Abstract
At the start of this fine and worthwhile collection, Clara Fischer and Luna Dolezal, the editors of New Feminist Perspectives on Embodiment, state their intention of making visible the norms and assumptions that underlie how bodies are currently interpreted, valued, perceived and experienced. Their reference to such a set of revelations, aside from being accurate, is also poignant; for across the various chapters that constitute this book, we are constantly made aware of how particular bodies and subjectivities are erased and occluded. For if particular assumptions and norms function and are felt despite (and, most powerfully, through) their invisibility, then their effect is to render many embodied lives and experiences similarly hidden.
Accordingly, Namrata Mitra (ch. 10) tells of how faithful articulations of the traumatised bodies of Indian women are obstructed by patriarchal scripts that ironically enabled their trauma in the first place. Emily Putnam (ch. 11) writes of the exclusion of pregnant women’s subjectivities through medical technologies, while Luna Dolezal (ch. 12) describes how such bodies are emptied of subjectivity by the terminologies and practices of commercial surrogacy. Diana Tietjens Meyers (ch. 9) details how sexually trafficked women have their agency turned against them so as to deny them their victimhood. Similarly, Dianna Taylor (ch. 8) explains how sexual violence is not fully recognised since women’s lives do not fully count as lives and therefore harm to such lives is not fully grievable.
In other words, we are dealing here with violence in all its diversity, from it most blunt to its most insidious forms. It is a violence that erases lives, potentials, experiences, difference, similarity and acknowledgement, just as it simultaneously amplifies the suffering and alienation of the embodied subjectivities against whom it is – often mindlessly and procedurally – targeted. Exposing norms and assumptions importantly also then renders visible this suffering and alienation; it allows these women recognition.
Which brings us to the central theme of this collection as identified by the editors (Fischer & Dolezal, ch. 1): our unavoidable position as vulnerable subjects. Vulnerability forms the primary focus of especially the first part of the book, a particularly philosophical collection of three chapters. Called into question by Gail Weiss (ch. 2) is the abstract notion of an ethics aligned with the autonomous and rational subject where the body is associated with disruption, emotion, inferiority and, as is well known, femininity. In contrast, as both Weiss and Danielle Petherbridge (ch. 4) argue, the body in its vulnerability, dependency and openness (and thus relationality) is the very ground of ethics. Developing this and drawing on Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology, Julia Jansen and Maren Wehrle (ch. 3), refer to the vulnerability entailed in normalisation, where the latter enables a constant and common experience but then also leaves us open to normalities that are repressive and constraining.
This highlights the ambiguity identified by Judith Butler that lies at the heart of vulnerability; the body’s remarkable openness both enables connection and growth but also leaves us simultaneously open to the often cruel vicissitudes of the other. These cruelties frequently come in the form of simplistic and rigid impositions of binary logics, whether, for instance, in the form of mind/body (Weiss, ch. 2), victim/conspirator (Tietjens Meyer, ch. 9; Taylor, ch. 8) or sex/gender (Rademeyer, ch. 6). In the face of such simplicity, various authors highlight the actual complexity at work in such circumstances; if this be in the conceptualisation of vulnerability (Petherbridge, ch. 4), the determination of what counts as nature (Lennon, ch. 7), the negotiations of smuggled women with sex traffickers (Tietjens Meyers, ch. 9), or women’s relationships with their pregnant bodies and the spaces they open for their foetus (Putnam, ch. 11; Dolezal, ch. 12).
At work in this complexity is a dialectical relationship between similarity and difference, for in recognising vulnerability as the very ground of our ethical obligation, we run the risk of having this commonality being used to erase difference – after all, we are all vulnerable bodies. This is an issue addressed by both Weiss (ch. 2) and Petherbridge (ch. 4); since, as the former states, ‘not all bodies are equally vulnerable’ (p. 29), which means that vulnerability is open to contestation and critique. Similarly, for Petherbridge, the ontological ground of vulnerability still requires the establishment and endless maintenance of political and ethical accounts and activism. Made viscerally concrete, Mitra (ch. 10) writes of how only certain categories of Indian female bodies are acknowledged, in patriarchal terms, since only “cisgender unmarried women or cisgender married women under the age of 15 can access the rape law” (p. 191). Lanei Rodemeyer (ch. 6) describes how the economic, class and racial dimensions of the lived reality of trans people often go theoretically unacknowledged. And, in Dolezal’s chapter, where, aside from the gestating mother’s subjectivity, her social class is erased in the commercial discourse around surrogacy.
As is hopefully illustrated above, these dynamics unfold across the entirety of the book, which, aside from its aforementioned first part, is made up of a further three sections. The second part, across three chapters, engages with several aspects of embodiment debates in feminism. For instance, Clara Fischer (ch. 5) addresses the absence of the work of John Dewey, and pragmatism in general, from new materialism and affect theory, making evident a history of continuous engagement with issues that indicate the utility of closer debate and collaboration between these theoretical projects. Part 3 has three chapters that tackle sexual violence and the policies that translate such violation in patriarchal and nationalist terms which render the violated embodied subjectivities spoken for; their pain abducted in the service of these ideologies. Finally, Part four is comprised of two chapters that explore the aesthetics of pregnancy and metaphors of commercial surrogacy respectively.
In closing this review, something should be said about the theoretical resources drawn on across this edited volume. A range of fascinating and diverse work by different theorists is drawn on including, for example, Emmanuel Levinas, Marion Iris Young and Martin Heidegger. Two theorists, however, loom large in many chapters: Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Judith Butler. The former’s nuanced articulations of embodiment, such as through his notion of “flesh”, continue to serve as a rich resource for engaging in contemporary debates. This includes that the felt body can serve as its own distinct and legitimate ground for articulation (Rodemeyer, ch. 6); an expressive subjectivity that can communicate nature only because it is part of it (Lennon, ch. 7). Butler’s distinction between precariousness and precarity, as well as recognisability and recognition, is repeatedly and critically drawn on (e.g. Petherbridge, ch. 4), especially in making visible the unequal distribution of vulnerability.
To conclude: reading this collection of chapters is a rewarding and moving experience; the latter a signal that what is being addressed here is about relationship and shared (and differing) humanity and suffering. There is little to mention in terms of critique, aside to confess the occasional thought here and there of texts neglected in dealing with a particular issue. This, however, is a minor issue since what we are dealing with here is a critical and sincere discussion (not the pursuit of mastery); a collective pursuit of both making visible and making a difference, pushing against the tide of crass right-wing and neoliberal ‘rationality’ and rabid patriarchy that so taints our current world.
