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Body and Politics The Body and Politics Oxford Handbooks Online The Body and Politics Diana Coole The Oxford Handbook of Gender and Politics Edited by Georgina Waylen, Karen Celis, Johanna Kantola, and S. Laurel Weldon Print Publication Date: Mar 2013 Subject: Political Science, Comparative Politics, Political Theory Online Publication Date: Aug 2013 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199751457.013.0006 Abstract and Keywords This article focuses on the concept of the body in political thought, which has been widely ignored. In gender studies, however, the body serves as a relevant dimension of politics. Some of the main approaches to the body in the field of gender studies were created by feminists, and emphasis has been placed on women’s embodiment. The article addresses the theoretical questions that arise when the (gendered–sexed) body is brought into political life and discourse and then summarizes several lasting questions and lists some distinctive approaches. Finally, using a study of representative authors and texts, it presents a detailed analysis of these approaches. Keywords: body, political thought, gender studies, women’s embodiment, gendered, sexed (p. 165) Introduction There is a vital sense in which humans are their bodies. We experience their demands and are made constantly aware of how others observe their appearances and abilities. Yet the body has been widely neglected in political thought and it is a notable success of gender studies that it has retrieved the body as a significant dimension of politics. The main approaches to the body in the field of gender studies were forged by feminists, with specific emphasis on women’s embodiment: a necessary but risky strategy inasmuch as women’s oppression has conventionally been founded on their identification with carnality. Just how essential sexual difference is to bodies or how foundational they are for sexed or gendered identities remain contested issues. Over time the sort of approaches developed by feminist scholarship have certainly been applied more broadly to otherwise gendered bodies—masculine, transsexual, queer, hybrid, cyborg, Page 1 of 27 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: University of Washington; date: 07 January 2019 The Body and Politics intersectional—thus broadening the field while displacing assumptions that the gendered body is solely a feminist issue or that sex and gender are necessarily the dominant markers or experience of actual bodies. The focus in this chapter is on theoretical questions that arise when the (sexed/gendered) body is brought into political life and discourse. An initial section summarizes some enduring questions and identifies a number of distinctive approaches. This is followed by a more detailed analysis of these approaches, principally through an examination of representative authors and texts. (p. 166) Theorizing the Body: Enduring Questions, Distinctive Approaches Some of the most enduring questions regarding the body are ontological. What is a body? Is each body, for example, a distinct biological organism, or is it more accurately understood as the accretion of general biochemical processes that are susceptible to environmental factors? To what extent are the bodies of social actors best treated as natural phenomena that society modifies, or should the focus be on imaginary and symbolic aspects of the cultural body? In addressing such questions it has proven necessary not only to consult the latest science but also to revisit some of philosophy’s most enduring oppositions, such as mind–body or culture–nature. The way the body is conceptualized has far-reaching implications regarding the perceived malleability of the flesh, the contingency or duality of gender or sex, and opportunities for political intervention or personal choice in matters of individual self-expression or behavior that are more or less corporeal. Additionally, there are deep-seated epistemological and methodological questions posed by body matters. How do we represent or express this corporeal realm inasmuch as it is a material alterity existing in a register other than that of philosophy? Are theorists condemned merely to write about the body in more or less imaginative ways, or does lived experience grant some clues here? Can we know, write, or intuit in ways particularly appropriate to the body’s (sexed) carnality, or does theory inevitably impose upon it alien concepts that may, in turn, be structured by gendered assumptions? Responses to these kinds of philosophical inquiry can be enormously influential in structuring scholarship on sex, gender, and the body, especially regarding the political or ethical implications of embodiment. Over recent decades, furthermore, disagreement has been played out against the backdrop of a more general trend in critical theory away from materialist political economy or empirical social science through a cultural turn where language and literary approaches have been privileged and the body is read as a text or script. Now there is evidence of a new materialist turn as ecology, biotechnology, demography, and political economy again frame issues of bodies in social contexts (Coole and Frost 2010). Page 2 of 27 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: University of Washington; date: 07 January 2019 The Body and Politics For gender studies, the point of analyzing the body is to discern the power relationships that regulate, denigrate, define, or produce it as well as to identify the ways different bodies are located and constructed. The body gains political significance by being recognized alongside language or the state as a principal site where sex, gender, and power are enmeshed. An insistence on interlocutors’ embodiment within conventional political activities like parliamentary debates or deliberative forums has important ramifications for political analysis. How diverse bodies are treated by policy makers and how they fare in economic systems or familial structures—say, through welfare and tax regimes—is also influenced by perceptions and constructions of the gendered body and its roles. (p. 167) Political studies of embodiment have tended, however, to go well beyond this political science framework and generally define the political more widely: as a web of power relations that situate, saturate, and constitute bodies differentially. In addition to the body’s role in locating individuals within a sexual division of labor, it is recognized to serve as a key index of differential experience and practices; a significant marker of identity; a vehicle for long-standing myths and rituals; a means of expression, pleasure, and agency; a target for and instrument of power; and a site of desire or vulnerability where violence and seduction occur. For those whose bodies are most exploited or denigrated—women, but also the colonized, the laboring classes, the disabled—the stakes are particularly high. The ethics of livable flesh and the politics of how bodies are treated or interpreted as well as their corporeal agency in resisting or transgressing hegemonic norms remain some of the most significant fields for feminist or queer sexual politics as well as for critical men’s, race, or postcolonial studies and for the increasingly important fields of aging and disability. A number of distinctive theoretical approaches to sexed/gendered embodiment is discernible: materialist investigations of the body’s sexually differentiated roles and functions; phenomenological attention to the experience of lived corporeality; psychoanalytic emphasis on the imaginary body; poststructuralist accounts of constructed flesh. As research methodologies, these are applicable not only to women’s bodies and their sex or gender but also to a range of other bodies that are socially disadvantaged and whose corporeal markers are additionally borne by women, too. Thus class, race, ethnicity, age, and ability are all manifest in and reproduced by their carnal avatars in ways that invite critical analysis and contestation. While the various approaches often coexist, their development also reflects both external theoretical fashions and an internal dialectic of inquiry and critique. The latter imparts a certain chronology to distinctive phases, and this lends itself to narrative reconstruction. In the case of feminist analysis of the sexed/gendered body, it is worth telling this story briefly because it conveys something of the logic of its evolution. The long prefeminist era has to be the starting point here because it is against its presuppositions that feminism reacts. The default position for Western culture has been overwhelmingly somatophobic in the sense that the body is relegated to a piece of nature Page 3 of 27 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: University of Washington; date: 07 January 2019 The Body and Politics and is consequently either neglected as irrelevant or denigrated as a dangerous source of unruly passions that threaten reason, political order, and civic virtue. Because of their role in reproduction women have been considered closer to nature than men and judged to remain more in thrall to the flesh and its dangerous desires. Their affinity with the body has accordingly been used to justify women’s exclusion from citizenship as well as their confinement to a private realm of family values and domestic labor in which they are regarded as men’s property.
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