Month: June 2020

Language and Embodiment

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Bitch: Language and Embodiment

Sarah Lucas Bitch, 1995

 

What do we make of this sculpture, Bitch? It is a base, if rather humorous, representation of a female body on castors – mobile, accessible – a vacuum packed kipper nailed to its tail end –  two melons for breasts, suspended from a T-shirt.

People often do have a giggle once all the constituting parts and attendant meanings become clear –  despite its degradation, despite the makeshift aspect of it, or the disgust elicited either by the pool of brine that collects underneath the fish’s head, or the violence of the sculpture itself.

What is the joke? Are we having a laugh at the expense of womankind and setting back feminism a few generations? Well humour is an odd state from which to view the world: like pushing a reset button. Humour suspends us in a state of momentary disbelief – of excitement even. We get the joke.

But humour also has a dark underbelly.  Jokes, puns and witticisms are true manifestations of social and intellectual processes/signification because they illustrate collective cultural phenomena, and how infrequently we consider our habituated behaviour as shaping and reinforcing our attitudes towards certain things.

Reflect upon how we experience things. To look upon the object is already to inhabit it through our senses. One can perceive objects in the world relative to their purpose and significance to the lived body’s needs and capacities

The condition of seeing the object as a rigid Other, humorously identifiable through a grotesque sexuality renders it devoid of self. Through it we become disconnected from our common humanity.

By deconstructing the ‘natural’ sexed body through the familiar – food and a table and otherwise objectifying the objectified in the absurd – we are caught up in momentary state of suspension granted to us by humour. We take up the object through the lived experience of our bodies, the phenomenology of the self.

Lucas’ Bitch sculpture is a concrete expression of immutable sexual differences, that are reified by symbols, corrupted words and social practices that perpetuate the myth of the feminine, the truth therein. A word for a female dog, has become, over time, an unforgiving, fixed representation of woman, is firmly entrenched in language, culture and thought. Even representations that try to claw back some power from this derogation cannot redeem the word bitch. Meaning is no longer derived solely from reference to external reality, but is constructed from the relation of the signifier bitch to other signs in the universe of meaning-constitution, including objects that represent the female body, the socio-cultural signification of the female, and the indignities of the body to which the female self is bound: from menstruation as taboo[i] to rape as war crime.[ii]

References and Additional Reading

[i] Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge, 1966).

[ii] Catharine MacKinnon , Are Women Human? And Other International Dialogues (Cambridge, MA and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006)

 

Sarah Lucas
Bitch, 1995

Table, t-shirt, melons, kipper

80.5 x 101.5 x 64 cm
© Sarah Lucas, courtesy Sadie Coles HQ, London

What are feminist economics? Addressing institutional, empirical and methodological biases

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What are feminist economics? Confronting institutional, empirical and methodological biases

Economics is a study of human behaviour and a  system of knowledge and organisation as much as it is political, ideological and power-based. In fact, any discipline that engages with the dynamics of human relations, especially if they touch on identity politics, rights, and participatory principles, has to contend with human behaviour, and thus with the materiality of bodies and our modality of being-in-the-world. [i]

Heterodox, or pluralist economics, depending on the focus of their investigations, present a challenge to established systems of knowledge in order to counter institutional biases. What is considered to be the radical self-interested behaviour of economic agents, is but a part of the totality of human action. Heterodox economics, then, refers to the various disciplines that take up the foundational principles of economics and re-calibrate them as a study of human development.

Feminism can be understood as a challenge to existing socio-cultural and political conditions through critical opposition to them, thus qualifying the value-unneutrality of feminist inquiries. This methodological bias goes against the grain of fairness and neutrality, conditionalities in epistemological research that pivot round the notion of impartiality.[ii] The tacit acceptance of the value-neutrality and sensible nature of this dictum hinges on sameness and difference, two of the most clearly coalesced, and conflicting tenets of feminist thought.

I would like to clarify the complications of making such an assumption, substantive though it may be.  Feminist epistemologies attempt to correct for the value-unneutrality that gender occasions.[iii] Central to these frameworks is how gender situates knowing subjects: what is known and how. How is knowledge known? Through formalised schooling, culture, general interest, research methods or cognitive styles. For my purpose here, the question of how gender impacts and affects the production and distribution of knowledge and meaning is explored through embodiment and experience as methods of knowing.

Feminist theory is not sufficiently cohesive in its viewpoints to offer the only methodological framework that supports this project.[iv] Feminisms differ, but converge on two points: a rejection of essentialism; and an agreement that no single social group or demographic category should be granted epistemic privilege when making an inquiry into the nature of social justice. That is, one ought to eschew the idea that groups – including women – have a fixed nature and conform in thought, behaviour and desires. On the whole, feminisms espouse respect for the fact that there are many ways to be a woman. On that basis, a critical inquiry into sexism should not take as given that all women have the same experience, or that there exists a top-down mechanism of domination that systematically subordinates women, despite historical antecedents to that effect.

