Dumb questions : blustering hostility : nature/nurture, the body and the sociology of child abuse

Abstract

This thesis critiques the nature/nurture debate in sociology and applies current thinking to sociological work on child abuse. By examining the literature available within sociology, biology and ecology, the nature/nurture debate is shown to be a defining epistemological construct within sociology. In deconstructing the debate, this thesis shows that addressing biology within sociology does not require an acceptance of determinism and that a plurality of possibilities still exists. It also reveals that human corporeality is viscerally susceptible to the environment and that separating human social life from its corporeality merely reiterates the Judeo-Christian theology that human life is divinely separate from its environment. In applying contemporay and classical sociology to the issue of child abuse, this thesis destabilises contemporary notions of the plasticity of the body and the irrelevance of the biological sciences to human social life.

Date of Award	2001
Original language	English