old conundrum: the mind–body problem. Previous diagnosticians missed the common enemy shared by this admittedly diverse group of intellectuals: to a person, these writers rejected any pure dualist theories of mind/body holding that the two entities are completely separate and distinct.Footnote 15 Late twentieth-century scholarship on the body aimed to bury the Christian and Enlightenment individual whom centuries of Western thought imagined as achieving consciousness in the form of a presence of mind apart from a body or a spirit sent outside the flesh. Those who took up the mantle of the body offered a seemingly simple caveat to anyone who cracked open one of their books: everywhere you went, in spirit or flesh, whether voluntarily or involuntarily, the body came with you. Rationality cannot exist apart from corporeality. Transcendence is never outside immanence. The anti-dualism in body writings ran deep, and these scholars proved to be profoundly ambitious. As we missed the simple aversion to the mind–body split at the heart of the corporeal awakening we simultaneously looked past its far-reaching implications as imagined by its practitioners. Body scholarship aimed to reorganize modern knowledge around the obvious relationality of mind and body, bridging other categories like nature/culture and subject/object at the point of the body. The body ended, at least in a literary sense, the existence of separate domains, replacing distinct spheres (mind/body, nature/culture, subject/object, spirit/flesh) with metaphors of continuums, hybridity, and blends. Pure realms ceased to exist. Viewed from the perspective of my article, the late twentieth century is not so much an “Age of Fracture” as a moment of melting and blobbing of the once parsed, sifted, or chopped.Footnote 16 This article offers some grounds to challenge the prevailing paradigm of late twentieth-century intellectual life as a splintering into shards (although one could make the case that “the body” itself is symptomatic of fracture). Yet we should be cautious not to portray the turn to the body as a shared agenda. The claims for embodied monism could be made as celebratory, or cautionary, or simply as an empirical observation—intellectuals who wrote about the body held varied, nuanced concerns. They shared an intellectual baseline but did not share a political agenda or a feeling of optimism. A subject melded body and mind to achieve a highly desirable form of freedom, as celebrated by certain feminists, or a system created “the body” in order to render a subject legible, and therefore governable, as in a history of enslavement. A philosopher of the late 1980s might insist that mind and body are connected as a matter of logic. An anthropologist or sociologist might submit that fieldwork and research reveal the importance of the body in an empirical manner.
The article moves in a chronological fashion. The first section takes stock of the important yet infrequent efforts launched by American intellectuals of previous eras to question stark delineations of mind and body. Slave narratives outlined a case for the unbreakable connections between the two realms. Abolitionists like Frederick Douglass began to explore the relationship of the enslaved body to the more protean mind. W. E. B. Du Bois and Frantz Fanon took important diversions in larger works to note how the white gaze objectified the black body. William James and John Dewey occasionally explored the possibility of the psycho-physical unity of the “body–mind.” Student movements, anti-imperialism, and feminists of the 1960s demanded the right to control one’s own body. The social movements of that era did much to bring the body to the attention of later scholars. As I note below, the body politics of the 1960s passed into an era of bodily reflection in the 1980s and 1990s. In the main section of the article, “The body’s American moment,” we then move from theology to political theory to sociology to history to black studies to analytical philosophy to anthropology to philosophy. In the conclusion, I reflect on how “the body,” as understood by the scholars of the late twentieth century as the constant shadow of the mind and the persistent companion of the spirit, depended upon rendering “the body” itself into a site of rationality and balance. To accompany you in thought or when you go to God, the body must first be made (imagined as) agreeable to such endeavors. At the center of body scholarship, then, exists a notion of the body as controllable or already under control. In the late twentieth-century push for the body, this new requirement of pliability is treated uncritically.
Viewed from one perspective, these late modern corporealists were just the most recent critics of any total mind–body separation. Certainly earlier generations of American scholars (particularly abolitionists and the pragmatists) offered the occasional pushback against René Descartes’s famous assertion—made in his 1641 book Meditations—that the mind directs the body as if the body were a machine. American scholars occasionally challenged Immanuel Kant’s suggestion, offered in his 1791 book Critique of Pure Reason, that the mind exists independently of reality, including any corporeal reality. Yet we can see how the 1980s and 1990s comprised a distinct moment in the history of the mind–body problem. What distinguished the onslaught of the 1980s and 1990s from previous contenders is the stunning number of publications and the impressive multidisciplinarity of the critics. Between 1980 and 2000 hundreds of American intellectuals—with assists from European scholars—set their sights on drawing all metaphysics into the flesh.
