Body Politics Notes

The Body

• Issues concerning assumptions about its UNIVERSALITY and NORMATIVITY.

• Lived experiences = EMBODIMENT = way of inhabiting the world; source of personhood, self, subjectivity.

Theoretical Traditions/Themes in the Study of the Body

• Symbolic significance of the body/ Representation of the body/ Body in metaphorical discourse

• The Agentic Body

• Body and technology

• Sociology/Anthropology of the Body

  • Health and illness, medical categories of disease, organization of health care

• Sociology/Anthropology of sport

• Virtual bodies

• Lived bodies/identities

Theorizing the Body: Enduring Questions, Distinctive Approaches

• Some of the most enduring questions regarding the body are ontological.

  • What is a body?

  • Is each body, for example, a distinct biological organism, or is it more accurately understood as the accretion of general biochemical processes susceptible to environmental factors?

  • To what extent are the bodies of social actors best treated as natural phenomena that society modifies, or should the focus be on imaginary and symbolic aspects of the cultural body?

• More importantly, we should be concerned how bodies are actually experienced and lived vis-à-vis all these views about the body.

• "the body" has come to be understood as simultaneously subject and object, meaningful and material, individual and social.

• Whether understood as text, symbol, or habitus, the body has proved a fertile site from which anthropologists have mounted refutations of abstract, universalizing models and ideologies and interrogated operations of power, systems of oppression, and possibilities for agency and political change.

Bodies and Cultural Practices

• “Humans may be the only creatures that steadfastly refuse to let nature alone dictate their appearance. Indeed, our capacity for self-modification and adornment is a central and essential feature of our humanity, though the particular ways in which we alter our bodies are clearly a cultural phenomenon.” (Reischer and Koo 2004)

• Plastic/cosmetic surgery has become a common practice in South Korea.

• Among the tribes of the Kalahari Desert, shiny skin is considered an attractive feature, so much so that even in times of famine, the tribes choose to use precious animal fats as a skin emollient rather than as food (Turner 1980).

• In the West, cosmetics are a multibillion-dollar industry in the United States alone ( Reischer 2004).

• Even our toys are undergoing “the knife” in the name of beauty.

• In 1997, Mattel’s most famous toy, the Barbie doll, emerged from the factory operating room with a “wider waist, slimmer hips, and. . .a reduction of her legendary bustline” (Wall Street Journal 1997).

• This reconfiguration of the West’s premiere icon of femininity after nearly forty years suggests that the image of femininity embodied by the original Barbie of the late 1950s has undergone a radical transformation of its own.

Symbolic vs Agentic Bodies

• Symbolic – body as a conduit of meaning; representation of the body in culture

• Agentic- body as an active participant or agent in the world social

Body as Symbolism

• Mary Douglas – “The Two Bodies” – physical and the social body; self and society

• The social body constrains the way the physical body is perceived.

• The physical experience of the body, always modified by the social categories through which it is known, sustains a particular view of society.

• There is a continual exchange of meanings between the two kinds of bodily experience so that each reinforces the categories of the other.

• As a result of this interaction, the body itself is a highly restricted medium of expression.

• The forms it adopts in movement and repose express social pressures in manifold ways.

• [T]he human body is always treated as an image of society and … there can be no natural way of considering the body that does not involve at the same time a social dimension.

• A complex social system devises for itself ways of behaving that suggest that human intercourse is disembodied compared with that of animal creation. It uses different degrees of disembodiment to express the social hierarchy.

• The more refinement, the less smacking of the lips when eating, the less mastication, the less the sound of breathing and walking, the more carefully modulated the laughter, the more controlled the signs of anger, the clearer comes the priestly aristocratic image.

• Body metaphors and social processes

  • menstruation as taboo

Body as ‘Text’

• Mary Douglas argues that the body is a text upon which social meanings are inscribed and that we need a common vocabulary and symbol set to decipher those meanings.

