On Thursday 9th and Friday 10th January 2025, participants gathered at the University of Kent in Canterbury to explore and critique the concept of ‘the leaky body.’
Developed by sociologists and philosophers, this concept emerged in the 1990s as a way to study aspects of the body’s materiality, and to explicate and counter the marginalisation of women in modern western patriarchal society. As argued by Margrit Shildrick, in contrast to the self-contained, composed, rational male body, western societies viewed women and their bodies as inherently ‘leaky’, and in turn, as inappropriate, uncontrollable and ‘Other’ (Shildrick, 1997). Close attention to the embodied, corporeal qualities of such leakiness, however, destabilised the boundaries, binaries and categories used to maintain social order through such marginalisation. In recent years, the leaky body concept has been used by researchers working across history, anthropology, literary studies, classics, and disability studies, and to form the theoretical foundations for the AHRC-funded ‘Buzzers for Bedwetters’ project at the University of Kent. Arguably, this concept has helped offer new perspectives on the relationships between particular bodies and the social order, and on embodiment and corporeality across time, space, context and place.
Taking place across two days, Kent’s leaky body workshop was formed of nine interdisciplinary panels, featuring participants who had utilised this concept from different perspectives yet whose work shared a common theme or focus; such as the climate and environment, research methodology, media and markets, the archive or the museum, resistance and gender. In ten-minute papers, participants engaged with the following questions:
- 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’?
After opening remarks from Claire Jones, the workshop began with a paper from Lisa Smith, who previously studied the pathologisation of male leaky bodies in eighteenth-century England and France (Smith, 2011). Reflecting on how this concept translated to her recent work in food history, Smith explained that in the sixteenth century, the consumption of blood was often tightly controlled. To ensure that consumption did not blur the boundaries between barbarism/civilisation, human/animal, contemporary recipes therefore laid out clear steps to make blood edible, rather than tainted. Margrit Shildrick similarly noted how her thinking on the leaky body had shifted over the years towards urine incontinence. As an archetypal leaky body, the incontinent body had become feminised and seen to lack control. Shildrick illustrated this through a recent advert for male incontinence products, which encouraged users to ‘Take Control’.
In their papers, participants revealed the different meanings ascribed to leakiness across time, place and context. As shown by Saqer Almarri, looking to fluids such as urine and the bodily location that they leaked from allowed medieval Muslim legal scholars to gender individual bodies. In this context, bodies that leaked certain fluids from unexpected places, such as the navel, transcended the legal boundaries of male/female and social order. According to Nina Studer, seminal leaks took on different, yet still transgressive, meanings in the nineteenth-century ‘Orient’. Conflicting with the offspring- and virility-related ambitions of French colonial authorities, these leaks raised moral concerns about uncontrolled sexuality, and were gradually brought within the diagnostic category of ‘spermatorrhoea’. In her paper on pimple-popping videos, Paula Muhr also explored the visuality and shifting meanings of leakiness. Depicting a ‘visual spectacle’ of popping, squirting and oozing, these videos staged leaky bodies as repulsive but also satisfying, visualizing messy corporeality in ways that were socially acceptable. In contrast to Almarri, Studer and Muhr, Alex-Jaden Peart reflected on what happens when bodily fluid stops, as was the case for Phaethousa in the Hippocratic Epidemics. Peart argued that after Phaethousa developed amenorrhoea, and became no longer able to carry children, her body was tied to masculinised traits and seen as abject, shameful, ‘Other’.
Following the arguments made by Shildrick and scholars like Robyn Longhurst, other participants explored the relationship between leakiness, corporeality and embodied experience (Longhurst, 2001). Focusing on disordered eating in seventeenth-century England (specifically, ‘pica’), Helena Aeberli argued that a focus on leakiness reveals how bodily processes, such as flow, excretion, expulsion, ingestion and obstruction, destabilised the boundaries of the biological body, and why such bodies are abjected by society. Georgia Haire also explored the shifting corporeal meanings of vaginal discharge. Through a focus on late-twentieth century Canadian newspapers and women’s literature, Haire highlighted how lurid, sensory descriptions of vaginal thrush (“Thick and white, like cottage cheese”) framed discharge as a normal or abnormal bodily process and shaped women’s embodied knowledge.