Feminism invokes a plurality of meanings. The category woman is itself a representation that already assumes a material reality. There is a qualified certainty expressed in radical materialist feminism over the designation woman, but equally there is danger in un-fixing woman from the culturally assigned sexual differentiation of her body. Untethering the body from the institutions and frameworks through which it engages is to foreclose the opportunity to destabilise the sexist attitudes that are fuelled by culture.

One such institution is the field of economics.  Economics stakes its epistemic methodologies on objective scientific principles, which insofar as can be determined, are gender-neutral, but not necessarily value-free.  Claims to reason, equality and truth are– and remain – carefully weighed and selectively bestowed through formal channels, suggesting the very notion of this universal transcendence is hierarchical. When societies have as their ‘natural basis the inequality of men,’ then there exists an ontological framework for equality based on inequality. [v]  Feminist economics considers the foundational tenets of the discipline and reconceptualises them through an intersectional perspective of what it means to negotiate the world through the subjective experience of being.

Being is determined by race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation and socio-economic positioning. These qualifiers are further compounded by opportunities: for education, for security, for livelihood and mobility and for expression – all of which are conditioned by the parameters of the body politic. Being gendered is just one of many social stratifiers [vi] that function as operational frameworks, which do not offer a totalising view of the world. By dint of us being in-the-world, there can be no purity or neutrality to which the phenomenological investigation of some schools of feminisms aspire: the condition of being-in-the-world assumes the natural, the given and the constructed factions of being cannot be elegantly separated. Think of adding sugar to tea; once the crystals have dissolved their previously reconstituted manufactured form is irretrievable. Yet, this integral framework can shape the subjective self without necessarily falling back on a reductionist biological account, [vii] or becoming irretrievably stuck in the binary of sexual difference.[viii]

Furthermore, the feminist precept ‘the personal is political’ does not deny a distinction between public and private. [ix] It does indicate there is a social division between public and private discourses, moderated by institutions that are deemed the right forum in which to discuss the ‘woman problem.’ [x] A challenge to the conceptualisation of care and other forms of social reproduction, for example, as passive units within the economy, is apt. Oft conceived as the domestic, and hence private, sphere of policy, feminist economists highlight the value of this work as the material foundation for the reproduction (labour), management (resources) and continuation (human capital, savings and investment) of the meta-economy.

References and Additional Reading

[i] Being, in Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, refers to the lived experience of the body through the senses.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1945),  Phenomenology of Perception (Routledge: London and New York,  2012)

[ii] MacKinnon 2006:121

MacKinnon, Catharine, Are Women Human? And Other International Dialogues (Cambridge, MA and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006)

[iii] Feminist epistemologies are classified by Sarah Harding The Science Question in Feminism, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986) as: empiricism, standpoint theory and post-modernism.  Feminist epistemologies were developed in the 1980s, to address the gender bias in scientific study and research. The last 25 years have seen a convergence of these methods, focusing on the ways in which gender is implicated in every facet of the world we live in. See also Sarah Harding (1990) “Feminism, Science, and the Anti-Enlightenment Critiques” in Linda Nicholson ed., Feminism/Postmodernism, (New York and London: Routledge, 1990).

[iv] Cited theorists like Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and Foucault are a resource; it is within the constructive aspects of the theory (and not the man and his perceived position within society, culture or academia)  that I can position my inquiry. This inquiry is limited in that I do not seek to untangle each author’s politics or belief systems; delve into their thoughts, reclaim them as  proto-feminists, or critique them as  anti-feminist; or for that matter, survey their views on women in general.

[v] Marx, Karl (1867), p. 997. Das Kapital

Marx, Karl (1867), Capital Volume 1: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. Ben Fowkes, (Penguin Books: London, 1976)

[vi] Merleau-Ponty (1945)

[vii] Toril Moi What is a Woman? And Other Essays, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999)

[viii] From Freud’s (1923) claim that the ego (and the id) is ‘foremost a bodily ego’; but also from de Beauvoir (1949) that the experiences of embodiment are not a consequence of anatomy but of the situation of women.

Sigmund Freud (1923) The Ego and the Id  in Jon Sletvold,. (2013). ‘The ego and the id revisited Freud and Damasio on the body ego/self’  The International journal of Psychoanalysis. 94:5, pp. 1019-32.

N.B. Freud does not use the phrase ‘bodily ego’ recurrently. Freud’s preoccupation was with identity, and marginally, with how mind is related to body. Here, it is argued throughout that mind and body are unified, as the embodied self.

[ix] Carol Hanisch, Notes from the Second Year: Women’s Liberation 1969

<http://www.carolhanisch.org/CHwritings/PIP.html> [18 April 2015]

[x] Lourdes Benería and Gita Sen. “Class and Gender Inequalities and Women’s Role in Economic Development: Theoretical and Practical Implications.” Feminist Studies, vol. 8, no. 1, 1982, pp. 157–176.

