The Seduction of the Female Body

Women's Rights in Need of a New Body Politics

Kenneth A. Loparo

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137030726
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Drawing on the ambiguous meaning of the notion of vulnerability, the book offers an innovative approach to the topic of the female body in relation to women's rights; going beyond the age-old dichotomy of casting women as either passive victims or conscious agents.

1

Feminism: A Trouble Spot

Introduction

Why include a chapter on feminism if I do not want to write a feminist pamphlet to defend women against all kinds of inequalities imposed upon them by an oppressive patriarchal structure? Why do I want to introduce the thought of two of today’s most eminent feminist writers if I, at the same time, wish to disclaim the label of feminism for myself? Why this fear of being called a feminist? What does it mean to be a feminist? Are national and cultural boundaries relevant to feminism? Feminism continues to evoke contradictory feelings both inside and outside the academic world and this seems, at least in part, due to everyone giving different answers to these questions and each of these answers having political and emotional loadings (Offen, 1998, 119). Still, it is impossible to eliminate the word from our vocabulary because there appears to be no satisfactory substitute. Therefore, it is important to come at least to some kind of understanding of the term, especially for someone like me who wants to place her research against the backdrop of some major issues and concepts within feminism.

There are three specific reasons why I need to clarify my position vis-à-vis feminism. Let us turn to the title: The Seduction of the Female Body: Women’s Rights in Need of a New Body Politics. It may be clear that I want to express the need of a new body politics which is able to improve the problematic position of women in society by developing a theory of the female body. Although thinking about the body has become very fashionable, the status of the body within the Western intellectual tradition has long been one of absence or dismissal (Price and Shildrick, 1999: 1). If the body was already discussed, it was usually the human (read: white masculine) body that was referred to; the female body was only addressed in an implicit way, that is, as fundamentally similar to or, on some occasions, shockingly deviant from the male norm. It is thanks to the feminist project that female bodies have gradually occupied a more explicit presence within the Western tradition. The same can be said of women’s rights: for a long time, roughly till the late 1970s, the human rights discourse has overlooked the needs and aspirations of women. Feminism, being among the most vigorous critiques of the human rights system, can take credit for having brought the male-biased character of the system to international attention, resulting in a revision of the human rights catalogue and in a specific Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination Against Women (1979). The adoption of the CEDAW was the result of the great effort made by second-wave feminism, a women’s movement best known for its captivating slogan ‘the personal is the political’. These feminists argued that the female body is a politically inscribed entity; a body shaped by histories and practices of containment and control. For this reason, they inverted the concept of body politic, a metaphor used by Plato, Aristotle, Hobbes, and others to compare the state and its various functions to the human body and its different organs: the politics of the body or body politics was born. Initially, the term body politics referred to the subordination of women and their bodies by and in favour of men. Emancipation consisted in throwing off all forms of subordination. Later in the 1990s, in particular under the influence of Michel Foucault, the term subordination was understood as the subjection of both women and men to an external order, be it patriarchy, disciplinary power, or bio-power. At the same time, the notion of emancipation was put into question because if, as Foucault had shown, the subject was created by the very power structures that were said to oppress it, then the idea of liberating the subject from such structures became untenable.

