## 1. Historical Background



It is unsurprising that early western feminists should have regarded
embodiment with suspicion, choosing instead to stress the rational
powers of the female mind; for as Francois Poullain de la Barre
famously claimed in 1673, "the mind has no sex" (1673
[1990: 87]). For some early feminists this meant enthusiastically
endorsing a dualism between mind and body, with bodily features
regarded as contingent characteristics of the self, and the
potentially rational minds as its core. For them, as indeed for later
feminists, it was essential to break any suggested deterministic link
between corporeal characteristics, mental faculties and social role.
Reason, they mostly claimed, was a universal human capacity
independent of corporeal differences (Wollstonecraft, Mill and Taylor
Mill). There were additional reasons for early feminists such as
Wollstonecraft in the eighteenth century and Taylor Mill in the
nineteenth, to regard their bodies with suspicion. In the context in
which they lived as middle class women, their bodies were commodities
to be preened and maintained, to enable them to entice men into
matrimony so that they would have the material means to live.
Women's attention to their bodies therefore took the form of
producing them as objects for others' appraisal, and the dangers
which Wollstonecraft saw in this have been echoed in feminist work up
to the present day. Wollstonecraft's 1792 text, *A
Vindication of the Rights of Woman*, provides, as Bordo (1993)
notes, a clear example of the *disciplining* of the female body
as we, post- Foucault, would now describe it. 



> 
> 
> To preserve personal beauty, woman's glory! The limbs and
> faculties are cramped with worse than Chinese bands, and the sedentary
> life which they are condemned to live, whilst boys frolic in the open
> air, weakens the muscles ... artificial notions of beauty, and
> false descriptions of sensibility have been early entangled with her
> motives of action. (Wollstonecraft 1792 [1988: 55]) 
> 
> 
> 



The body was also a source of vulnerability. Mill and Taylor Mill were
preoccupied with the way their susceptibility to illness interrupted
their ability to produce philosophical work and cast the shadow of
early death over their life plans. Moreover any celebration of the
female body as source of sensual pleasure was constrained by a risk of
pregnancy.



The body also came to prominence in nineteenth century feminism in
Britain through the campaign led by Josephine Butler against the
Contagious Diseases Act (Jordan 2001). This act permitted women to be
forcibly examined for venereal disease. Butler extended ideas of
individual rights, prominent within liberal political philosophy, to
rights over one's body. The campaign of inspection was viewed as
a particularly outrageous violation of such rights and the women
viewed as victims of male and medical appropriation of their bodies.
Here we find the beginnings of arguments picked up later in campaigns
against rape and sexual violence, as well as in campaigns for access
to birth control and abortion, and in the feminist health movement;
all of which stress women's rights to control what happens to
their bodies. This absence of control found its most extreme example
in the case of the bodies of slave women, where the body became
literally the property of another, disciplined in a way that bore a
marked contrast to that articulated by Wollstonecraft. 



> 
> 
> Her back and her muscle ... pressed into field labour where she
> was forced to ... work like men. Her hands were demanded to nurse
> and nurture the white man and his family ... Her vagina used for
> his sexual pleasure ... the womb ... the place of capital
> investment ... the resulting child the ... surplus worth
> money on the slave market. (Omolade 1983: 354)
> 
> 
> 



In the nineteenth and early twentieth century the campaign for
women's suffrage dominated feminist activity in the west. The
Seneca Falls Convention Statement does not mention the body, but
Sojourner Truth's famous speech to the Ohio Women's
Convention drew attention to the body as a marker of race and class
differences within the feminist movement: 



> 
> 
> I have as much muscle as any man, and can do as much work as any man.
> I have ploughed, and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man
> could head me! And ain't I a woman? I could work as much and eat
> as much as a man--when I could get it--and bear de lash a
> well! And ain't I a woman? (Truth 1851 [1881: 116]). 
> 
> 
> 



Moreover, in the writings of Cady Stanton we find a recognition of the
way bodily markers are used to perpetuate both racial and sexual
oppression: 



> 
> 
> The prejudice against color, of which we hear so much, is no stronger
> than that against sex. It is produced by the same cause, and
> manifested very much in the same way. The negro's skin and the
> woman's sex are both *prima facie* evidence that they
> were intended to be in subjection to the white Saxon man. (Stanton
> 1860 [1881: 681])
> 
> 
> 



Following the first world war and the granting of suffrage in many
countries, women continued to campaign on issues of sexual equality,
and control over their bodies. The issue of reproduction came to the
fore in political philosophies of the right and left. On the political
right, following the loss of life in the war, motherhood became a
concern of the state and a public duty. Moreover increasing concerns
with eugenics and racial purity led to a desire to control the
reproduction of certain groups within society. At the same time,
within United Kingdom feminist circles, the Abortion Reform
Association was formed and echoed both earlier and later feminist
demands for the right of every woman to decide what should happen to
her body. But an implicit dualism remained. The body was seen as
something owned by, and thereby separate from, the self, something
over which the self had rights.



Nonetheless in the early twentieth century, with the emergence of
psychoanalysis, came a different model of our relationship to our
body, which was to become crucial to later feminist philosophers. For
Freud the ego, the conscious sense of self, was *a bodily ego*:
"the ego is first and foremost a bodily ego" (Freud 1923
[1962: 26]). This means that our sense of self is a sense of a body,
and involves an awareness of that body as having a certain shape or
form. Significantly, the shape or form we experience our body as
having is not dictated simply by anatomy, but by the affective and
sensory significance with which different parts are invested. (Freud
1923). Certain aspects of the body have a salience, and other
anatomical parts do not show up, unless painful, in the sense of our
body which constitutes our sense of self (the insides of the body,
perhaps the back of the knees). Some parts are more significant than
others, linked to experiences of pleasure and pain, for example, or to
the possibility of effective agency, (the hands), to relations with
others, (the face). This insight of Freud and others (Schilder),
informed much of the critical theorizing around the body which
followed.


## 2. *The Second Sex*



It was, however, with the publication of *The Second Sex* by
Simone De Beauvoir, that feminist theorizing about the relation
between the body and the self took center stage. Along with other
phenomenologists, particularly Merleau-Ponty, and Sartre, Beauvoir
recognizes that "to be present in the world implies strictly
that there exists a body which is at once a material thing in the
world and a point of view towards the world" (Beauvoir 1949
[1982: 39]). The self, for phenomenologists, as for Freud, is
necessarily corporeal, the body constitutes the self. It is not a
separate entity to which the self stands in relation. This body,
however, is not simply what biology offers us an account of. The body
which gained their attention was the body *as lived*, as
yielding the sensory experiences and lived intentionality of a subject
negotiating its world. It is also a body which is encountered by
others whose response to it mediates our own sense of being. What is
central to Beauvoir's account is that such bodily existence, the
point of view it provides, and the response it garners, is different
for men and women. Her account provides a complex and non-reductive
picture of the intertwining of the material and the cultural in the
formation of our embodied selves (see the entry on
 Simone de Beauvoir, Kruks 2010,
Sandford 2006, Moi
1999).


