First, a note of thanks. Our discussion on sex work went so well, and I don’t mean because everyone agreed with me in the end (because they didn’t). I mean that we had a whole conversation about differences in big, crazy, foundational commitments in feminism without anyone losing their marbles. And if you are a regular reader of the feminist blogosphere, I think you know rare that is. My penchant for pedantry and abstraction make me want to keep having these conversations here, if we can. I would ask that everyone continue to practice “symmetry” in the discussion, meaning that everyone should assume that all participants are in good faith.
So, herewith: thoughts on biological essentialism in feminism.
It’s funny, but one of the easiest things to forget when one is in the heat of a feminist argument about rape or sex work or porn or abortion or pregnancy is that we are actually talking about women’s bodies. The annoying legacy of Roe v. Wade, for example, is that it forces us to talk about the abstract, fuzzy notion of “privacy” instead of the actual, lived fact of a woman’s body being co-opted by the state. Other feminist theorists want to talk about inscriptions and texts and performances, but they seem, at bottom, reluctant to admit that there are, in fact, actual bodies at stake.
The problem, though, is that when you starts to talk about bodies, you run the risk of getting overly caught up in biology. Sometimes that isn’t even your fault. See, if I never hear again that Andrea Dworkin said all sex is rape because she talked about the penetrative act, it will be too soon. It will be too soon because even a short perusal of the wikipedia page on Intercourse, the allegedly offending tract, can tell you that such a sentence does not actually appear therein. It will be too soon because said Wikipedia page also notes that, even if Intercourse implies that all sex is rape, Dworkin has clarified that she did not think of it as such:
No, I wasn’t saying that [all heterosexual sex is rape] and I didn’t say that, then or ever. … The whole issue of intercourse as this culture’s penultimate expression of male dominance became more and more interesting to me. In Intercourse I decided to approach the subject as a social practice, material reality. This may be my history, but I think the social explanation of the all sex is rape slander is different and probably simple. Most men and a good number of women experience sexual pleasure in inequality. Since the paradigm for sex has been one of conquest, possession, and violation, I think many men believe they need an unfair advantage, which at its extreme would be called rape. I don’t think they need it. I think both intercourse and sexual pleasure can and will survive equality.
Now, one can certainly debate how consistent this disavowal is with Dworkin’s other writings, but that’s really a discussion for a university seminar rather than us. I do think we owe her the obligation, though, to take her at her word above, if only because I think it raises the interesting question of whether we can evade biological essentialism when we talk about what are, in actual point of fact, violations of women’s bodies.
Sometimes, as did happen in the sex work discussion the other day, I have confront the possibility that I am being an essentialist. In that particular context, I was trying to construct a position – however inelegantly – that explained my objection to sex work in inner/outer, commodification-of-body terms. And in that context we talked about a great many things, like whether a vagina ought to matter more than a hand, or why a body should be sacred, that might boil down to mere biological essentialism, but I tend to think that something else is going on here.
See, as far as it goes, I don’t consider myself to be much for biology or even “science,” largely because whatever science I know comes to me in a highly digested form. It isn’t my specialty and it speaks a language I find difficult to understand. I recently read this article, which has nothing to do with feminism, really, but I was struck by this assertion: “There is no doubt that politics and science make uncomfortable bedfellows. Politicians sell certainty. Science lives off doubt.” Funny that, because laypeople will often tell you that science lives on certainty, but what little I do know about science does tend to give credence to The Economist‘s position. Science is about testing hypotheses. Politics – and here I’m using a definition that goes beyond institutional politicians – is usually about advancing them. So when someone says to me that I’m relying on biology, that biology imports too fixed a notion of gender into the discussion, I often think to myself that if I am, it is from a scientist’s position, ready to accept doubt if it comes complete with proof of merit.
Take, for example, my positions advanced about the integrity of the body, about the idea that we have some obligation to avoid practices that encourage us to use each others for our own end. Sometimes I am told that I am relying too much on a fixed and therefore essentialist notion of the body. But when I try to conceive of my body as a series of texts (as Butler seems to want me to do) or as, in any event, something amorphous and constructed, the earth weighs me down again. Recently I’ve been dealing with a chronic pain issue which sometimes feels like a reminder from my body that as much as I’d like to live only in my head, I don’t.