Sexism, Identity and the Subterfuge

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Sexism, Identity and the Subterfuge

The term sexist, modelled on the term racist, appeared in a 1965 speech given by American academic Pauline M. Leet.[i]In 1968, Caroline Bird explicitly referred to sexism as an imbalance of power between men and women, resting on value-laden judgements of sexual differentiation.[ii] As a result of such judgements, other social undercurrents and behaviours arise that, in turn, perpetuate sexist attitudes. The practices of out-sexing sexism, first identified by Joan Rivière in the early twentieth century, to which Bird refers, are the subterfuges women are compelled to employ to overcome certain social, cultural and professional prejudices borne out of institutionalised sexual differentiation.[iii] These subterfuges take on many forms: playing down one’s intelligence at work so that a male colleague does not feel threatened; feigning helplessness to guide an outcome to a desired result; or using sexist arguments to sidestep bias. It is a form of negotiation.

Subterfuge

Rivière referred to the variability of feminine identity in a specific context and in response to Freud’s, and later Ernest Jones’s,[iv] intimation of woman as a ‘failed’ man.[v] The woman to whom Rivière refers, based on her studies of professional and intellectual women and Jones’s casework, is not ‘mainly’ heterosexual. She is an ‘overtly masculine type of woman,’ who is at the same time seemingly apt in fulfilling ‘every criterion of feminine development.’ However, hinting at the instability of said subject, Rivière suggests that female identity is the mimicry of a ‘castrated woman,’ that is, her aptitude of womanliness is a form of mimicry. She must dissimulate a fundamental masculinity, a ‘compulsion’ driven by anxiety over the potential reaction to her self from authority figures, understood to be male. Rivière attempts to understand whether this masquerade is a conscientious betrayal of her ability and considers whether or not it is reflective of the ‘essential nature of fully developed femininity,’ and, therefore, whether or not they (authentic and simulated versions of femininity) are the ‘same thing.’[vi] In other words, women exaggerate their womanliness as a defence against the masculine elements inherent in their being and become prone to anxiety as a result of this instability. This anxiety provokes compulsive behaviours: either a reversal or denial of her intellectual capacity or ability to perform a ‘masculine’ task; seeking male attention by engaging in ‘coquettish’ behaviour; or generally trying to appear artless. This compulsion is the masquerade.

In contemporary terms, this definition of sexism may not always address the historical imbalances of power between individuals and/or social groups that have, traditionally, placed certain demographics of men in a privileged position in relation to women.[vii] Sexism is defined as discrimination based on gender, and the stereotypes, attitudes and practices that fuel this discrimination.[viii] This project does not claim that all women everywhere experience sexism, either insidious or violent; that there are no gradations to the scope and severity that sexism or any of its manifestations exhibit; that it is only women who are marginalised and vulnerable; or that women are not complicit in the systems that drive sexist practices. Rather, the focus is on the micro-dynamics of power that are enacted disproportionately against women. For the purposes of this project, this is what I mean by sexism.[ix]

Identity

Sexuality is not the cause of being-in-the-world, but an effect, and is not understood as the reflex response to situations because these are not ‘mechanical,’ and the body is not a processing machine, but embodied consciousness.[x] Merleau-Ponty argues that sexual life is not just a reflection of existence.[xi] A ‘ruinous sexuality’ is concomitant with an ‘effective’ life – even life on the political and ideological level – because ‘sexual life’ indicates our being in the world. In phenomenology, the first ontological dimension is the body that exists for-itself.  The second dimension is the body that exists as the object of knowledge and that can be instrumentalised by others. Our encounter with others signals our awareness of the third ontological dimension of bodies: our awareness that I exist as I am known by the other.[xii] For Sartre, this awareness signals conflict that can be manifested as a fear, or humiliation, of being known, judged or manipulated by the other, who is conceived in opposition to our freedom. Merleau-Ponty, on the other hand, offers us the notion of being and being-for-others as a unique and complete way of experiencing ourselves and others. Think of two yolks housed in one egg, or two soap bubbles stuck together on one side, each with its own space, but bound to the other.

References and Additional Reading

[i] ‘When you argue…that since fewer women write good poetry this justifies their total exclusion, you are taking a position analogous to that of the racist — I might call you in this case a “sexist.” Both the racist and the sexist are acting as if all that has happened had never happened, and both of them are making decisions and coming to conclusions about someone’s value by referring to factors which are in both cases irrelevant.’ Pauline Leet, ‘Women and the Undergraduate,’ (Franklin and Marshall College, Pennsylvania, 1965) in Fred R. Shapiro, ‘Historical Notes on the Vocabulary of the Women’s Movement,’ American Speech, 60:1 (1985), pp. 3-16.

