Reflections on embodiment and vulnerability

Bodies matter as our experience of them is the basis both for social life and also for much medical and social research. There has been a spectacular increase in academic research on the body in the last twenty years or so. This paper-although a review of three ethnographic studies on the seemingly disparate and narrow fields of the embodiment of working class experience, boxing, and ballet-illuminates the broader relationships between the body, self, and society. Our paper works on three levels: firstly, as an account of the "lived experience" of embodied vulnerability; secondly, as an application of Bourdieu's theoretical schema, and thirdly, as a philosophically grounded critique of radical social constructionist views of the body.