I do believe that much of our knowledge about ourselves is incomplete, because it is socially constructed, and therefore shares certain biases and lacunae with the patriarchy. But I also get a little frustrated when an avoidance of biological essentialism turns into, at least as far as it seems to me, a denial of the body itself. People do report rape as a traumatic experience, for example, and I don’t think it’s enough to say that’s just because society tells them it is, that there is no particular reason to object to someone entering your body without consent other than what’s in your head. That bodies don’t or shouldn’t matter. It strikes me, for one, as ableist – the only reason we experience bodily integrity as optional or irrelevant is because we have “a whole body” – and also as just plain naive.
Understand that I am not taking the position that biology is everything. But it isn’t nothing either, and it seems to me particularly myopic to declare it so in the context of feminism, when women do actually suffer from FGM, beatings from their partners, murder, rape, and all manner of other experiences that happen, here, in the world, to their bodies, and not entirely as texts or readings in their heads. It is also important, it seems to me, paradoxically, in deconstructing the gender binary (the growing understanding of intersexuality fits in here). So I can’t agree that a mere emphasis on the body makes me a biological essentialist. Or rather, if it does, maybe I just need to learn to live with the epithet.
I agree, PSoul. Discussing the body as a text is all very well and good, but that’s not how we live our lives every day. We experience menstrual cycles that have physical and emotional effects on us. Dressing every day is a battle between our images of ourselves and the image of the female that exists outside of us. If you can get pregnant, sex is never a completely carefree event; the worry is always there.
The abortion battle shows me that women’s bodies are considered to have less value than fetuses. Somehow, a faked poster of a bloody “fetus” has more power to convince than a real picture of a woman who’s tried to abort herself lying in a pool of blood. And a picture of a cute greeting card (white) baby carries more weight than a picture of a girl graduating from high school ready to start her productive life.
Abortion is fundamentally, essentially an argument about who will control our bodies. If we let anyone steer the argument away from that, we lose. If you don’t control your body, you are not free. And if we allow male-controlled power institutions to deny us our freedom, we’re complicit in our own slavery.
Well this is pretty abstract and free flowing so I’m not sure exactly what arguments you are talking about, but I think that in general when people talk about the body as a text they are not denying the experience of embodied existence. Rather they are saying (something like) there are different interpretations of these experiences, that “women’s bodies” is a kind of problematic category because there are all kinds of bodies experienced in all kinds of ways. Someone who has been raped, been pregnant, had genital cutting, etc. may have a completely different relationship with their body and their gender than someone who is only aware of those things happening to other people, or unaware, or who fears it happening to him or herself. It feels a little bit strange and sort of…I don’t know, domineering? totalizing? to me to say that all women’s bodies everywhere are defined by these experiences in the same way. To me it makes more sense in many cases (not all) to talk about the experiences themselves — after all men too experience physical violation in the form of rape, unwanted medical procedures, etc. but it doesn’t seem like there is the same instinct to frame “mens bodies” in that way.
Right, JD, but once you make bodies abstract, they lose their reality. In any discussion of the body as text, it’s absolutely necessary that the participants remember that these are real people with real bodies and real lives who are being discussed. And if they don’t have control over those bodies to the greatest extent possible, they are not free human beings.
I totally agree we should stay concrete. To me talking about “womens bodies” as a category feels more abstract than breaking it down by experience, the experience of being raped, for example, rather than the experience of “having a female body” or something which I have trouble relating with.
I’m a biologist, so while I have a hard time wrapping my mind around the body as a series of texts, I can address some of your points about science generally and biology specifically.
Science at its very heart lives off doubt, and this is especially true in ‘softer’ sciences such as biology (softer vs. chemistry, physics, etc.). This is due to the very nature of the scientific method, aka the hypothetico-deductive method. The esteemed philosopher of science Karl Popper realized that it is impossible to prove a biological theory through induction (inference of a generalized conclusion from particular instances) because it is always possible that the next instance could falsify the conclusion. Instead, he proposed the use of deductive reasoning, which is still central to the scientific method today. Rather than proving any point, scientists develop hypotheses based on observations and attempt to falsify those hypotheses. If these hypotheses have been tested over and over and over again and never falsified, it is named a “theory” (e.g., Theory of Natural Selection). This is essentially the closest you can come to a law or truth in biology (unlike the hard sciences, where laws are common). Yet nothing is never certain, as the next test of the hypothesis could falsify it. This is why biological scientists heavily incorporate statistics into their work, in order to quantify the level of doubt – there will always be some, but a conclusion that is, say, 95% probable is better than one that is 85%.