### 2.1 The Data of Biology



In the first chapter of *The Second Sex* Beauvoir reviews the
data of biology. But she does so with a warning. Such data are not to
be thought of as determining individual characteristics or social
life. With that warning she goes on to describe what are claimed as
biological characteristics of the female qua *animal* or
*organism* which, in addition to differences in reproductive
role, includes claims that *"*woman is weaker than man,
she has less muscular strength, ... can lift less heavy
weights" (1949 [1982: 66]). She rehearses these
"facts" while also declaring that "in themselves
[such facts] have no significance" (1949 [1982: 66]). This is
because "it is only in a human perspective that we can compare
the female and the male of the human species", and from this
human perspective "the physiological facts ... take on
meaning, this meaning ... dependent on a whole context"
(1949 [1982: 66]). So, for example, in relation to "the burden
imposed on women by her reproductive function ... society alone
is the arbiter" (1949 [1982: 67]).



Such remarks have led to Beauvoir being regarded as an originator of
the sex/gender dichotomy, which became pivotal to feminist theorizing
in the 1970s (see the entry:
 feminist perspectives on sex and gender).
 Standardly sex was seen as fixed by biology, and gender, as the
social meanings attached to such biology, seen as historically and
socially variable, and open to change. It is in this context that
Beauvoir's famous claim that "One is not born, but rather
becomes, a woman", is consistently quoted (1949 [1982: 295]).
Nonetheless Beauvoir's own position does not map onto this sex
/gender distinction in a straightforward way (Sandford
2006, Lennon and Alsop 2019, cp 4). For her the
data of biology, offered as facts, lack the fixity which later
accounts sometimes took for granted. She shows herself aware of the
way in which cultural myths and metaphors influence the telling of the
biological story, even as she herself offers it to us. In pointing out
the ideological influence on the descriptions of the active sperm and
the passive egg (1949 [1982: 44] she anticipates the work of later writers
(Martin 1987). Moreover she shows herself consistently aware of the
possibilities which the biological data leave open to us, stressing
alternatives to heterosexual reproduction throughout the biological
realm, the incidence of hermaphrodism in human and other animals, and
drawing attention in the animal kingdom to cases where care of the
eggs and the young is done by both male and female animals. The
consequence is that not even the biology of sexual difference is
determined. 



> 
> 
> *It is only through existence that the facts are manifest*
> ... and nothing requires that this body have this or that
> particular structure ... the perpetuation of the species does not
> necessitate sexual differentiation ... [while] it remains true
> that both a mind without a body and an immortal man are strictly
> inconceivable ... we can imagine a parthenogenetic or
> hermaphroditic society. (1949 [1982: 390], my emphasis) 
> 
> 
> 



On the other hand, the meanings and significance which we attach to
our materiality do not float free of that materiality. The way the
body is lived by us has to accommodate the data which biology variably
tries to capture, including facts of reproduction, menstruation and
menopause. "Sex" for Beauvoir was not, then, a biological
category. It is, as Sandford (2006), points out an existential one.
And in exploring what constituted existing as a woman, biological data
was just one of the constituents.


### 2.2 Living the Female Body



In later chapters Beauvoir provides a phenomenology of the body as
lived throughout the different stages of a woman's life. Here
she is explicitly offering her narrative as an account of lived
experience, the body in situation. In childhood the young girl's
body is experienced in a different way from that of the young boy. She
is trained into a different way of inhabiting it. He is encouraged to
climb trees and play rough games. She is encouraged to treat her whole
person as a doll, "a passive object ... an inert given
object" (1949 [1982: 306-307]). The consequence is an
inhibited intentionality, her spontaneous movements inhibited,
"the exuberance of life ... restrained" (1949 [1982:
323]), "lack of physical power" leading to a
"general timidity" (1949 [1982: 355]). The account
which Beauvoir is offering here is one in which girls undergo
something like a training in bodily habits which structure the
possibilities for interaction with their world.



As the girl enters puberty, Beauvoir notes, her body becomes to her a
source of horror and shame. "This new growth in her armpits
transforms her into a kind of animal or algae" (1949 [1982:
333]), her menstrual blood a source of disgust. These negative
descriptions are continued for sexual initiation, marriage, and
motherhood. Her phenomenology of the maternal body has been especially
controversial: 



> 
> 
> ensnared by nature the pregnant women is plant and animal ... an
> incubator, a conscious and free individual who has become life's
> passive instrument ... not so much mothers... as fertile
> organisms, like fowls with high egg production. (1949 [1982: 513])
> 
> 
> 
> 



These accounts have been a source of criticism, particularly when
later feminists sought to celebrate the female body as a source of
pleasure, fertility, and empowerment, (see below). However it is
important to recognize that what she was offering was a descriptive
phenomenology of female bodies as lived in specific situations. She
was describing a particular set of experiences at a specific social
and historical point. As she explicitly says: 



> 
> 
> if the biological condition of women does constitute a handicap, it is
> because of her general situation .... It is in a total situation
> which leaves her few outlets that her peculiarities take on their
> importance. (1949 [1982: 356-357]) 
> 
> 
> 



It is this situation which her writings aimed to highlight and
change.


### 2.3 The Body and Others



The way in which the young girl and then the woman experiences her
body is, for Beauvoir, a consequence of a process of internalizing the
view of it *under the gaze of others*. 



> 
> 
> Through compliments and admonishments, through images and words, she
> discovers the meaning of the words pretty and ugly; she soon knows
> that to be pleased is to be pretty as a picture; she tries to resemble
> an image, she disguises herself, she looks at herself in the mirror,
> she compares herself to princesses and fairies from tales. (1949
> [2010: 304]) 
> 
> 
> 



Here is the beginning of the way in which women live their bodies as
objects for another's gaze, something which has its origin not
in anatomy but in "education and surroundings" (1949
[2010: 304]). Beauvoir's account of the way in which women live
their bodies in such an objectified way, internalizing the gaze and
producing their bodies as objects for others, has been one of her most
important contributions to a phenomenology of female embodiment,
anticipating and influencing the work of later feminists such as
Bartky and Young (see below sections 5.1 and 7.1) .



