The Body Politic as Spatial Metaphor

Abstract

As part of a special issue on the geographies of citizenship, this paper considers the longstanding and popular metaphor of “the body politic” for a polity. The metaphor's comparative power is successful because it imports key geographic assumptions about how polities are best organized. It makes claims about society and space (premises about location, spatial organization), nature–society relations (how the two spheres do and do not connect) and cartographic representation (the human body is the optimal representation of spatial and natural relations in a polity). We describe three ways in which geographical imaginations are constructed: organic, mechanical, and posthuman bodies politic. Our goal is twofold: first is to consider the ways the deployment of the metaphor of the body is used in political theory to convey a normative conception of citizenship; second is to bridge the gap between political theory and geography by paying special attention to the ways the body is a space. The metaphor of the body politic is a political geography that links citizenship to particular geographical and normative relationships.

Keywords:

• Political theory
• political geography
• metaphor
• polity

Acknowledgements

Gina Aaf, Caroline Faria, and Peter Mayell were research assistants at various stages of this research project, and the authors thank them for their work. We also thank Stephen Andrews for his kind permission to use figure 3.

Notes

¹ “The Body Politic” was the name of a Toronto-based gay and lesbian liberation magazine published from 1971 to 1987 (see http://www.clga.ca/Material/Records/inven/tbp/tbpint.htm). It is currently the name of a UK-based queer rights online magazine.

² The body politic is always represented as a human body, rather than that of a non-human animal. The significance of this will be discussed further in the second section but a few general points will be noted here. The human body, of course, is the more familiar type of body and, therefore, is more useful as metaphor. Second, because man is a political animal, and politics is often viewed as a uniquely human enterprise, the human body is the only appropriate comparison.

³ This is not to imply that only phrases like “the body politic” are metaphorical. Indeed the view of language we proffer is that all language is metaphorical since it establishes a relationship between two things (language and materiality).

⁴ Locke, for example, sees the body as man's original property. According to the labor theory of value, man acquires additional property through his laboring body.