Donna Haraway

Joan Jacobs Brumberg’s work, The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls, examines how American societal changes are reflected on the female body. Brumberg’s work draws primarily from the diaries of young American girls, giving intimate glimpses into the inner workings of their minds about how they relate to their bodies.

The phrase “social construction” is difficult to define as it encompasses a multitude of elements, but despite that, conventionally, social construction shows ways society has conceptualised expectations and ideals which can be related to specific sociological interested areas, such as the body. Social action has been shown to have an effect on the transformation of a biological individual, although bodies appear to be simply natural - eye colour, body shape, size of feet etc - a deeper context reveals that many social situations and factors contribute to the construction of bodies. How are we to make sense of people’s bodies? Theoretical traditions which highlight socially constructed bodies have been put forward by theorists such as Elias, Foucault, Goffman and Bourdieu, however, an alternative strategy of viewing socially constructed bodies could be to link these apparently contrasting theories together. This essay will focus upon ways in which the body appears to be a social construction, paying particular detail on the length individuals endure to perform socially constructed ideals with reference to gender and class.

This essay will critically analyze the various forms of oppression that are set out through Audrey Lorde’s concept of the “mythical norm” as discussed by Barbara Perry. Through the “mythical norm”, it can be seen that oppressions exists through the forms of racism and sexism which are exhibited through many scholarly texts and articles. Racism can be seen as a means of privilege and power that is given to individuals who coincide with the criteria of societies norm. In this case, these individuals consist of white, heterosexual, male beings who unknowingly oppress their racialized counterparts. Oppression can also be seen through the form of sexism. Sexism looks at the injustice and inequality of male dominance over female, which results to men being more privileged and advantaged in society over women who are disadvantaged. Therefore, privilege and power is obtained by those who coincide with the concept of the “mythical norm”, leaving minority groups who do not coincide with this conception oppressed through the forms of racism and sexism.

In The Story of My Body, Judith Ortiz Cofer is a young girl coming to America. She touches upon several of her personal struggles with assimilating in a new country. She is forced to confront the nature of people categorizing her body and looks and she provides detailed context on who views her body and in what way. This implies the idea of how different cultures view specific features through stereotypes. Her body is separated into different sections: skin, color, size, and looks.

One of the main themes in Sociology’s Missing Other is the social construction of a “normal body”, and how this affects

Mississippi was organized as a territory in 1798 and was admitted as the 20th state to join

Work hard, show up every day and to give your best ,” this is how Brenda Wilson lived her life. Brenda Wilson is a loving person with a great sense of humor. Growing up on a farm taught her how to work hard and care for others. She said her proudest achievement was raising two fantastic children.

“I not only noticed that it was not a boy's face but a man's; I also felt or saw that it was not entirely the face of a man either, but had something feminine about it, too. Yet the face struck me at the moment as neither masculine nor childlike, neither old nor young. But somehow a thousand years old.” (Hesse 52). The road to discovering one's self is often fraught with hardships and tears, especially if one's self does not fit the norm of the world they are living in. It has taken a long time and will continue to do so, but slowly people are starting to understand that the world is not all black and white and neither is gender. Stereotypes associated with gender have plagued people for centuries and adhering

Paul B. Preciado advances the intriguing “pleasure of multiplicity” notion in his gender-bending academic text Testo Junkie: “The Unique Pleasure of writing in English, French, Spanish, of wandering from one language to another like being in transit between masculinity, femininity, and transsexuality (Preciado 133). Preciado’s fluidity and liminality open a gateway to discuss “social bodies,” that is, a shift from viewing the human body exclusively as a biological entity to viewing it as an entity dictated by the hegemonic social and cultural practices (Shilling). In a highly socialized space, the human body becomes a ‘social text’ because it is spoken, and hence memorialized, inscribed and archived, by the legal structures of society. As Clarice

Bey, M. (2015). She Had a Name That God Didn’t Give Her: Thinking the Body through Atheistic Black Radical Feminism. Journal of Feminist Scholarship, [online] (9), pp.1-17. Available at: https://doaj.org/article/12d5104216b344b49a39272b9ced2454 [Accessed 8 Jul. 2017].

The body once established as “natural” and binary sex an unquestioned “fact,” is the alibi for constructions of gender and sexuality, which can purport to be the just-as-natural expressions or consequences of a more fundamental sex. It is on the foundation of the construction of this natural binary sex that the binaries of gender and heterosexuality are likewise constructed as innate. This narrative “gives a false sense of legitimacy and universality to a culturally specific and, in some cases, culturally oppressive version of gender identity” (Butler 329). Without a critique of sex as produced by discourse, Butler claims, the distinction of sex and gender used to contest the constructions of binary gender and enforced heterosexuality would be wholly ineffective.

“Bodies” explores how an understanding of feminized media is in part governed by a gendered understanding of the body, as well as how individuals use feminized forms of media in order to push and redefine the boundaries of the “feminine.” Authors Barbara L. Ley, Kyra Hunting, Michele White, and Beretta Smith-Shomade examine pregnancy apps, fashion, nail polish, and embodied spirituality, analyzing the twenty-first century understanding of the feminine body

“ Gender reaches into disability; disability wraps around class; class strains against abuse; abuse snarls into sexuality, sexuality, sexuality folds on top of race... everything finally into a single human body.”

Critical realism underpins the ontological disposition of this research, body politics to be specific. A body politics paradigm assumes that the body may become a site for political contestation and power relations (Scotland, 2012, p.13). Body politics has been used in different disciplines and contexts, including race, to study the connection of how the body becomes at the core of status and power representations "contemporary societies tend to segregate not only access to political power but also work, religious life, domestic work, and intimate relationships according to the sex and race of the bodies they organize" (Weldon, 2013, p.1).

women’s bodies are used and misused, how society sees them as just items, something to