Antecedents
Slave narratives were among the first sustained efforts undertaken by American writers to seriously explore the threads connecting minds and bodies. As Lindon Barrett demonstrated in an important 1995 article for American Literary History, the slave narrative, the most popular literature in the nineteenth-century United States, performed an “intricate negotiation of the mind/body split.”Footnote 17 Literacy seems to extend thought beyond the body, to elevate the self beyond matter, but the slaves who wrote autobiographies of bondage and escape wrote frequently about the body. The body became ubiquitous in slave narratives because “African Americans live within a culture where they are forced to deal, first and foremost, with the spatiality and materiality of their existences.”Footnote 18 Slaves and ex-slaves knew well that a mind never strayed far from a body. While waiting for an overseer just out of his sight, Henry Bibb, in his 1849 memoir, Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, contemplated how “the springs of my heels, which nature had so well adapted for takin the body out of danger,” might transport his corporeal frame away from enslavement.Footnote 19 Slavery brought writers like Mary Prince, Lucey Delaney, Ellen Craft, and Solomon Northrup to detail the embodied nature of punishment, attempted escapes, dangerous environments, and grinding labor. As scholars Mia Bay and R. I. Judy noted, ex-slaves distinguished their bodies from the bodies of animals.Footnote 20 When ex-slave Tom Windham told a Works Progress Administration interviewer in 1937 that blacks “should have our liberty cause us ain’t hogs or horses—us is flesh” he articulated a notion of freedom that connected personhood to the body.Footnote 21
The pushback against slavery on corporeal grounds produced a series of significant anti-dualist moments in nineteenth-century American thought. As the historian David Blight has shown, Frederick Douglass believed the mind comprised a space of liberation—a space for the slave to retreat and think—but Douglass also frequently acknowledged that the slave owner’s assaults on the slave’s body bore directly on the mind.Footnote 22 In his 1855 book My Bondage and My Freedom Douglass explained how repeated attacks on his body sapped his will to read and think. Physical assaults reduced him to a “brute.”Footnote 23 Douglass portrayed slavery in graphic terms—whips cracking on flesh, crying mothers deprived of children, slave hunters kidnapping men—in his famous 1857 address “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?”. He asked the unsuspecting crowd, with his famous wit (the answer was already known), “Would you have me argue that man is entitled to liberty? That he is the rightful owner of his own body?”Footnote 24 Douglass adopted a much more anti-dualist stance between 1859 and 1865 on fascinating and surprising grounds: he grasped the political possibilities that came with the advent of portrait photographs. As the rhetorician Ginger Hill has helpfully demonstrated, Douglass rejected the transcendentalist notion of the self as a disembodied seeker of truth and instead he theorized the self as an embedded material reality.Footnote 25 Truth required a material articulation in the form of a body. The photograph connects the thoughts in the free mind to the enfleshed reality of the body. When Douglass posed for a portrait he straightened his back and stared directly into the camera. He appeared in a fine suit with a sharp tie. The photograph itself, Hill points out, argued that the free subject is self-possessed of body and mind.
The pragmatists of the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth launched a series of intellectual assaults against the division of mind and body as part of a much wider agenda to bridge the chasms between theory and practice, knowledge and action, and empiricism and idealism. The pragmatists hoped to amalgamate various binaries, with the mind/body being one hybrid zone among many. As the historian James Kloppenberg has shown in his pathbreaking study Uncertain Victory, William James and John Dewey chafed against the epistemologies inherited from Descartes and Kant.Footnote 26 They rejected the idea that reality is separated into two spheres (inside a mind/outside a mind). They held that the physical world shapes the mental world, and vice versa. The physical sensations of life are connected to the production of ideas in the mind. While James, as philosopher Daniel Robinson notes, maintained a “interactive dualism” that did allow consciousness (or the will) to act on the body in an independent fashion, the famous psychologist–philosopher did not see ideas themselves as disembodied.Footnote 27 James’s Psychology (1890) assigned serious influence to embodied emplotment on emotional life. Dewey, however, went much further than James and argued frequently for the existence of a non-dualist “body–mind” or “psycho-physical unity.”Footnote 28 Dewey told the New York Academy of Medicine in a 1927 lecture that “integration of body and mind in action is the most practical of all questions we can ask of our civilization.”Footnote 29 He rejected the division of knowledge as physical and mental as completely artificial. Knowledge did not appear in the mind as a spiritual transfusion from a force outside nature. Experience and action are part of a unified whole in which stimulus of the body and response of the mind are intertwined. Dewey, joined by several other pragmatists, drew on the body to question the divisions of knowledge. But, from the perspective our article, the pragmatists did not start a mass intellectual movement on this premise.
In excursions lasting just a few pages in their much broader scholarly oeuvres, writers from W. E. B. Du Bois to Frantz Fanon highlighted how racism, in the form of the white gaze, objectified the black body. In diagnosing the political or personal aspects of racism, Du Bois and Fanon did not mention the body with great frequency but their occasional analyses of the somatic—and its relationship to the subject/object divide—proved to be influential. In his 1903 Souls of Black Folk Du Bois famously noted the “double self-consciousness” that results from “the sense of always looking at oneself through the eyes of others.”Footnote 30 The black subject separated itself from the object of the body to look at the self with his own eyes and a pair of white eyes. The white gaze removed the black body from the black subject’s control. In an important passage in White Skin, Black Masks (1952), Fanon ruminated on how everyday white racism usurped a black self integrated in mind and body. Fanon, operating as a self-grounded synthesis of flesh and intention, contemplated how he expressed a free sense of self when he removed a packet of cigarettes from a drawer. But the racist observation of a white child who told his mother, “Look a Negro!” handed Fanon’s body over to racist idealism and created a “historical racial schema” that attached his fleshy frame to a history not of his making.Footnote 31 The black body represented more than just his singular body when the white gaze connected it to contrived histories of crime and danger. Fanon, drawing on existentialism and psychoanalysis, collapsed the duality but for a moment, then the white gaze reinstated the subject/object split by remaking the black body as an object outside the subject’s control. The framing of the desirability and difficulty of collapsing mind and body as an expression of freedom anticipated later problems in the anti-dualist agenda along the lines of race and even gender.
