The Encyclopedia of Human Geography

This is a chapter about the specific geographies of human bodies. It contains the stories and experiences of two different human bodies. The first is that of Zhang Haichao, a young male migrant miner in China, whose body we get to learn about from the inside. Our second story is that of ‘Charlie’, the protagonist in the 2022 film The Whale, whose body challenges us to think more critically about how bodies are represented. The two stories highlight different geographical approaches to comprehending the infinite complexity of the human body. Indeed, writing about the body involves attending to the experiences of diverse bodies and understanding that the world is made for some bodies more than others. Before presenting the stories, however, we will introduce the various ways that geographers think about bodies and the spaces they inhabit and produce.