BodySpace

Destabilising Geographies of Gender and Sexuality

Nancy Duncan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 1996
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134761005
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

BodySpace brings together some of the best known geographers writing on gender and sexuality today. Together they explore the role of space and place in the performance of gender and sexuality.
The book takes a broad perspective on feminism as a theoretical critique, and aims to ground - and destabilize - notions of citizenship, work, violence, "race" and disability in their geographical contexts.
The book explores the idea of knowledge as embodied, engendered and embedded in place and space. Gender and sexuality are explored - and destabilized - through the methodological and conceptual lenses of cartography, fieldwork, resistance, transgression and the divisions between local/global and public/private space.
Contributors: Linda Martin Alcoff, Kay Anderson, Vera Chouinard, Nancy Duncan, J.K. Gibson-Graham, Ali Grant, Kathleen Kirby, Audrey Kobayashi, Doreen Massey, Linda McDowell, Wayne Myslik, Heidi Nast, Gillian Rose, Joanne Sharp, Matthew Sparke, Gill Valentine

PART I

(RE)READINGS

1
FEMINIST THEORY AND SOCIAL SCIENCE

New knowledges, new epistemologies

Linda Martin Alcoff

New feminist work in geography has (at least) two disciplinary discourses within which it participates: geography and feminist theory. This chapter offers an overview of feminist theory concentrating on those aspects that have been particularly relevant to work in the social sciences. And feminist theory in turn needs to be understood in its relationship to a larger historical context of academic enquiry, in order to reveal something about both its past and future. Needless to say, in taking an incoherent amalgam of diverse work and artificially producing a coherent historical narrative called ‘feminist theory’ I have necessarily left more things out than I can cover. I have decided to focus more on ideas than on specific people, on critiques of reason and methodology more than on substantive explanatory theories, and on Anglo-American theory more than any other. So what follows is decidedly only a part of the story.

THE CRITIQUE OF REASON

By the end of the eighteenth century, philosophy had discovered, with the help of Kant, that reason, knowledge and in fact philosophy itself was limited by the intellectual and perceptual attributes of man, that our reasoning capacity provides as much a reflection on us as a window onto the world. Indeed, as John Donne might have put it, human knowledge works more on the model of a drawing compass, whose fixed foot leans and hearkens after, but remaining always connected to the foot which strives to reach beyond. Man organizes and shapes his world, conferring on it meaning and intelligibility, and thus man is a constitutive condition of all knowledge. Philosophers continue to struggle with the implications of this idea, perhaps the most important of which is that, as Martin Heidegger said, the world which is the object of our enquiry is a world whose reference points all point to us, a lived world, and not a world in itself, or a world indifferent to human projects and concerns.

In the nineteenth century, with the help of Hegel, philosophy began to understand that knowledge and reason are also embedded within and marked by history, and thus temporally located or indexed, and unable ever to surpass completely the horizon of their historical era. Neither philosophical puzzles nor their solutions have a timeless reach, and in fact many resolutions develop only through the historical evolution of social change. Marx identified a further fundamental qualifying condition for philosophy in material power, which he defined as forms of labouring practices and relations of production. After Marx, reason and knowledge were understood to be mediated by class, situated in particular economies and permeated by an ideology that obstructed the self-criticizing project Kant had initiated. After Marx, philosophy could no longer be entrusted to discern and correct its own errors; it required external critique from other disciplines in order to reveal its ideological content.

Nietzsche and Freud also contributed, of course, to the undermining of the rigid demarcation between abstract reason and the desiring body, with Nietzsche arguing that the body is a fundamental source of all human thought and argument and Freud arguing that the rational ego maintains its autonomy over a-rational desire only temporarily.

In the (late) twentieth century, I believe it will in the future be said, philosophy began to discover that its categories of reason and knowledge are marked by sexual difference. Feminists have argued that these concepts of reason and knowledge, as well as those of man, history and power, are reflections of gendered practices passing as universal ones. What feminist theory has inserted into the critical project of our era is the sexually specific body, as a mediating element of knowledge, a constitutive component of reason, and a condition of the right to know. Let me emphasize from the outset that this is not to say that women have our own innate reason, or that truth is relative to one’s gender, but that, in other respects no less important, reason is indeed ‘male’.

To say that ‘reason is male’ is more than simply to say that men have been biased against women’s capacity to be rational. It is to say that reason has been defined in opposition to the feminine, such that it requires the exclusion, transcendence and even the domination of the feminine, of women and of women’s traditional concerns, which have been characterized as the site of the irreducibly irrational particular and corporeal. Moreover, as Genevieve Lloyd has pointed out, ‘femininity itself has been partly constituted through such processes of exclusion’ (see Lloyd 1984 esp. p.x; see also Le Doeuff 1987, esp. ‘Long hair, short on ideas’). The woman who reasons, declared Kant, might as well have a beard. It is our irrational, intuitive and emotional characteristics that both define us as female and make us capable of affirming men’s ‘essential’ superiority.