It may be clear that if I want to develop a theory on the female body and address the issue of women’s rights in connection with body politics, I shall have to confront myself with what has been written and said on these arguments in the name of feminism. Given that the label of feminism is usually applied to all theories, actions, and campaigns that improve women’s social condition, why the need to dissociate myself from feminism? The first reason is that the term feminism has become so all-embracing that it risks becoming obsolete. There are so many different strands of feminism, which are not only divergent but sometimes also forcefully opposed, that it has become difficult or even impossible to define what feminism ‘is’. Secondly, the (in)-famous ‘F’-word, introduced at the end of the nineteenth century to describe the women’s movement, has become a term of derision, a stigma used against women (Moi, 2006). Feminists are said to be frustrated women or man-haters who keep trotting out the same line: women are always and everywhere the defenceless victims of man, in all his guises. Since this victimhood has not changed everyday life, feminism has lost its credibility with the younger generation (Badinter, 2006: 5). Moreover, feminism seems to have changed from an active movement into a sterile academic discipline which has lost touch with the real concerns of the majority of women: ‘academic feminist theory […] consists largely of people theorizing from other people’s theories about yet more theory’ (Russ, 1998: 435). Here we touch a sore point: feminism has always been deeply concerned with practice; the point has always been to change the world not merely to interpret it. But if contemporary feminism is truly unable to engage in politics, has it then not come to a dead end (Badinter, 2006)? The third and most important reason for rejecting the label of feminism is of a more philosophical nature. All feminists believe in some sense, that women are subordinated and that this should be changed (Stone, 1997: 4–11). Each feminist current gives a different interpretation of this subordinate condition and of how it has to be remedied. Some interpret this condition as one wherein women are not equal to men. Others believe women to be subordinated insofar as they are not recognized in their differences from men. Still others think of subordination in terms of being made into a woman in the first place (Stone, 1997: 8). But what does subordination mean? According to the dictionary definition people are subordinated if they are made to be of lower importance or value to someone else. To claim that women are subordinated is to claim that they are made subordinate and that this situation should be changed (Stone, 1997: 8). That does not necessarily mean that men do the subordinating. It simply means that women are made subordinate by something outside themselves, be it patriarchy, disciplinary power, or bio-power and that this condition should be altered through e-mancip-ation. Or to formulate it in a more positive way: subordination should be rectified, depending on the feminist strand in question, either by rendering women equal to men, by recognizing them in their differences, or by abolishing womanhood altogether (Stone, 1997: 7).

On this point, it is important to make a distinction between emancipation – traditionally understood within equality feminism as freeing women from political, social, and legal restrictions by giving them the same opportunities as men – and e-mancip-ation understood on the basis of Jean-François Lyotard’s analysis of mancipium in ‘The Grip’ (1993). Lyotard refers to the etymological origin of mancipium (the gesture of taking hold) and he contends that the human subject is tied to a mancipium from which it cannot emancipate itself. This mancipium, which he also calls childhood or thing, constitutes a condition of irrecoverable passivity from which we cannot and should not free ourselves. It is something inhuman that belongs to the very heart of humanity itself (Visker, 1999: 122). Not all feminists subscribe to emancipation in the first sense. Difference feminists argue that such emancipationism results in a naive and simplistic solution to female oppression: it presumes that society can be transformed simply by including women in the public sphere. Feminists who celebrate women’s difference from men contend that emancipation leads to homologation, that is, to the assimilation of women into masculine modes of thought and practice and that it upholds the normativity of masculinity. For them the strategy of including women in an unchanged masculine world is not enough because it does not challenge the status quo. They want to make the world hospitable for other values and needs by asserting the positivity of difference. Still, both difference and equality feminists seem to believe in an authentic female subject that can e-mancip-ate itself from its subordinate position: they do not recognize the mancipium in Lyotard’s sense. Feminists who take a Foucauldian approach to power are more sceptical about such an e-mancip-ation because if the subject is constituted through practices of subjection, then it is not clear how the subject can emancipate itself from these practices without emancipating itself from itself. The problem with this position is that it precludes the possibility of resistance. Yet, ultimately, most of these feminists refuse such a determinist strand: they all appeal to a feature (a kind of ‘pre’-mancipium) which escapes conditioning in order to ground agency. So, in the end, like Foucault (Visker, 1995: 85), they still interpret body politics in terms of subordination to an external order. I will come back to this issue in Chapter 2.

Throughout this book body politics is understood in relation to the body’s need of symbolization. Although symbolization is an external order too, one can hardly speak in terms of subordination when one considers it to be a process of signification motivated by a need from within the body itself. I will show that this need has something to do with the fact that the body is a unique corporeal given with no definitive content. We cannot emancipate ourselves from this need because the body is constitutive of who we are. My position shows some resemblance with Lacanian thought because of its emphasis on symbolization and its decentring of the subject. Still, it also departs from such an approach, for three main reasons: first, it rejects the idea of a fixed, invariant symbolic order; second, it contends that the apprehension of our finitude is not only a social, intersubjective thing, but can also be a cruelly private experience; third, it denies the fact that we can/have to assume this finitude.

