Nature - autonomous learning

the ‘nature’ of geography 97over-sexed. Rather than seeing representations of bodies as accurate,human geographers have asked why certain aspects of certainpeople’s bodies gain social salience and come to be valued inpositive or negative ways (see, for example, Jackson 1994). Second,representations of bodies profoundly affect how individuals comportthemselves. In turn, these modes of comportment can serve toconfirm the representations that engendered them in the first place!As the feminist theorist Iris Marion Young (1990) showed in hergerminal essay ‘Throwing like a girl’, people learn to use their bodiesin ways that often conform with the societal representations intowhich their bodies are fitted. Geographers like Gill Valentine haveinvestigated how there’s a geography to this disciplining of bodilyconduct, as individuals learn which modes of comportment areappropriate to which spatial settings. Overall, contemporary geographersinterested in the body take issue with the assumptionthat differences between people are mostly determined by biology.They argue that there is no given ‘natural’ body that automaticallydistinguishes people but only pliable bodies that vary because ofrepresentations and practices that vary over time and space. In thissense, contemporary geographers of the body eschew the abstractuniversalism of the humanistic geography influential in the 1970sand early 1980s. Most recently, geographical researchers on the bodyhave challenged the distinction between the social and physicaldimensions of the body (see Chapter 5). Good summaries ofgeographical understandings of the body can be found in Valentine(2001: ch. 2), Hubbard et al. (2002: ch. 4) and Duncan et al. (2004:ch. 19). For a wider introduction to social science research into thebody see Shilling (1997; 2003).This de-naturalising research into human identity and the human bodycan best be understood within the wider context of a ‘nature versus nurture’debate in the West that goes back to at least the 1970s.Within the disciplinesof human biology, physical anthropology, neuro-psychology and the youngfield of socio-biology, a debate has raged over whether people’s mental andphysical capacities are mainly a function of genes and the like or a product