42Dominant Theories of the Body5

42Dominant Theories of the Body5

These theories were effective in illuminating how the body was ordered
and inscribed by power relations, but frequently remained silent about how
the body could be a source of the social, and about the ‘lived experience’ of
embodied action. They also tended to erase any ontological existence the
body had apart from society, thus making it impossible to evaluate institutions in terms of their beneficial or detrimental effects on the body. In
response to this lacuna, the 1990s witnessed a rise in studies about ‘the
body’s own experience of its embodiment’ which viewed the opportunities
and constraints of action as given by the ‘problems of bodies themselves’
(Frank, 1991: 43). Drew Leder’s (1990) focus on the lived experience of
instrumentally rational action is an important example of this genre. His
conception of the ‘absent body’ suggests that the body ordinarily ‘fades’ and
‘disappears’ from our experience when we are engaged in purposeful action,
yet abruptly reappears as a focus of attention when we are ill or in pain. In
contrast, Iris Marion Young’s (1980, 1998: 147–8) feminist phenomenology
highlights the daily foregrounding of the female body within patriarchal
societies in a manner which ladens women’s bodies with immanence, while
Arthur Frank (1995) has drawn on experiential accounts of the prominence
of the body during illness in analysing how a ‘pedagogy of suffering’ can
result in a new ethics of relating to others.