New Horizons

The fact that bodies are never merely one thing is not only a matter of experience but also a recurring theme in cultural theory. There is no such thing as a body that is exclusively dancing or political, entirely social, or purely natural—neither in theory nor in the lived world. Since at least the beginning of the twentieth century, intellectual discourse has explicitly grappled with the fact that our bodily "being-in-the-world" is not merely physical but is always multiply coded. As psychoanalysis began to demonstrate, bodies are invested with imaginary significance and permeated by traces of memory; at the same time, they are socially codified. In his seminal 1934 essay Les techniques du corps, the sociologist and anthropologist Marcel Mauss describes how everyday movement ...