Author: user_epimentell

Argumentative Reflection on the Harm Principle: Disavowing Feminism

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In considering the role of the State in the promotion of welfare one is struck by the application of John Stuart Mill’s harm principle (On Liberty, 1859) to contemporary concerns, particularly to the question of unfettered access to sexual and reproductive health care, and to the rising incidence of gender-based violence. The harm principle demands the actions of individuals be curtailed if they mean to harm others. During this period of disruption brought about by measures to mitigate the national health emergencies occasioned by the novel coronavirus, the natural rights of citizens have been curtailed in the service of the collective welfare. In so doing,  women’s autonomy, bodily integrity and best judgement have been obscured within the deceptive orotundity of equal rights discourses – as part and parcel of the stark reality of inhabiting and negotiating the world in a female body manifestly determined by culture and by the social body.

Abortion is an ethically and legally divisive issue, and an area suited to appropriate action by the State, were it committed to the well-being of all citizens. The State –referring here to the United Kingdom – has, during the first weeks of the global pandemic crises, taken a characteristically paternalistic stance on abortion rights. On 25 March 2020, the State reneged on a pledge announced two days earlier that would ensure continued early access to medical abortion[i]  services during the health crisis and national lockdown.  A week later, following widespread concern, the provision of at-home abortion pills was reinstituted. Opposition to abortion remains entrenched within Government[ii] and the brusqueness of this back-and-forth pawing with our civil liberties is  worrisome.

Despite having worked on the liberalisation of the law alongside the Royal College of Obstetricians, the Royal College of Midwives and14 other related agencies, the Department of Health and Social Care provided no further justification. Women seeking abortion services are normally required to travel to a clinical facility, seeking the permission of two doctors. Effectively, under stringent lockdown rules, women would have had to tell police officers they have left their homes to seek pregnancy termination help. [iii] Women in isolation, and in coerced relationships, or those with disabilities would have found it difficult to travel to a clinic, many of which closed in the first weeks of the national lockdown.

It is not unheard of for states, the world over, to permissibly exercise restraint against a person only if it does so to prevent harm to others (the unborn child or foetus). A person’s inability to –  or, with cause, unwillingness to[iv] –  carry a pregnancy to term can be sufficient condition for the State to exercise restraint by way of stripping civil liberties, and preventing access to care. Is this, however, a legitimate use of power?

Setting aside the question of the pre-conscious, conscious or spiritual state of the foetus, and the legal and human rights of the unborn child, let us consider the onerous burden placed upon the actual person, who, at a vulnerable time, is to be denied the right to access care, the right to choice, and to autonomy over their own body. Is there a sufficient and justifiable condition for liberty-restricting state action? The state has not always acted in the best interest of women, as one of many vulnerable groups. There is ample anecdotal and current evidence to suggest that when given the mandate to do so, the state has failed, through lack of political will or resources, or through discriminatory practices that prejudicially affect others, to prevent harm being done to women.

Consider the pernicious systems of harm perpetuated by humans onto others: the machinery and economies of slavery; and the organised rape of women in conflict, and its habitualness in peacetime. Yet some of the world’s greatest statesmen  and proponents of the  equality of man were slave owners, such as one of the Founding Fathers of the United States (Jefferson); or believed, once slavery was abolished, that property owners needed to be indemnified (de Tocqueville) for loss of property[v]; or supported the machinery in other ways –Mill himself was a servant of the East India Company. The organised rape of women in conflict was only declared a crime against humanity in 2008, with the adoption of Resolution 1820 by the UN Security Council.

Gender-based violence goes hand in hand with the long-standing legal, economic and political subjugation of women. The year 2018 commemorated the centenary women’s suffrage. That is, in the scope of human evolution, and the rise and fall of civilisations, women have been recognised in personhood just these last 100 years. Despite epistemic capabilities, robust legal frameworks and policing, states have failed these citizens precisely in the realm of freedom from violence as an inalienable human right.

The total burden of gender-based to society is estimated at £66bn annually in the U.K.,  the most comprehensive figure to date. [vi] It estimated 1 in 4 women will experience domestic abuse, and 1 in 5 sexual assault during her lifetime. Prosecutions for rape and sexual assault stand at an all-time low, since official record-keeping began,[vii] at less than 2% of reported cases. More rape and sexual survivors are reporting acts of violence yet laws demanding survivor’s phones and personal information cause a large number of complainants, [viii] to feel it is they who are under investigation. Cases collapse due to a number of factors: lack of forensic evidence, or lack of rape kits or trained medical staff to administer them and advise on next steps; lack of knowledge of the legal system and fundamental rights, or no recourse to legal aid. Socio-cultural factors such as placing blame on the victim are harder to shift without tackling the bases of gender disparity and gender stereotyping.