[ii] The term sexism appeared in print in 1968 in the introduction to Born Female: The high cost of keeping women down (New York: D. McKay Co., 1968) by Caroline Bird, a book that is widely held to have launched the Women’s Liberation Movement in the United States. Bird argued sexism does not make ‘sense in a world of equal opportunities.’ In Mary Kosut, ed., Encyclopedia of Gender in Media (Los Angeles: Sage, 2012). <http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=sexist&allowed_in_frame=0> [  9 September 2014]

[iii] Rivière, Joan. ‘Womanliness as a Masquerade,’ International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 10 (1929), pp. 303-313

<http://mariabuszek.com/mariabuszek/kcai/DadaSurrealism/DadaSurrReadings/RiviereMask.pdf> [  14 March 2017], along with ‘Jealousy as a mechanism of defence,’ International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 13 (1932), pp. 414-424.

[iv] Alfred Ernest Jones, Welsh neurologist and psychoanalyst, Freud’s biographer. See R. Andrew Paskauskas, ed., The Complete Correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Ernest Jones (1908-1939) (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).

[v] Freud proposed that the trajectories of male and female psychosexual development mirrored one another, until girls ‘failed’ to be boys due to the ‘destiny’ of their anatomy. This ‘destiny of the anatomy’ is defined by the observable differences in each sex’s genitalia, a destiny that for girls prescribed humiliation, anger and jealousy at this ‘failure.’ Taken from Freud’s 1912 essay ‘On the Universal Tendency to Debasement in the Sphere of Love,’ where he argues that bodily sexual differences have psychological consequences. See Alan Soble, ed., Sex from Plato to Paglia: A Philosophical Encyclopaedia, Volume. 2, M-Z (Westport, CT and London: Greenwood Press:  2006) pp. 887-888.

[vi] Rivière,1929

[vii] On the issue of complicity: sexism is not the same as gender-based prejudiced. Gender-based prejudice refers to power in the sense of denying rights to another by working within a framework of advantage or privilege. Men can experience gender-based prejudice but not sexism, as it is argued that the androcentric nature of the world imparts men, as a universal demographic, with privilege. Under this definition, a woman can be sexist if she is working within the framework of advantage. ‘Sexism is judging people by their sex when sex doesn’t matter…Women are sexists as often as men.’ Caroline Bird (1968) Born Female: The High Cost of Keeping Women Down (London: Longman Publishing Group, 1978)

[viii] ‘sexism,’ OxfordDictionaries.com, <http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/sexism> [  16 September 2014]

[ix] Feminism represents a plurality of thoughts and movements, many of which are presented in this chapter. Not all forms of feminism can be concerned with all topics at all times. Given the limitations here, and the focus on the phenomenology of the body, I have chosen not to disperse the collectivity represented by feminism.

[x] Merleau-Ponty, 1945:240 says humans are convinced that sight (visual perception), is “really” all about light waves hitting the occipital lobe in the brain. This is, of course, a perfectly legitimate way to describe vision from within a certain perspective. If we only focus upon chemical, neurological processes, we miss the way in which the experience and meaning of the world unfolds for us. Human experience is the result of a unique relation between the embodied subject and that which shows itself to him/her at every instant.

[xi] Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy on embodied subjectivity, if read from a non-foundationalist perspective, indicates there is scope for understanding its historical and cultural situatedness and the consequences for subjectivity and inter-subjectivity if the body is always a lived body. How is the world illuminated, or revealed to us? In ‘The Body as a Sexed Being’ Phenomenology of Perception (1945, pp. 157-178), he discusses existential sexual schema, and how these can relate sexuality to body image and how beings are in the lived world. Sexual life cannot be circumscribed as a separate causality proper to an ‘organic apparatus,’ but neither is existence entirely understood through sexual life. Sexual life reiterates existence but it is not a mere reflection of it, because our being-in-the-world cannot be divorced from sexual life: ‘There is no outstripping of sexuality any more than there is sexuality enclosed within itself. No one is saved and no one is totally lost.’ (1945, p. 159).

[xii] Sartre, 1943

Sartre, Jean-Paul, Being and Nothingness: A Phenomenological Ontology, trans. Hazel Barnes (New York: Philosophical Library, 1956)

Are Women Human?

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Are Women Human? [i]

Feminisms are efforts geared towards making sense of the non-sensical treatment of women. If representation and language are to be taken into account, we may draw the conclusion that women are not inhuman, simply not persons. The state, the legal and justice systems, and social and religious institutions are the measure of the extent to which one is able to constitute personhood. Our bodily integrity, that is, body and our mind together, is a projection of the wider world internalised into the self. Being human does not necessarily imply the condition of being an autonomous, rational self – it is as much about the individual’s situated-ness in the world and the interactions with those around us. I do not suggest that the condition of being a woman is universal and uniform across the board. I do maintain that unity – for all persons who identify as women –in the spirit of achieving recognition as human, with all its attendant significations, is important.

