IngentaConnect The Body Politic as Spatial Metaphor

Authors: Rasmussen, Claire¹; Brown, Michael²

Source: Citizenship Studies, Volume 9, Number 5, November 2005 , pp. 469-484(16)

Publisher: Routledge, part of the Taylor & Francis Group

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

Document Type: Research article

DOI: 10.1080/13621020500301254

Affiliations: 1: University of Delaware, Department of Political Science and International Relations, USA 2: University of Washington, Department of Geography, USA

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