Continuing to think about this body history stuff again.
I was looking over my old notes on the blog about this and along the way ran across this post by Wildly which set wheels turning in my head again. She made several points there that I think didn’t sink in for me at first, which are really important. One of them is the point about mind/body dualism.
One risk with using the body as a category of analysis is that it is easy to think of bodies as distinct from persons. I have done some research on lawsuits brought response to workplace injuries in the early 20th century US. I have often thought of those lawsuits in terms like “in every injury suit a person went to court seeking monetary compensation for damage to his or her body.” This formulation makes sense but it frames the body as distinct from the person and as a form of property, analogous to the formulation “a person went to court seeking monetary compensation for damage to his or her automobile.” While the law in the US did sometimes distinguish between persons and bodies and treat bodies as property belonging to persons, body history should not simply assume that conceptual framework. That framework implies a dualism of mind and body, where persons are mental or spiritual beings that possess and inhabit bodies.
On the other hand, while persons are always embodied one must be careful in how one proceeds. Persons are not reducible to their corporeal qualities and rarely if ever derive all of their identity and experience from corporeality. Indeed, many people have protested being treated as if their corporeality exhausted their humanity, as if they were just a body, understood as an inert and manipulable object.
Hey nate, it’s nice to see this stuff come around again. Your final paragraph, though, I kinda disagree with. An embodied person is precisely not someone reducible to the object ‘the body’. That is, embodiment theory (Liz Grosz is especially good on this) argues that both the presuming that the body is an object possessed by a spirit (or whatever) and that persons (usually women, or PWD, or ‘racial others’) are reducible to their body, ‘an inert and manipulable object’ are two sides of the Cartesian coin. In other words: understanding the subject as *embodied* is to argue precisely against understanding the body as an object: whether an object for the subject in question, or an object for others. Or that’s my reading, anyway
I hope I’m vaguely clear. I seem to be having a bad communication day!
Comment by WildlyParenthetical — April 16, 2009 @ 3:01 am
I am not sure I understand the previous comment, if only because I do not necessarily see it as a disagreement, hence I default to my lack of understanding instead of the post as a non-sequitor. Maybe some further explication?
In any case, I find this terribly interesting. The first rule of bodies I was taught in grad school was that an unmarked body needs to be presumed to be a white (privileged) body and not a universal body. Not to say you make this error, but if you are returning to this area of analysis then it might be a helpful observation to place as a reading strategy.
Comment by travis — April 16, 2009 @ 6:37 pm
hey Wildly, Travis, thanks for the comments.
Wildly, I think I wasn’t being clear. I agree w/ everything you said. Here’s what happened: I started working on this, then re-read our discussion from a while back, your comments here and your post at yours, and realize I was treating bodies as things and as things distinct from persons. Like, “me and my body” kind of thing. That’s a mistake. If I love my legs, I lose some of me, I don’t lose an object. If my body is radically reconfigured in an accident or an attack then in an important sense *I* am radically reconfigured. All of that said, I’m still attached to a notion that some of the time some people experience this distinction - along the lines of “my body has been reconfigured but I still the same person I was.” It seems to me that that kind of statement is not a mistake, thought it’s not literally true.
Travis, I think that’s a pretty sensible thing to say for most social locations. My preliminary research suggests that the normative body at law (within the laws that deal with workplace injury in the early 20th century US) was a male body.
take care,
Nate
Comment by Nate — April 16, 2009 @ 8:50 pm
Mmm… I think it was the final paragraph: it looked to me like you were saying ‘careful of talking about embodiment, you might reduce people to their bodies!’ Whereas I would say that talking about *embodiment* avoids precisely the means by which the body becomes ‘the body’ as an object (i.e. the dualism which, as you identify, either plays out by privileging the mind (esp. men, for e.g.) or devaluing the body (so women are esp. reduced to their body, in order to sustain the privilege of men) and usually both, just across different bodies).
That more clear?