The body politics pursued by the activists and intellectuals of the 1960s and 1970s made significant strides towards delegitimizing the mind/body split. The immediate roots of the late twentieth-century corporeal turn can be found in this heady era, particularly the woman’s movement and the rise of black studies as an academic field. These were the initial efforts, and the first round of questions, before the veritable deluge of body scholarship of the late twentieth century. Viewed from this perspective, the corporeal awakening is a slightly delayed reaction. Whereas the 1960s and 1970s made the body a site of politics (edging it into the academy), the 1980s and 1990s made the body a consistent site of academic reflection. We noted above how Iris Marion Young and Susan Bordo credited feminism with the initial push towards corporeality as an analytic. No More Miss America!—the pamphlet prepared by feminists for the famous boardwalk protest of 1968—decried the reduction of women’s bodies to “cattle” and “breeding devices.”Footnote 32 The Boston Women’s Health Collective’s famous text Our Selves, Our Bodies declared in a non-dualistic manner, “Our bodies are us. We do not inhabit them—we are them (as well as mind).”Footnote 33 Control over one’s body became a rallying cry. This in turn pushed scholars to study the wider economic and political systems that affixed bodies in hierarchies of submission. Gender rested at the center of this new body politics, and so did race. The student uprisings at San Francisco State in 1967 and 1968 pushed for a new understanding of flesh to be centered in the academy. It rejected the line of imperialist thought (previously interrogated by Du Bois and Fanon) that black and brown people were mere bodies to be exploited by global capitalism. As the historian Roderick A. Ferguson notes, activists like those at SFSU “demanded that women and people of color be seen as constituencies within the academy, not just bodies but bodies and minds that could help reorganize knowledge in ways that people never imagined.”Footnote 34 Previous knowledge reduced the black body to a source of labor. A new academic dispensation emerging from the 1960s recognized the black body as a source for a fresh epistemology.
When looking at a sweep of American intellectual history, various generations of American literati can be seen to express dissatisfaction with the mind–body dualism handed down to them by early modern and Enlightenment savants. The all-knowing mind that floated outside the body object underwrote racial and gender hierarchy, or simply seemed decoupled from lived reality. The abolitionists and the pragmatists offered the occasional yet significant reflections on the body to question the independence of the mind. Yet the efforts never amounted to an academy-wide effort in the decades before the 1980s and 1990s. Below we explore how American thought witnessed a mass mobilization of body scholarship at the end of the twentieth century. Certainly a few important works appeared in the preceding years—scholars like Herbert Marcuse, Norman Brown, and Shulamith Firestone published key 1960s-style works on the body.Footnote 35 The body, it should be noted, gained critical momentum in the 1970s, contributing to its later rise as an object of fascination. Debates about abortion ensured that body language recurred in American political discourse.Footnote 36 Michel Foucault’s articles and interviews, and his monumental Discipline and Punish, began appearing in English in the 1970s.Footnote 37 Yet it was right at the end of that decade and at the beginning of the 1980s that intellectual life in America reached a new stage of body scholarship. The concept of the body appeared incessantly in American letters after 1980, and it became scholars’ preferred means to end the divisions at the heart of modern knowledge. We now turn to the boom in body scholarship. We move slowly, text by text, to clock the growth of this field, and to demonstrate the anti-dualist impulse at the heart of these body books.
The body’s American moment
The late twentieth-century assault on dualism began in Christian theology. James Nelson, a professor at United Theological Seminary of the Twin Cities and a minister in the Congregational Church, encouraged readers of his 1979 landmark work Embodiment: An Approach to Sexuality and Christian Theology to think of the immanent (the body) as possessing the transcendent (God). Nelson proved influential on an entire generation of Protestant educators and theologians.Footnote 38 Embodiment found a wide audience in the American academy and it appeared frequently in citations in later body scholarship. His argument was iconoclastic, to say the least. The believer approached God not by way of the mind alone, but as a body connected to a mind. To ascend with a spirit out of the body towards God produced alienation from one’s own body. Christians ought to accept the body, end the elevation of the mind above a body, and join in corporeal-based communion with God. “I really am one person,” Nelson explained, commenting on the flesh supercharged with grace: “body and mind are one, my body is me and my mind is me.”Footnote 39
The end of alienation achieved by dissolving the mind–body split held several advantages. For Nelson, in fact, it held the key to creating a more sensual and gentle world. He staked his entire career on these arguments and in later stages drew upon embodiment theology to encourage fellow liberal Protestants to accept homosexuality and transsexuality.Footnote 40 Nelson, like many of his fellow body scholars, was intellectually ambitious. He aimed to overhaul Christian thought since antiquity and challenge secular thought since the 1780s. The immanentizing of the divine in a human body curbed the destructive rationalism of the Enlightenment.
The theologian agreed with Herbert Marcuse that capitalism put modern men and women out of touch with their bodies.Footnote 41 Market logic required all of the body’s movements to suit work’s timetables: one ate, slept, and copulated at appointed times. The subject competed against his or her own body just as the subject competed against other persons in the modern marketplace. These alienated people then sought control of the world with the power of reason. The Christian splitting of spirit and flesh underwrote this socioeconomic order. To seek to know a body—and accept existence in a body—meant embracing the primordial side of human life, rather than seeking to conquer it. The turn to the body mitigated patriarchy, militarism, racism, and environmental destruction, as it slackened man’s will to dominate nature. For contemporary Protestants, relocating God into the body meant that those actions of the flesh were no longer equated simply with depravity and sinfulness. The body became the authentic instantiation of a person’s inner spirit. While Nelson was no fan of the sexual revolution—he criticized Playboy, depersonalized sex, and polyamory—the theologian encouraged the churches to accept the synergy with nature that came with the fleshy eroticization of grace. The spirit was in a body and spoke through a body.
