Bringing Our Bodies and Ourselves Back in: Seeing Irving Kenneth Zola’s Legacy

The purpose of this paper is to review the legacy of sociologist Irving Kenneth Zola in bringing the body into social science research and making visible and dismantling social structured barriers to hearing and speaking and living as fully human.

It begins with an examination of Zola’s experience of “being sexy” in his book, Missing Pieces (1982). It considers what a visual sociological focus on “being sexy” can contribute to understanding structured barriers to living as fully human after the emergence of this field in the 1990s and 2000s.

It provides two examples of the use of video cameras in understanding the daily experiences of adults using wheelchairs and children with asthma that continue the embodied work begun by Zola.

Embodied sociological research can be a strategy for social and political change.