In this series for The Bodies, Emotions and Material Culture Collective blog, Dr Holly Fletcher interviews leading scholars on the subject of the history of the body. For this post she spoke to Professor Luna Dolezal, an expert on embodied philosophy, about her previous and current research, as well as future directions in the field.

Luna Dolezal is Professor of Philosophy and Medical Humanities at the University of Exeter. Her research focuses on applied phenomenology, philosophy of embodiment, philosophy of medicine and medical humanities. She is the Principle Investigator on the Wellcome Trust funded ‘Shame and Medicine’ project, and the UKRI-AHRC Covid Rapid Response project ‘Scenes of Shame and Stigma in COVID-19’, and a co-Investigator on the ‘Imagining Technologies for Disability Future Project’. Her work is driven by an interest in lived experience and embodiment and how these intersect with, and are co-determined by, the socio-political and technological frameworks in which we are enmeshed. In 2015 she published The Body and Shame: Phenomenology, Feminism, and the Socially Shaped Body and in 2023 she co-authored Covid-19 & Shame: Political Emotions & Public Health in the UK.

Holly Fletcher is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Manchester on the Wellcome Trust funded project ‘Sleeping well in the early modern world: an environmental approach to the history of sleep care’. Her work focuses on the history of the body and its entanglements with the material world and her research has been published in leading journals including Historical Research, Gender & History, German History and Food & History. Her article ‘“Belly-Worshippers and Greed-Paunches”: Fatness and the Belly in the Lutheran Reformation’ won the 2021 German History Article Prize. She completed her PhD at the University of Cambridge in 2020 for which she examined the cultural significance of body size, fatness and thinness in early modern Germany.

Holly Fletcher: In your 2015 monograph The Body and Shame: Phenomenology, Feminism and the Socially Shaped Body you argued that understanding ‘body shame’ sheds light on how the social is embodied, and thus how the body becomes a social, cultural and political subject shaped by external forces and demands. Historians of embodiment, who are similarly interested in the socially shaped body, seek to historicise these external forces to uncover how the body was experienced, perceived of, and even behaved, differently in the past. You mention in the book the radical anthropological transformation in what it means ‘to have’ and ‘to be’ a body which has taken place in the twentieth century – how significant is this historical context for your phenomenological and philosophical approach to the body and specifically to body shame?

Luna Dolezal: As a feminist and critical phenomenologist, I believe it is important to situate any analysis of lived experience within a cultural and historical context. While arguably body shame, or negative self-consious feelings about one’s own body and how it is meeting, or falling short of, external norms and standards, has been around for as long as we’ve had social groupings, there is a particular intensification of bodily self-consiousness in contemporary times. In a Western context, the confluence of neoliberal ideologies, the saturation of image-based advertising and media, and the hyper-mediatisation of social life, via online spaces, have created an ecological niche for shame and shaming, particularly concerning physical appearance. Shame dynamics dominate our cultural world—reality TV, social media, print media, advertising. Neoliberalism, a late 20^th and 21^st century set of ideological practices which are applied to the economic market and to social life, has led to the ossification of more rigid social hierarchies, along with a pervasive politics of personal responsibility, a cultural disdain for vulnerability, dependence and need, and increasingly precarious structures in the fabric of social life. When we think about how people experience their own bodies, in terms of appearance, illness, vulnerability, ageing, sexuality, gender, etc., then the normative imperatives of neoliberalism, which emphasise personal responsibility, self-care, productivity, polished appearance, have become naturalised and normalised, meaning that we experience our bodies through these meaning systems. While the basic phenomenology of an experience like body shame may remain generalisable across cultures and historical time periods, there will be many aspects of the phenomenology of bodily experience which need to be understood through its historical specificity, especially when we think about power, gender and variable social positioning.

HF: In the same work, you wrote that your theoretical curiosity about the body comes from your own experience of embodiment, both as a practitioner of yoga and meditation and as a woman in western late modernity. Can you expand on the ways in which your lived experience of the body informs your scholarship on this subject?

LD: Working in philosophical phenomenology, part of the methodology is to corroborate theoeretical insights with one’s own lived experience and also through intersubjective dialogue with other phenomenologists. My own lived experiences of shame, chronic shame, feminity, gender, ageing, pregnancy, motherhood, bodily vulnerability, embodied practices, among many others, continue to inform how I understand and theorise embodiment. I also recognise that many embodied experiences are not available to me, and the work of other feminist and critical phenomenologists on subjects like disability, race and illness have been hugely influential in my own thinking, particularly in recognising the often invisibilised embodied privileges we can live with, and also the embodied consequences of uneven distributions of social power.

HF: The need to situate shame historically is particularly clear from your latest co-authored monograph Covid-19 and Shame: Political Emotions and Public Health in the UK which argues that the Covid-19 pandemic was a public health event imbued with and irrevocably shaped by emotions. Have you found that the experience of living through the pandemic has shaped or changed your approach to questions of embodiment and shame in your research and teaching? In what ways?

LD: Living and working through the Covid-19 pandemic was a unique experience. I had the privilege of working with two amazing colleagues, Fred Cooper and Arthur Rose, on our AHRC-funded Scenes of Shame and Stigma in Covid-19 Project. Our publications from that research project, including the book Covid-19 and Shame: Political Emotions and Public Health in the UK, were a way to reflect as scholars on the extraordinary circumstances we all found ourselves in during lockdowns and other public health measures that radically altered daily life. And as an individual, doing this scholarly work was an important way to process what I was experiencing, but also a way to feel agency in a time where people felt hugely disempowered. It was also an interesting time to think about embodiment, because during the pandemic, bodies became contaminated, and vectors for disease, we feared other bodies, kept our distance. And it was fascinating how for many people this was nothing new. I worked with my PhD student Gemma Lucas, to write a short article called Differential Experiences of Social Distancing which looked at how we people experienced social distancing very differently. For someone like me, it was a radically new experience to have people being wary of my body and keeping their distance, or looking disgusted if I got too close. But for others, this is a commonplace experience and numerous Black writers, particularly in a US context, wrote during Covid about how social distancing was “nothing new” or “more of the same”—their bodies were already treated with suspicion and wariness, they were used to feeling ‘contaminated’.

HF: You are currently a co-I on the project Imagining Technologies for Disability Futures which examines how disabled people can be brought together fruitfully with technologists to jointly imagine and enhance lives in the future. This exploration of the blending of the human with technology points towards a posthuman approach to the body which destabilises categories of dis/ability and perhaps even embodiment itself. Is this the direction in which you see your research heading in the future?

LD: There is a strand of my research that is about bodies and technology, and most recently I’ve been working with some sociology colleagues at the University of York and Touchlab, an Edinburgh based deep tech company that makes e-skin for robots, to do some research around a telepresence robot called Välkky, which has been trialed in a hospital in Helsinki. I’ve long been interested in telepresence, especially through robot embodiment, and how aspects of the experience we have of our lived bodies, like motor intentionality, the body schema, expressivity, the look, recognition, can be transposed into other environments via technological mediation. I think some part of my future research will follow this thread and I will continue to think about embodiment and intercorporeality in technological contexts, like interacting with social robots.

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