Towards an Embodied Sociology of Youth and Identity

The body has become a key sociological theme of academic study. However, while the body has emerged as a central focus of much theoretical work, in youth studies the physicality and materiality of the body is more often than not taken for granted, or is an ‘absent presence’. This paper contends that questions of identity and subjectivity, fundamental to youth studies, are connected to understanding bodies as sites of experience through which young people embody and actively respond to their socio-cultural and historical context. As such, young people’s bodies are a contested site particularly regarding where the ‘naturalness’ of the body ends and the ‘sociality’ of the body begins. Nevertheless, the body often remains implicit, or as a site upon which societal inequalities play out, rather than an active force. Where the body is directly addressed in the study of youth, it is frequently identified as the locus of social or cultural ‘problems’, more often than not reflecting the concerns of Western culture, such as in the alarm surrounding childhood obesity and poor body image. This paper places young bodies at the forefront of sociological analysis. It highlights the active relations between bodies and the social world and focuses on bodily issues and how they shape identities for young people. It also corrects previous approaches in which the body is invisible or rendered inferior to the mind in a binary logic. Theorising the body has implications for youth identity research as all major structural inequalities such as gender, class, race, sexuality, dis/ability, and place are necessarily embodied. A focus on the body and embodiment can provide a way of exploring the threading and mediating relations between youth, identities and society and the complexities of human experience.

This paper is submitted for: 'Theme VI - Other Methodological and Theoretical Advances'.