In everyday life, we usually go by the one-body-one-person rule: one person has one body (and vice versa). This social belief builds on two assumptions: bodies are individual units and they (and 'their' person) are the same in different situations. This is also the conceptual resource for social theories that build on the notion of individuals. In this article, we turn it into a sociological topic. We develop a vocabulary for reconstructing bodily one-ness and bodily sameness as practically achieved social order, as body boundary work: what belongs to a body is a matter of local practices that define its situational contours, limits and margins. Practices of identification and personification draw on social memories and enact bodies as trans-situational entities. Persons and bodies, we argue, evolve in co-individuation. Personal corporality, then, can be conceptualized as a body of work that encompasses these practical efforts of boundary-making.
This chapter examines how a particular kind of life course transitions, those between affiliations to categories of “human distinctions” like gender, ethnicity, or age, are culturally observed in terms of their normality or deviance. It asks how framings and doings of such transitions as (not) ‘normal’ are related to those of individuals in transition. To this end, it introduces the analytical framework of “un/doing differences” as a way of understanding categorizations of humans as the product of drawing distinctions and connects it to the concept of “doing transitions”. It argues that doing transitions can be understood as one mode of un/doing differences. To illustrate this point, the chapter presents reflections on how affiliations to human categories, combinations of affiliations, and of doing transitions between them are linked to cultural definitions of normality and deviance.
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