Embodied Practice: Claiming the Body's Experience, Agency, and Knowledge for Social Work

********** Although social work practice typically is concerned with physical conditions and experiences such as poverty, addiction, and violence, relatively little attention has been given to the body in professional literature. Emphasizing both physical and sociocultural dimensions of the body, this article argues for an invigorated, more complex understanding of the body in social work theory, practice, and research. Drawing from scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and social work, a framework involving three dimensions of the body is proposed for integration with accepted ecological practice models. The nature and implications of three primary dimensions of the body for multiple domains of social work practice are explored, citing examples from narratives of mothers living with HIV disease: (1) the experiencing body, focused on the physicality of daily life; (2) the body of power, focused on the physicality of oppression and marginality, typically based on race or ethnicity, socioeconomic status, gender, sexual orientation, age, disability, physical appearance, and illness; and (3) the client body, reflecting the bodily experiences of those identified as clients who participate in relationships with social workers. Key words: body; embodiment; knowledge; theory; postmodernism The "care and control" of client bodies, particularly disenfranchised bodies, lies at the heart of social work's disciplinary activities. In everyday practice, social workers routinely are involved with clients whose lives are profoundly influenced by traumatic, painful, or degrading bodily experiences, such as poverty, violence, addiction, chronic illness, or child maltreatment. Given this sustained, intimate connection with the body and its many and varied conditions, it is surprising that in its theoretical and practice frameworks social work pays relatively little attention to the body. This lack of conceptual development is mirrored in social work practice, where although client bodies are an integral part of daily practice, social work efforts are directed mostly to their surface attributes or to managing the consequences of bodily conditions, such as addiction or violence. A reading of current practice texts, for example, suggests that although the body is recognizably an important element in social wo rk practice--in clinical practice, for example, attention to body language and to the "visceral knowledge" of the body are considered to be essential--little attention is given to issues of the body that transcend actual physical states, including social constructions of the body, mind and body relationships, and the role of power in determining how bodily knowledge and experience are defined, interpreted, and managed. Largely missing from contemporary social work discourse, in other words, is the now widely accepted understanding that the body is both physical and socio-cultural: that it not only encompasses specific, personal, corporeal experiences but also experiences that are socially and culturally constructed and reflective of larger social arrangements. In this article we propose an invigorated, more complex understanding of the body and its knowledge in social work theory, practice, and research. Our arguments for "bringing the body back in" reflect and resonate with core concerns in the contemporary social work profession, which increasingly recognizes the value and salience of diverse and plural perspectives as well as the need for critical examination of prevailing social work orthodoxy (Robbins, 1999; Weick, 1999; Witkin, 1999). We are motivated also by a rich body of recent work in the humanities and the social sciences, which from a variety of different perspectives seeks to recenter the body as a focus of theoretical and practical concern (Ceronetti & Moore, 1998; Clark, 1999; Stensland & Malterud, 1999; Williams & Bendelow, 1998). In using this work, we are, however, mindful that social work has its own commitments and preoccupations, and that these require us to thread a path through these contributions that has integrity and meaning for this prof ession and its purposes. …