48Exploring Bodies 21页

These substantively informed discussions consist of broad general
overviews and assessments. They draw on the mountain of body relevant
work published in recent years, but place these studies within, and interpret them on the basis of, a realist schema which facilitates substantive analysis of the interaction between the embodied subject and society. Individual chapters analyse Working Bodies, Sporting Bodies, Musical Bodies, Sociable Bodies, and Technological Bodies. I have chosen these subjects as they constitute important issues in their own right (with music, in particular, being a subject that has been unjustifiably marginalized in the area), and because they cover the economic/technological, cultural and social concerns of those classical theorists whose work has been drawn on in establishing the convergence thesis central to this study. Finally, Chapter 9 concludes by explicating the consequences of this study for future empirical research and for the concerns of recent theories about the fate of the body in Western societies. The body has served as an enormously productive focus for theoretical and empirical work over the past two decades, but this has resulted in an increasingly fragmented field of studies. In this context, the conclusion makes the case for a consolidation of body studies around an agenda that can impart a greater degree of coherence to the subject.