Of course, for someone interested in women’s rights it is important to ask how cultural ‘yokes’ have affected women’s social condition and how this situation can be changed. Even someone who usually abstains from the woman’s cause will have to admit that, on the whole, women have been much more restricted in their manner of movement and their spatiality than men. In that sense, the feminist project of improving women’s social position hardly requires justification. The aim of this book is not to reject feminism as a movement that is concerned with the improvement of women’s position in society. What it opposes, from a philosophical point of view, is that feminists presume that subordination exists and should be remedied. Some of them have tried to remedy this situation by drawing on philosophical concepts and theories of past and recent philosophies. Phenomenology, psychoanalysis, and poststructuralism have become increasingly vital for the production of feminist theories, although, at times, there also has been a considerable degree of feminist disquiet with these theories, especially with those of a more misogynist stamp. There is, in fact, no guarantee that traditional philosophical analyses can provide the necessary and convincing arguments to overturn the ‘subordination’ of women because it is difficult to know how deep male bias in philosophy goes. Or to say it with Audre Lorde’s words: ‘the master’s tool will never dismantle the master’s house’ (Lorde 1984: 110). Moreover, the question is: on which basis should feminists correct the male bias in philosophy? Are there experiences in women’s lives which can offer such a vantage point on male supremacy? Are there experiences that all women share? What about social and cultural diversity? What seems questionable is not the idea that women may have different experiences than men, but rather that the differences between men and women are philosophically relevant (Bauer, 2001: 36). It is one thing to explore these differences as cultural phenomena to be studied by anthropologists, sociologists, or politicians; it is quite a different matter to endorse some kind of philosophical (metaphysical-ontological) claim about the difference between women and men. Still, in all communities as we know them, women have been much more constrained by cultural practices than men. It would be wrong therefore to state that there is no such thing as difference because this would only offer the frail assurance that there should not be a problem. The supposition of an archaic matriarchy has long been falsified as part of mythical thinking (Bamberger, 1974); there has never been such a thing as a Mother-Age. It is almost as if women’s ‘subordination’ belongs to a remote past which has never been present; as if it always already happened, without it being the result of a particular historical event (de Beauvoir, 1989 [1949]: xxiv). The question is thus not whether there is a difference between women and men, but rather what difference this difference really makes (Rhode, 2003). The challenge consists in coming to grips with this difference while avoiding the pitfall of essentialism. My claim that the female body is particularly vulnerable can easily be misunderstood as me wanting to reify a certain view of what it is to be a woman. However, the ontology of bodily vulnerability that I propose in this book is an emptied ontology (Cavarero and Bertolino, 2008: 131) which does not focus on the what of identity, but on corporeal uniqueness. This explains why, in order to tackle the question of difference, I use literary and real-life examples which enable me to focus on singular lives (bodies) instead of on abstract and universal categories.

In what follows, I do not want to engage with the entire body of feminist scholarship – which would be an impossible enterprise considering the great variety of feminist theories – but to place my research against the backdrop of what I take to be some of the major issues and concepts within feminism. Inevitably, there will be many generalizations. My aim is to show that these theories always develop within a certain socio-political context and that they lose their meaning whenever they are cut off from the conditions that gave rise to them. This chapter also enables me to introduce the work of two of today’s most eminent feminist writers, Adriana Cavarero and Judith Butler, whose work on vulnerability has been of great inspiration to me. Cavarero is an Italian sexual difference feminist who is deeply influenced by the work of Hannah Arendt and Luce Irigaray, while Butler is an American feminist working in the tradition of Continental feminism and deeply indebted to poststructuralism. Today it has become almost commonplace to assume that Anglo-American feminists advocate equality, whereas Continental feminists celebrate women’s difference from men. This oversimplified categorization is the result of an ahistorical approach which has favoured division over cross-fertilization. The focus in this overview is on clarifying terms as gender, sex, and sexual difference from their introduction in feminist theory to their most recent conceptualizations. The emphasis of much of today’s scholarship is on deconstructing these notions: they are said to be part of essentialist/ontological thinking and to promote binary oppositions, which exclude those who do not conform. The concern of these scholars is to give the so-called ‘others’ (lesbian, gay, transgender, and intersex persons) viable lives either by establishing more inclusive conditions (Butler, 2004b, 2004c), by focusing on the body’s capacity for material signification (Ingram, 2008), or by taking seriously the idea that the individual is the political (Monceri, 2010). In this book I certainly do not want to deny the importance of such a project. On the contrary, like these authors I believe that we desperately need to rethink the framework for thinking difference and like them I acknowledge the complex interpersonal and social realities that shape people’s lives and identities. Still, the focus of the present book is elsewhere: not on the interpersonal, but rather on the intra-personal or intimate level. Taking my cue from Cavarero (2008) and Visker (2003), I want to rethink (rather than deconstruct) ontology by relating it to the human condition. Like Cavarero (Cavarero and Bertolino, 2008: 141), I identify this condition with corporeal vulnerability, but unlike her, I understand this vulnerability not, or at least not primarily, in relational terms. My aim is not to belittle the fact that the human condition is that of corporeal beings which are reciprocally exposed, but rather to show that our condition is also characterized by a kind of metaphysical loneliness which cannot be absorbed into intersubjectivity (Visker, 2003: 268). The burden of corporeal uniqueness is a condition that all human beings share. Still, it does not seem to characterize them all in the same way. I have chosen the problematic label of ‘the female body’, not only to denote this difference, but also to emphasize the need to rethink the concept of the body itself. In the next chapter I will clarify my preference for the notion of the female body in full knowledge of the risks that this may entail. For now it is important to point out that whenever I speak of women and ‘their’ bodies I am not speaking in terms of sex or gender and I am certainly not making a claim about the essence of women. I am rather referring to a unique corporeal given that asks for meaning.

