Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Theories of Representation and Difference)

Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Theories of Representation and Difference)

Elizabeth Grosz

Language: English

Pages: 272

ISBN: 0253208629

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


"The location of the author’s investigations, the body itself rather than the sphere of subjective representations of self and of function in cultures, is wholly new.... I believe this work will be a landmark in future feminist thinking." ―Alphonso Lingis

"This is a text of rare erudition and intellectual force. It will not only introduce feminists to an enriching set of theoretical perspectives but sets a high critical standard for feminist dialogues on the status of the body." ―Judith Butler

Volatile Bodies demonstrates that the sexually specific body is socially constructed: biology or nature is not opposed to or in conflict with culture. Human biology is inherently social and has no pure or natural "origin" outside of culture. Being the raw material of social and cultural organization, it is "incomplete" and thus subject to the endless rewriting and social inscription that constitute all sign systems.

Examining the theories of Freud, Lacan, Merleau-Ponty, Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida, etc. on the subject of the body, Elizabeth Grosz concludes that the body they theorize is male. These thinkers are not providing an account of "human" corporeality but of male corporeality. Grosz then turns to corporeal experiences unique to women―menstruation, pregnancy, childbirth, lactation, menopause. Her examination of female experience lays the groundwork for developing theories of sexed corporeality rather than merely rectifying flawed models of male theorists.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

manifestations of the body image in psychical life] seem to exhibit the laws of Gestalt; the fact that the penis is dominant in the shaping of the body image is evidence of this. Though this may shock the sworn champions of the autonomy of female sexuality, such dominance is a fact and one moreover which cannot be put down to cultural influences alone. (Lacan 195 3: I 3) Among Lacan's most deliberately provocative statements (in a body of work that abounds in provocation), it is unclear that the

the body. . . . We call it a schema of our body or bodily schema, or, following Head . . . the postural model of the body. . . . There is a self-appearance of the body. It indicates . . . that, although it comes through the senses, it is not a mere perception. There are mental pictures and representstions involved in it . . . (Schilder 1978: I I ) Combining Head's largely neurological model with Freud's notion of libidinal investment, Schilder's position on the relations between neurological and

agree that sexuality may be that arena in which intentionality breaks down, no longer functions adequately, but where its breakdown is positively sought and relished with pleasure. Perhaps more serious than Lingis's objections is the claim that in discussing the question of sexuality and the body image, Merleau-Ponty leaves out-indeed, is unable to address-the question of sexual difference, the question of what kind of human body he is discussing, what kind of perceptual functions and what kind

Whereas models of the subject as psychical interior introduce the dimension of social relations and the external world through modes of introjection and in- 120 I The Outside In corporation-the social "enters" the subject through the mediation and internalization of social values and mores (usually by means of some kind of identification with social representatives such as the parents)-the model of social inscription I will elaborate here, by contrast, implies that social values and

requirements only by branding the law on bodies through a mnemonics of pain, a memory fashioned out of the suffering and pain of the body: One can well believe that the answers and methods for solving this primeval problem [the problem of how to instill a memory in the subject] were not precisely gentle; perhaps indeed there was nothing more fearful and uncanny in the whole prehistory of man than his mnemotechnics. "If something is to stay in the memory it must be burned in: only that which never

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