The same year as Nelson published Embodiment Pope John Paul II gave the first of 129 lectures that later became known collectively as The Theology of the Body. While he joined Nelson in condemning the sexual revolution, the Pope drew upon embodiment to uphold a more traditional morality that located sex in the parameters of marriage—marriage defined exclusively as between a man and a woman, and one that opened every sexual act to the possibility of procreation. The ontological and political divergences need not distract us completely from the similarities in approach. Body scholars did not agree on sexual politics even if they shared an antipathy towards the mind/body split. John Paul II joined Nelson in working to remove the barriers between mind and body. The Pope, an astute reader of the phenomenological and existential tradition, frequently mentioned his disdain for dualism and Manicheism to his audiences at the Vatican.Footnote 42 In the wake of John Paul II’s lectures, an entire cottage industry of body thought sprang up in American Catholicism.Footnote 43 Catholic theologians proffered frequent commentaries on the theology of the body, offering context or synthesis, while popular writers like Christopher West wrote public-facing books for a wide audience.
The Pope urged Catholics to see themselves as “subject–objects.”Footnote 44 “Subject–object” was a popular turn of phrase among body scholars, as it signaled a new bond between heady consciousness and one’s embodied reality. Subjecthood–objecthood meant that the body is the site of consciousness (subject) and it is the psychical vehicle that makes the true self known (object). A person is a subject in an object (the body), not, as Descartes or Kant would have it, a mind apart from the flesh. John Paul II argued that one expresses one’s consciousness with physical acts. An individual who understands himself or herself in this authentic sense approaches God as a conscious self and a physical body, with awareness that the two units are in fact one. You speak your innermost thoughts and deepest moral commitments with your body. “The Body, and it alone, is capable of making visible what is invisible,” John Paul II wrote, “the spiritual and the divine.”Footnote 45 The considerable disadvantage to life as a Catholic subject–object is that the imagination and desires cannot be stowed away in mind. Morality as enfleshed is eminently observable. Your body presents who you are. The Pope believed that the body told a truth with proper sexual behavior. With adultery (or homosexuality, or premarital sex), he thought the body lied. Here the embodied self offers the true sense of self (the real subject–object) only in the paraments of the sacramentally sealed nuptial bond between a man and a woman.
As quickly as the body emerged as the ideal anti-dualist vector among some thinkers, so did challenges to its supposed integrative capacities. Political philosopher Iris Marion Young argued in her blockbuster 1980 article “Throwing like a Girl” that women’s bodies never achieved seamlessness. The female body experienced irresolvable tensions “between transcendence and immanence, between subjectivity and being a mere object.”Footnote 46 While she lamented the staying power of the divide between these realms, Young joined thinkers like Nelson and John Paul II in seeking to end the separation of the subject from its body. Her efforts to concretize feminist philosophy (alongside her conceptual work on democracy and pluralism) gave her a salience in the American academy. Young deserves credit for introducing the works of French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty to a wide American audience. Shortly after she published her 1980 article, she left the University of Miami for the University of Pittsburgh, ultimately landing at the University of Chicago in 2000.
Young selected the seemingly simple exercise of pitch and catch to illustrate her argument. Women, in the motion of throwing, did not mobilize the entire body. The woman was a subject but her body remained an object. The woman who winds up to pitch a ball concentrates on a single part at the expense of the whole, failing to move the entire body forward in a singular motion. She focused on one zone or appendage—the arm, the leg, the torso—rather than making a swift unified movement. She does not thrust the entire body into the air to pluck the ball from the sky but merely throws out an arm while the rest of the body recoils. Women, Young concluded, “must have our attention directed upon our bodies to make sure they are doing what we wish them to do, rather than paying attention to what we want to do through our bodies.”Footnote 47
While she remained pessimistic about bodily integration, Young’s deeply descriptive analysis showed the way to embodied freedom. At the start of the 1980s the body was becoming the key vehicle used by intellectuals to express hopes for a social and political transformation from a dualistic world of hierarchy into a singular world with more equality. For most of modern history, Young argued, men turned female bodies into objects and deployed social mechanisms that made sure “woman herself often actively takes up her body as a mere thing.”Footnote 48 Young wished to realize a world in which all people, men and women, threaded subject and object together in a body. She argued that a new process of gendered socialization might reunite the female subject with her body. One throws like a girl not because of a mystical female essence or the inherent burden of having a female body, but due to a specific assimilation into the patriarchy of industrial urban and commercial society. What humans made could be unmade. Women can become active subjects in control of the object that is the body. Young held out hope that a resocialization of the female body might overcome the patriarchal rending of subject and object. A woman could then throw like a person.