• Bodies transmit an array of complex information (intentionally or not), and members of a given culture tend to be experts at reading these culturally-specific meanings

• For instance, a white dress worn during a wedding may symbolize a virginal body; tattooed bodies may mean different things in different cultures = in the time of the Drug War for instance, tattooed bodies may signal danger of being identified as an addict

Body and Social Structure (Social Body)

• Mauss and Durkheim = cultural parallel between body and social structure ;

• emotionally expressive and experiencing body as a crucial multi-dimensional medium for the constitution of society. Bodies possess this status for Durkheim for three reasons.

  • 1. They are a major source of those symbols through which individuals recognize themselves as belonging to a society.

  • 2. They constitute a major location for these symbols (that are also incorporated into what Marcel Mauss ([1934] 1973) referred to as the habitus and shape the gestures, habits, and affects of individuals).

  • 3. Finally, they possess social potentialities which provide how individuals transcend their egoistic selves and become energetically attached to the symbolic order of society

• Mauss, wrote in “Techniques of the Body”

• The habitus of the body being upright while walking, breathing, rhythm of the walk, swinging the fists, the elbows, progression with the trunk in advance of the body or by advancing either side of the body alternately (we have got accustomed to moving all the body forward at once). Feet turned in or out. Extension of the leg. We laugh at the 'goose-step' . It is the way the German army can obtain the maximum extension of the leg, given in particular that all Northerners, high on their legs, like to take as long steps as possible. In the absence of these exercises, we Frenchmen remain more or less knock-kneed…

• For the adult in any society, Mauss concluded, walking is an acquired technique. There is no 'natural way' of going about it

• Walking, talking, sitting, looking all convey cultural meanings

Cultural Body

• The radical move made by poststructuralists was to present both sex and gender as culturally constructed

Religious Body

• Body as fundamental to conceptions of religious power (celibate body; King’s body; gender of God)

Body Politics in Early Greece (Representation)

• Body politics was sexed:

  • in Greek society, only the males were considered as citizens, women were in charge of the oikos (household)

  • women and children were excluded from the body politic (governed society)

  • State governed the economy

Mind/Body Dichotomy (Metaphorical)

• Descartes postulated the mind/body dichotomy where the mind rules the body

• Hegel – how is self-consciousness formed?

• Post-structuralist: emotions, desire and the affective

• Post-modern: lived experience; everyday life

• Metaphors like: mind over matter/ basic instincts ( libido) versus higher self (spirit)

• Expressions like: the spirit is willing but the body is weak

Agentic Body

• Active role of the body in social life

• Phenomenological studies by Merleau-Ponty – sought to go beyond dualisms (Cartesian) and focused on what the body does; body as a sentient entity. (experience as vital to understanding the self)

• We do not have an experience of embodiment, we experience by way of our (sentient) embodiment.

• It is the Lebenswelt or “lived world,” which is the fundamental ground of our being and consciousness.

Gender and Sex Differences

• Sexual differences are grounded in a physical (anatomical, biological, and physiological) differentiation of reproductive functions

• Gender as a socio-cultural differentiation of functions and roles

• And how this differentiation of social functions according to Sylvia Walby is itself merely an expression of political and economic inequalities between men and women which are summarized under a general notion of patriarchy

• Researches on fashion, sexual violence, domestic and public spheres, domestic architecture, lesbianism, child training, etc.

The Body and Politics (Coole)

• For gender studies, the point of analyzing the body is to discern the power relationships that regulate, denigrate, define, or produce it as well as to identify the ways different bodies are located and constructed.

• The body gains political significance by being recognized alongside language or the state as a principal site where sex, gender, and power are enmeshed.

• How diverse bodies are treated by policy makers and how they fare in economic systems or familial structures—say, through welfare and tax regimes—is also influenced by perceptions and constructions of the gendered body and its roles.

Embodiment

• Political studies of embodiment have tended to go well beyond this political science framework and generally define the political more widely: as a web of power relations that situate, saturate, and constitute bodies differentially.

Pre-Feminist Notions of the Body

• Somatophobic (fear of the body) – relegating the body to a piece of nature that is constantly neglected as irrelevant, or denigrated as an unruly source of dangerous passions that threaten reason, political order or civic virtue.