Women are bound, in experience, by the universalised sexual differentiation of their bodies.[ii]  Whether I feel myself to be a woman at all times; whether I am supposed to know I am a woman; or am conditioned to act accordingly and accept certain realities in my experience of the lived world, these considerations are predisposed by the fact that I inhabit a biologically female body. I enter the world in this body as the medium of my representation.[iii] Childcare and household management, and any work I undertake in the domestic setting, is unremunerated and unaccounted for in the national GDP.[iv] In paid employment, my salary and position are contingent upon the potentialities and actualities of my reproductive body.[v] If I were to experience physical violence, it would most likely be in the form of sexual crime. The vulnerabilities of such a body also bear the burden of the ontological implications of sexual difference.[vi]

These phenomena abound despite formalised gender equality.[vii] The fact that this equality must be codified in law suggests an implicit and established hierarchy that regulates the complex mechanism of rights. The realisation of substantive rights, across the broad swathe of human conditions, requires more resources, agency, political will and openness of mind in interpreting the law, than the acceptance that such rights are the natural preserve of every human being.[viii]

If women are not human, as measured by a universal standard of dignity and wholeness, equality is but an unrealisable notion, for women’s freedom, due to them in the quality of personhood, is denied at the outset. A sexed, gendered and sexually differentiated being is not the same as an integral human being.

Based on my work on the practical aspects of realising rights, I began thinking about the role of culture in fuelling sex-based discrimination, an area that is not given as much attention as economic and political issues. My interest in re-conceptualising this preoccupation with gender rights finds expression in the socio-politics of sex, gender and sexuality.  It is both correct, and not untrue, that we – collectively – represent a socio-political project that exemplifies feminist debates of this generation. If freedom is not conceived in a metaphysical sense, then any project that surveys women’s socio-cultural positioning assumes individuals already possess a legal and moral right to their person, hence a political entity and subject by virtue of living in an egalitarian society. Such rights are constitutionally guaranteed, but can be withheld in the realm beyond what is defined as political, signalling a state of disempowerment at the level of the individual. The political refers to dynamics of power across a wider range of institutions, and not just elected office. Foucault refers to these as the ‘disciplinary’ micro-powers that constitute individuals as unfree, even as political rights are sought on their behalf.[ix] Power is less preoccupied with vested legitimacy, theoretical rights and consent, than it is with administering issues of choice and free will.

References and Additional Reading

[i] A question posed by feminists the world over. See the work of MacKinnon (2006), who argues there is evidence within the law and the policies of social institutions to suggest women are not human.

Catharine A. MacKinnon Are Women Human? And Other International Dialogues (Cambridge, MA and London, UK: The Belnap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006)

[ii] See Sherry B. Ortner (1996) Making Gender: The Politics and Erotics of Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1997)), who notes that according to historical data, there does not exist an organised community, association of peoples, ethnic group or nation-state that has not been organised along gender lines.

[iii] Ortner’s (1996) research reveals that where societies are drawn along gender lines, most of them are established as a hierarchy where the female is positioned as the ‘degraded other.’

[iv] Issues discussed at length, in every country’s context, in the World Economic Forum Global Gender Gap Report:

< https://www.weforum.org/reports/gender-gap-2020-report-100-years-pay-equality>

[Accessed 2 July 2020]/

World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report: WEF tracks the global progression in gender equality. In 2020, the Swiss-based organisation estimated it would take 99.5 years for women and men to be equal.

[v] For further information, see the Briefing Papers of the UK Women’s Budget Group, which analyses the gender impact of UK budget allocations and changes in government policy.

[vi] I mention the vulnerabilities of the body, not as the physical vulnerability that Butler (1990) describes, but in keeping with the condition of the corporealised uniqueness of the body as per Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Towards a Corporeal Feminism, (London: Routledge, 1994).

[vii] Gender refers to the idea that sexual difference is socially and culturally constructed, not to the biology of the sexed body. Both gender and biological sex are now said to be social constructs.

[viii] Kantian political philosophy asserts the freedom of each member of a community as a human being, alongside the equality of each member as a subject, asserted by the independence of each subject as citizen; this notion presumes there are no asymmetries of power and representation, though Kant does concede there is a ‘contradiction’ between freedom and what is ‘compatible’ with nature, which can be rationalised, but never fully comprehended.

Immanuel Kant (1791), The Moral Law: Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, (London: Routledge, 2005): 113

[ix] Foucault’s theory on the body releases its materiality from biology. Strategies of ‘corporeal oppression’ ‘discipline’ bodies to render them ‘docile’ and amenable to systems of organisation constructed through dynamics of power.

Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison,  trans. A. Sheridan (London: Penguin, 1975)

Docile Bodies: The Social Context of Sex-based Disadvantage

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Docile Bodies: The Social Context of Sex-based Disadvantage

Michel Foucault disputes the notion of the ‘natural’ body, for it cannot be divorced from its cultural signification and its role in socialisation[i]. The body is the channel that maintains and perpetuates gendered relations of power by ‘naturalising’ a regulatory idea that simplifies, or bifurcates, the biological categories of sex from a range of incongruent biological functions, bodily pleasures and the body’s materiality, to make a hetero-homogenous whole.