The question of gender-based violence comes to bear as one facet of the human experience that is not resolved through the application of the harm principle through the rational system of law. In fact, there is no congruence within the law with respect to the application of rights. Rights are subject to socio-political factors, political will, and resource allocation, and the deeply entrenched – worldwide –  bias against women.[ix] It is subject now to emergency powers brought on by states, the world over, to mitigate the harmful effects of the pandemic. Self-isolation, curtailment of movement, and economic insecurity beget destitution, disempowerment and alienation.

The harm principle has non-consensual element to it, the maxim volenti non fit injuria, or the Utilitarian doctrine Mill explains as: ‘that is not unjust which is done with the consent of the person who is supposed to be hurt by it’. The sexual liberation of women has a dark underbelly which is the commoditisation of women’s bodies for profit, without due regard for the person trying to live a life in the freedom to which that liberation alludes. It has not translated into unencumbered access to sexual and reproductive health and rights, or the safeguarding of the body against violence. Gender-stereotyping and gender-based discrimination that remain deeply entrenched in society feed into the maltreatment of women’s bodies and remain, still, ‘one of the chief hindrances to human improvement’ (Mill, The Subjugation of Women, 1869). Why?

Little has changed since the Victorian-era charitable foundations that had as their mission the care of foundling children, taking in, by petition, the babies of first-time unwed mothers. Fallen women had to prove that prior to their fall, they had been respectable. Their applications contained detailed accounts of their ‘fallenness’: they had to show contriteness if they wanted help from the State. The representation of women in painting and literature at the time defined outward codes of sexual behaviour and respectability, weaving themselves into the monolithic edifice of public morality, that privately endorsed institutions of prostitution and pornography. In contemporary society, the representation of women in movies, advertising and the media, centres on the body, and in so doing, condones its widespread public consumption. Legislation that curtails certain necessary freedoms, oftentimes however, remains an opaque process, accompanied by an outward display of morality. The most egregious form of intimate partner violence can now be successfully defended in court, with proceedings detailing the supposed sexual preferences and lifestyle of victims[x], too dead to counter the claims of defence attorneys.

Allowing the State to dictate the terms of intervention in order to prevent harm, when harm is qualified only to serve narrow special-interest narratives, or tragically, budgetary allocations, is an aspect of public policy deliberations ethically-minded citizens must be empowered to take up and express through participatory decision-making channels.

 

References and Additional Reading

[i] In England, Scotland, and Wales abortion is allowed in certain circumstances specified in  the Abortion Act of 1967 (and revised by the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act of 1990). Abortion was decriminalised in Northern Ireland in 2019. In England and Wales abortions that are not covered by the circumstances listed in the 1967 Act are covered by  the Offences against the Person Act of 1861. This means abortion is part of criminal law, and therefore, not available on demand.

https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1967/87/contents

https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/Vict/24-25/100/section/58

The law has also failed to keep pace with best practice and advances in the field of medicine. In England, Scotland and Wales women seeking abortion services require a two doctors to sign off on the termination, after first having demonstrated she is at physical or mental health risk as a result of her pregnancy.  Women still risk prosecution, and the law is subject to interpretation.

See: British Medical Association (2017). Decriminalisation of abortion: a discussion paper  from the BMA, February

[ii] with 70 Members of Parliament voting against lifting the ban in Northern Ireland in July 2019, whilst the country was in the grip of political chaos. Dozens more abstained. Abortion was decriminalised in Northern Ireland in October 2019.

[iii] An expected 44,000 women across England and Wales will require access to specialised health centres in the next 3 months, during which time the window for early access for medical intervention with regard to terminations would have closed.

[iv] I take account here only of some areas that may come to bear upon the decision to terminate a pregnancy: escaping abuse, rape, fear of destitution and child poverty.

[v] The first free country in the Western Hemisphere, Haiti, inspired by the French Revolution, took arms against their colonial masters (only 5% of the population) and declared themselves emancipated 1794 and  independent in 1804, and yet, France required indemnifications (under threat of invasion) for the loss of their colony and subsequent harm to their coffers, that was paid until 1950.

Piketty, Thomas (2020). Capital and Ideology (The Belknap Press of Harvard University: Cambridge, MA: London, U.K.)

[vi] Home Office, The economic and social costs of domestic abuse, January 2019 [https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/772180/horr107.pdf]

[vii] Rachel Krys, End Violence Against Women Coalition

[viii] Male survivors face different challenges. The stigma around male rape, and a culture of toxic masculinity discourages men from coming forward. For more information, see Petersson, C.C. & Plantin, L. Clin Soc Work J (2019) ‘Breaking with Norms of Masculinity: Men Making Sense of Their Experience of Sexual Assault’

[ix] The first UNDP Gender Social Norms Index analysed data from 75 countries, collectively accounting for more than 80% of the global population, and found nearly 90% of those interviewed have ‘a deeply ingrained bias’ against women.

United Nations Development Programme (2020). Tackling Social Norms: A game changer for gender inequalities . Human Development Perspectives 2020 http://hdr.undp.org/sites/default/files/hd_perspectives_gsni.pdf

[Accessed 24 January 2020].

[x] ‘Rough sex’ defence

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.