Beauvoir's phenomenology of women's experience was also,
itself, influential on, and in conversation with, philosophers
theorizing raced embodiment. The phenomenological writer Franz Fanon,
(*Black Skins White Masks*, 1952 [1968]) describes how, on his
arrival in France, he discovers his blackness: 



> 
> 
> I discovered myself as an object among other objects...the other
> fixes me, just like a dye is used to fix a chemical
> solution....It is not a question of the Black being black
> anymore, but rather of his being Black opposite the White...we
> came to have to confront the white gaze .... I was all at once
> responsible for my body, responsible for my race, for my ancestors. I
> ran an objective gaze over myself, discovering my blackness, my ethnic
> characteristics and then I was deafened by cannibalism, intellectual
> deficiency fetishism, racial defects, slave ships, and above all,
> above all else, "Sho good Banana". (1952 [1968:
> 185-186]) 
> 
> 
> 



Later theorists have, however, pointed out that in, offering her own
account, Beauvoir herself failed to recognize the way in which both
race and gender *intersect* in providing a phenomenology of
lived corporeality (Gines 2017; see the discussion of
intersectionality in
 section 4 below).


## 3. Sexual Difference



The descriptions which Beauvoir offers us of the female body as lived,
are in marked contrast to the valorization of that body which we find
in the writings of sexual difference theorists: "What is at
stake in the debate ... is the positive project of turning
difference into a strength, of affirming its positivity"
(Braidotti 1994: 187). Engagement with female embodiment, the goal of
which is to give positive accounts of it, are found in two different
strands of feminist thought: Anglo-American radical feminism
(particularly in the late 1970s and 80s) and psychoanalytic feminism,
drawing on the work of Freud and Lacan. Sexual difference theorists,
whether working from a radical feminist tradition or from a
psychoanalytic feminist tradition, insist on the specificity of female
embodiment, a horizon which becomes invisible when the male is taken
as the norm of the human. For many of these theorists sexual
difference is fundamental and immutable. Braidotti claims "being
a woman is always already there as the ontological precondition for my
existential becoming as a subject" (1994: 187).


### 3.1 Radical Feminism



There are some controversies over exactly what is to be termed radical
feminism. As used here the term refers to feminists who stress
essential or very deep rooted differences between men and women, and
who celebrate the distinctive modes of embodiment and experiential
capacities that women have. Radical feminists were/ are centrally
involved in highlighting sexual violence against women globally, which
they sometimes see as rooted in male nature, or deep processes of
socialization. Despite Shulamith Firestone's (1970 [1979]; Merck
and Sandford 2010), early visions of liberating women from
reproductive tasks; within most Anglo-American radical feminism, both
female sexuality and the female capacity to give birth are seen as
grounds for affirming the power and the value of the female body.
Female sexuality is celebrated for its power and its supposed capacity
to escape from structures of dominance and submission, (Rich 1979). Women's maternal bodies are seen as a source of
positive values to set against male norms, stressing care and
inter-subjectivity, as opposed to autonomy and duty (Rich 1979,
Ruddick 1989). Women's engagement with the reproductive process
is also regarded as anchoring both anti-militarism and a respect for
the natural world, which puts them at the forefront of peace and
ecological movements (Griffin 1978). Reproduction and their caring
roles also sets them against the widespread violence of men. These
approaches are very significant for giving women's bodies a
positive value which induces pride rather than shame. However, such
approaches also suffer from the dangers of homogenizing what are very
variable experiences both of sexuality and maternity. As Grimshaw
points out, for women childbearing has been seen "both as the
source of ... greatest joy and as the root of their worst
suffering" (1986: 73). Moreover woman themselves engage in
military professions, and can themselves be violent in private and public space. Claims
celebrating female embodiment therefore need to heed Beauvoir's
insistence that the experience of embodiment is a product of
situation.


### 3.2 This Sex Which is Not One



In the work of Irigaray, (1975, 1977, 1993), we find a sustained
critique of both philosophy and psychoanalysis, for their masculinist
presuppositions. She points out that in these bodies of work
"man" is presented as the universal norm, and sexual
difference is not recognized, or it is recognized in such a way that
woman is conceptualized as the "maternal-feminine", which
has been left behind in the move to abstract thought. Such a critique
insists on the recognition of sexual difference and the difference
that female corporeality can make to the shape which thought can take.
She makes here what may seem like a rather startling claim: namely
that the morphology of the body is reflected in the morphology of
certain thought processes. So, for example, western rationality is
marked by principles of identity, non-contradiction, binarism, atomism
and determinate individuation. She sees this as: "the one of
form, of the individual, of the (male) sex organ". In contrast:
"the contact of at least two (lips) keeps woman in touch with
herself" (1977 [1985: 79]), and suggests an ambiguity of individuation, a fluidity
and mobility, a rejection of stable forms.



Such claims have been interpreted by some as suggesting that Irigaray
is a biological essentialist, that she sees the biology of male and
female bodies as yielding (potentially) different patterns of thought,
and that she is insisting that the thinking and writing which is
expressive of women's bodies should be made visible. In contrast
to such a reading however, is Irigaray's own insistence on the
impossibility of returning to a body outside of its representation
within culture. This makes evident that the bodily features which she
invokes in her writings are not brute materialities, but, (as is
perhaps made clearest in Whitford 1991), bodies as they
feature in the interconnected symbolic and imaginary of western
culture. (1991: chapter 3). When Irigaray refers to male and female
bodily characteristics she is, according to Whitford, capturing the
way she finds these features both represented and imagined, that is,
affectively experienced, in the personal and social domain. She argues
for the need to reconstruct an inter-connected imaginary and symbolic
of the female body which is liveable and positive for women. Whitford
suggests this is not an essentialist task of providing an accurate
description of women's bodies as they really are. It is a
creative one in which the female body is lovingly re-imagined and
rearticulated to enable women to both feel and think differently about
their embodied form. Irigaray's attention to the imaginary body
is, however, informed by a respect for a materiality, a nature, which
although open to multiple modes of disclosure, offers us *two kinds
of sexed bodies*, to which our imaginary significations remain
answerable.



Irigaray herself considers how philosophical and psychoanalytic
thinking would be different if we took a re-imagined female or
maternal body as its starting point instead of the male body, imagined
in phallic terms. Such work has been continued in the writings of, for
example, Battersby (1998), Cavarero (1995) and Alison Stone (2011).
Battersby explores "what happens to the notion of identity if we
treat the embodied female as the norm for models of the self"
(1998: 38). Natality challenges a fixed conception of identity, makes
evident that self and non-self are not in opposition, and that
identity "erupts from the flesh" (1998: 39). For Cavarero
the lack of attention paid to the fact that we are born from woman has
given western metaphysics a preoccupation with death rather than
birth. Stone (2011) explores the maternal body to suggest models of
subjectivity of a new kind, immersed in relations of intimacy and
dependence. Stone "analyses this form of subjectivity in terms
of how the mother typically reproduces with her child her history of
bodily relations with her own mother, leading to a distinctive
maternal and cyclical form of lived time" (2011: Jacket).