A history of feminisms

Defining ‘feminism’ is challenging because the term has gained so many different meanings and loadings that it risks becoming obsolete. Perhaps it would be better to speak of feminisms because as soon as one tries to analyse all that has been written and spoken in the name of feminism, it becomes clear that it is a very diverse and multifaceted phenomenon (Freedman, 2001: 1). The term ‘feminism’ is a relatively modern one. In effect, historians have shown that it barely existed before the twentieth century (Offen, 1988: 123). Still, scholars have taken up the words ‘feminism’ and ‘feminist’ to describe pro-woman actions and theories from long before the term itself was in use. One can find articles and books on feminism in Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance. Such an anachronistic use is problematic for at least two reasons: first, authors rarely intend the same thing by ‘feminism’ and this can lead to contrary results with regard to the same action or theory; second, the risk is that one deflects analysis from the true content of the ideas and actions which one labels ‘feminist’. Still, many contemporary scholars continue to speak loosely of ‘pre-feminism’, ‘proto-feminism’, ‘post-feminism’, and ‘anti-feminism’. But, how can one possibly understand these terms if one does not even have a proper notion of feminism itself (Offen, 1988: 124–5)?

There have been different attempts to come to an insight into the pheno menon of feminism (Freedman, 2001: 4–6). It is common to make a distinction between a more activist and a more theoretical dimension. In the beginning, the emphasis lay especially on the women’s movement, that is, on the practical concerns with social and political transformation. There was no professional category of ‘feminist theorists’ and often activists did not even refer to themselves as feminists. The few people who were into theory were doing it as advocates of women’s rights. From the late 1970s onward, feminist theory matured quickly and within the university it tended, and still tends, to adhere especially to disciplines such as literature, history, and philosophy (Cacoullos, 2001: 73). The academization of feminist theory has evoked much scepticism among both feminists and non-feminists. Sceptical feminists worry that, far from improving women’s lives, these theoretical projects and their internal differences have actually hampered the women’s movement because too often they have lost touch with women’s real experiences (Bauer, 2001: 21). Non-feminists, by contrast, think ‘academic’ feminism tout court is suspicious because in their view the political concerns of feminism are incompatible with the academic commitment to open enquiry (Cacoullos, 2001: 74, 78). Another problem is that there is no real consensus as to which categories are the most meaningful when classifying feminist action and thought. Nor is there any agreement on the number of categories or on which writers/activists belong in each. Some scholars talk about a series of waves and although the number of waves is still a contested issue, generally one speaks of (hitherto) three feminist waves. Other scholars divide feminism into different political families, such as liberal, socialist, Marxist, and radical feminism (see Jaggar and Rothenberg, 1993; Tong, 2008). Still others classify feminism into two geographical and theoretical camps: Anglo-American and Continental feminism (Cahill and Hansen, 2003). The problem with all these classifications is that they tend to gloss over differences within the various categories of feminism on the one hand and are inclined to emphasize the differences between the categories on the other hand (Freedman, 2001: 6). It would be wrong, therefore, to understand labelling as an accurate representation of real groups. It is a h...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Feminism: A Trouble Spot
• 2 The Adventures of the Body
• 3 The Problem of Human Vulnerability
• 4 Bodily Uniqueness and Symbolization
• 5 Contemporary Society and its Body Politics
• Bibliography
• Index