Feminist Theory and the Body

A Reader

Janet Price, Margrit Shildrick

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351567091
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Feminism & Feminist Theory
• Index: Social Sciences

First published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Section 1
Woman as Body?

Introduction

This section serves to introduce questions of how we analyse, understand and theorise our bodies as women, particularly within the values of modernism which grounded early second wave feminism. Broadly speaking the move has been from an initial disregard for body matters – except in the context of sexuality and reproduction – through a recognition of the force of body politics, to a contemporary focus on the inescapable relationship between embodiment, power and knowledge.

The identification of women with the body is a familiar idea in the Western tradition from Aristotle to postCartesian modernism, although not necessarily one that traces an unbroken continuum. It is not the purpose of this section to present the link as an ahistorical truth, but rather to uncover the complex components and implications that are inherent in the apparent straightforwardness of the woman/body/nature association. Although somatophobia, especially in association with the feminine, is a recurring feature, it must be contextualised in terms of very different paradigms of the body over time. The moves, for example, from a Platonic concern with the state of the embodied soul, to the medieval concentration on pain, death and decay, through Enlightenment concerns with the transcendence of the mind over the body, to our current focus on pleasure, sex and life do little to suggest continuity. Even in the light of such broad and relatively crude summations, it is clear that the meaning of the body changes dramatically over time. This in turn suggests that the questions feminists ask about the body should be ones set within the context and concerns of particular historical moments. Nonetheless, although the relationships between such studies and the questions pertinent to the present are not direct ones, they are ones, as Bynum (1995) suggests, of analogy and proportion. The relevance for today is that the past has shaped our own context, and allows us to draw broader lessons from the specificity of late twentieth-century studies.

With all that in mind, the extracts here come from a range of disciplinary areas – history, biology, philosophy, sociology – and examine the body in a variety of ways – as pure physicality, as the carrier of self/identity, as an indicator of position in hierarchies of power. The questions of sexual difference that are so often the focus of feminist theory are complicated by the problems of applying current categories to the past. For one thing, the specificity of sexual difference cannot be taken as a singular constant, but is often intimately tied up with other operative differences such as those of race. Londa Schiebinger, for example, traces the complexity of how histories of the measurement and documentation of bodies are bound up with colonialism, with scientific sexism and racism, with a need to prove the irrationality of women, and with the desire to exclude them from political life. As she puts it, '(w)oman, considered a monstrous error of nature, was studied for her deviation from (the) male norm', but, nonetheless, not all similarly sexed bodies had the same value. Schiebinger clearly shows how studies of sex and race in the eighteenth century were linked to explicit political questions of rights and equality, and she points out that gender is not, in all situations, the primary distinguishing characteristic between humans. The corporeal mapping of race and sex is never simple, and feminists need to ask more complex questions about the interrelationship of those categories and the body.

It is no surprise, then, that the devaluation of women through their putative identification with bodily matters is mirrored by a similarly grounded devaluation of slaves, of children, of animals, and of black people. Work in both philosophy and science studies, as the pieces by Elizabeth Spelman and Lynda Birke show, outlines a move to reduce marginalised others to their bodies. The process of categorisation that works to set in place boundaries between the normal and the abnormal, between the fully human and the sub-human, is as pertinent to the classical institution of slavery as it is to more recent biological reductionism that ties women to their reproductive functions. As Spelman eloquently points out, one heritage of the Platonic distinction between bodies and souls, which ranged women, slaves and animals on the side of the former, is a somatophobia both in the philosophies that feminists critique, and in work of feminists themselves who wish to deny the 'taint' of immanence. Rather than become mired in what is seen as the gross giveness of physicality in the feminine – especially with respect to pregnancy and childbirth – it seemed more liberating to claim that women too could transcend their bodies. Even Simone de Beauvoir who took women's bodies seriously enough to devote a major work, The Second Sex, to them was unable or unwilling to reconsider the value split between transcendence and corporeality. Although she did not believe that biological facts establish a fixed or inevitable destiny – as she says, 'the facts of biology take on the values that the existent bestows on them' (de Beauvoir 1972: 69) – she displays nonetheless an apparently deep aversion to some everyday experiences of the female body. On reproduction she remarks scathingly: 'giving birth and suckling are not activities, they are natural functions; no project is involved; and that is why woman found in them no reason for a lofty affirmation of her existence' (de Beauvoir 1972: 94). The answer, then, is clear: women too must leave behind the materiality of their bodies.

In her emphasis on the possibilities of women's becoming, Simone de Beauvoir holds out hope to women, but it is a different move to 'the body becoming' by means of which Birke signals the possibility of transformation within the biological itself. For all her ambivalence, de Beauvoir is to be associated with the phenomenological approach that sees the body and its social/cultural world in a mutually constitutive relationship. Instead of the body being positioned as a bar to knowledge, knowledge is produced through the body and embodied ways of being in the world. Both Felly Nkweto Simmonds and Helen Marshall utilise such an approach, which entails reflection on the habitus of the body, and on the image of, and experiential changes to, the body itself. Clearly, while being female is a major parameter of experience, it is only one of a number of possible aspects of bodily comportment. For Simmonds, her position as a Black woman is both a defining part of her social reality, a fully evident physical 'fact', but at the same time as being asked to speak on race issues, she feels that to 'talk about the body is to invite derision'. Simmonds takes the risk, however, in discussing her embodied reality not only in terms of her blackness, but also in terms of her experience of illness. In a similar way, Marshall utilises the the bodily transitions of her own pregnancy, to offer a phenomenology of the everyday body. What both extracts speak to, in a sense that is scarcely apparent in de Beauvoir's work, is a way of theorising the physicality of the body – including the body that bleeds, that sweats, that feels pain, that is marked both externally and internally – a way which moves beyond the dis-ease with flesh and blood experience that has often characterised feminist theory.

