What can the body do?

This article examines Danish 9th‑grade students’ affective relations with their bodies across ages 5, 10 and 15, asking what the body can do in everyday life. Drawing on 56 qualitative interviews and workshops with 118 students in two Copenhagen schools, we use biographical photo‑elicitation and collective memory work to trace how embodied capacity and ‘well‑being’ are produced through shifting socio‑material assemblages. A Deleuzo‑Guattarian affective lens highlights how early childhood memories of a ‘free’ body are later interrupted by territorialising forces, including peer and family evaluation, school norms, and digital body cultures. We show how these forces contribute to gendered pathways of becoming ‘bodies‑with‑organs’, intensifying self‑surveillance and criticism, while also generating moments of de‑territorialisation through sport, sensuous immersion, supportive relations and spirituality. By conceptualising well‑being as embodied capacity, the article contributes to sociological debates on embodiment, health identities and healthism by demonstrating how school‑level and family‑level conditions shape the uneven distribution of what young bodies can do.