Abstract
<jats:p>Across the social sciences and humanities, embodiment has become a central analytic perspective, reflecting the recognition that bodily experiences vary historically and cross‐culturally. Far from a fixed biological entities, human bodies are understood as socially mediated, relational, and power‐laden processes. Since the 1980s, cultural sociology (drawing on phenomenology, French pragmatism, poststructuralism, and feminist theory) has shown how what counts as “natural” is produced through cultural boundary‐work, and how embodiment constitutes a fundamental dimension of subjectivity. Contemporary scholarship traces how gender, race, class, and age shape embodied experiences, emphasizing objectification, stigmatization, and intersecting systems of oppression. Moreover, environmental concerns, population aging, consumer culture, and digital media underscore the body's centrality in display, self‐management, and quantification, while biotechnology and epigenetics complicate nature/culture divides. The field can thus be broadly organized around three themes: power (from Foucault to Bourdieu); inequality (genderization with Connell and Butler; racialization and intersectionality), and subjectivity (from Goffman to criticism of neoliberal commercialization and the sociology of emotions). Emerging sensory and nonrepresentational methodologies foreground the experiential, precognitive, and more‐than‐human dimensions of bodily life, conceptualizing data as relational encounters. Together, these developments position embodiment as a dynamic cultural and material accomplishment at the heart of social analysis.</jats:p>