As for the point about people being attached to particular experiences of the body, my way of describing this is that we embody the cartesian dualism. Which sounds, to a certain extent, contradictory. But for example: people who claim that they like rationality, but don’t think that that ‘liking’ is, at least partly, a visceral response/attraction to a particular style of thought. Or that women’s empathy, long understood as ‘irrational’ is at least ‘parse-able’ in terms of an extremely rational but less self-interested approach to other people. That is, insisting on a mind/body dualism often requires the *disavowal* of the fact that we are *always* embodied. I also think that ‘embodying the cartesian dualism’ means that we deal very badly with what we therefore experience as ‘the body asserting itself’, in illness etc: we can only experience the body as ‘asserting itself’ problematically if we experience it as kinda *absent* for the most part… And not everyone *does* experience it that way, and they often are better at dealing with illness or disability. Point being: if we understand the embodiment of the cartesian dualism as a contingent matter, there are interventions that can be made. Theoretically, anyway
Sorrysorrysorry to go on… [sigh]
Comment by WildlyParenthetical — April 16, 2009 @ 10:46 pm
Sorry, one last thing… You say “It seems to me that that kind of statement is not a mistake, thought it’s not literally true.” I think this hits on the construction thing entirely. As in, most embodiment theory is kinda committed not to a distinction between ideology and truth, but to construction, which means that experiences can be *true*, even ‘literally’ so, and STILL be contingent and constructed. And thus mutable, just… slowly
Comment by WildlyParenthetical — April 16, 2009 @ 10:49 pm
hi Wildly,
I think we’re agreeing but not using the same terms. Here’s what I’m trying to get at. I want to say that the self vs body distinction (where the self owns, sells, and profits from the body) is not true or accurate, and that this understanding is not one that I should use analytically. I took you to be making a similar point in our earlier discussions (I think I got this point from you, really!) If I got you wrong, let me know.
At the same time… in the court cases I’ve been looking at in the early 20th century US women seek damages for injuries that remove their hands. They talk sometimes about damage to their bodies, as property apart from themselves. This is in pert because they seek compensation under a legal regime that treated the body as property, and as apart from their selves. It may be that they talk that way just because it’s how the law worked at the time. It may well be that they meant it, though - the women in these cases appear at least some of the time to have believed what they said and used that outlook to understand their experiences.
This presents a difficulty, I think, because this is precisely the understanding I said above that I reject and think is a mistake. The dilemma here is because I want to say that for these women they really did experience things the way they seem to. Put another way, I want to take them at their word - if they talk with a self vs body distinction, the body as owned, manipulated, and inhabited by the self, then I want to say that there’s a truth to that. It seems to me that I still have to say which is really the case, though. Otherwise I’ve got no justification for having my analytical perspective (bodies not distinct from selves) differ from the perspective of the people I’m studying (who talk like they think and experience their bodies are distinct from their selves). Make sense?
take care,
Nate
Comment by Nate — April 17, 2009 @ 10:30 pm
ps - don’t apologize! This is all really, really productive for me. Our earlier discussion on this (your comments mostly) really helped me a lot and changed my mind.
Comment by Nate — April 17, 2009 @ 10:31 pm
Aww. Thanks Nate
I don’t think I was clear above. We talk about bodies as if they are separate from selves all the time, and we even experience them that way. But that experience is itself embodied: the frustration that we feel when we’re sick is not ‘all in the mind’. It’s manifested in the experience of, say, tightened muscles, frowny eyebrows and so on. That is, I agree that there is a kind of truth to the stories people are telling the court cases you describe. But I want to do the Foucauldian thing: how does it become true? It’s not that it becomes true only and simply in the courtroom: power would be singularly inefficient if it worked only by requiring people to ‘translate’ themselves into its own language at every turn. No, it’s a more efficient system than that. It becomes true, IMO, because we are not individuals pre-existing our insertion into a cultural world. That is, our very experiences of ourselves and our bodies - of our embodiment - is derived from a particular cultural context. That’s what I mean by construction: the body is constructed, for the embodied subject, within a context. This is why, yes, people’s experiences will come to reflect the requirements being made of them within a context shaped economically, legally, etc etc. This construction isn’t entirely coherent, of course, and there are multiple requirements made of us, all the time, which have different effects on our embodiment (embodiment is shaped, then, by contradictory forces: those which want to make the body property, productive and saleable - work - and those which want the body to be something else, say, a source of pleasure…
Sociology - and other disciplines, of course - sometimes has difficulty negotiating with the category of ‘experience,’ and I wonder if this is part of the difficulty we’re having in making our perspectives link together a bit? It seems to be because researchers think that if they *explain* how or why someone’s experience comes about, they are therefore declaring it to be *not true*, therefore to be ‘false’, therefore declaring that they have access, or potential access, to some kind of ‘really real truth’, as opposed to the ideological or false one people ‘experience’. Such a position kinda presumes that there it’s possible to have a true experience, and to have a false one. I think this distinction is entirely problematic. If people experience their bodies as objects, then that’s their experience. Explaining that their experience comes about because they embody a cultural understanding of the body as property, and as an object, doesn’t undermine that, I think. But what it does allow us to do is consider how and why that experience plays a particular role in, say, systems of production, in power/knowledge, in the maintenance of heteronormativity (just for examples). And it also helps us to pay attention to those fragmented, often unarticulable experiences which fall outside those regimes of knowledge and labour.