  • women’s association with nature due to their role in reproduction and the taboos surrounding women’s bodily processes

  • women’s exclusion from public life or citizenship

Binary View

• Feminist analysis shows that Western culture’s treatment of the body is deeply imbued with a gender bias that privileges mind or reason, in turn identified as masculine. A conceptual edifice of binary oppositions is identified here— mind–body, culture–nature, subject–object, rational–irrational, active–passive, public–private—in which the first of each pair is perceived as superior, masculine, the norm (Lloyd 1984; Prokhovnik 1999).

Body and Technology

• The development of technology provides the potential to replace bodily functions and parts, to repair and upgrade the performance of the body

• Two ways: altering the body’s infrastructure (e.g., genetic engineering)

• use of artificial devices and altering the immediate near-to-body environment to augment and replace human capacities through systems designed to increase empowerment (machine-body fusions; cyborg)

Feminism

• For the most part, early feminist arguments still accepted traditional oppositions and thus conceded the disadvantages of female embodiment.

• But they also maintained that sex was not an insuperable (impossible to overcome) barrier to becoming fully human nor gender a determinant of rational incapacity (Wollstonecraft 1929).

• By driving this wedge of contingency into what had commonly been regarded as women’s natural destiny, liberal feminism opened the door to political change.

Impact of New Technologies

• Feminists have explored the potential gains for women (reproductive technologies – artificial insemination, in vitro fertilization); reproductive and emancipatory implications of new forms of technology = emancipatory impact of contraception on women’s sexual lives

• Virtual reality, cyberspace = how have these affected social relations

• Technology and social relationships = cybersex = disembodiment, re- embodiment, emotional attachment

Social Construction of Diseases

• Disease categories in medical science are not neutral representations of fact but social and political expressions of social relations and power struggles in society

• Women and Hysteria:

• The uterus was believed to wander around the body like an animal, hungry for semen. If it wandered the wrong direction and made its way to the throat there would be choking, coughing or loss of voice, if it got stuck in the the rib cage, there would be chest pain or shortness of breath, and so on. Most any symptom that belonged to a female body could be attributed to that wandering uterus. “Treatments,” including vaginal fumigations, bitter potions, balms, and pessaries made of wool, were used to bring that uterus back to its proper place. “Genital massage,” performed by a skilled physician or midwife, was often mentioned in medical writings. The triad of marriage, intercourse, and pregnancy was the ultimate treatment for the semen-hungry womb. The uterus was a troublemaker and was best sated when pregnant.

Regulation and Surveillance

• Althusser – ideological state apparatus –repressive parts of the state are there to discipline the body through consciousness/ideologies

• Biopower - a term coined by French scholar, historian, and social theorist Michel Foucault. It relates to the practice of modern nation states and their regulation of their subjects through "an explosion of numerous and diverse techniques for achieving the subjugations of bodies and the control of populations".

Politics

• State institutions:

  • government

  • military

  • police

  • taxation system

  • bureaucracy

  • educational system/schools

  • prison

  • corporations

  • factories

  • medical profession

  • family

Body Politics

• Refers to practices and policies through which powers of society regulate the human body, as well as the degree of individual and social control of the body

• The powers at play in body politics include institutional power expressed in government and laws, disciplinary power exacted in economic production, discretionary power exercised in consumption, and personal power negotiated in intimate relations

• Individuals and movements engage in body politics when they seek to alleviate the oppressive effects of institutional and interpersonal power on those whose bodies are marked as inferior or who are denied the rights to control their own bodies

Body Politics and Feminism

• Body politics was first used in this sense in the 1970s, during the “second wave” of the feminist movement in the United States. It arose out of feminist politics and the abortion debates.

• Body politics originally involved the fight against objectification of the female body, and violence against women and girls, and the campaign for reproductive rights for women. “The personal is the political” became a slogan that captured the sense that domestic contests for equal rights in the home and within sexual relationships are crucial to the struggle for equal rights in the public

• This form of body politics emphasized a woman’s power and authority over her own body.