This ‘artificial unity’ serves to disguise the productive manifestation of power in relation to sexuality, that is, sex is an ‘unruly’ thing that must checked through power.[ii] But this ‘artificial unity’ is what feminists have extrapolated onto critiques of characterising a feminine body, which tends to conflate the biological capacities of women with their social, physical and intellectual capabilities.

Intent on avoiding the collapse of the social, and subsequently political, category of woman into biological functions, feminist theory sought to reject this essentialism in favour of a theory of social construction based on the distinction between sex (biology) and gender (social). If the social body is constructed, then gender does not derive from the ‘natural’ body, and women are capable, like men, of transcending the biological through reason and applied knowledge. The notion of equal rights, and their realisation, even at the most basic level, and as a political project, stands in direct debt to conceptualising the sexed body away from the social body.

Foucauldian theory, however, is an uncomfortable reminder that culturally-constructed gender cannot be un-problematically severed from sexed bodies, which have been overlooked in the struggle not just to discipline gender, but to identify it and secure it in the world through signification. At the centre of this regulatory system the body remains messy and unwieldy, under constant surveillance and control within a ‘machinery of power’ designed to optimise its utility and productivity.[iii] This body  is not merely practiced and ‘docile,’ but has entered into, and sees itself within a state of ‘conscious and permanent visibility.’[iv] This state of self-awareness defines the modern subject.

Foucauldian theory endowed the politics of ‘everyday life’ with as much validity as macro-level socio-political and economic issues, from which women had traditionally been excluded.[v] It also opened up for debate the ‘so-called “personal problems” … especially all those “body issues” like sex, appearance and abortion’.[vi] The slogan ‘the personal is political’oes not deny a distinction between public and private.[vii] It does indicate there is a social division between public and private discourses, moderated by institutions that are deemed the right forum in which to discuss the ‘woman problem.’ [viii] Access to public life is arbitrated on the basis of equality, inconsistently applied, for such a conception will always exclude those who cannot gain access, whether through lack of education, poverty, or any other form of social exclusion that runs against power.

If the body is imagined as a locus point, or the ‘point of intersection’ or ‘interface’ between the biological and the social, as Braidotti suggests, then the notion of desire associates the embodied self to the socio-cultural conditions that constitute its reality.[ix] It is a desire for recognition and personhood. Because sexualisation is fundamental to the processes of socialisation, representations of the female body are fundamental not just to the formation of feminine identity, but of identity full stop. The individual is not negotiating between subjectivity, a fixed biological essence, or competing social obligations, but is fully participant, either through self-awareness, complicity or utility, in the currents of power of the social body. This is only a starting point and, it must be noted, one that also nears the view from ‘nowhere,’[x] if one is not attendant to all the assumptions that must be held in place to assume that an individual is able to access and utilise his or her own agency informed by the contradictions inherent in the lived world.

References and Additional Reading

[i] (Foucault, 1984: 80-82) proposed that power is materially produced from historical contingencies, and knowledge is the non-material aspect of the flow of power between individuals and social groups with vested interests in perpetuating the status quo. By insisting on the historical specificity of a body that is at the locus of social control, Foucauldian theory (decidedly gender-neutral) is central to the questioning of the subjugation of women, because biological differences are the foundations that ground, naturalise and legitimise gender inequality. Unarguably, biological functions are associated with distinct social characteristics, capabilities and divisions of labour, with women defined by their reproductive and physical capacities.

[ii] Michel Foucault (1976) The Will to Knowledge: Volume 1 of the History of Sexuality (London: Penguin Books, 1998), pp. 151-154

[iii] Foucault, 1975: 138-139

Michel Foucault (1975) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison,  trans. A. Sheridan (London: Penguin, 1975)

In ‘Docile Bodies’, Discipline and Punishment (1975:135-169) Foucault argues there is no single centralised authority: rather, power dynamics exist between groups of people that regulate and discipline bodies to keep them docile. His seeming disregard for the issue of sexual difference is consistent with his strategies of thinking in terms other than the polarities of the masculine and the feminine. Given that the construction of sexuality around sexual difference has been a tool of subjection for centuries, his suggestion for a different emancipatory strategy aims towards a redefinition of the body.

[iv] Foucault, 1975: 201

[v] Nancy Fraser (1989) Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory (Minneapolis, MN: Polity Press) p. 26

[vi] Carol Hanisch 1969 quoted in Gemma Edwards ‘Personal Life and Politics’ in Vanessa May ed.  Sociology of Personal Life (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011)p. 150

[vii] Carol Hanisch, Notes from the Second Year: Women’s Liberation 1969

<http://www.carolhanisch.org/CHwritings/PIP.html> [18 April 2015]

[viii] Lourdes Benería and Gita Sen. “Class and Gender Inequalities and Women’s Role in Economic Development: Theoretical and Practical Implications.” Feminist Studies, vol. 8, no. 1, 1982, pp. 157–176.

