One (em)body, why not everybody: the need to recognise collective embodiment in the context of health.
Authors: Watkins, M. and Samuel, W.
Conference: Socio-Legal Studies Association
Dates: 6-8 April 2022
Abstract:Embodiment is an approach that seeks to capture the ways in which we exist within a particular temporal and spatial environment. Embodiment has been successful in identifying how institutional frameworks are produced and proliferated through the conceptualisation of an ideal able body, as well as how the physical realities and values implicit in these frameworks’ co-produce and pathologise marginalised embodiment. Law is a key institutional framework that co-constructs and regulates embodiment. Importantly, this theory has allowed for the problematisation of the current framing of law, which ignores the realities of diverse living bodies. This problem is particularly acute in the context of medical law – which rationalises duties and standard owed to embodied individuals, based on the (ideal) reasonable man.
We suggest that further important critical perspectives are opened-up when we view embodiment through the lens of health. First, we identify the relational aspects of embodiment, which we encounter through lived experiences in our health & social environment’s. Second, we explore the increasing collectivisation of our bodies through mass data and genetic technologies. Third, we address the increasing technological hybridisation of our embodied selves. In doing so we argue that the increasing collectivisation of our physical, social, psychological, and linguistic health spaces require recognition of a novel form of collective embodiment. This paper sets out our conceptualisation of collective embodiment, to suggest that this (re)framing offers further opportunity for: recognising the formation and marginalisation of group intersectionalities, problematisation of law beyond individual embodiment, and more effective opportunities for collective advocacy.
Source: Manual