Regulating Bodies: Essays in Medical Sociology

Bryan Turner's book provides a framework for the development of a sub-field: namely the development of the body. Through the examination of various philosophical traditions--phenomenology, philosophical anthropology, structuralism, and postmodernism--RegulatingBodiesshows how the human body has been ignored or neglected by mainstream social theory. Turner integrates these different traditions, demonstrating how this absence has not only impoverished the sociology of health and illness, but the very foundations of sociology itself. There are three major aspects to this argument. Firstly, it is impossible to develop an adequate theory of social action without a conception of the embodied social agent. Secondly, the idea of embodiment offers a fundamental critique of the positivistic side of the medical model of illness, thus offering a new theoretical basis for medical sociology. Thirdly, following the work of Michel Foucault, Turner demonstrates that medicalpractice functions as a moral discourse which produces a regulation of the body. In providing a general account of the problem of the body in modern society, this book builds on Turner's previous studies ofThe Body and Society(1984) andMedical Power and Social Knowledge(1987), attempting to solve many of the existing epistemological and theoretical difficulties in social theories of the body. Turner has provided a major synthesis of his earlier work on the sociology of the body, establishing the idea of embodiment as fundamental to the sociology of health and illness, and guiding the way to new areas of cultural analysis. This volume is a major university text for sociology, philosophy, and feminist theory.