A Right for a Body: in Captivity of Socio-Culture and Juristic Discourses

The human body in the conditions of (post) modernity becomes significant both from the point of view of the person and from the regulatory discourses in which this significance is fixed. Therefore, there is talk about having the right to a body, the implementation of which is problematic, because the body is controlled by various discourses, including socio-cultural, economic, media, medical, legal and others. The article deals with the right to a body, which can be considered in the context of the theory of generations of human rights and attributed to the fourth generation of human rights - somatic rights. In the socio-cultural perspective, the right to the body can be seen as the right to free bodily existence outside the controlling gaze, the choice of one’s own appearance (shape, weight, level of care, etc.), one’s own sexuality, marriage partner. At the same time, society has a system of rules that determine bodily norms and deviations, the conditions under which they are formed and exist and the characteristics according to which they are determined, the pool of experts who can dictate and evaluate, and categories of people depending on their compliance to those norms. First of all, such a strict normative view is aimed at women, which leads to a variety of negative consequences, including extreme forms of violation of the right to the body, including severe injuries. The existence of the norm is supported by discrimination against non-compliant social groups or stigmatization of inappropriate bodily practices. However, a person has the inalienable right to choose what to do with his/her own body, to take care of it, to express himself/herself by any means, i.e. he/she has the right to bodily autonomy and non-violence. The quality of his/her life depends on this direction. In Ukrainian society, the exercise of the right to the body is associated with both the existing socio-cultural discourse that legitimizes bodily norms and legal discourse that defines certain bodily practices as significant and therefore regulated by law (this includes birth / reproductive rights, including abortion and artificial insemination, euthanasia, cloning, gender reassignment).