Perhaps an example? A woman called Kathy Davis wrote a book a while ago about cosmetic surgery. Up until this point, most feminist work on cosmetic surgery had been relatively damning and disapproving. Kathy Davis went in with that perspective, but decided to really pay attention to what the women she was interviewing said. And over and over again, these women said that they were suffering. They were suffering because their bodies were abnormal. Davis comments that she could never tell what these women thought were wrong with their bodies until they actually pointed it out, and even then, all she could think was that they were, in general, pretty good looking women. Now, lots of feminists would want to say that their suffering is *not true*, that it’s a result of some kind of false consciousness. Davis refused to do that, and so she wound up claiming - a bit cautiously, but claiming it clearly nonetheless - that cosmetic surgery could be ‘empowering’ because it allowed women to feel in control of themselves, their lives and their bodies.
And the response, from those who take embodiment seriously? Well, basically, they asked: But why? Why do they feel in control of themselves when they undergo cosmetic surgery? Why do they feel the suffering in the first place? We believe that their suffering is *real*, but that doesn’t mean that it’s not *produced*; that is, it doesn’t mean that it’s not the result of misogyny and the commodification of bodies and the narrowing of the corporeal norm. And insofar as it is, ‘treating’ their suffering by giving them cosmetic surgery is really about treating the symptoms, rather than the cause. It doesn’t shift the contemporary logics of embodiment one whit, and in fact can be understood as entrenching the embodiment of the cartesian dualism even further.
Does this help? I just think your analysis of these court cases thus far is great, and I can see such exciting things that could be said about the ways that the law shapes embodiment… (have you read the section in ‘Gender Trouble’ about ‘the subject before the law’ btw?)
Comment by WildlyParenthetical — April 17, 2009 @ 11:15 pm
All,the ‘Cartesian’ sounds funny to me. I’m more inclined to view the most important strand of duality in euro-american talk as Christianity.. Let’s whale on Augustine.
Comment by Chuckie K — April 19, 2009 @ 10:24 am
There’s a reason to use ‘Cartesian’, though, Chuckie, and one of those reasons is that there’s a long-established feminist philosophical history, also picked up in embodiment theory and some strands of phenomenology (i.e. the more interesting ones
), which is quite specifically directed against this particular dualism (which feeds into others). And whilst Descartes was pretty damn Christian, I’m less convinced that Augustine has the thread of rationalism in him that Descartes does, and that plays through in really important (usually sexist and racist) ways into modernism and humanism. I’m all for whaling on Augustine, too, though 
In amongst the astonishing misogyny of the other Church Fathers!
Comment by WildlyParenthetical — April 20, 2009 @ 7:22 am
Oops. Of course, where I work with working class Christians and not intellectual feminists, so I’m talking with people with much more conventional view of the world. I don’t think anyone her ehas even heard of Romping
Rene.
Comment by Chuckie K — April 20, 2009 @ 2:34 pm
I’m kinda tempted to use the epithet ‘Romping’ every time I refer to Descartes from now on
But in general, my response would be that although intellectuals often refer to specific philosophers, it’s more, at least for me, to identify a particular, continuing form of discourse; to identify, in other words, something specific about the conventional view of the world. The mind/body split as Descartes framed it remains ‘common sense’ in contemporary Western culture, and familiarity with Descartes is not necessary for familiarity with the effect of the Cartesian split. Most people still *do* think the most important thing about them, the most essential thing, is their ‘mind’ or ‘thinking soul’ even if ‘cogito, ergo sum’ is beyond them.
And some of us have histories as working class Christians *and* intellectual feminists, you know… not quite so mutually exclusive as you might think (though I’m an atheist, my parents are not, and they retain both titles with pride!) ;-P My point above was more to indicate that there is actually a significant body of thought in this area, and it’s important to acknowledge that history. Also important to acknowledge the misogyny of the Church Fathers, though. My fave hating-on quote from those boyz? “A woman is only a virgin until she’s ripe.” Puke. And we still live in the aftermath of that bullshit.
Comment by WildlyParenthetical — April 21, 2009 @ 10:33 pm