Construction and Corporeality

Abstract

One of the most compelling but difficult questions raised by contemporary poststructuralist theory concerns what remains of `the body' if social, linguistic structures are granted primacy in determining its formation and representation. While some argue that poststructuralism renders `the body' passe, poststructuralist theory can be understood as framing a call to retheorize the body's relation to cultural and sociopolitical structures and practices. This call seems particularly urgent in light of the distribution and impact of new, biomedical `technologies of the self' (see Foucault). These technologies appear destined to become one of the most powerful new forms of subject-making to emerge in Western culture in centuries. In spite of the centrality of questions concerning the `materialized' body as a unique social, cultural and political object in other disciplines, such questions have yet to catch the disciplinary imagination of theoretical psychology in a sustained way. Theorizing the body in its materiality is more important than ever as a counterweight to appropriation of new biotechnologies within psychology's dominant essentialist materialist paradigm. The failure to theorize the particular ways in which the trope of materiality functions and is reproduced renders theoretical psychology ill equipped to address the consequences of the cultural shift towards understanding the body's materiality as the privileged medium for transforming subjectivity.