## 4. Intersectionality



Both the *foundational status* and the *inevitability*
of sexual difference has become a key point of contention between
sexual difference theorists and intersectional theorists whose work is
anchored particularly in black feminist thought (Crenshaw 2019, Hill
Collins and Bilge 2016 ), but also in contributions from theorists of bodily
abilities and trans theorists. (Garland-Thomson 2002, Bettcher and Garry
2009, Koyama 2006) These
theorists challenge the priority of sexual difference, in our accounts
of embodied subjectivity, and the possibility of providing generic
accounts of what such difference consists in. What *counts as*
being a man or a woman, what life opportunities result from gendered
positionality, and how these factors are internalized to form our
lived experience of being gendered, is mediated by the other
categories which intersect with gendered ones. Being a "black
man/woman", or "gay man/woman", or "trans
man/woman" (themselves categories which also mediate each other
and are mediated further by, for example, nationality, religion, age,
class and our positioning on the ability/disability axis), each has a
different content from being a "white, straight, middleclass,
cis gendered, able bodied woman or man". The normative ideals
attached to the concepts are different, though also overlapping. These
positionalities have consequences for our life opportunities both
economically and in the wider social realm, which the structural data
make evident. And all of this has consequences for our lived
subjectivity, how we experience our bodies, our sense of ourselves as
male or female, amongst other identifiers. 



Black feminist critiques challenge the racism of mainstream white
feminist thought for theorizing womanhood from the perspective of
white women thereby rendering the particular experiences of black and
other groups of marginalized women invisible. Audre Lorde writes:



> 
> 
> As a Black lesbian feminist comfortable with the many ingredients of
> my identity, and a woman committed to racial and sexual freedom of
> expression, I find I am constantly being encouraged to pluck out some
> aspect of myself and present this as a meaningful whole, eclipsing or
> denying the other parts of self. But this is a destructive and
> fragmenting way to live. (Lorde 1984) 
> 
> 
> 



Two centuries earlier Sojourner Truth, in her famous
"Ain't I a Woman" speech at Seneca Falls (see above)
signalled the very different modes of embodiment for black slave women
and white bourgeois women. The coining of the term intersectionality
is often accredited to African-American civil rights advocate and
feminist and critical race scholar, Kimberle Crenshaw (2019). As black
women we do not experience racism AND sexism as separate discrete
strands of oppression, Crenshaw argues, but instead racism and sexism
intersect and combine to shape the lives, including the experiences of
embodiment, of black women, in very specific ways. This is not a
matter of adding on experiences of being raced to a foundational sexed
identity. What constitutes being a woman is inter-articulated with
being black, in ways that challenge the universalism of sexual
difference theory.



Disability theorists from the 1990s onwards explored how disability
affected the gendering process and gender the experiences and outcomes
of differing bodily abilities (Mairs 1990, Thomas 1999). Feminist
theory, as Garland-Thomson argues: 



> 
> 
> interrogates how subjects are multiply interpellated; in other words,
> how the representational systems of gender race, ethnicity, ability,
> sexuality and class mutually construct, inflect and contradict one
> another. (2002: 3) 
> 
> 
> 
> the status of the lived body, the politics of appearance, the
> medicalisation of the body, the privilege of normalcy (2002: 4) 
> 
> 
> 



all look different from the perspective of women regarded as disabled.
And the relative privileges of normative femininity are often denied
to these women. Such work by intersectional feminists challenge any
foundational role, or universal articulation of, sexed difference
itself.


## 5. Bodily Practices


### 5.1 Disciplining the Body



Feminist writers from Wollstonecraft onwards have drawn attention to
the way in which society prescribes norms in relation to which
subjects regulate their own bodies and those of others.
Beauvoir's account of this has been highlighted above.
"Our bodies are trained, shaped and impressed with the
prevailing historical forms of ... masculinity and
femininity" (Bordo 1993: 91). By regimes of dieting, makeup,
exercise, dress, and cosmetic surgery, women, and increasingly men,
try to sculpt their bodies into shapes which reflect the dominant
societal norms. Such disciplinary practices attach not only to the
production of appropriately gendered bodies, but to other aspects of
bodily identity subject to social normalization. Hair straightening,
blue tinted contact lenses, surgical reconstruction of noses and lips,
are practices in which the material shapes of our bodies are
disciplined to correspond to a social ideal, reflecting the privileged
position which certain kinds of, usually, white, always able, always
young, bodies occupy.



This became a major theme in 1970s feminist writing. Dworkin writes:




> 
> 
> In our culture not one part of a women's body is left untouched,
> unaltered.... From head to toe, every feature of a woman's
> face, every section of her body, is subject to modification. (1974:
> 113-114) 
> 
> 
> 



From the 1990s, feminist attention to the *power* relations
working through such disciplinary practices has made extensive use of
the work of Foucault (Foucault 1975, Bartky 1990, Bordo 1993).
Foucauldian insights regarding disciplinary practices of the body are
applied to the disciplining of the gendered, and most insistently the
female, body. Such accounts stress the way in which women actively
discipline their own bodies not only to avoid social punishments, but
also to derive certain kinds of pleasure. There are two key features
of such accounts. One stresses the way in which the material shape of
bodies is modified by such practices. The second that such
modifications are a consequence of bodies carrying social meanings,
signalling within specific contexts, sexual desirability, or
availability, or respectability, or participation in social groupings.
With attention to the work of Foucault and other poststructuralist
writers, also came the recognition that practices of bodily
modification could have multiple meanings, with disagreements over
responses to cosmetics, fashion and cosmetic surgery (Davis 1995, Alsop and Lennon 2018). It was against this
background that Bordo (1993) developed her complex and influential
reading of the anorexic body: 



> 
> 
> female slenderness ... has a wide range of sometimes
> contradictory meanings ... suggesting powerlessness ... in
> one context, autonomy and freedom in the next. (1993: 26; see the
> Ethics of Embodiment,
>  section 8,
>  below) 
> 
> 
> 


