ABSTRACT
During the early 1980s, sociologists rst started to explicitly take on ‘the body’ as a serious topic of enquiry. As I indicated during the introduction to this book, this was an important reexive period for the discipline, wherein taken-for-granted ontologies of society, social actors and the social were called into question. e importance of the body for rethinking social identity, social regulation, social experience and intersecting relations of power has become accepted and overall, while we should see it as an ongoing project, this has become a notable and successful disciplinary shift. Moreover, this exceeds the discipline of sociology: we can also point to ‘bodily turns’ in the humanities and social sciences more generally, and it also complements and intersects with the deepening of other sociological endeavours in, for example, the emotions, gender, and health and illness. However, at this point I want to argue that this mainstreaming of the body has been overly disconnected from the emergence of the ‘question of the animal’ in the humanities and social sciences. Although a sociology of human-animal relations has also emerged, it has been less embedded within other parallel questionings of the discipline. Consequently I think we have witnessed the assumption that a sociology of the body is more or less a sociology of the human body.
