This panel will explore the usefulness of the term ‘body work’ in cultural history. Body work is understood as work focusing on the bodies of others as component in a range of occupations in health and social care, as well as in unpaid work in the family. How can the notion of body work inform cultural history of health and illness whether through a micro-social focus on the intercorporeal aspects of work in health and social care, or through clarifying our understanding of the
times and spaces of work, or through highlighting the relationship between mundane body work and global processes. The British sociologist Julia Twigg has introduced and explored the term `bodywork', most recently in Body Work in Health and Social Care - Critical Themes, New Agendas (2011). She extends the
term body work from applying to the work that individuals undertake on their own bodies, often as part of regimens of health and wellbeing to covering paid work done on the bodies of others who thus become the objects of the worker's labour. The panel will pursue a discussion of the concept of body work in its manifold ways and how it has changed historically. We invite presentations that explore the multiple ways in which body work features in medical, therapeutic, and care fields as well as in different sectors of work outside health and social care. The aim of such bodywork can be medical, therapeutic, pleasurable, aesthetic, erotic, hygienic, or symbolic. It encompasses a range of practitioners: surgeons, scientists, physiotherapists, nurses, care workers, alternative practitioners, hairdressers, beauticians, masseurs, sex workers, undertakers
etc. What are the meanings of this work both for those employed to do it and those on whose bodies they work? How do constructions of the body affect how different social and age groups are regarded? In what ways has different practices limited or extended its involvement in the body? Has
work been organized hierarchically in relation to the degree of direct body work? What happened when body work became mediated by machines and technology? Has body work as forms of knowledge and practice been associated with lower status? How has the intimacy of body work been dealt with?