### 5.2 Performativity



In the work of Butler (1990, 1993, 2004), the subjection of our bodies
to such normalizing practices become viewed, not only a way in which
already sexed bodies seek to approximate an ideal, but as the process
whereby sexed subjects come into existence at all. Here Butler is
following Beauvoir's claim that we *become*
differentiated as women and men, rather than being born as such. Since
1990 with the appearance of *Gender Trouble*, her performative
account of gendered subjectivity has dominated feminist theory. Butler
rejects the view that gender differences, with their accompanying
presumptions of heterosexuality, have their origin in biological or
natural differences. She explores, instead, how such a
"naturalising trick" is pulled off; asking by what means a
unity of biology, gendered identification, and heterosexuality comes
to *appear* natural. Butler, like Foucault, views discourses as
productive of the identities they appear to be describing. When a baby
is born and the midwife says "it's a girl" she is
not reporting an already determinate state of affairs, but taking part
in a practice which constitutes that state of affairs. The effect of
repetition of acts of this kind is to *make it appear* that
there are two distinct natures, male and female. These gendered
performances are ones which we act out ourselves and which others act
out in relation to us. They are acted out in accordance with social
*scripts* prescribing ideals which are unrealizable, but which
none the less provide the framework for our activities. These dominant
ideals reinforce the power of certain groups; e.g., men and
heterosexuals, over others. These others: women, gay people, trans and
gender non-conforming people, those with differently abled bodies, or
bodies differently shaped from the dominant ideal, are treated
socially as outsiders, "the abject", and subject to social
punishments.



The performances by means of which our bodies become gendered vary in
different contexts, and can change over time. Constituting myself as a
caring mother, my performance would differ from that of a sexy pop
star. Moreover these practices are not independent of those which
produce other aspects of our identity. Butler has stressed the way in
which gendered performances incorporate a presumptive heterosexuality;
but, as intersectional theorists have made clear, they also are
co-constituted with class, race and national and cultural positioning,
as well as age and a variety of forms of abilities and disabilities.
In bodily acts manifesting gendered positionality, other social
positions are carried along, in such a way that it is not possible to
disentangle a strand of gender which is universally present.



If gender becomes a matter of bodily style and performance, as this
model suggests, then there is no *necessary* link between
gender and any particular bodily shape. The alignment between
anatomical shape and gendered performance is itself just a norm.
Furthermore this norm, along with others governing gendered
performance, is open to destabilization and change. For Butler same
sex practices are one way of destabilizing the normative links of
gender and heterosexuality. Various trans performances, in a parallel
way, challenge the link of anatomical shape and gender. The trans
community, problematised by sexual difference theory, therefore comes
to occupy a central position for Butler. They are pivotal to the
process of "queering" by means of which gender binaries,
established by normalizing practices, are to be undermined and
unravelled. So, for example, the television documentary, *Pregnant
Man* by McDonald (2008), featuring a pregnant man who is referred
to as a man and presented as a regular guy, works to undermine our
binaries. What remains problematic about this, however, is that the
effect of performance is unpredictable. Drag, for example, can support
or dislodge gendered stereotypes and we cannot always sort out which
any instance will produce. This make possibilities for reflective
agency difficult to negotiate (McNay 2000).


### 5.3 Materialisation



For some commentators such a performative account of the formation of
sexed bodies, fails to capture how the materiality of the body enters
into our sense of self. In the preface to *Bodies that Matter*
Butler reports a common response to her work: 



> 
> 
> What about the materiality of the body, Judy? ... an effort
> ... to recall me to a bodily life that could not be theorized
> away ... for surely bodies live and eat; eat and sleep; feel pain
> and pleasure; endure illness and violence; and these facts ...
> cannot be dismissed as mere construction. (1993: ix) 
> 
> 
> 



Butler answers such questions by giving an account of the materiality
of the body in terms of a process of *materialisation*. Here
she is "calling into question the model of construction whereby
the social unilaterally acts on the natural and invests it ...
with ... meaning" (1993: 4). Instead she offers us a
picture in which what we count as the material, as nature, as the
given, is not something to which we have unmediated access. It is
itself a product of particular modes of conceptualizing, modes which
do not escape the workings of power. "Sex posited as prior to
construction will, by virtue of being posited, become the effect of
that very positing" (1993: 5). She concurs with the position of
Spivak: 



> 
> 
> If one thinks of the body as such, there is no possible outline of the
> body as such. There are thinkings of the systematicity of the body,
> there are value codings of the body. The body, as such, cannot be
> thought, and I certainly cannot approach it. (Spivak 1989)
> 
> 
> 



For Butler, we have to think of matter in terms of "a process of
materialisation that stabilises over time to produce the effect of
boundary, fixity ... we call matter" (1993: 9). We cannot,
then, ask questions about what limits are set by something outside of
what we conceptualize. We can, however, explore the possibilities of
conceptualizing otherwise. This does not mean that there is nothing
outside of discourse. Butler makes clear that the body
*exceeds* any attempt to capture it in discourse. It is just
such excessiveness which allows the possibility of alternative
formations of it, for the body outruns any of the ways we might have
of thinking about it. But we cannot approach the extra-discursive
except by exploring discursive possibilities.


## 6. Biology and the New Materialisms



Butler's (1993) thinking together of the material and the
discursive, has, however, been criticized, for not allowing the body
more of a drag on signification (Alaimo and Hekman 2008; Lennon and Alsop 2019). Such a "flight from
the material" according to Alaimo and Hekman, has foreclosed
attention to "lived material bodies and evolving corporeal
practices" (2008: 3). To correct such a deficit, in the
framework of what is termed the new materialism, what is stressed
instead is that, although "language structures how we apprehend
the ontological, it doesn't constitute it" (2008: 98). The
insight of the new materialist discussions has been to ensure that
matter, the material, is accorded an active role in this relation.



For Grosz, there is: 



> 
> 
> an elision of the question of nature and of matter in Butler's
> work. Mattering becomes more important than matter! Being
> "important", having significance, having a place,
> mattering, is more important than matter, substance or materiality.
> (interview with Ausch, Doane, and Perez 2000) 
> 
> 
> 



In Grosz's own work such materiality is conceived of in terms of
"active forces". The body is involved in a process of
active "becoming" which outruns any account which might be
offered of it within culture. In the same interview she claims:
"Nature is ... is openness, resource, productivity".
Here the body is not simply a materiality which outruns any attempt to
conceptualize it; it is actively involved in processes of change and
transformation. Grosz's recent work (1999 [2008]), exploring
biology and its relationship to culture, shows an increasing interest
in unravelling the nature/culture opposition by a stress on "the
virtualities, the potentialities, within biological existence that
enable cultural, social, and historical forces to work with and
transform that existence" (1999 [2008: 24]). Returning to the work of
Darwin, she sees in his work "the genesis of the new from the
play of repetition and difference within the old" (2008: 28).
Nonetheless she draws some problematic conclusions which are not
endorsed by current feminist biologists (Fausto-Sterling 2000; Fine
2012, 2017). In embracing natural selection she appears to give it a
foundational explanatory role so that 



> 
> 
> language, culture, intelligence, reason, imagination memory, -terms
> commonly claimed as defining characteristics of the human and the
> cultural-are all equally effects of the same rigorous criteria of
> natural selection. (Grosz 1999 [2008: 44]) 
> 
> 
> 



Moreover within this process a binary sexual difference is required,
as, "one of the ontological characteristics of life
itself" (1999 [2008: 44]). And this sexual differentiation and the
sexual selection with which, for her, it is interwoven, is then
invoked to ground racial and other forms of bodily differences.



