A Low-toned Bio-politics. Time, standards of growth and focus on the male body at the dawn of the 20th century

Diasio, Nicoletta

doi:10.4000/rsa.3165

Cited by 7 publications

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“…The techniques of surveillance medicine such as screening, population studies, statistical enquiries, and public health campaigns have turned the variations of these changing bodies into measurable, understandable, objective, and predictable phenomena (Armstrong, 1995 ). Developmental thinking has introduced the idea of a life cycle divided in a regular and universal succession of stages (Turmel, 2008 ; Diasio, 2019b ), which relating bodily transformations to a specific vision of time, seen as linear, irreversible, progressive and teleological. This epistemology and the apparatus it deploys aim to stabilize the mutability of the body.…”

Section: The Normative Power Of Physical Developmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

Illegitimate bodies? Turner syndrome and the silent interplay of age, gender, and generational positions

Diasio

2023

Front. Sociol.

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This paper focuses on the strength of social norms that define the right development of the body in time. It also analyzes how the social positions of age, gender and generation intertwine in the definition of such a legitimate body. The starting point is anthropological research carried out in France between 2018 and 2020 among girls and women affected by Turner syndrome, a rare genetic condition causing small stature, ovarian insufficiency, a delay or absence of puberty, and infertility. We first explore how measuring the body has become central in the social construction of the concept of age-appropriateness. We then present four women' narratives, which express various forms of desynchronization: the gap between physical appearance, chronological age and age status; the cleft between the physical development induced by hormone therapy and being in a particular stage in life; the difference between chronological and reproductive age; and lastly, the trouble in a generational position related to infertility. For women suffering from this genetic condition, the gap between bodies, time and social statuses associated with age, gender and generation, may engender a feeling of “being out of place.” The alignment of body and time is then one of the bastions of essentialization and naturalization. Finally, we stress the complex interplay of bodily and social markers of age and gender, and their role in social relations as both a resource and a constraint. Thus, while the syndrome may cause distress and sometimes a lack of legitimacy, it also leads to a critical re-examination of hegemonic models of womanhood and their intersection with age positions.

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Section: The Normative Power Of Physical Developmentmentioning

confidence: 99%