I would also like to contest your comment that “biology imports too fixed a notion of gender into the discussion”. Biology is merely the study of “what is”, of natural variation. In fact, in the natural world, gender is not strictly fixed. While rare, there are instances of hermaphrodism, of XXY or XXX genotypes, of men with ovaries or women producing levels of testosterone equal to or greater than that of men. Witness Caster Semanya. The problem comes not in the natural variation (i.e., biology), but rather in the human need to categorize and squeeze all that variation into two black-or-white boxes. I would argue that the fixed notion of gender is a human concept, and more from a need to understand how to integrate the body into society than from the biology of the body.
Otherwise, very interesting post. As I stated at first, I’m a biologist and so, I guess, a biological essentialist. I’m very interested in these discussions, but to me they’re very abstract and amorphous and hard to wrap my mind around. I’m looking forward to learning from the continuing discussion.
such a good point viajera. Gender essentialism actually has very little to do with science, or biology. It’s a cultural belief system, which is why some people talk about gender as a text. I don’t think it belittles the experience of the primacy of personal and cultural interpretation of the fact of having a body to call it a text, and I don’t think it means that having a body is “all in our heads.” Saying something is socially constructed does NOT make it any less real.
Just on a personal level, I have a really hard time thinking of the body as abstract. I feel very, here I don’t know the right word, connected? aware? of my body. Constantly. I spend a lot of time thinking about various parts of my body, how they look, how they feel, how others are viewing them etc etc…
I wish I had more to add but I feel like a lot of this sort of thing just flies over my head.
Yeah, JD, all I want is to stay concrete. I know what you mean about those theorists saying they don’t really want to deny bodies, but I do find they try to have it both ways, because if we say that “people experience their bodies in all different ways and there are no constants,” it seems to me we are wandering away from the concrete. I mean, sure, my body has never been pregnant and that means I relate to it differently than someone who has, but if I were to become pregnant, would it continue to be an individual experience? I’m not sure.
viajera, point taken. I think what I mean there is that “popular” biology views gender as fixed, which really has nothing to do with actual science.
I can see why feminists would want to make the body an abstract, though. There’s such a long history of using the existence of biological differences to justify unequal treatment. We’re weaker, we bleed, we’re incapacitated in childbirth . . .
Even now, every time you get into a discussion of feminism when there are conservatives around, someone will accuse you of thinking that men and women are biologically identical, which just isn’t true, so everything else you’re saying isn’t true either. We spend so much time having to defend a woman’s right to be fire fighter even if she can’t bench press as much as a man, it’s easy to want to ignore the bodies in question.
I’m with bluebears – it seems impossibly on a personal level to separate most feminist issues from intense awareness of my body. I said on a previous thread that I came to my passion on abortion issues by way of my own pregnancy, and the unexpected physical demands. I think on an individual basis, that awareness is very true of most women – it’s just in public discussion that the body falls away.
I do wonder (and worry) if it’s partly our patriarchy-induced habit of thinking of our bodies as something a little shameful that we shouldn’t talk about though.
Our experience of our bodies isn’t pure. It’s affected by our beliefs and culture. Even a physical sensation, like cramps, must call up different feelings–shame, pride, relief, etc–bound up in our notions of what it means to be a woman. I’m also having a hard time thinking of a bodily experience that’s truly universal among, and limited to, women. This is another area where I feel we can never get to the “truth” so long as we’re living under patriarchy.
Avogrado that’s just it. I feel so helpless when it comes back to my body. Because I have weak upper body, because I have a hole that a penis fits into, because I am potentially fertile, I feel that when we reduce it to having a female body, I just feel trapped and no way out. The cultural part, at least, we can hope to change.
And PS, yes, I think peoples’ experiences of pregnancy do differ culturally and personally — not to say that we cna’t talk in generalities about pregnancy, but that’s not the same thing as saying that women’s bodies are constant whether they have ever been pregnant or not. I am much more comfortable talking about the experience of pregnancy than the experience of womanity, you know?