[ix] Rosi Braidotti  (1994). Nomadic Subjects Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), p. 105.

[x] Thomas Nagel (1986), View From Nowhere (Oxford: Oxford University Press), who says humans have the ability to view the world in a detached way.

The Phenomenology of the Breasted Self

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The Phenomenology of the Breasted Self

In Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, the chest is the centre of our being-in-the-world.[i] The philosopher Iris Marion Young agrees: ‘the chest is importantly the center of a person’s being,’ albeit with a sensibility particular to the nature of breasts  atop these chests.[ii]Women’s chests have breasts: ‘the primary things…this reification of breasts is at the heart of the reification of women.’[iii] Without conscious effort, when one wants to indicate to others who one is, one generally points to oneself at the level of the chest to signify I, not to the head or brain, the ‘seat of consciousness, identity.’[iv] For women, this simple identifying movement is laden with signification.[v]

Breasts, a primary signifier of female bodies, are everywhere. These lumps of variable, vulnerable, multi-functional tissue affect physical movement and subjective and psychic identity. They form the landscape of the everyday, as objects of fascination, desire and even disgust. And yet women’s own accounts of breasts, or the lived experienced of having breasts, as opposed to being a breasted entity generally, do not extend beyond the discourses of medicine and pathology.[vi]

The ‘slit aesthetic’ is a term used by Young (1990) to refer to clothing that is cut and arranged to reveal the erogenous zones of the female body. The slit aesthetic is a sublimated attempt at titillation, a contrast to sexualised images of the female breast that assault the eyes in places where one would not necessarily expect to see them, such as on public transport, offering little in our understanding of what it means to exist within the public body as a breasted individual. The acceptability (in Western countries) of showing cleavage, but never the nipple (considered obscene and classed as a misdemeanour in some countries), indicates the breast to be an active, independent zone of ‘sensitivity and eroticism,’ mediated by ‘patriarchal taboos,’[vii] or instances when the fetishism that permeates the breast ebbs, making it just another signifier of feminine functions, such as breastfeeding.

The ideal breast shape –coaxed by restrictive garments or surgery – is round, full and perky. Aged or lactating breasts hold no interest in Western visual culture, which has laid a claim on the female form by suggesting – from the sculptures of classical antiquity, after the fourth century BCE to the tabloid breasted body – that a woman’s body is an ideal of beauty.[viii] Mary Beard argues that the preponderance of breasts in visual culture is not  incidental. Yalom adds that the breast’s evolution into a symbol of excess and lechery in society has to do with politics and economics, noting that in Asian and South Pacific cultures where the breast has not been sexualised, the bared breast is viewed indifferently.[ix]

Sarah Lucas, Mumum (2012)

Popular expressions that are used to refer to women, such as bitch or ‘tits and ass,’[x] become, involuntarily, central to a sense of self in many capacities: through anxiety, mortification, and in some cases, pride. Breasts are fluid matter: ‘in movement they sway, jiggle, bounce, ripple …’[xi] They are like ectoplasms. Without a supporting garment they would shift and shape in tandem with the body’s movements. In this sense they are not inert matter, and in the social and cultural sense they take up a persona that defies the Cartesian worldview,[xii] a persona characterised by Young as ‘breasted individuals.’[xiii] Breasted is a term usually reserved for describing a jacket, or for identifying birds. Unlike that other sexual marker, the vagina, breasts are easily co-opted and appropriated. Menstruation is a deeply personal and hidden aspect of the feminine lived body,[xiv] so breasts are truly the only visible sign of a girl’s trajectory into womanhood: they are objects of shame, inquiry, exploration and exploitation.[xv] British artist Sarah Lucas’ notion of ‘perviness’, however, celebrates, albeit awkwardly and impishly, the pleasure of the breast through visual and tactile examination in ways that offset the indignity of being qualified as a walking pair of breasts.

Breasts are ‘de trop’ (Sartre’s term),[xvi] the ‘contingency of presence,’ hidden behind clothes and artifices, but never disguised. When these are thrown off, what remains is the ‘pure intuition’ of flesh, what Sartre defines as ‘not only knowledge,’ but the ‘affective apprehension of an absolute contingency[xvii] The ontological contingency of being-in-the-world is reflected in the gap between oneself (or what one thinks one knows) and objects (more a reflection of reality than one is willing to concede). Subjective embodiment is the way humans make sense of the world – it is the channel through which people ‘make space, the object or the instrument exist for us and through which we take them up, as well as to describe the body as the place of this appropriation.’[xviii] However, as Young argues and Lucas demonstrates, when the focus is on the perceived thing (the breast, for instance) and not the relation between the embodied subject and the world, it is easy to miss how this correlation becomes an exchange between, and, for the epistemological subject and the object. Therefore, in phenomenology, ‘bodily organisation’ is governed by affective states, affected, in turn, by the objective world.[xix]

