The rise of the body and the development of sociology

Studies of embodiment have occupied an increasingly important role in sociology and across the social sciences and humanities since the 1980s. This ‘rise of the body’ has led not only to the establishment of a vibrant interdisciplinary area of ‘body studies’, but has also prompted an ongoing reconstruction of disciplinary and subdisciplinary areas seeking to account more adequately for the embodied nature and consequences of their subject matter. It has also been responsible for a shift in mainstream social theory. A growing number of works concerned with performativity, structuration theory, nature, realism, feminism, and human creativity, for example, are illustrative of an increasingly widespread recognition that the embodied subject needs to be central to any comprehensive understanding of social life