In my experience, “abstracting” my own body has been enormously helpful in my relationship to it and the world. When I stopped thinking about my individual body as such, and started thinking about my body as either a space on which cultural texts may be written, or one letter in the larger text of the female experience, or even the white lower middle class American female experience at the beginning of the 21st century. It helped me forgive myself for incorporating patriarchal constructs or perceptions–the need to have shaved legs in order to feel sexy, the revulsion at my own fat rolls, the multitude of feelings about my period. It also helped me see trends in the patriarchy that I hadn’t before, and therefore hadn’t examined in my own life, and the ways in which I am complicit in them.
But on the other hand, I find it useful to talk about the material reality of the body when I’m talking about larger social trends, like rape or DV or, especially, abortion. My big problem with anti-abortion activists is that they think it’s ok for another person to use my body. Outside of the more abstract notion of controlling women’s bodies or controlling sexuality, if someone believes that a fetus is a person then they have to believe that pregnancy is the occupation by one person of another’s body. If it’s a forced occupation or intrusion on someone’s body, it’s illegal and the inhabited victim has the right to forcibly remove said occupier. Coming to this conclusion was the a-ha moment for me, as to why abortion needs to be legal and easily available to everyone regardless of the personhood of the fetus.
But now that I wrote that out, I’m not sure if I’m actually just talking about the body in the abstract again, and then if I ever really talk about material bodies in an intellectual context.
Hi everyone,
I’m just stopping by to say that a lot of feminists have resolved a lot of the questions you are dealing with here, and there’s no sense in reinventing the wheel, even while we do all have to figure out where we are with theories that effect how we treat one another, and, as some women here have pointed out, how people think of themselves.
First, the human body obviously is more than a series of texts. When a man’s fist hits a woman’s face, because she’s his wife, that’s not a “textual” experience, that’s physical and political. Yes, there’s narrative attached to him doing so, but battery can’t be reduced to an abstraction, as has been said here by some of you already.
The rather peculiar strains of (especially) U.S. postmodernist discourse, treating everything as if it were literature to be analysed, is VERY messed up. Postmodernism was meant to critique text, not turn the world into text, or performance. (If there were no written language at all, no books, no magazines, no academic journals, there would still be a living, breathing world, right?)
I’ve often responded about Judith Butler’s assessment that “gender is performed” or, more abstractly, “performative”. (People get paid money to use words that basically mean “acted out”. To the extent that is true, gender is, metaphorically, performed on a stage with snipers in the wings and enemies in the audience.
We cannot forget about real force, institutional power, and actual threats that shape how we “perform” gender. It’s the force, the power, the threats that the feminists I know are challenging and fighting. Not something performative that women are doing.
I worked in an academic setting for nine years and was a student for eight. I’m sorry to hear that person-as-text is still even being taught. The discussions and analyses and understandings, often by feminist women of color, have totally moved beyond modernist and postmodernist ideas about women and “gender”. That chapter has been closed for some time. And I’m wondering if it’s just that the faculty aren’t up to date, or are only comfortable speaking of gender in terms of text and performance. (We teach what we know, right? Well, there’s more to know.)
Part 2 of 2 from Julian:
I’ll suggest some readings about postmodernism and feminism in a moment, but the first reading I’d like to link to here has to do with something said early on, about Dworkin and biological essentialism. Dworkin lived a life filled with many of the things that women experience because they are women: molestation, battery, poverty, prostitution, and rape. She wrote a whole essay about “biological superiority” addressed, bravely, to female essentialists who believe women are superior to men. As I read through the discussion to date, I didn’t see that speech mentioned here so I just wanted to make sure you knew of it.
And, btw, it’s only academic feminists who have ever accused Andrea Dworkin of being “essentialist”. If you do your homework, you’ll find “analytic books about feminism” boil down to a few misquotes and misreads, promulgated from academic text to academic text–by writers who have never been activists, by writers who get paid to come up with really dense lingo for really simple stuff.
Repeating misunderstandings over and over enough times ought not make what someone didn’t say into something they did say. Things in textbooks are often UNTRUE! I’ve done the research on what is attributed to A. Dworkin, and it all traces back to a few women who hated her politics, because she spoke truths those women (and men) couldn’t face.
Please don’t just read feminist academic work if you want to be educated about feminism. Read the work by activist WOC around the world who are fighting various forms of subordination.
The academy tends to turn everything into a matter of abstraction, but if you’re starving to death, or don’t have clean water to drink, or are being incested by your mom’s boyfriend, there’s nothing abstract about it. Theory grows from experience, not the other way around. There is a dialectical relationship between the two, but when only theory starts spinning in on itself, clear out of the room, fast. And go visit a place where women live in poverty and SEE what patriarchal atrocity looks like. Smell it. Don’t just read about it.
