44Dominant Theories of the Body 7-19

Structuration theories provide us with a ‘middle way’ between social
constructionist accounts of governmentality and phenomenological
accounts of ‘lived experience’. The body, in short, is a means through which
individuals are attached to, or ruptured from, society. Whether they provide
us with viable alternatives, however, is questionable. While Bourdieu (1984:
466) asserts the facts of changing bodily dispositions, his argument that the
habitus operates at the level of the subconscious makes it difficult to see
how individuals can escape from the dispositional trajectory assigned to
them. The emphasis Giddens places on changeability and reflexivity, in contrast, invests the body with an unlikely ‘lightness of being’; it is a durable
resource rather than a frail, inescapable part of existence, and can be reinvented by the individual alongside their reflexively constituted narratives of
self. Finally, despite her concern to identify possibilities for change, Grosz’s
focus on the body’s sexual specificity, and the additional ‘investments of difference’ made by society into the interiors and exteriors of bodies, seems to
ensure the continuation of opposing male and female identities. Putting
these difficulties aside for a while, however, each of these analyses can be
interpreted as raising, once more, deep concerns about the body’s productive capacities. For Bourdieu, Giddens and Grosz, the body has become subordinated respectively to the imperatives of social class, cognitive reflexivity
and sexual difference.