ABSTRACT
Physical cultural studies (PCS) offers many possibilities for scholars who wish to contextualize sexualized and sexed bodies, theorize the sexualization and sexing of bodies, highlight the (in-)visibility of certain sexualized bodies, question which bodies are sexualized, and examine the complexities of defining how, when, where, which and by whom might bodies be sexualized and sexed. In this chapter, we offer our suggestions on delineating what a PCS approach to the study of sexualized and sexed bodies might look like by identifying existing research on sexualized and sexed bodies which (we suggest) embraces a PCS approach. We then discuss our current research in terms of what a PCS sensibility offers to us as teachers/activists/researchers as a way of encouraging others to further contemplate the viability of PCS in this domain. As scholars who are particularly interested and involved in research that considers transnational perspectives on physical cultures, we hone in on sexualized/sexed bodies, but remain mindful of the impossibility of isolating one dimension of subjective or embodied experiences; it is the privilege of white bodies in a white supremacist society wherein one can imagine or see a body only as sexualized or sexed, since the white body can exist as universal, ‘unmarked’, and not racialized (Mohanram, 1999). The bodies we consider and research are simultaneously gendered, raced, classed and located within discourses of (dis-)ability, nation, ethnicity, beauty and (re-)productivity which privilege and marginalize them in complex ways. In this chapter, we choose to focus on sexualized and sexed bodies, which we suggest are highly interrelated and slightly different effects of the same thing: heteropatriarchy and racism. While we understand that all bodies are sexualized/sexed to certain degrees and in certain contexts, the bodies we consider in this chapter are oftentimes demarcated as homosexual, gay (G), lesbian (L), bisexual (B), trans- (T), intersex (I) and queer (Q) bodies. They may also be bodies (‘diagnosed’ or not) with hyperandrogenism. We include this brief list not to be exhaustive or to exclude but in order to provide some parameters for this chapter. While we readily acknowledge the multiple ways sexualized/sexed bodies (dis-)appear in physical culture, our work in this area primarily deals with bodies coded, read or asserted to be ‘lesbian’ (Chawansky) and ‘queer’ (Itani), and so we invariably drift towards work which includes these subjectivities.
