Book Review--Embodied Modernities: Corporeality, Representation, and Chinese Cultures

Over the last two decades, the field of “body studies” in the West has made its way from the scholarly margins to the centre of the page. As Chris Shilling observes, “the body has historically been something of an ‘absent presence’ in sociology...,” leading a shadowy life between the lines, but seldom brought into the light of serious academic enquiry. The combined offices of consumer culture, second-wave feminism, technological advance, and a growing awareness of corporeality as an object of discipline and control have changed all this, and now the body is up for grabs from all academic quarters. The disciplines of literary criticism, sociology, cultural anthropology, cinema studies, history, psychoanalysis, diaspora studies and others have all had their contours realigned, sometimes dramatically, by the advent of the body as a recognized subject of discourse. The multi-stranded research thus produced explores both the body per se (as a material object) and also experiences of embodiment (the process whereby we animate that body with our individual psychic selves), and its reach knows few bounds. Today, bodies are gendered, sexualized, biological, sporting, sartorial, technological, digitalized, customized, commodified, performative, ritualized, fetishized, stigmatized, abjected, or exalted－ almost as legion in their academic categories as they are in life, and offering themselves up for scrutiny from every angle. Indeed, so speedy has the entrenchment of body studies been that no self-respecting study of the contemporary cultural condition can fail to put corporeality close to the heart of its analysis.