The social construction of peripheral bodies

Abstract

This paper focuses on the ways our societies deal with non-central corporalities, that is, those corpo ralities that depart from the socially constructed standard model of what the body should be. It begins by taking the body as a privileged locus for the communication between the biological, the individual and the sociocultural, and defining the core concepts of the ensuing analysis: corporality, bodily centrality, natural symbol, and incorporation. It then moves on to question the rise of the body in the contemporary, hiperindividualistic societies, and highlights social processes that produce the norms about what the body should be. Such norms turn into metaphors the images of bodies on the examination table, the passerelle and the podium. We then present the notion of the peripheral body as that from which emanates signs that are deval ued by the standards of body centrality. Physical deformities and obesity are shown as examples of how the body can be a source of stigma and the locus of psychological suffering in common interaction processes. We attempt to provide elements for the analytical questions that run through the paper: what processes lead a given social object to become a part of the center or, on the contrary, be relegated to the periphery? How the peripheral is socially constructed? What are the social and psychological consequences of being seen as a peripheral body?