Sociologist Bryan Turner turned to the body out of an acute dissatisfaction with the long-standing cleavages between nature and culture. In his 1984 book The Body and Society, he argued that sociology’s classic concerns with social control, social order, and stratification all focused on a subject’s cognitive powers—his or her mental assent to prevailing regimes—at the expense of embodied realities. Sociologists misunderstood systems of power as bent on controlling minds alone. Turner blasted his discipline as “Cartesian in nature,” and “implicitly accepting a mind/body dichotomy.”Footnote 49 Turner granted that the discipline’s focus on cognition was a much-needed response to sociology’s racist biologism of the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth, but, regrettably, such a pendulum swing brought sociologists to adopt “a somewhat ethereal conceptualization of our being-in-the-world.”Footnote 50 The 1984 book proved to be a widely used primer in the American social sciences. It could rightly be called foundational. Turner, who liked to synthesize the works of Foucault and Max Weber, showed his fellow social theorists the great analytical potential of the flesh, and he later became one of the founding editors of the aforementioned journal, The Body and Society. He published his first article on embodiment, which called for collaboration between medical sociology and the sociology of religion, in 1981.Footnote 51
Turner spoke prophetic words that echoed for the next few decades when he dubbed the body “both natural and cultural.”Footnote 52 He argued that the body is certainly biological but is constructed by a specific culture, in a time and place. It did not rest solely in either nature or culture but straddled these zones in an act of synthesis. It therefore served as the ideal baseline for a sociological analysis in late capitalism: one could have nature without essentializing it. The body was timeless in one sense but it was time-bound in a defining manner. The body became a space where nature and culture met. “To accept the corporeality of human life, it is not necessary to deny the fact that the nature of the human body is also an effect of cultural, historical activity,” Turner concluded.Footnote 53 Academics from several disciplines nodded their heads in agreement. Turner made the social sciences and the humanities safe again for biology.
Turner felt that the absence of the body from the sociological imagination crippled the discipline’s ability to explore a wide range of late twentieth-century human experiences, from religious ritual to modern medicine, to contemporary behaviors like jogging, dieting, aging, plastic surgery, pornography, eating disorders, and exercising. The Body and Society offers another important contextual clue as to why the body gained popularity in the 1980s: the body became helpful means to understand consumerism. Consumption melded the human subject with processes of his or her embodied nature. So many seemingly rational decisions made in a cogito culminated with the comforting of the body or the stimulation of a body. Late capitalism shaped the mind by meeting the needs of the body. Turner insisted that one could reread all of human history, from medieval medicine to the installation of a sewer system in nineteenth-century Paris, with this insight in mind. A focus on mental assent or social control missed the crucial aspects of economic structures in meeting the embodied desires of consuming subjects. Sociologists, in turn, had to come up with a way to study the formation of the self in a consumer society that smashed the mind and the body into the same frame. Just as society became monistic by way of capitalism, so should sociology adopt a more synthetic mode of analysis that bridged nature and culture. The body is the crucial link.
Historians of the late 1980s found that the people of the distant past never lived in worlds that adhered to tidy bifurcations of spirit and flesh. Caroline Walker Bynum’s 1987 book Holy Feast and Holy Fast put to rest any assumptions that medieval people loathed the body, or that medieval people existed in a simplistic hierarchical dichotomy of spirit over matter. Bynum’s historical interventions proved influential on a generation of historians, theologians, and scholars of religious studies. She returned frequently to the concept of the body over the course of her storied career at Columbia University.Footnote 54 Bynum opened up a world in which medieval women embraced embodiment as a means to blend the self with God. Medieval women “strove not to eradicate the body,” she explained, “but to merge their own humanity and painful flesh with that flesh [Christ’s] whose agony espoused by choice was salvation.”Footnote 55 For medieval women, God was not something abstract, but a fleshy convergence between supplicant and object. Women did not despise the flesh: quite the opposite, they understood the body as a key vehicle for spiritual bliss. “To women the notion of female as flesh became an argument for women’s imitatio Christi through physicality.”Footnote 56
Bynum’s arguments struck at the core of the history of Western thought. The separation of mind and body no longer appeared as an advancement of knowledge or an epochal birth of consciousness but an arrogant self-serving construct invented by early modern and Enlightenment philosophers and then inorganically imposed on the world. Bynum suggested in her 1995 article for Critical Inquiry that the mind/body split pursued by early modern philosophers like Descartes was “but a blip on the long curve of history.”Footnote 57 Most human beings granted the body a significant role in shaping behavior, and they embraced or acknowledged the materiality of existence. The barrier separating the physical and spiritual, imposed by historians on the past, evaporated. Historians like Peter Brown and Thomas Lacquer showed that intellectuals from Tertullian to Freud wrote at length about the body, and not simply in an effort to prove its secondary status.Footnote 58 The body was the subject of sophisticated and acrobatic acts of reasoning from early Christianity to Victorian modernism. Historians of the 1980s and 1990s suggested that the past never included a denigration of the body in favor of the spirit, so nor should the future.