So here’s the link to the speech Andrea Dworkin gave to women about the dangers of thinking in essentialist terms. I’m not sure if I can html code this. I’ll try, but I’ll also just copy and paste the URL. If you can click on it and get to the speech, great. If not just copy and paste the URL into your browser:
http://www.nostatusquo.com/ACLU/dworkin/WarZoneChaptIIID.html
Noting that women are systematically raped by men, or that white women are told by media to always be thin, or that Black women are often portrayed in media with their mouths wide open, isn’t just a matter of narratives. Things are being done to real people. Pornography, for example, is anything but abstract. It’s an industry in which pimps get rich by selling images of women that say “I want to be fucked, always, by every man”. And that those women posing ARE being fucked by actual men, often by many, often ending up with semen all over there faces, is not at all abstract. It’s patriarchy and white supremacy and capitalism at work, in the real world.
McDonalds isn’t “an idea”: it feed people food that causes heart and other cardiovascular disease. That there are the most McDonalds where poor urban people of color live is part of a system that is killing people of color. Uranium mine waste wasn’t buried near Indian reservations for no reason: it’s part of the genocide.
NONE of this is abstract, and the academy really fails in its teaching when it resorts to disappearing into the realm of ideas that aren’t located in real experience.
I recommend reading Conquest, by Andrea Smith, and Deals With The Devil by Pearl Cleage. Women of color, disproportionately, don’t have the white- and class-privilege luxuries to theorise away their lives.
And white women are busting through the post-modernist bs too. I especially recommend reading C. A. MacKinnon, chapter
9. Keeping It Real: On Anti-”Essentialism”, in her book “Women’s Lives, Men’s Laws”. Also check out chapter
5. Postmodernism and Human Rights, in her book “Are Women Human?” I think you’ll find they answer a lot of the questions you are wrestling with here. I hope they help you along in the discussion, and in your understanding of the politcal, not intellectual, function of feminism. It’s goal isn’t primarily to theorise better, it’s to end patriarchy faster. Women’s lives are at stake. Also read the work of activists, grassroots activists, like Yanar Mohammed and the women of INCITE! who aren’t stuck in ivory towers pondering the meaning of meaning. Oppressive power mostly exists beyond text, beyond language, after all. Which is why so many women have such a hard time putting into language what physical assault and sexual slavery actually feels like and does to a human being.
But those two MacKinnon chapters deal most directly with what you’re discussing here. I’ll jump back into the discussion if you’d like. And I’ll shut up if you’d prefer!
Julian, I don’t think it is really fair to say that these issues have all been “resolved,” and I don’t think that anyone here is endorsing a totally abstract or even remotely academic view. In fact you’ll notice none of the commenters talked about Judith Butler, or performativity (though I could and would, any time). We talked about our lived experiences and what ideas and frames helped us wrap our minds around having a body that is classified as female. I totally appreciate your points and your reading suggestions but I think your assertion that issues about how we talk about having bodies and what happens to them and what we do with them have all been resolved by the people on your list is not entirely true.
I often think about how language itself is imperfect, a shorthand to make communication easier but incapable of telling exactly what it means to be a woman or a man or me or a table or anything else that exists. In speaking, I might try to put together sentences which explain something precisely or stylishly, but the words are not inherently related to that thing, we make the relationships because they are useful.
Gender essentialism takes the shorthand of language a step further and makes it law; by saying “woman” and “man” have been defined, these definitions are immutable, now conform. It seems we do the same thing with the ideas of rape or molestation. Instead of letting the person involved process the event and deal with it as seriously or lightly as they need to, we place an expectation of how these things should be dealt with on the person and ask them to live up to those expectations.
Julian:
Thanks for stopping by. You seem to have read a lot of feminist theory, and good on ya. I’m not sure where you are in your real life practice, but let me advise not coming into feminist spaces and telling the ladies that we are doing it wrong. It’s impolite.
This is an absolutely fascinating discussion. I think that one of the things that is the most interesting is that we can divorce our thinking from our meat-bodies, and sometimes forget the damage that can do. I think this is part of where it is difficult to be an ally, and part of why all allies stumble- regardless of all the theory you have read about an ism, regardless of a complete outsider’s understanding, those theories are not immediately relevant to your meat-body. They’re ethical dilemmas, “tough questions”, all manner of things that allow you to forget that the oppressed people you are learning about are actual people, and not a theoretical problem for you to solve.
