“I Trust my Body:” Understanding Bodily Autonomy in Times of Precarity and Beyond

• In Event: Sociology of the Body and Embodiment Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 3: Bodies & Health

Abstract

Throughout COVID-19, mandatory masking, vaccination and lockdowns became heightened sites of “rights talk” that produced a moral, political and legal panic over the right to bodily autonomy (Albrecht 2022). Tensions emerged as the province of Ontario, like other regions, set arbitrary distinctions between “essential” and “non-essential” work, regulating the movement of bodies within public space. Skilled allied health and personal care professionals, who enhance the body in various capacities (i.e bodyworkers) such as physiotherapists, chiropractors, dental hygienists, hairstylists, aestheticians, personal trainers, dieticians, cosmetic injectors, were deemed non-essential and thus forced to confront the parameters of their work. Meanwhile, box chain workers like the Liquor Control Board of Ontario (LCBO) were deemed essential. In this paper, I examine how bodyworkers navigated, resisted, and asserted their understandings of bodily autonomy vis-à-vis governmental COVID restrictions on their work. Through a grounded theory approach of 20 semi-structured, qualitative interviews, collected between April to November 2025 that capture ideological processes of meaning-making, I explore how bodyworkers from the Greater Toronto Area narrated their claims to bodily autonomy through the ways they resisted or upheld pandemic health measures. Drawing primarily from Hutson’s (2013) notion of “corporeal credibility,” which establishes trust through mastery of one’s body, I argue that participants’ assertion of bodily autonomy becomes entangled with what I call “embodied intuition”—a culmination of personally held beliefs (real or imagined) and expectations of their body’s ability or capacity to fight off illness. I therefore consider how “embodied intuition” functions as a proxy for the material and social construction of the body’s legitimacy by suggesting that participants’ “embodied intuitions” allowed bodyworkers to envision their own bodily autonomy through socio-legal obligations of care. This research therefore affords us the opportunity to reflect on how we ought to understand autonomy well beyond COVID and reenvision social responsibility post-COVID.

Author

• Cheery-maria Attia, University of Toronto