Bodies, flesh, embodiment

Kath Woodward and Sophie Woodward

Chapter 5 in Gender Studies, 2025, pp 84-105 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: This chapter explores how bodies and embodiment are central to understanding gender, and we explore here how different disciplinary frames approach and understand gendered and sexed bodies. We highlight the need for multiple disciplinary frames in thinking through the complexities of how gendered bodies are regulated, experienced, stereotyped and lived. We explore the theoretical frames of phenomenology to think through how these ideas may have emerged from philosophy, but have moved cross discipline and also benefit from both scientific discourses of bodily developments and changes as well as sociological insights into inequalities and stereotyping. We take two case studies firstly we look at sport and specifically boxing as a particularly interesting field as it is demarcated by a gender binary (women's and men's sports) and explore examples of trans and intersex participation in sport within the context of multidisciplinary sports studies. We consider this in terms of gendered exclusions from sports, assumptions of naturalised abilities, as well as different embodied capacities and strengths as these change over time. The second case study we take the clothed body to explore how gendered bodies become over time in relation to clothing, gendered norms as well as media imagery. We explore the possibilities of empirical research from sociological and anthropological accounts which offer insights into lived experience and how people may feel comfortable or uncomfortable in their clothed bodies.

Keywords: Embodiment; Clothing; Sport; Feminist phenomenology; Trans; Intersex; Butler; De Beauvoir (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
ISBN: 9781800373945
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