by Dr Kate McAllister, University of Kent
On 9-10 January 2025, twenty-eight participants gathered at the University of Kent in Canterbury to attend a workshop titled ‘The Leaky Body: A New Turn in the Humanities and Social Sciences?’ and co-organised by Dr Claire Jones and Dr Kate McAllister. The workshop was generously supported by an Arts and Humanities Research Council Research, Development and Engagement Fellowship (AH/Y003683/1) and the Society for the Social History of Medicine.
Developed by sociologists and philosophers, the leaky body concept emerged in the 1990s to study aspects of the body’s materiality, and explicate and counter the marginalisation of women in modern western patriarchal society. In recent years, this concept has been used across different disciplines, including history, to offer new perspectives on the relationships between particular bodies and the social order, and on embodiment and corporeality. It forms the theoretical foundations for the Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded ‘Buzzers for Bedwetters’ project at the University of Kent.
Participants in Kent’s workshop critiqued the concept of ‘the leaky body’ via nine interdisciplinary panels organised by theme, such as climate and environment, research methodology, media and markets, the archive or the museum, resistance and gender. Participants considered:
- How useful is the turn towards the ‘leaky body’ in the humanities and social sciences?
- In what ways does or might the concept of the leaky body aid studies of corporeality?
- How might disparate fields in the humanities and social sciences be further united through this concept?
- What does focus on the unbounded body reveal that focus on the bounded doesn’t?
- Where do we go next in ‘leaky body studies’?
Various papers interpreted the leaky body concept as a tool to reveal the different meanings ascribed to particular bodies and fluids across time, place and context. Participants for example used this concept to show how and why the consumption of blood was regulated in the sixteenth century, but also critique the feminisation and stigmatisation of urine incontinent bodies in the present. Discussing medieval Islamic legal literature, colonial policies in the nineteenth-century ‘Orient’ and current social media ‘pimple-popping’ videos, other participants explored how certain bodies became seen as transgressive, but also sometimes as socially acceptable: these were bodies leaked fluids from unexpected bodily locations, conflicted with the ambitions of French colonial authorities and were staged online as repulsive yet sometimes satisfying. Attention was also paid to what happens when bodies fail to leak. For Phaethousa in the Hippocratic Epidemics, her amenorrhoeic body was tied to masculinised traits and seen as shameful, ‘Other’.
The leaky body concept was additionally viewed as a way to understand how corporeality and embodied experience relates to the construction of the body as a cultural metaphor: this was shown in papers on the lurid, sensory descriptions of vaginal thrush presented in late-twentieth century Canadian newspapers and women’s literature, and on disordered eating in seventeenth-century England. Focusing on leakiness also shaped how participants understood their own embodiment and conducted their research. Such awareness informed further reflections on the stigmatisation of people living with leaky health conditions (like incontinence) through a focus on the contemporary marketing of pads, and on the possibilities of an ‘explicitly presentist’ history of urinary tract infections, failed treatment and medical uncertainty. There was also discussion about how focus on leakiness foregrounded certain embodied experiences, for example those of women navigating infertility whilst working in the neoliberal academy. Historians of medicine, science and psychiatry were however encouraged to remain aware of the often mediated, fragmentary nature of archival evidence in their efforts to ‘uncover’ such experiences.
Yet, the leaky body concept informed new disciplinary and interdisciplinary perspectives. This concept proved useful for historians of medicine, in reframing the development of modern disease categories whilst keeping the patient in view, but also offered a conceptual middle ground for research that combines disability studies and the environmental humanities, and explores the material relationships between corporeal porosity, environment, leakage and the disciplining of certain bodies. Considering the meanings attributed to the leaky postmortem body also drew focus to the perspective of non-human entities, such as flies or beetles, thus potentially contributing to post-humanism. The materiality of leakiness was a consistent theme across various papers. Participants discussed the leaky texts of François Rabelais and how they shaped tactile, embodied experiences, but also how children with Inflammatory Bowel Disease embody and negotiate sociomaterial containment at school. Material culture also offered a shared reference point for participants considering the uses of this concept in a heritage context, in revealing how objects produce knowledge by stimulating, managing or hiding leakiness, but also how curating practices might inadvertently sanitise the messy materiality of leaky bodies.
Closing discussions returned to the questions: What is the value of the leaky body concept, and where do we go next? Participants highlighted opportunities for this concept to be more fully applied in modern history, histories of the body or medical history. In a world confronting the effects of climate change, it was suggested that focus might broaden to leaky bodies of vegetation or water, though attention to the human body from the perspective of disability also remained necessary. Above all, this concept was interpreted as a way to establish community across disciplines, produce disruptive research which resonates with people beyond academia and work towards a future where leaky bodies are no longer shamed or hidden. Arguably, the leaky body concept is here to stay.