Self-Transformations: Foucault, Ethics, and Normalized Bodies (Studies in Feminist Philosophy)
Cressida J. Heyes
Language: English
Pages: 176
ISBN: 0195310543
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Heyes' monograph in feminist philosophy is on the connection between the idea of "normalization"--which per Foucault is a mode or force of control that homogenizes a population--and the gendered body. Drawing on Foucault and Wittgenstein, she argues that the predominant picture of the self--a picture that presupposes an "inner" core of the self that is expressed, accurately or not, by the outer body--obscures the connection between contemporary discourses and practices of self-transformation and the forces of normalization. In other words, pictures of the self can hold us captive when they are being read from the outer self--the body--rather than the inner self, and we can express our inner self by working on our outer body to conform. Articulating this idea with a mix of the theoretical and the practical, she looks at case studies involving transgender people, weight-loss dieting, and cosmetic surgery. Her concluding chapters look at the difficult issue of how to distinguish non-normalizing practices of the self from normalizing ones, and makes suggestions about how feminists might conceive of subjects as embodied and enmeshed in power relations yet also capable of self-transformation.
The subject of normalization and its relationship to sex/gender is a major one in feminist theory; Heyes' book is unique in her masterful use of Foucault; its clarity, and its sophisticated mix of the theoretical and the anecdotal. It will appeal to feminist philosophers and theorists.
Jacobs Brumberg (1997) reports that bathroom scales did not become widely available in the United States until the 1920s and that prior to that time weighing oneself could only be done at the drugstore or a county fair. Figure 25 in Brumberg’s book reproduces a 1905 postcard showing an Edwardian showman enthusiastically assessing a young woman in front of his scale under the slogan “No Charge if I Fail to Guess Your Weight Within Three Pounds.” These scales were perfectly public, and weighing
Essentialism”. Political Theory 20 (2): 202–46. O’Grady, Helen. 2004. “An Ethics of the Self.” In Taylor and Vintges 2004. Oksala, Johanna. 2005. Foucault on Freedom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. O’Leary, Timothy. 2002. Foucault and the Art of Ethics. London: Continuum. Oliver, J. Eric. 2006. Fat Politics: The Real Story behind America’s Obesity Epidemic. New York: Oxford University Press. Orbach, Susie. 1998 [1978]. Fat Is a Feminist Issue. London: Arrow Books. Owen, David. 2003.
it enables us to make sense of ourselves, being held captive by a picture implies that one cannot reorient one’s reflection and is thus profoundly unfree. David Owen, in his “Genealogy as Perspicuous Representation” argues that Wittgenstein’s metaphor of a picture that holds us captive describes an important “tendency to fall under the spell of our inherited ways of thinking.” One mode of such captivity “operates when a picture is subject to reflection and taken to be universal, necessary, or
necessarily bearing a relation to a norm thus explains certain features of phenomenology (without reference to any anatomical necessity and while acknowledging its own internal systems of reference) in a way that dualist models of the static, mechanized body that is incidental to selfhood cannot. The absence of sovereign Others (whose presence would make manifest the political context of our self-understandings) furthers the search for an authentic core that represents the individual in her
disease), the proliferation of old somatic techniques into new markets The Somatic Individual 5 (such as tattooing), and the refinement and development of technological possibilities (remember that the first heart transplant was performed in 1967). Increasingly the line between medical intervention aimed at restoring normal functioning and enhancing existing capacities has blurred: psychoactive drugs, for example, are interpreted both as treating mental disorders and as making us into better