• Many feminists rejected practices that draw attention to differences between male and female bodies, refusing to shave their legs and underarms and rejecting cosmetics and revealing, form-fitting clothing

• The book Our Bodies, Our Selves, published in 1973, aimed to widen and deepen women’s knowledge of the workings of the female body, thus allowing women to be more active in pursuit of their sexual pleasure and reproductive health

VAW

• Second-wave feminist body politics promoted breaking the silence about rape, sexual abuse, and violence against women and girls, which many interpreted as extreme examples of socially sanctioned male power. The feminists who followed at the end of the twentieth century accepted this stance on rape and violence against women and girls, but they found the gender ideals of second-wave feminists too confining

• Members of this generation, sometimes called third-wave feminists or post-feminists, endorse a range of body modification and gender practices that include butchfem gender roles, gender-blending, transgender lifestyles, transsexual surgeries, body piercing, and tattoos

• Debates about laws and women’s bodies sparked the interests other groups of women who felt that government or institutional power had unfairly exercised control over their bodies or that society should take greater responsibility for the care and protection of women and children. Noting that the abortion debates were about whether or not to have a child, activists pointed to policies and practices that denied reproduction to women in minority communities, especially the forced sterilization of Native Americans

Racial Body Politics

• The attribution of ethical, moral, temperamental, and social characteristics to individuals or populations based on skin color, facial features, body types, and sexual anatomy figure prominently in racial body politics. This practice is most pronounced in the United States in racism against African Americans

  • Africans as slaves; racial profiling practices

  • white as good and black as evil

  • contemporary black artists and pop stars are sexualized (bootylicious, etc); Other examples? For instance Asian women are preferred as workers; Rise of Asian hate crimes in the advent of Covid

• Xenophobia- fear ‘fear and hatred of strangers or foreigners)

Counter Ideologies

• “Black is beautiful”

• Girl power

• Legally blonde vs dumb blondes

• Angat ang Pinoy!

• “Kaya natin ito!”

• Gay pride

• Other examples?

Cyborg Manifesto

• Haraway’s position on gender rests solidly on the refusal of antonymous categories (female/male, nature/culture mind/body) and defines identity in contemporary culture through the postulation of the cyborg, a corporeal form linking the biological with the technological. Naturalness and essentialism are called into question in all of contemporary cultural theory including feminism.

• This hybridized posthuman form becomes a metaphor leaving the way open for a new non-Western, non-patriarchal discourse (precisely because “grammar is politics by other means” (Haraway 1991)).

• Thus, in rejecting the rigid boundaries separating “human” from “animal”, and “human” from “machine”, Haraway makes a significant contribution to the epistemological shift in postmodernism which positions itself as unequivocal critique of binarized identities (cf. also Haraway 2003).

Transsexual Bodies

• Connell (2012:857-858) discusses at length the feminist implications for transsexual women. Her definition of transsexual women focuses on the process as embodiment:

• By “transsexual women” I mean women who have been through a process of transition between locations in the gender order, from earlier definition as a boy or man toward the embodiment and social position of a woman – whatever the path taken and whatever the outcome.

• Gendered embodiment moreover is complex in transsexual subjects, whose personal narratives reveal that, in these subjects, masculine and feminine embodiments sometimes co-exist and sometimes alternate with each other. At any rate, the complexity of embodiment here can be seen simply as an extreme case of a process that in all human subjects is always present as contradictory.

• Transsexuality thus becomes a profoundly feminist issue, since the choice of change of gender position foregrounds the feminist call to the recognition of difference, opposes the state’s claim to regulate gender identity, and in ultimate analysis, is a forceful antagonist to the patriarchal order, which guarantees the capitalistic state. (Connell cited in Ponterotto, 2016)

Next Topics

• Masculinities and Femininities

• The Gaze = Are you familiar with the male gaze? What is this and where did this term originate?

• Is there also a female gaze? Queer gaze?