Bodily Knowledge: An Approach to ‘Embodied Subjectivity’

Abstract

There are two main parts to this chapter. The first is the development of a methodological framework to understand the political production of knowledge. This is a framework from which to examine the different threads of the ‘anatomising urge’ and the influence of this form of knowledge and construction of the body on the development of organisation studies as an academic field. This methodological framework is largely based on Foucault’s genealogical method.

… we should think in terms of transforming both the social relations of knowledge production and the type of knowledge produced. To do so requires that we tackle the fundamental questions of how and where knowledge is produced and by whom, and of what counts as knowledge.

(Weedon, 1987, p. 7)

… the perceiving mind is an incarnated mind.

(Merleau-Ponty, 1989, p. 3)