Grosz's endorsement of a biology which renders the sexual binary
unassailable, has been criticized for going beyond recognizing the
importance of the material, to privilege a particular biological
account of matter (Jagger 2015). The history of sex difference research show
that the biological theories, which give an account of sex
differences, are the products of particular historical and culturally
specific moments of production. Such a recognition has allowed
biological accounts of sex differences to be revisited with an eye as
to where cultural assumptions about gender have influenced them. Of
key importance in this regard has been the assumption that there are
*simply two sexes*, male and female, a model which has come
increasingly under challenge. Fausto-Sterling points out the range of
inter-sex bodies that are forced into a binary classificatory system
(1992, 2000). She points out that "the varieties are so diverse
... that no classificatory scheme could do more than suggest the
variety of sexual anatomy encountered in clinical practice"
(1993: 22). Oudshoorn (1994), in a genealogy of the emergence of the
theory of sex hormones, shows how a model of binary sex differences
prevailed, in a context in which dualistic notions of male and female
could have been abandoned (see entry
 feminist philosophies of biology
 and also Fausto-Sterling 1992, 2000; Fine 2012, 2017). Lane argues
that 



> 
> 
> mobilizing a reading of biology as open-ended and creative, supports a
> perspective that sees sex and gender diversity as a continuum, rather
> than a dichotomy--put simply, "nature" throws up all
> this diversity and society needs to accept it. (2009: 137) 
> 
> 
> 



Lane, as a trans theorist, is confronting what is seen as an
anti-biologism within performative gender theory, and exploring the
complex interpellation of biological and cultural factors in the
aetiology of trans subjectivity, without treating Grosz's
biological account as authoritative (see entry on
 feminist perspectives on trans issues).



This is not to deny that there is something independent of our
conceptualizations which sets constraints on what can be said about
it. What we cannot do is disentangle the bit which is *given*
from our ways of thinking about it. What needs addressing according to
Barad is "the entanglement of matter and meaning" (Barad
2007), the inter-implication of the discursive and the material in
which no priority is given to either side. Barad explores this
entanglement with particular reference to the work of physicist Niels
Bohr. Viewing matter as an active "agent" ensures that
matter and meaning are mutually articulated. Importantly, however,
although the empirical world of matter takes an active part this does
not involve according it some sort of immediate givenness, or a
straight-forwardly determining role. In her approach Barad is
following in the footsteps of Haraway. In 1985, prior to
Butler's *Gender Trouble*, Haraway had published her
"Cyborg Manifesto" (1985 [1991]). Haraway's project
had some overlap with that later articulated by Butler. She wished to
overcome the binary between nature and culture, replacing the two
terms with *nature/culture*, in which different elements cannot
be disentangled. She was also concerned to draw attention to the
complex factors which go into constituting what is to count as nature
for us. Most crucially she was concerned to undermine the supposed
naturalness of certain binaries; insisting on a breaching of
boundaries between human and animal and between animal and machine. So
came her invocation of the *cyborg*: a creature
"simultaneously animal and machine" populating a world
"ambiguously natural and crafted" (1985 [1991: 149]). In
pointing to the cyborg as the figure which captures our "bodily
reality", Haraway is resisting any appeal to a pure nature which
is supposed to constitute our bodily being. There is no clear boundary
between what is natural and what is constructed. In Haraway's
picture, however, the body, along with the rest of the natural world,
has what she calls "a trickster quality that resists categories
and projects of all kinds" (1997: 128). In this and her later
work (Haraway 2003, 2008), her account of the quirkiness and agency which, in
Butler, is primarily discussed as a feature of discursive practices,
is as much a feature of nature. Nature is viewed as an agent, actively
contributing to the indivisible *nature/culture* with which we
are faced. "We must find another relationship to nature besides
reification, possession, appropriation and nostalgia" (2008:
158). This other relation is to view nature as "a partner in the
potent conversation" (2008: 158), in which we attempt to
constitute it. What is so notable about her work is the careful
respect shown to the concreteness of bodily existence and to the
biological narratives, alongside narratives of historical and cultural
kinds.


## 7. A Return to Phenomenology



A return to an interest in feminist phenomenology, in the footsteps of
Beauvoir, started with the work of Bartky and Young in the late 1970s,
but became widespread only in the 1990s. At the center of
phenomenological accounts of embodiment is the lived experience of the
body. For such writers embodiment is our mode of
*being-in-the-world* (Young 2005: 9). The notion of
*experience* is treated with great suspicion in the
poststructuralist framework within which Butler is primarily
positioned. The suspicion is a consequence of empiricist uses of the
term, in which experience is tied to a "myth of the given"
whereby body and world are offered to us in an unmediated way. The
experiences to which phenomenological writers draw attention are not,
however, of such a pure kind. For they are experiences of bodies in
situations, in which it is impossible to disentangle so called
"natural" and "social" elements. For as
Merleau-Ponty points out, 



> 
> 
> everything is both manufactured and natural in man, as it were, in the
> sense that there is not a word, not a form of behaviour which does not
> owe something to purely biological being--and which at the same
> time does not elude the simplicity of animal life. (1945 [1962: 189])
> 
> 
> 
> 



Here there is an entanglement of nature/culture, matter and meaning,
which parallels that insisted on by Haraway and Barad discussed above.
But the phenomenological accounts foreground lived experience of the
body in a way that is often absent from, what are now termed, the new
materialist writings, (although it is foregrounded in the writings of
some trans theorists, see Salamon 2010).



Interest in the phenomenology of embodiment is an attempt to further
articulate Freud's claim that "the ego is a bodily
ego" (Freud 1923 [1962]), to capture the way corporeal
characteristics surface in our experiences of ourselves and others.
Feminist writers such as Bartky, Young, Alcoff, Heinamaa, and
Weiss are carrying on the project started by Beauvoir; but a major
influence for many of them is also the work of Merleau-Ponty. They put
such resources to work to make visible the variable experiences of
gendered, raced, classed, differently abled and differently aged
bodies, to reflect on the way such experiences, mediate social
positionality, and constitute our sense of self. 