In the late 1980s scholars began to argue that the forced migration and enslavement of Africans pushed body and mind in opposite directions. For an Enlightenment philosophe on a walk or a medieval woman performing devotions at the foot of a cross, the mind (or spirit) synced somewhat easily with the body. Slavery, as represented by the late twentieth-century body scholars, entailed a violent series of disconnections of mind and body. In her influential and frequently anthologized article “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” first published in Diacritics in 1987, scholar of black studies Hortense J. Spiller reframed the slave trade and the brutality of slavery around the theme of corporeality.Footnote 59 The epoch of slavery presented direct evidence that the sought-after amalgamation of subject in a body object required privilege and security. While acknowledging the desirability of unification of subject and object as a mode of freedom, Spillers argued that slavery marked the “severing [of] the captive body from its motive will, its active desire” on a mass scale.Footnote 60 Stated another way, Spillers called slavery an act of “total objectification” that separated the body from the will—permanently sealing off subjects from objects.Footnote 61 The prolific kidnappings and relocations produced “the body” as a resource to be economically exploited or a mere object to be sexually violated. From the perspective of the slave owner or the slave trader, the enslaved person became a body with no previous history, relationships, or social positions. In the years after Spillers published her famous article, ‘the black body’ became a key concept in literary theory, theology, history, philosophy, and religious studies.Footnote 62 Black intellectuals produced a raft of books, articles, and edited volumes on racial embodiment. The body went on over the next twenty years to become a central unit in the historiography of slavery, providing an analytical anchor in historical works like Walter Johnson’s Soul by Soul, Edward Baptist’s This Half Has Never Been Told, and Daina Ramey Berry’s The Price for a Pound of Flesh.Footnote 63 Ta-Nehisi Coates, in his 2015 best seller Between the World and Me, took these arguments to an extreme conclusion to argue that no reality (or metaphysics) existed outside “the black body.”
Spillers argued that the partitioning of body and will went deeper still. She drew an important distinction between “flesh” and “body.” A person, man or woman, existed as flesh before the system of slavery and enslavement made corporeal material into a body. Slavery therefore brought the body into existence out of a preceding, much freer, protoplasmic material. The flesh connoted a “liberated subject position” whereas the body signified the “captive subject position.”Footnote 64 Calculated torture reified the body as object, and then repeated objectifications teased a body from flesh, making the body into an economic and sexual unit fit for exploitation. Significantly, Spillers argued that “the body” emerged a posteriori through a process of violence. “The anatomical specifications of rupture, of altered human tissue, take on the objective description of laboratory prose,” Spillers wrote, “eyes beaten out, arms, backs, skulls branded, a left jaw, a right ankle, punctured; teeth missing, as the calculated work of iron, whips, chains, knives, the canine patrol, the bullet.”Footnote 65 The body scholars who recognized the importance of blending mind and body brought forward significant tranches of evidence, in the form of patriarchy and racial hierarchy, to reveal how social and historical actors with power denied populations perceived as subordinate any opportunity to live a life that melded the subjectivity of the mind and the objecthood of the body. The notion of a separated mind and body, we might note, served as a justification for these regimes. Slavery—along with race and racism—produced unbridgeable fault lines: slavery made the body a distant controlled object, outside the raced subject’s (i.e. the slave’s) will.
Spillers’s article became influential because it offered a deep critique of 1960s feminist politics along with a scathing indictment of twentieth-century liberalism as expressed by the Moynihan report. Both feminism and liberalism rested firmly in the genealogy of body objectification because both imagined a self—a body—severed from family or community. To make “the body,” the subject must be separated from its own will and desires, along with all systems of ethics and interrelationships, particularly the mother–daughter relationship. The objectification of the body in slavery expunged gender. Like Young before her, and as with Bordo’s work explored below, Spillers critiqued duality of mind and body while stressing the impossibility of overcoming the cleavage under the conditions of American society in the late 1980s. Spillers shows how slavery haunted the very category of “the body.” The body, a vestigial category of slavery and New World mass kidnapping, carried a baggage of total objectification that effaced values and relationships.
The idols of the Enlightenment, as Bynum made clear, were not safe from the body scholars. Whereas the famous medieval historian provincialized Descartes, analytical philosopher Mark Johnson sullied the purity of Kantian thought. Kant famously divided knowledge into two realms—the physical and the metaphysical—in an attempt to let the imagination roam as freely as possible in the latter. This cleared space for the categorical imperative—the following of a law that all must follow—to take place anywhere, without a concern for concrete circumstances. Kant further held that the mind existed outside the material world (including the body) and, as such, it framed the categories of the world.
Johnson set out to prove in his influential 1987 book The Body in the Mind that Kant, the quintessential transcendentalist, partook of embodiment theory. Johnson touched off a fundamental pivot in philosophy and linguistics towards the body. Along with coauthor George Lakoff, a writer well known for his book on the culture wars, Johnson published Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought with a major clearinghouse, Basic Books, in 1999. Books like these made embodiment a major theme in philosophy, linguistics, and communication. Kant was always said to have demanded a nonphysical—non-bodied—rationality. But Johnson contended that Kant made space in his thought for a “preconceptual imagination.” The preconceptual imagination, a phenomenon of the body producing knowledge before the mind refined it, gave the body a capacity to generate an initial set of cogitations that anticipated and then formed the powers of a mind.
Even for Kant, then, the mind and body are not so much divided and distinct, but interrelated and on a continuum. The mind–body comprised a vertically integrated unit in which ideas traveled upward from a fleshy frame to a headspace. Ideas moved, in other words, from the body’s preconceptual imagination to the mind’s conceptual imagination. Johnson pushed the categories produced by embodied experience—balance, movement, manipulation of an object, voluntary action—up into sacred and previously detached realm of the cerebral. The preconceptual imagination reconnects the mind to the body. Humans crave symmetry, for example, because balancing the body in the more mundane acts of walking or riding a bike percolated into the skull to inform cognition. Johnson explained that humans acquire moral responsibility when performing an act out of volition. This voluntarism manifested, according to Johnson, when an individual freely chose to physically move a body to perform an act.
