43Dominant Theories of the Body 6-18

These analyses of the ordered and ‘lived’ bodies provided the field with
alternative lines of development, but replicated what many saw as a longstanding and debilitating division between theories of structure and agency
(Dawe, 1970, 1979). Structuration theories developed as a means of overcoming this opposition. Based on assumptions about the mutually constituting nature of social structures and actions, the body was central to
structuration theory’s vision of society. Pierre Bourdieu and Anthony
Giddens are the most influential proponents of this theory of social life,
while Elizabeth Grosz provides us with a different, feminist analysis of the
mutual constitution of the body and dominant norms of sexuality. Despite
their differences, each of these theorists claimed that the body was a recipient of social practices and an active creator of its milieu. In Bourdieu’s theory of social reproduction, the body is shaped by, yet also reproduces, class
inequalities. The embodied dispositions that people acquire during their
upbringing ‘continuously transform necessities into strategies, [and] constraints into preferences’ (Bourdieu, 1984: 190). Giddens’s (1991) conception of ‘high modernity’ provides us with a different version of how the
body and the social principles characteristic of society are mutually determining: the contingency of the contemporary social world is incorporated
into and reinforced by the contingency of the body. Grosz’s (1994) view of
the sexual body as both constituting and constituted is again quite different.
Using the topographical image of the Möbius strip (the inverted threedimensional figure eight), she explores how the body provides a morphological basis for sexual difference, yet is also structured (both internally and
externally) by the inscriptive powers of sexual norms.