Part of the way of combatting this, I find, is to establish genuine emotional relationships with members of oppressed groups; women, POC, trans people, non-hetero people. When you do, there’s suddenly an immediacy to the theory, and you become a more engaged ally not just because it’s the right thing to do, but because it hurts to see people you love get beaten down by an unfair world over and over again. And you KNOW it hurts them more than it hurts you to see it happen, and you engage.
(Full disclosure: White, cis, straight, married, middle-class male)
Julian – I stayed out of this thread because I don’t feel like I have enough 101 to really contribute to a discussion of biological essentialism, and I will be taking your reading list to heart. But even as [apparently] your target audience — not well-versed and aware of it — your posts are really really ridiculously condescending. You’re dropping by to tell us these issues have been resolved? We’re reinventing the wheel? DO YOUR HOMEWORK?
I think you have some decent points to make, and what looks like a strong background in theory, but when you speak down to your audience rather than meeting them as equals, the chances of anyone learning from what you say are decreased.
Julian, is it? You’re new here, I believe. Perhaps you should have looked around the site before you rolled in to favor us with your pearls of wisdom about how real women really suffer. Like, for real. We never ever had noticed that before, because we ourselves are merely texts.
Sweet jiminy jeebus.
If you’d like to have a contest about who has been in school longest or read more books on feminist theory and its relationship to lived biology and performance/performativity (and yes, those are distinct things and NEITHER ARE ABOUT UNDERSTANDING THE BODY AS A TEXT), we can meet in the parking lot after school and settle the issue.
However, if you’d like to remain here on the playground, I ask that you contribute to the discourse through questions and prompts rather than steamroll our readers with insults and lectures.
PSoul, I know you and I disagree about Judy B., but I gotta say that I think she’s as misunderstood as Dworkin.
Good post! Bodies are important. I think that point is inarguable. I guess the thing that has always struck me about feminism has been how much the struggle was over control over our own bodies. Safety, well-being, reproductive health, etc., all of these things are argued for under the basic premise that women are entitled to self-determination, both over her life AND her body.
Within patriarchy, women’s bodies are seen as objects to be controlled by other people: her father, her husband, her children, her society. A woman could be beaten or raped because she was her husband’s property. A woman had no access to birth control or abortion because her body was either for chastity or children. Her sexuality was denied. Her ability to self-determination was denied. Her ability to be anything other than a societal determination of what her physiology made her was utterly stifled by the total legal and social control of her body by others–largely male others.
I’m not sure if the idea of a controlled body counts as abstract (there were certainly enough laws in place in previous times to argue that this control was very concrete for the women who experienced it), but the essential argument behind why women should be able to decide her own sexual partners and reproduction, why women should be free from assault, why women should be able to decide for themselves what to do with their lives is that women’s bodies should be controlled ONLY by the women themselves.
This can, of course, become a difficult thing to accept even for feminists when other women do things with their bodies that we do not approve of or that we think have a negative impact on society or on other women or even on the women themselves. I think of the issue of Muslim women who cover. Many [largely Western] feminists argue that the idea that women should cover is a form of patriarchal oppression, based on a backward belief that women’s bodies are the possessions of their husbands or that their sexuality is to be controlled lest they tempt chaste men. At the same time, you find many Muslim (and increasingly also non-Muslim) feminists who argue that covering should be an individual choice, and no man or woman has the right to make that choice for them. So when a country like France passes laws saying, “You can’t wear hijab, you can’t cover,” for many Muslim women this feels like their bodies are being controlled by others…even if it is in a way that many feminists see as “liberating” for them.
So what is more important: to reject the influence of patriarchy, or to reject the idea that others should have control of your body? These two things aren’t entirely separate, but at the same time, each argument has a slightly different implication.
Every woman should have the right to decide and articulate for herself what constitutes “bodily integrity.” I think for each woman that is a little different. You say you’ve been accused of being a biological essentialist, but I don’t see your argument as being purely biological. The argument is as much about integrity as it is about bodies, and while there are many areas in which we would all agree on integrity (bodies should be free from assault, for instance), there are many other areas where integrity is a personal determination made on a variety of other factors (values, education, personal experiences, etc.) Everyone has different ideas about what integrity means.