The preconceptual imagination put the body on par with the mind and made the two units somewhat indistinguishable. The body handed the mind concepts and organizational schema which the mind then refined, rather than, as dualism held, a mind setting a body machine in motion. The body presaged the mind, and contributed significantly to the streamlining of data into concepts. With writings like those by Johnson (along with the important work of literary critic Elaine Scarry), the body began taking on more and more powers previously reserved for the mind. To collapse the duality of mind–body, scholars diminished the special powers of the mind, as they dropped some of the mind’s powers into the marrow of bones and the connective tissues around the muscles.Footnote 66 While Johnson conceded that Kant would never have acknowledged this affection for the body, he still maintained, in a classic anti-dualist fashion, that Kant’s writings “did in fact undermine” any “unbridgeable gap” between universal reason and embodied emplacement.
The implications of Johnson’s arguments are significant for a body turn in American letters hitting full stride by the late 1980s: an analytical philosopher—a member of a guild who placed a premium on logic and dispassion—asserted that the mind did not transcend nature. He boldly reinterpreted Kant as a body man. The mind was fastened to the body which was connected to nature. The mind therefore reflected natural experience. “As animals we have bodies connected to the natural world,” Johnson wrote, “such that our consciousness and rationality are tied to our bodily orientations.”Footnote 67
In the 1990s, in yet another significant shift, scholars began to argue that bodies—rather than a mind directing a body—produced the category of culture. No scholar made this case more effectively that anthropologist of religion Anthony Csordas, whose name began appearing in numerous footnotes and bibliographies in the 1990s. In a slew of publications unleashed over the course of that decade (a veritable blitz of body scholarship), Csordas argued that it was socially linked bodies, not minds, reared in a specific, historically based culture that generated similar thoughts and actions in members of the group. He made the case that the bodies, acting collectively and exchanging information between one another, created an “existential ground for culture.”Footnote 68 As such, the body—socially wired to other bodies—became the foundation, Csordas argued, for analysis of group behavior.
The body constantly learned from its surroundings, making it a type of body–mind. Csordas arrived at this conclusion by way of his ethnographic and anthropological observations of Christian charismatic communities in the 1980s.Footnote 69 His research convinced him, as he argued an award-winning 1990 article, that demons or spirits entered his subjects, not by way of the mind or a divine intervention, but through “a concretely embodied pre-objective state.”Footnote 70 Csordas’s “pre-objective state” was akin to Johnson’s “preconceptual imagination,” but it was more social than the philosopher’s Kantian model. The body of the charismatic, according to Csordas, is “socially informed” by ritual and spontaneous worship and it produces its own behaviors, feelings, and ideas.Footnote 71 Bodies, in other words, learned in a group to bring the demons and spirits into existence. Bodies, as themselves, produce a culture. “On the level of perception,” Csordas wrote, bearing a staunch anti-dualism, “it is not legitimate to distinguish mind and body.”Footnote 72 By emphasizing practice, the movement of an intellectualized flesh, scholars could “collapse the conventional distinction between subject and object.”Footnote 73 The subject does not stand apart from an object, but is an object, because of its body. At the same time, the body is itself a subject because it too has the power to create and process concepts.
Insights like these revolutionized how anthropologists studied culture and how scholars of religious studies analyzed ritual: the ethnographer or anthropologist now beheld a knowledgeable body teaching and informing a mind. The scholar did not simply watch a subject’s mind control a body. As collectives of bodies learned together, culture was born. By the end of the twentieth century, the work of body scholars like Csordas had facilitated what a fellow anthropologist described as a “paradigmatic shift in anthropological studies of human movement, from an observationist view of behavior to a conception of body movement as dynamically embodied action.”Footnote 74
Postmodernism threatened to make everything a text, including the body.Footnote 75 Philosopher Susan Bordo’s best-selling 1993 book Unbearable Weight proved to be the most prolonged feminist defense of the mind–body blend in the 1990s. In postmodernism, which Bordo associated with choice, a blind faith in agency, and unimpeded subjective identity creation, she perceived the renascent specter of dualism. Postmodernism—in line with Plato, Augustine, Descartes, and Kant—generated a dichotomy that hoisted mental imagination far above the body. For these men the mind (and the spirit) qualified as a realm superior to the body. Postmodernists, according to Bordo, exulted the mind in a similar fashion. They set the mind free to roam the terrains of culture, to delight in pastiche and fragmentation. The context of the body does not matter to the postmodernist, “so long as,” wrote Bordo, “the imagination is free.”Footnote 76 If the imagination is freed but the body is left behind, the dangerous bifurcation of mind and body stands.
According to Bordo, postmodernism validated a late consumer-capitalist regime that encouraged women to will a thin body into existence. It cultivated a dualist fantasy of the mind gaining control over the unruly body. The dichotomy ultimately allowed the patriarchy to exercise more power over the female body. Men wanted the imagination to run roughshod over the flesh if such an imagination willed a body into something slim and big-breasted. Feminists ought to understand that patriarchy used the dualism, with an exercise of power, to convince women to shape the female body into a form pleasing to male eyes. The postmodern mind moved the female body to become pleasing to the male gaze.