### 7.1 Throwing Like a Girl



In a series of essays written early in her career, Young, (reprinted
2005), captured everyday experiences of women's embodiment. Such
accounts were not simply descriptive, but were aimed, initially, to
make evident the way in which the social norms governing female
"bodily comportment" yielded an *inhibited
intentionality*, an interruption in the pre-reflexive engagement
with our environment to which Merleau-Ponty had drawn our attention
(1945 [1962]). So, for example, in "Throwing Like A Girl"
(1980) she points to studies which suggest that girls and boys throw
in different ways and that women, when attempting physical tasks,
frequently fail to use the physical possibilities of their bodies.
Here she is echoing the descriptions offered by Beauvoir. Also
following Beauvoir, Young suggests that the inhibited intentionality
characteristic of female embodiment derives from the fact that women
often experience their bodies as things/objects, "looked at and
acted upon" (1980 [2005: 39]), as well as the source of
capacities. "She often lives her body as a burden, which must be
dragged and prodded along, and at the same time protected" (1980
[2005: 36]). For Young, as for Beauvoir, such experiences of
embodiment are not a consequence of anatomy, but rather of the
*situation* of women in contemporary society, but they point to
significant ways in which female lived embodiment can be an obstacle
to intentional engagement with the world.



Other of Young's essays, for example, "Pregnant
Embodiment" (1984), "Breasted Experience" (2005, but
a shorter version in 1992) and "Menstrual Meditations" (2005a), focus
on distinctive aspects of female embodiment that yield distinct ways
of being in the world. Here the stress is not only on inhibited
intentionality. There is also recognition that such experiences can
offer alternative possibilities for embodied engagement that can be
positive as well as negative. In her accounts Young stresses that it
is *such everyday ordinary experiences of embodiment*, variable
as they are, that constitute women's sense of their identity
*as* women. Young develops this insight in a discussion of
Moi's suggestion that we should replace categories of both sex
and gender with the category of the lived body. Moi (1999) suggests
that the category of the lived body can capture the way material
features of our bodies play a role in our subjective sense of self,
without giving a reductionist, biological account of such
embodiment.


### 7.2 Visible Identities



Alcoff points out that such phenomenological accounts "require a
cross-indexing by cultural and ethnic specificity" (Alcoff 2006:
107). In her work a phenomenological account is employed to give an
account of those identity categories which are anchored in material
bodily features, what she terms *visible identities*. Alcoff is
offering an account which integrates social identity categories with
people's experiences of the bodies of themselves and others.
Focusing primarily on raced and gendered identities, she makes clear
the way in which bodily features, (color, hair, nose, breasts,
genitals) are invested with a significance which becomes a part of our
immediate perceptual experience of them: 



> 
> 
> Both race and sex ... are most definitely physical, marked on and
> through the body, lived as a material experience, visible as surface
> phenomena and determinant of economic and political status. (2006:
> 102) 
> 
> 
> 



Because of the material reality of the features and the immediacy of
our perceptual response, the meanings attached to such features become
naturalized. The fact that they are the product of learned modes of
perception is not evident to us, for such perceptual practices have
become habitual and are resistant to change. She points out how
"race and gender consciousness produce habitual bodily
mannerisms that feel natural and become unconscious after long
use" (2006: 108).



The significance, therefore, of certain bodily shapes, informs our
sense of our own body and of the bodies of others. The sense of our
own body reflects, as was articulated by Sartre, Fanon, and Beauvoir,
the way it is perceived by others. The very shape of the body carries
its position in patterns of social interaction. In a striking example
regarding raced physiognomies, Alcoff quotes from Rodriguez's
book *Days of Obligation* (1992): 



> 
> 
> I used to stare at the Indian in the mirror. The wide nostrils
> ... the thick lips .... Such a long face--such a long
> nose--sculpted by indifferent, blunt thumbs, and of such common
> clay. No one in my family had a face as dark or as Indian as mine.
> *My face could not portray the ambition I brought to it.*
> (Alcoff 2006: 189; my emphasis) 
> 
> 
> 



Ambition is something expressible in a body of a different kind, and
the face he looks at points to a positioning at odds with what he
desires. Although Alcoff restricts her analysis to race and sex, it is
clear that it also has relevance to other bodily identities. The body
in the wheelchair has similar difficulty expressing physical prowess
that Rodriguez's has of expressing ambition. Lennon and Alsop
(2019, Ch. 7) point out, that such a framework makes sense of the
desires of some trans people for corporeal transformation. For
experiences of material features of the body are foundational to our
sense of our sexed identity and used by others to position us in
patterns of social interaction. Despite the polarising and often
damaging consequences of the perceptual practices which Alcoff draws
our attention to, she remains optimistic about the possibilities for
change, though stressing the difficulties of even bringing these
practices into view. Such changes require that people are brought to
viewexpereince their own bodies and the bodies of others in a
different way: "perceptual practices are dynamic even when
congealed into habit ... people are capable of change"
(Alcoff 2006: 189).


### 7.3 Bodily Imaginaries



Alcoff is drawing attention to the salience which particular bodily
features have in our experiencing of our own bodies and the bodies of
others. This links her work to that of other theorists who explore
this relation with reference to the notions of both "body
image" and "bodily imaginaries". Weiss (1999) begins
her exploration of body images with the work of Merleau-Ponty (1945
[1962]) and Schilder (1935 [1950]), though castigating both for
ignoring the difference that sexed and raced positionality make. For
Merleau-Ponty our body image or body schema is the awareness we have
of the shape or form of our body: "my posture in the
inter-sensory world, a form" (Weiss, 10). Such an awareness is
not as of an objective anatomical body, but the body in the face of
its tasks, a body in which some aspects stand out and others are
invisible. It is by means of such body schemas that we are able to act
intentionally in the world, and, although they most commonly operate
at a pre-reflective level, they constitute our sense of ourselves as
corporeal beings. In the work of Schilder the multiple nature of such
body images and their dynamic nature is stressed. For him the
phenomenological account is interwoven with a psychoanalytic one. Our
corporeal or postural schema is formed, in part, by the emotional and
imaginative significance which is given to parts of the body by our
personal relations with others, and by the significance attached to
corporeal features in the social domain: "the touches of others,
the interest others take in the different parts of our body, will be
of enormous importance in the postural model of the body" (Weiss
1999: 16). This, ensures that our body image is formed by the way the
body is experienced and *emotionally invested* rather than
cognitively represented. This is what for many writers is captured by
the notion of the bodily imaginary. (Gatens 1996, Lennon 2015).
Feminists employing the concept of the bodily imaginary,(influenced by
the work of Irigaray discussed above), therefore, stress that the way
we have of experiencing our bodies invests particular contours with
emotional and affective salience. Gatens (1996), in exploring the
notion of bodily imaginaries, also draws on the work of Spinoza. For
her the imaginary body is 