MALE MINDS/FEMALE BODIES

The major factor in this masculinist formulation of reason has been mind-body dualism. From the time of Plato, reason was thought to enable the soul to reach a ‘pure, and eternal…immortal and unchangeable’ realm where truth dwells among the ‘divine…and the wise’ as Genevieve Lloyd puts it. ‘The senses, in contrast, drag the soul back to the realm of the changeable, where it “wanders about blindly, and becomes confused and dizzy, like a drunken man, from dealing with the things that are ever changing’” (Lloyd 1984:6). To achieve knowledge, Plato concluded, ‘the god-like rational soul should rule over the slave-like mortal body’. In the Phaedo he states it even more strongly:

We are in fact convinced that if we are ever to have pure knowledge of anything, we must get rid of the body and contemplate things by themselves with the soul by itself. It seems, to judge from the argument, that the wisdom which we desire and upon which we profess to have set our hearts will be attainable only when we are dead, and not in our lifetime.

(Plato 1961:49)

Such a view, in various manifestations, has been present throughout the history of Western philosophy, through Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Bacon, Descartes, Rousseau, Hume and even Kant¹. And needless to say, it was men alone who could hope to transcend the realm of the body, with its everyday commitments, its pedestrian passions, and its emotions shadowing the route to the Real. Women, preoccupied with the cares of the particular, more regularly reminded of their fleshly limitations, could never ascend to the plane of the universal. As Rousseau put it, ‘The male is only a male now and again, [but] the female is always a female…everything reminds her of her sex’ (quoted in Bell 1983:199). Therefore, he advises, ‘Consult the women’s opinions [only] in bodily matters, in all that concerns the senses. Consult the men in matters of morality and all that concerns the understanding’ (ibid.: 197). Kant, for his part, introduces interesting spatial metaphors, locating reason in the ‘public space of autonomous speech’ (Lloyd 1984:67). He defined enlightenment as precisely men’s ability and willingness to use their own reason in a public space, defined in opposition to a private one. For the private space, inhabited by women and children, is dominated by particular concerns and by inclinations toward others based on feeling rather than universal principle. It is only in public, the realm to which free men have exclusive access, that a universal reason can be exercised and developed. In this light, consider the dictates of the scientific method, which require intersubjective testability of hypotheses and public confirmation. Knowledge exists in public, and not in the private, domestic environments associated with women.

The maleness of reason was thus, paradoxically, both supported and concealed by this evaluative hierarchy of mind and body. When the feeling body was split from the knowing mind, only of service to the mind as a brute recorder of perceptual images, bodily differences could not be seen to play any constitutive role in the formulation of reason. The body was conceived as either an unsophisticated machine that took in data without interpreting it, or it was considered an obstacle to knowledge in throwing up emotions, feelings, needs, desires, all of which interfered with the attainment of truth. The real epistemological action was always thought to occur in the mind, which, if it could overcome the distractions of the body and discipline it to the yoke of reason, alone had the potential to achieve knowledge.

Though reason was portrayed as universal and neutral precisely because it was bodiless, this schema worked to justify the exclusion of women from the domains of the academy, of science, and from generally being accorded epistemic authority and even credibility, because women were well known to be much more subject to bodily distractions, hormonal cycles, emotional disturbances and the like. Thus Schopenhauer, in all seriousness proposed that ‘in a court of law a woman’s evidence…should carry less weight than a man’s so that, for example, two male witnesses would carry the same weight as three or even four female’ (quoted in Bell 1983:279). Even Simone de Beauvoir, writing the inaugurating treatise of feminist theory of this century, agreed with the claim that women were more prone to corporeal intrusions than men, and her (in)famous solution was for women to refuse marriage and motherhood.

The female, to a greater extent than the male, is the prey of the species …in maternity woman remained closely bound to her body, like an animal. It is because humanity calls itself in question in the matter of living—that is to say, values the reasons for living above mere life—that, confronting woman, man assumes mastery. Man’s design is not to repeat himself in time: it is to take control of the instant and mould the future. It is male activity that…has prevailed over the confused forces of life; it has subdued Nature and Woman.

(quoted in Lloyd 1984:100–1)

As long as the body and the realm of the domestic were seen as obstacles to reason, cognitive achievement and, indeed, freedom, women who sought equality had to establish an ability to transcend the body and its distractions. So even in 1970, Shulamith Firestone was advocating test-tube reproduction in order to free women’s bodies from the material ties that oppress us. And some career feminists still today pursue a strategy of showing that women in management can be just as cold, detached and unfeeling as men. It is precisely for this reason that Genevieve Lloyd argued in 1984 that a feminist project determined to gain for women the realm of the ‘mind’ will never work to overturn male supremacy. We cannot simply remove women from the sphere of the ‘body’ and claim for ourselves the sphere of the ‘mind’ and ‘reason’ when these latter concepts have been constructed on the basis of our exclusion. Such a strategy would only participate in the violent erasure of women, continuing the valorization of the masculine as the only gender that can achieve full humanity. Thus Lloyd (1984:107) warned that,

the confident affirmation that Reason ‘knows no sex’ may likewise be taking for reality something which, if valid at all, is so only as an ideal … If there is a Reason genuinely common to all, it is something to be achieved in the future, not celebrated in the present.