Where the selections in this section reject the crudity of the traditional identification of women with their bodies, they do not reject the body itself, but seek to find ways to reconceptualise its nature as an organism with both integrity and transformativity. For a very different set of theorisations, see Section 4, 'After the Binary' in which the body as such is a much more slippery concept, evading all attempts at categorisation.

References and Further Reading

de Beauvoir, Simone (1972) The Second Sex, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.

Bynum, Caroline (1995) 'Why All the Fuss about the Body? A Medievalist's Perspective' in Critical Inquiry 22: 1-33.

Doy, Gen (1996) 'Out of Africa: Orientalism, "Race" and the Female Body' in Body & Society 2 (4): 17-44.

Gatens, Moira (1991) 'Woman as the Other' in Feminism and Philosophy. Perspectives on Difference and Equality Cambridge: Polity Press.

hooks, bell (1981) 'Sexism and the Black Female Slave Experience' in Ain't I a Woman, Boston: Southend Press.

Jordanova, Ludrnilla (1989) Sexual Visions: Images of Gender in Science and Medicine between the Eighteenth and Twentieth Centuries, London: Harvester Wheatsheaf.

Kaplan, Gisela and Rogers, Lesley (1990) 'The Definition of Male and Female. Biological Reductionism and the Sanctions of Normality' in Sneja Gunew (ed.), Feminist Knowledge: Critique and Construct, New York: Routledge.

Kappeler, Susanne (1994/95) 'From Sexual Politics to Body Politics' in Trouble and Strife 29 (30): 73-70.

Oakley, Ann (1982) 'Genes and Gender' in Subject Woman, London: Fontana.

Ortner, Sherry B. (1974) 'Is Female to Male as Nature is to Culture' in M. Z. Rosaldo and L. Lamphere (eds), Women, Culture and Society, Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Spanier, Bonnie B. (1991) '"Lessons" from "Nature": Gender Ideology and Sexual Ambiguity in Biology' in J. Epstein and K. Straub (eds), Body Guards. The Cultural Politics of Ambiguity, New York: Routledge.

Scheman, Naomi (1993) 'The Body of Privilege' in Engenderings. Constructions of Knowledge, Authority and Privilege, New York: Routledge

Wittig, Monique (1992) 'The Category of Sex' and 'One is Not Born a Woman' in The Straight Mind and Other Essays, Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf.

1.1
Theories of Gender and Race

Londa Schiebinger

The volcanic eruption of freedom in France will soon bring on a larger explosion, one that will transform the destiny of humankind in both hemispheres. (Henri Grégoire, De la littérature des nègres, 1808)

The expansive mood of the Enlightenment – the feeling that all men are by nature equal – gave middle- and lower-class men, women, Jews, Africans, and West Indians living in Europe reason to believe that they, too, might begin to share the privileges heretofore reserved for élite European men. Optimism rested in part on the ambiguities inherent in the word 'man' as used in revolutionary documents of the period. The 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen said nothing about race or sex, leading many to assume that the liberties it proclaimed would hold universally. The future president of the French National Assembly, Honoré-Gabriel Riqueti, comte de Mirabeau, declared that no one could claim that 'white men are born and remain free, black men are born and remain slaves'.¹ Nor did the universal and celebrated 'man' seem to exclude women. Addressing the convention in 1793, an anonymous woman declared: 'Citizen legislators, you have given men a constitution ... as the constitution is based on the rights of man, we now demand the full exercise of these rights for ourselves'.²

Within this revolutionary republican framework, an appeal to natural rights could be countered only by proof of natural inequalities. The marquis de Condorcet wrote, for instance, that if women were to be excluded from the polis, one must demonstrate a 'natural difference' between men and women to legitimate that exclusion.³ In other words, if social inequalities were to be justified within the framework of Enlightenment thought, scientific evidence would have to show that human nature is not uniform, but differs according to age, race, and sex.

Scientific communities responded to this challenge with intense scrutiny of human bodies, generating countless examples of radical misreadings of the human body that scholars have described as scientific racism and scientific sexism.⁴ These two movements shared many key features. Both regarded women and non-European men as deviations from the European male norm. Both deployed new methods to measure and discuss difference. Both sought natural foundations to justify social inequalities between the sexes and races. Eighteenth-century anthropologists, though, did not always perceive that what they said about sex had a bearing on race and vice versa. Leading theories underlying scientific racism (the doctrine of a great chain of being, for example) did not incorporate new views on sexual difference, while leading theories explaining sexual divergence (the doctrine of sexual complementarity being a prime example) applied only to Europeans.

Here we explore the paradoxes and incompatibilities plaguing eighteenth-century theories of sexual and racial difference. Where did naturalists place women along the great chain of being? To what extent did the theory of sexual complementarity reach beyond Europe? How, in other words, did notions of gender influence the study of race, and how did notions of European superiority influence studies of sex? The anatomy of sex and race was caught up, as we shall see, in eighteenth-century politics of participation – struggles over who should do science and who should be actively involved in affairs of the state. Eighteenth-century male anatomists in Europe were obsessed with black men (the dominant sex of an inferior race) and white women (the inferior sex of the dominant race). It was these two groups, and not primarily women of African descent, who challenged European male élites in their calls for equal rights and political participation.

Were Women on the Chain?

One of the most powerful doctrines governing theories of race in the eighteenth century was the great chain of being. This doctrine postulated that species were immutable entities arrayed along a fixed and vertical hierarchy stretching from God above down to the lowliest sentient being. The historian Winthrop Jordan has shown that the notion of a chain of b...