Several participants acknowledged how their own embodied experiences of leakiness were informing their research. Chris Chatterton offered insight to his current research on (and lived experience of) male urine incontinence, noting how the recent commodification of incontinence technology feminised this condition and impacted the lives of people living with leaky health conditions. Agnes Arnold-Forster recognised how her historical interest in urinary tract infections, failed treatment and medical uncertainty was shaped by her embodied experiences; thus, leading her to write an ‘explicitly presentist’ history. Arguing that infertile bodies are often hidden in the neoliberal academy, Samantha Wilkinson used her experiences of leakiness to bring their unruly materiality to the fore. These papers showed how the leaky body concept helps researchers reveal the ‘messiness and irrational sensuousness of human experience and corporeality’ (Longhurst, 2001, p. 51) but also become more aware of their own positionality. According to Kate McAllister, however, there were still pitfalls for historians of medicine, science and psychiatry utilising this concept in their search for patient experience. In her paper on urine incontinence and elderly bodies, McAllister emphasised the continued need for a careful approach to identifying the voices of patients in the archive, based on mediated fragments of experience.
Despite such potential methodological limitations, other papers showed that the leaky body concept can inform new disciplinary and interdisciplinary perspectives. Focusing on the leaky postmortem body, Lee Claiborne Nelson reflected on its utility in reconceiving ‘the human’ as a part of the world and refocusing attention on what the perspectives of non-human entities, such as flies or beetles, reveal about human corporeality. For historians of medicine, Richard Bellis argued, the leaky body concept also unsettles accepted orthodoxies. Though the clinical and pathological work of Richard Bright and the influence of the French clinic is often taken to explain the development of modern disease categories, Bellis showed how focusing on insufficiently leaky bodies both revealed the significance of investigations into retained fluid and urine and kept the patient in view. To Elaine LaFay, this concept also facilitated interdisciplinary approaches, exemplified by her analysis of incontinence in the nineteenth century. Drawing from disability studies and the environmental humanities, LaFay highlighted the material relationships between corporeal porosity, environment and leakage which disciplined, gendered and shamed certain bodies.
The methodological possibilities offered by exploring leakiness and materiality was addressed by other participants more directly. Rather than bodies, Rachel Hindmarsh was concerned with texts that leaked curative liquid, specifically those written by François Rabelais. Hindmarsh showed that these texts require a methodological approach that combines literary studies, book history and the cultural history of medicine, to understand how and why meaning leaked out of their pages and shaped tactile, embodied experiences. Catherine Wilkinson applied a sociomaterial approach to explore how children with Inflammatory Bowel Disease embody and negotiate social containment at school, due to their messy, material bodies. For Wilkinson, acknowledging that these children and their bodies actively resisted dis/ableist conceptions of normativity created possibilities for continued resistance.
Countering the prevailing focus on uses in the academy, Katie Dabin, Gabrielle Bryan-Quamina, Sarah Bond and Harriet Jackson from the Science Museum explored how the leaky body concept can be used by curators in a heritage context. Each focusing on particular objects and historical case studies, Dabin, Bryan-Quamina, Bond and Jackson highlighted how material culture produced knowledge by stimulating, managing or hiding leakiness. They also reflected on if their curating practices inadvertently sanitised the messy materiality of leaky bodies, putting distance between the object and the reality of its use.
After two days of varied and thoughtful discussions, Claire Jones closed the workshop by again asking: What is the value of the leaky body concept to the arts, humanities and the social sciences, and where do we go next? Some participants noted that whilst this concept has been widely adopted in medieval and early modern histories, it has yet to be fully applied in modern history, histories of the body or medical history. Others emphasised that in a world confronting the effects of climate change, it might be productive to shift focus towards leaky bodies of vegetation, water or of air. Attention to leaky human bodies from the perspective of disability was still however seen as a necessary response to the material issues faced by those who inhabit these bodies. Above all, the leaky body concept emerged from these discussions as a way to establish common ground between disciplines and produce disruptive research. Its attentiveness to embodied experience could help ensure that such research resonates with people beyond academia, and works towards a future where leaky bodies are seen and celebrated, rather than shamed or hidden. It seems clear from these discussions, then, that the leaky body concept is here to stay.
References
Robyn Longhurst, Bodies: Exploring Fluid Boundaries, (London: Routledge, 2001)
Margrit Shildrick, Leaky Bodies and Boundaries: Feminism, Postmodernism and (Bio)ethics, (London: Routledge, 1997)
Lisa Wynne Smith, ‘The Body Embarrassed? Rethinking the Male Leaky Body in Eighteenth-Century England and France’, Gender & History, 2011, 23, pp. 26-46