Body as text and body as performance, I think, do have useful places in the world of feminism. However, in many places, those arguments lose their usefulness. Abortion legislation is one of those places. When people start talking about taking away my ability to make reproductive decisions for myself, when they start making those decisions for me, I know I can’t help but feel tangibly physically violated. For me the violation is as much about the state feeling like they should have control over my body, that they feel like THEIR say is more important than my own, than it is about the idea that my body itself is being violated.
Maybe I’m unusual in my beliefs (I’m sort of a control freak, so it wouldn’t surprise me if my personal interpretation of control is one borne of my own desire to control everything), but I think it is an argument that we see coming up again and again in feminism. The very idea of “choice,” and that it is a woman’s “choice” whether to have an abortion OR not is a strong example.
I’m not entirely positive I spoke directly to what you have to say, but…thanks for putting this out there. It was very thought-provoking.
Pilgrim Soul, thanks for another thought provoking post. I went to sleep last night with thoughts about biological essentialism, gender, and feminisms, trying to draft a thoughtful response.
One thought that seemed to resonate as the sandfairy put the sleep in my eyes, is that there is simultaneous movement in the creation of bodies (female, male, and the ones that are not singly male or female) – at once biological, and social. So in this sense, there will be difficulties if a definition is required, as it will be difficult to define bodies as wholly biological or wholly social, in my opinion.
If used as a functional term to refer to both biological and social issues/process/thoughts, then at least it seems to be a little bit less problematic, kind of like the views expressed by JD, viajera and bluebears, mixed together in the Mackey thinking pot.
In terms of feminisms, coming to terms about bodies, as abstract and/or material, from my reading, there isn’t a consensus, either in academia and/or activist circles that I frequent.
Katie:
I think you make a very good point, it seems to me that being compelled to wear the veil is just the flipside of Western sexiness. Both are ways which women are denied the ability to define themselves and denied the ability to negotiate how they will be viewed.
Of course I agree. And I apologise for making it sound that way by, er, saying it that way!!
I remember a prof of mine once saying when engaging in a conversation, try and know as much as you can about the history of that conversation. His context for saying this was primarily in academic and/or philosophical and/or intellectual conversations about ideas. So I think he was sort of whispering to me to fill you in on some relevant readings on the subject–but as you note, the readings are not exactly what you are discussing here and, again, I apologise for misreading the focus of this thread. (I just kind of think you’ll find the two pieces by MacKinnon pretty cool. And the Toril Moi book, well, here’s a description:
Book overview
What are the political implications of a feminist critical practice? How do the problems of the literary text relate to the priorities and perspectives of feminist politics as a whole?
Sexual/Textual Politics addresses these fundamental questions and examines the strengths and limitations of the two main strands in feminist criticism, the Anglo-American and the French, paying particular attention to the works of Cixous, Irigaray and Kristeva. In the years since publication this book has rightly attained the status of a classic. Written for readers with little knowledge of the subject, Sexual/Textual Politics nevertheless makes its own intervention into key debates, arguing provocatively for a commitedly political and theoretical criticism as against merely textual or apolitical approaches.
With a new afterword in this edition, Sexual/Textual Politics is a must-read for all those interested in feminist literary theory.
Peace, Julian
Oh, one more thing!! MacKinnon’s piece on rape theory is one of the best pieces I’ve read on the subject of how men’s legal theories about what sex and rape are do not match with what women actually experience as rape. And she points out the great limitations, for example, of the notion of “consent”. She’s not in any way making a case for “All sex being rape” or anything like that. (In fact, Snopes.com has a whole piece on what a lie that is, that she or Dworkin ever said or wrote such a silly thing.) But her points about how rape law cannot accommodate experiences like dissociation, deciding not to resist in order to survive, and more, prove that “looking for force” and assuming meaningful consent exists because there was no “No!” uttered, does not adequately explain, understand, or validate, many women’s experiences of rape and sexual violation. I believe that’s chapter 19 in Women’s Lives, Men’s Laws, titled: 19. “A Sex Equality Approach to Sexual Assault”.
Ok, I’ll shut up now!