The academy today continues to be dominated by this conceptualization of knowledge and reason. Knowledge requires public confirmation, universality and a demonstrable transcendence of emotion and commitment. Knowledge must be capable of being expressed as an immaterial abstraction, beyond the irreducible concreteness of the particular, and can only be achieved in the public domain, among men, primarily through the aggressive interplay of adversarial discourse. Knowledge does not occur in private, it does not occur within the context of loving relationships, and it cannot occur where research is guided by political commitments.

By the early 1980s, feminist theorists thus began to recognize that they needed to develop a better account of the relationship between reason, theory and bodily, subjective experience. To paraphrase Rosi Braidotti, we need to

elaborate a truth which is not removed from the body, reclaiming [our] body for [ourselves]… [We need] to develop and transmit a critique which respects and bears the trace of the intensive, libidinal force that sustains it.

(Braidotti; 1991:8)²

If women are to have epistemic credibility and authority, we need to reconfigure the role of bodily experience in the development of knowledge.

In light of this, a new conception of reason has begun to be developed within feminist theory. This represents an ambitious undertaking, which is still in its early stages, but it starts from the following premises: (a) the mind is not in fact separable from the body; (b) from which it follows that the mind has never been separated from the body; (c) from which it also follows that our dominant conceptions and ideals of reason have been connected to bodies, have been expressions of bodily concerns or needs and reflections of embodied ways of being, and have had other interesting relations to the body that we have yet to discover; (d) and which also suggests that we need to rethink the entire opposition that has been drawn heretofore between reason and its ‘Others’, Others which all, in one way or another, have to do with the body: as rhetoric, irrationality, dreams and so on.

The project to ‘reinsert’ the body is not, of course, totally new. Marx inserted the labouring body into philosophy, Nietzsche reminded us of the body that feels and needs, and Freud insisted that the desiring body is a ubiquitous element in all human thought and practice. Feminism simply pointed out that these bodies are both sexually specific and sociocultural, that they are inscribed by power, and that the Kantian ‘man’ who conditions all knowledge is, indeed, a man, and not a woman.

RECONSTRUCTING REASON

I mark the development of contemporary feminist theory as beginning from this point, where sexual difference as a bodily, material, corporeal manifestation becomes a player in the critique of reason. I understand feminist theory today as pursuing the implications of this claim, and the effects of sexual difference on the methodologies and existing knowledges in every academic discipline, as well as exploring what a new vision of knowledge might look like without mind-body dualism, without a pretence to neutral universality or an erasure of sexual difference. I know that such statements may raise the red flag (or is it the red herring?) of essentialism, or be taken to imply that feminism is thus committed to the eradication of reason in favour of a celebration of its Others (maybe a Wicca fest in the forest). But I am not proposing a reasoned defence of irrationalism, nor advocating that a female reason should replace the male one. The feminist critique I have been describing holds out for the possibility of that future reconstruction referred to by Lloyd that would repair the split between reason and its material basis, though whether this can be accomplished with a universalizable reason left intact is still up for debate. Feminist theory is pursuing this possibility by advancing two complementary projects: first, a reactive project to critique existing theories and notions of theory itself, as well as to identify the ways in which sexual difference has both constituted and been constituted by existing knowledges, and, second, a constructive project to develop alternative theories and theoretical norms, not simply as a reversal but as a strategic transformation.³ Both projects are pursued in the chapters included in this volume.

FEMINIST FORAYS

These projects of course evolved historically, and not just out of the critical philosophical traditions from Kant onward that I traced out earlier. In the 1970s women began to inhabit the US academy in numbers previously unthinkable. Before that time, daughters were rarely given as much money for their education as sons, much less the encouragement and support a graduate education requires, and it was not illegal for graduate programs to discriminate against women in handing out fellowships and assistantships. Thus the first female philosophy professor I ever had, in the second year of my graduate work, was there only after having overcome the trauma of having a fellowship taken away from her because, as her graduate director told her, spending money on a woman was a waste. Before I could finish my own degree, I had had a professor try to undress me in a hallwa...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• CONTRIBUTORS
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• PART I: (RE)READINGS
• PART II: (RE)NEGOTIATIONS
• PART III: (RE)SEARCHINGS
• CONCLUSION
• REFERENCES