Regulating Bodies

Résumé du livre

Turner integrates these different traditions, demonstrating how this absence has not only impoverished the sociology of health and illness, but the very foundations of sociology itself. There are three major aspects to this argument. Firstly, it is impossible to develop an adequate theory of social action without a conception of the embodied social agent. Secondly, the idea of embodiment offers a fundamental critique of the positivistic side of the medical model of illness, thus offering a new theoretical basis for medical sociology. Thirdly, following the work of Michel Foucault, Turner demonstrates that medicalpractice functions as a moral discourse which produces a regulation of the body. In providing a general account of the problem of the body in modern society, this book builds on Turner's previous studies of The Body and Society (1984) and Medical Power and Social Knowledge (1987), attempting to solve many of the existing epistemological and theoretical difficulties in social theories of the body.