P.S. I had no idea this was an all woman discussion, and wouldn’t have posted if I did. The only gendered names here are mine and Katie’s. (I respect woman-only spaces and try not to invade them.) When ungendered names are used, and ideas are discussed, it isn’t always possible to discern what gender someone is. Yes, some of the writings definitely indicate that some of you are women. But not all.) And I agree: it’s not just impolite, it’s damned sexist. As is hogging up discussion space, as just about the only boy here! Sorry about that. I’m finally clear on the fact that virtually all the “ungendered names” belong to women and/or female-bodied people.
Julian that is funny (I am actually laughing), I actually assumed you were a woman until you just said otherwise. Now your posts look very different to me! Not that men aren’t welcome to post (and not that I am the harpyness police, just a regs commenter), it just puts in perspective for me why your posts, while criticizing the “textual” approach to the body, recommended all kinds of reading instead of reflecting on your own embodied existence. I think that in a space like this where it’s not like, a feminist theory seminar, it can be difficult to know how much it helps the conversation to make reference to feminist texts that not everyone has read. Sometimes we end up talking past each other. My own approach in cases like this, not that it is the only or the best one, is to try and speak from my heart and experiences, of course informed by what I have read, but primarily in a non academic, civilian mode grounded in what I have lived. Not to lecture you, just to explain my own commenting mode in hopes that you will be able to join us in a more collaborative way. I personally am very interested in hearing from people of diverse genders about their experience of embodiment, and how they personally respond to the idea of the body as a text. It would be very interesting to hear that from you instead of a reading list.
Julian:
You seem very excited about these issues, and that is a wonderful thing. You are probably wondering what taboo you have broken that your posts aren’t being received with the same enthusiasm with which they are posted, and this can be a confusing, enigmatic thing.
It is obvious that you have done a lot of academic work on these issues, and you are communicating in an academic style: I know this is true + here is someone else who thinks the same thing = my point is proven.
That in itself isn’t inherently bad, but it does closely resemble the privilege shown when dominant groups communicate with oppressed groups. Sue Monk Kidd calls this the Churchman Voice. To members of the oppressed class, whether women or other minorities though this style often triggers some red flags.
I am a member of the group which gets to define reality + this is what I believe = I have proven my point.
This is a space where collaborative communication is practiced. If you look at the posts which were well-received you’ll find a lot of people saying “I believe,” “In my experience,” “I personally,” etc. A striking example is the difference between your initial posts and Magpie_Seven’s response, if it helps to see a man use this communication style.
These interjections are missing from your posts and most of the posts which respond to you, because you are being definitive and the respondents are trying to let you know that you have crossed a boundary.
I know that you have probably been told that this sort of hedging makes your argument weak, in a different forum that would be correct, but here it is a sign of respect and a tool which keeps this community of people with very strong opinions civil and viable.
Hope that helps.
Bella-
@J.D. – I thought the same way you did.. (having a fit of laughter)
“Gender essentialism actually has very little to do with science, or biology. It’s a cultural belief system, which is why some people talk about gender as a text.” –J.D. Regent
“Biology is merely the study of “what is”, of natural variation. In fact, in the natural world, gender is not strictly fixed. While rare, there are instances of hermaphrodism, of XXY or XXX genotypes, of men with ovaries or women producing levels of testosterone equal to or greater than that of men. … The problem comes not in the natural variation (i.e., biology), but rather in the human need to categorize and squeeze all that variation into two black-or-white boxes. I would argue that the fixed notion of gender is a human concept, and more from a need to understand how to integrate the body into society than from the biology of the body.” –Viajera
I think a big part of the apparent gap between views comes from euphemism. We’re used to ‘gender’ being used as a polite word for ‘sex’, as in all those forms that ask you to check one: “Gender: Male/Female”. But it isn’t.
There is no gender in the natural world. The natural world has sex-linked chromosomes and hormones that produce a variety of body shapes and body functions. Usually the effect is that any given mammal develops as male or female, but sometimes the results are more intersex or infertile.
Gender is, as J.D. Regent said, a social construct: two boxes that we try to sort people into. There are a bunch of restrictions and expectations applied to people in each box, and society is set up to give the people in one box a lot more power and safety than the people in the other box.
I have always understood feminist thought as saying that our reproductive anatomy does not determine our personalities, intelligence, ambitions, or anything else than our reproductive capabilities—in contrast to patriarchal thought, which claims that women and men are different kinds of people with nothing in common.
[...] as a result of social anxiety around issues of sex and gender difference. According to “Pursuit of Harpyness” [...]