The women of the 1980s and 1990s who binge dieted or underwent plastic surgery did not exercise agency, but instead pruned and slimmed the body to comply with patriarchal conceptions of beauty. Bordo was unsparing in her critique: “Female obedience to the dictates of fashion is better conceptualized as bondage than as choice.”Footnote 77 Choice meant the mind, which meant, for Bordo, a gaslit mind severed from the body—a mind that shaped the body into an entity pleasurable for patriarchy. Bordo warned that women themselves would be participating “in the cultural reproduction of dualism, both practically and representationally,” unless women took up a struggle to make workplaces informed about embodied experiences and the personal history of each female body.Footnote 78 Once again, an American intellectual recommends the body as a means to singularize a dichotomy perceived as dangerous. Liberation comes from prolonged consideration of rootedness, which locates the body on the ground it stands upon. The material body was, in fact, “a site of political struggle” that found itself caught up in a culture with a “direct grip” on the flesh “through bodily habits of everyday life.”Footnote 79 Women should avoid shaping the body to the standards of the era while seeing emancipation from patriarchy as commencing with complete self-governance of the body. The mind must grapple with the flesh as a reality of life, and allow the body to accompany the mind in pursuit of freedom. Postmodernism—with its emphases on fluidity and fragmentation and choice and identity—relied on a false power of the mind, occluding the possibilities of systemic critique of the governance of bodies and therefore diminishing the chance for a social liberation of women. The mind is always connected to a body, tethered to it, completely. The body and the mind must be freed together.
Conclusion
The scholarship on the body, in its haste to modify the notion of the subject at the center of American and European thought, simultaneously pushed back against another legacy of Western thought: the imagined unruliness of the body. As the scholarship attempted to overturn the arguments of Descartes and Kant that, with consciousness, the mind successfully escapes the body (or sets the body in motion), these scholars repudiated the inherence of Plato–Augustine–Freud that understood the body to be inherently unstable. The body scholars of the late twentieth century downplayed this alternative intellectual legacy in an effort to establish the body itself as a site of rationality. The agenda sketched above depended to an important extent on an imagined concept of the body itself as pliable, or even cooperative. Either the conscious subject, as imagined by the body scholars, had at its disposal a “mindful body” with a “preconceptual imagination” (or a body, to use the language of Csordas, capable of producing a “pre-objective state”) or the subject corralled the body so it joined the mind and the spirit in the task at hand. The “subject–object” promises the possibility of bringing the external comportment of body under control to accurately reflect one’s inner thoughts and drives. The notion that the body can be properly re-socialized to throw a ball in a fluid singular motion suggests that the body can be remade if life is restructured. You become your body, as the theologian James Nelson put it at the opening of the essay. But why does your body, with its own passions and commitments, not override you? You can bring the body with you wherever you go, in other words, because it proved quite amenable to the task at hand. Tensions between passion and control, sexuality and chastity, old age and youth, are expunged by many of the body scholars. The body itself becomes a mind. The body itself becomes a companion. The body never works against the subject. The body actually helps to create a thoughtful subject. We should mention that, given the inherent patriarchy behind dubbing flesh irrational, feminists like Young and Bordo depended upon the possibility of control of the body to create an insurgent feminist subject. But the male philosophers and theologians mentioned above also willed a friendly notion of the body into existence in order to offer their revisionist takes on grace, idealism, and morality. The insurgent feminist subject, along with the moral subject and the grace-infused subject, all held court over an object, the body. The empiricists—a sociologist like Turner, an anthropologist like Csordas, or a historian like Bynum—laced the body into the analysis of human subjects, past and present, without suggesting that consumers, supplicants, or culture creators were somehow unhinged. The body is simply part of living a mostly reasonable life.
This scholarship rests on a fantasy of control and controllability. To join the Enlightened or Christian subject the body required a new agreeability, which it received routinely in the 1980s and 1990s from these scholars. The body is not docile; it possesses agency, but the body of the late twentieth century offers little resistance to directives of the mind or spirit. The body, to put this another way, became respectable. It did not enjoy such a reputation from Greek thought to the Victorian era, but one would not necessarily detect this from several volumes on the body bookshelf. The notion of the untamable body quickly became passé. Here, as elsewhere in American intellectual history, gender and race clash. Indeed, race clashes with everything. The very control of the body in the name of freedom has a much more problematic legacy if control of the body is set to different ends, or harnessed for the very freedom of others. Above, we noted with Spillers that slavery haunted very creation of “the body” as a category. The violence of slavery brought “the body” into existence out of “flesh.” A line of thought that stretches from Henry Bibbs (and other authors of slave narratives) to Frederick Douglass to Du Bois to Fanon, and even to Ta-Nehisi Coates, shows that imagining the body as controlled and controllable has a problematic legacy. One can bring the body under control to throw a ball or launch a real political rebellion, to live a moral life or structure thought, or enjoy life as a consumer or create a culture, but the body can be controlled in the name of economic productivity or racialized governance. The very act of bringing “the body” into existence, as Spillers shows, suggests a rationalization of human corporeal existence that allows for increased mastery of human life. The vast majority of the scholarship on the body simply accepted the possible control of the body as a good to be celebrated. Yet such control and the fantasy of control have a problematic history. It seems appropriate to grant the final word to race in our analysis of twentieth-century body scholarship.
Acknowledgments
The author wishes to thank the members of the Midwestern Intellectual History Group who read the initial draft. Enthusiasm and feedback from the audience at the 2022 gathering of the Society of US Intellectual History conference in Nashville proved crucial to launching this effort. Special thanks go to Andrew Hartmann and Richard Candida Smith, who took the time to read an advanced version of the article. I owe a debt of gratitude to the two anonymous reviewers as well as the editorial staff at Modern Intellectual History. I am especially appreciative of the attention and guidance offered by editor Brandon Byrd.
Open access