References and Additional Reading

[i] Merleau-Ponty could be described as a philosopher of the body. Whereas Husserl had already addressed embodiment as Leib (intentional living aspects as opposed to the body’s thing-like aspects, or körper), Merleau-Ponty, by drawing out  ‘the un-thought thought’ of Husserl’s work (The Body and the World, p. 27) declared the body as the site of the material and of consciousness. It is the subjective, lived body that is in constant dialogue with the world. Merleau-Ponty calls the lived unity of the mind–body-world system ‘the lived body.’

Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1945),  Phenomenology of Perception (Routledge: London and New York,  2012)

[ii] Young, 1980, 1990. Young uses de Beauvoir’s theory of constraint and Merleau-Ponty’s thoughts on perception to consider the ways in which women are unable to occupy the spaces they inhabit: they see themselves as objects, not subjects. Young notes that a body’s relationship to space and to objects, according to social and cultural norms, dictates the modalities of movement and of being.

Iris Marion Young develops Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology to focus on embodying and occupying gendered spaces, in ‘Throwing like a Girl: A Phenomenology of Feminine Body Comportment, Motility and Spatiality,’ Human Studies 3:2 (1980), pp. 137-156.

Simone de Beauvoir (1949) The Second Sex (London: Jonathan Cape, 2009),

[iii] Young 1990: 195

Iris Marion Young On Female Body Experience: ‘Throwing Like a Girl’ and Other Essays (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005)

[iv] Young 1990: 189

[v] Prior to Young’s challenge of the phenomenological body – male by default – de Beauvoir (1949) had posed a challenge of her own, conceptualising the embodied subject through the erotic and how the erotic perceiving body is situated in the world.

[vi] There is a dearth of literature on women’s experience with breasts, Young being one exception. On the other hand, there is a lot of material on vaginas. See Emma L. E. Rees, The Vagina: A Literary and Cultural History (London: Bloomsbury, 2013).

[vii] Young, 1990:196

[viii] Mary Beard reflects on the reason for the sudden appearance of female statues after this date, with the Venus Pudica thought to be an early example. The Greek statue of the Aphrodite of Knidos, popularly known as Venus Pudica, is thought to be the earliest, and is typical in its attempt to conceal the genitalia with the artful placing of the model’s hand.

Mary Beard, Confronting the Classics: Traditions, Adventures and Innovations New York and London: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2013)

The ancient Greek figure of the single-breasted warrior Amazon (from the Greek a (without) mazos (breast)) was, in contrast, deliberately contrived to be threatening. The Amazons were women ‘who had cut off one breast so they could draw a bow. The remaining breast nursed only female children: male infants were discarded.’

Adrienne Mayor, The Amazons: Lives and Legends of Warrior Women across the Ancient World (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2014)

[ix] Marilyn Yalom, A History of the Breast (New York: Ballantine Books,1998), p. 49

[x] American slang for ‘tits and bums,’ itself British slang for woman. Oxford Dictionaries Online.

<https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/tits_and_ass> [ 20 November 2015]

[xi] Young 1990: 195

[xii] See Susan Bordo (1989) quoted in Young (1990) who argues ‘that 20th century advanced capitalist consumer culture has gone beyond the Cartesian mechanical understanding of the body, to a view of the body as plastic, moldable, completely transformable and controllable according to a variety of possibilities.’ (p.91)

Susan Bordo, Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993)

[xiii] Young 1990

[xiv] See Iris Marion Young, ‘Menstrual Meditations,’ in On Female Body Experience, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 97-122. Young discusses how female bodies move as a result of the parameters enforced by having breasts.

Young is credited with transforming our understanding of lived phenomenological experiences by grounding this discourse on events and situations specific to female bodies: breasts; pregnancy; menstruation; body positionality and space.

[xv] Young (1990) commented on the absence of women writing about their experiences with breasts (not just the body in general). Writing about breasts tends to focus on medical, health or aesthetic concerns and  breasts are a recurring site for exploring issues around gender, subjectivity, desire and power. But writing about feelings or ideas related to this changing part of the body – on both the physical changes and the function and meaning of breasts – is scarce. One notable exception is a 1979 collection of essays on the body experience of having breasts called Breasts: Women Speak About Their Breasts and Their Lives, edited by Daphna Ayalah and Isaac J. Weinstock (New York: Summit Books).

[xvi] Sartre in Being and Nothingness.

[xvii] Sartre, 1943: 367

[xviii] Merleau-Ponty 1945: 156

[xix] Ibid

Sarah Lucas, Mumum, 2012
not signed or dated
tights, kapok, chair frame
145 x 110 x 90 cm
© Sarah Lucas, courtesy Sadie Coles HQ, London