> 
> 
> the social and personal significance of the body as
> "lived", socially and historically specific in that it is
> constructed by a shared language ... and common institutional
> practices. (1996: 11-12)
> 
> 
> 



Many of the emotional saliencies which are attached, socially or only
individually, to specific bodily features are damaging and
destructive. There are many damaging imaginaries of women's
bodies, gay bodies, black bodies, or those imagined as disabled. It
therefore seems imperative that such ways of thinking/feeling specific
corporeal features can be subject to change. The matter becomes
complex once we recognize that the affective salience which our bodies
bear may not be available to reflective scrutiny, but nonetheless
reveals itself in the habitual perceptual practices to which Alcoff
drew our attention. To effect change we need to offer alternative
pictures which make emotional (imaginative) and not only cognitive
sense. This is a crucial issue for all writers who want to provide an
account of corporeal identities in terms of affectively laden body
images, or bodily imaginaries. We can see this process at work in the
rewriting of the female body offered by Irigaray, and in the
re-imagining of the black body which we find in writers such as hooks,
where the skin of the man lying next to her, "soot black like my
grand-daddy's skin" can return her to "a world where
we had a history ... a world where ... something wonderful
might be a ripe tomato, found as we walked through the rows of Daddy
Jerry's garden" (hooks 1990: 33; see also Tate 2009).
Feminist theorists of the body, working with the notion of the bodily
imaginary, therefore see creative acts directed at alterations in our
mode of perceiving bodies, as central to the process of political and
social transformation. (Lennon 2015).


## 8. The Ethics of Embodiment



The work on bodily imaginaries from within the phenomenological
framework, makes explicit the extent to which our embodied identities
are dependent on the responses of others. They are negotiated
intersubjectively, linked to the possible pattern of social
interactions within which we can recognizably be placed. It is also
clear that the imaginaries which are normatively attached to certain
bodily morphologies can be restricting and damaging. Both Beauvoir and
Fanon described the damaging consequences of encountering the myths
and images carried by female and black bodies, which become
internalized to mediate our embodied sense of self. The work of many
theorists of bodily abilities point to the norms surrounding bodily
shape and form in relation to which non normative bodies are seen as
freaks and monsters. (Garland-Thomson 1997). Mairs admits experiencing
shame of her body: 



> 
> 
> it is a crippled body. Thus it is doubly other, not merely by the
> ... standards of patriarchal culture but by the standards of
> physical desirability erected for everybody in our world.... My
> belly sags from loss of muscle tone, which also creates all kind of
> intestinal disruptions, hopelessly humiliating in a society in which
> excretory functions remain strictly unspeakable. (Mairs 1990 [1997:
> 299, 301]) 
> 
> 
> 



The way Mairs experiences her body is formed in relation to
normalizing discourses in which the "crippled" body, in
particular the "desiring crippled body", is banished to
the realm of the rejected, often unthinkable, other. The blossoming of
the aesthetic surgery industry amongst women, and increasingly men, is
a consequence of an increasingly narrow set of bodily morphologies
being accepted as attractive and desirable, Moreover these
morphologies are usually of young bodies. This fuels the demand for
body modification of aging bodies. (Alsop and Lennon 2018; Dolezal
2015; Gilman 1999; Heyes and Jones 2009).



As a consequence of these insights, there is increasing work amongst
feminist philosophers concerning the *ethics of embodiment*.
Weiss (2015) points to 



> 
> 
> specific feminist philosophers, critical race scholars, and disability
> theorists who ... illustrate, and ultimately combat, the
> insidious ways in which sexism, racism, and "compulsory
> able-bodiedness" (McRuer 2006), impoverish the lived experience
> of both oppressors and the oppressed, largely by predetermining the
> meaning of their bodily interactions in accordance with
> institutionalized cultural expectations and norms. (2015: 77) 
> 
> 
> 



There are two special issues of the feminist journal *Hypatia*
(Bergoffen and Weiss 2011, 2012) devoted to the ethics of embodiment,
dealing with the implications of situating bodies at the center of
ethical theory. This requires looking at the operation of bodily
norms, and which bodies and modes of comportment are valued and which
not. It also requires engaging with bodily vulnerability in relation
to the normative human and ethical ideals of autonomy and subjecthood.
Garland-Thomson discusses what she terms "misfitting", a
lack of fit between body and world and between our bodies and other
peoples (2011, also Bergoffen and Weiss 2011). When we fit
harmoniously and properly into the world, we forget the contingency of
this, because the world sustains us. 



> 
> 
> When we experience misfitting and recognize that disjuncture for its
> political potential, we expose the relational component and the
> fragility of fitting. Any of us can fit here today and misfit there
> tomorrow. (Garland-Thomson 2011: 597)
> 
> 
> 



Our bodily vulnerability, and consequently our vulnerability to
others, is also central to the later work of Butler. It is through the
body that we become vulnerable to our material environment and to the
violence which may be inflicted on us by others: "living in a
world of beings who are ...physically dependent on one another,
physically vulnerable to one another" (2004: 22). The
vulnerability to social punishments and the threats of violence attach
particularly to those who fail to conform to social norms. But Butler
stresses the vulnerability and precariousness of everyone's
subjectivity, formed as it is by public systems of meaning which are
themselves precarious and crisscrossed by differences. We are affected
by the outside, the social and familial bonds, which enable us to
assume subjectivity and agency, but are also injurious to us in
closing down possibilities for our ways of being. 



> 
> 
> I am affected not just by this one other or set of others, but by a
> world in which humans, institutions and organic and inorganic
> processes all impress themselves upon this me, who is, at the onset,
> susceptible in ways that are radically involuntary. (2015: 6/7) 
> 
> 
> 



Such susceptibility is for her, the mode of being of embodied
sensibility. (See Gonzalez-Arnal, Jagger and Lennon (eds.) 2012, for
papers highlighting the distinctiveness of different modes of
embodiment and the vulnerability of the body to pain and assault. Also
see Widdows 2018 for a discussion of Beauty as an Ethical Ideal and the entry on
 feminist perspectives on disability).


## 9. Conclusion



Feminist theorists of embodiment have made a central contribution to
philosophy of embodiment and ensured, along with critical race
theorists and theorists of (dis)ability, that attention to the body
plays a central role in metaphysical, ethical, social and political
thought. The theories which emerge are not simply of gendered
embodiment. They provide a general account of the relations between
bodies and selves. What is stressed within the feminist literature is
the range of philosophical theories which are required to make sense
of the embodied self. Naturalising frameworks need supplementing with
phenomenological, poststructuralist and psychoanalytic ones, in just
way the feminist theorists have exemplified, if embodied subjectivity
is to become intelligible.