Body Politics
What is body politics?
As a general definition, human body is the structure which forms people, but explaining “body” as just a structure makes the notion simplistic and superficial. Because our relationship with our bodies is much more complicated than that. It’s a story which contains all experiences we had, from birth to present.
As R. Baumeister said, “everywhere in the world, self starts with body”.
Our bodies shape our identities but also social environment shapes our bodies. This relationship looks like a loop, but it doesn’t has to be like that.
However, there are some problems, some limitations that come from power mechanisms. Mostly, governments’ laws are based on only particular kind of bodies, and this system causes a ostracisation of other types of bodies -and of course identities-. Normalization and standardization repress individuality.
Normative thoughts about the body are results of the control mechanisms of government, and this is where body politics get involved. Body politics is a notion that focuses on the body’s power level of governing. So, it is the political usage of living bodies. Michel Foucault, who is a famous philosopher, uses the “biopolitics” notion to explain body politics and also calls it “the art of government”. Foucault described biopolitics as a “new technology of power…[that] exists at a different level, on a different scale, and [that] has a different bearing area, and makes use of very different instruments. He explains it by examining the historical transition of the classical period to the modern neo-liberal period. The importance of this transition is the Industrialisation period.
With industrialization, the human body started to be seen as a “machine of production”. ”In the second part of the 18th-century biopolitics thus came into view as a kind of ‚threshold of political modernity, at the same time as the “population” appears as a “machine of production” for the actualization of prosperity and welfare by use of its resources and potentials” he explains. Opinions on the population and the human body have always been changed for centuries. Due to the Industrialization period, government policies changed since the population started to be seen as an economic concept. The fact that the human body is blockaded by power relations is related to the economic usage of it. Therefore, the government structured specific forms of intervention to control the population. In the modern period, the government provides its power by capturing the bodies, controlling the souls. This way of governing is called “biopolitics”.
Extensions of power and debated bodies
The power of controlling the population is provided with the various control mechanism which can be called “extensions of power”. In this situation, the main tool of biopolitics is to develop convenient norms and implementing them into society. Therefore, education, military, health services, and the family institution became the control mechanisms of government.
For instance, a family institution is the first place where the body is abused. In a society where parenthood is considered sacred, parents -especially mothers- feel the pressure of responsibility of the child because of the social norms while the child, who obeys his/her parents, became the open target for the government to be controlled. So, the child learns obeying to others from his/her family first. Therefore, many situations occur in daily life because of social norms. Some of these social norms can be alined like norms about body forms, sexual orientation, gender orientation and motherhood.
“government is not a term that is only discussed in political side, also in philosophical, religious, medical and pedagocic fields since government is a term that refers to a set of social networks. It structures specific forms of intervation.”
Body and controlling bodies are still discussed today, these are some examples of “debated bodies”.
Reproductive Body:
It includes women and some trans and intersex people’s bodies, in that context “reproduction” means giving birth, pregnancy. Whole process of pregnancy is related to body of individual who has the only right to speak or make decisions about that.
Most governments take over that decision by implementing some laws and restrictions such as banning abortion.However, abortion is still common whether it’s legal or illegal. But in this case, banning acces to modern contraceptives of abortion results very serious, dangerous consequences.Punishing abortion is one of the best proof in terms of controlling bodies by governments.
Militarized Body:
Militarized bodies are one of the fundamental surfaces shaped by power mechanisms. It emphasizes the power of embodied being.
Bodies which comes from everyday life turn into machine-like entity. They are named and categorized quasi mechanistic terms. Standardization makes soldiers feel like all in a body, they aren’t individuals anymore, they are one and they exist as their country.
Non-normative body:
Most countries don’t provide legal recognition sex characteristics and gender identities except of heterosexual male and female.
Non-normative bodies and architecture
Imposing normative ideas is also carried out in architectural scale.
Le Corbusier’s idealised modular man is one of the most known example for that issue. Corbusier ignored people who has different kind of body type, by using ‘good looking’ policeman modulor. And it affects all modern architecture history. It caused important obscurities about human habitation and ergonomics of design. These kinds of projects show that architecture is all often designed for particular kinds of bodies.Architects shouldn’t design habitable place only for one kind of body, they must regard public and public needs.
Future of the body
The human body has an ever-changing structure. With technological developments, more and more individuals are electing for their bodies to be enhanced with machines. So, the mechanisms used to fix a disability -mostly health issues- became a choice for people who want to gain new features for their bodies. These people who have extensions on their body called cyborgs. Cyborg activists are fighting to regulate their rights and also, they prepared civil rights to recognize cyborgs.There are five rights prepared by cyborg activists:
-Freedom from disassembly
-Freedom of morphology
-Equality for mutants
-Right to bodily sovereignty
-Right to organic naturalization
Body politics is a everchanging structure. Design practices are settled on an uniform body perception as a result of normative thoughts about the body. In the future, architectural design perception could change with the changing body norms and new body forms. So, the most imporant factor that affects this situation could be the body politics thay change and evolve in the same direction.
by Gülşah Pelin Arı, Ezgi Küçükpehlivan
References:
-Fashion and body according to Neo-liberal Biopolitics: A Discourse Analysis About Vogue Magazine, Özlem Kalan, 2014
-Thomas Lemke, »The Birth of Bio-Politics« — Michel Foucault’s Lecture at the Collège de France on Neo-Liberal GovernmentalitY.
-Economy and Society, 30 (2), 2001, 190–207
-The Birth of Biopolitics LECTURES AT T H E COLLÈGE DE FRANCE, 1978–79. Edited by Michel Senellart
-Real-life cyborgs are fighting for their rights with art, Georgina Ustik, 2018Brown, N. & Gershon, S. A., 2016, Politics, Groups and Identities.
-W., Georgina, Celis, K., Kantola, J., Weldon, S.L.,(2013), The Oxford Handbook of Gender and Politics.
-Disability, Dr.Rebecca Kukla’s lecture,
-“Abortion Law”(2020), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abortion_law
-“Legal Gender Recognition”, TGEU
-Andreescu,F. C.,(2016) War, trauma and the militarized body
-Parker, Joanna, (2020), “Architecture is Yet to Come to Terms with Trans Bodies”
-https://failedarchitecture.com/architecture-is-yet-to-come-to-terms-with-trans-bodies/
