Abstract
This chapter offers a brief historical overview of the gendered mind/body dualism associated with the rationalist tradition, according to which women’s bodies have been viewed as a threat to reason and to ethics. Taking up critiques of this model offered by Beauvoir and Fanon, I maintain that the body of the Other makes an ethical claim upon us in the form of “bodily imperatives.” I conclude with a critical analysis of contemporary feminist ethics that seeks to move beyond the false dichotomies of mind/body, reason/emotions, transcendence/immanence, and male/female dualisms. Assuming as their starting point the universality of human dependency and the debilitating reality of embodied oppression, contemporary feminist ethicists seek to overturn the sexist, racist, and ableist effects of a philosophical tradition that has always privileged some minds and bodies over others.
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Notes
- 1.
Elizabeth Grosz. Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism. (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994): 19.
- 2.
Grosz , Volatile Bodies, 19.
- 3.
Plato “Republic,” in eds. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns. Collected Dialogues, trans. Paul Shorey. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980): 684 441e.
- 4.
Plato, “Republic”, 684 441e.
- 5.
Plato, “Republic”, 684 442a-b.
- 6.
Donna-Dale Marcano , “Race/Gender and the Philosopher’s Body” Living Alterities: Phenomenology, Embodiment, and Race. Ed. Emily S. Lee. (Albany: SUNY Press, 2014): 76.
- 7.
Marcano , “Race/Gender and the Philosopher’s Body”, 77.
- 8.
René Descartes. Discourse on Method and Meditations. Trans. Laurence J. Lafleur. (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Educational Publishing, 1960): 75.
- 9.
Descartes , Discourse on Method and Meditations, 76.
- 10.
Aristotle. “Politics” and “Nichomachean Ethics” in ed. Richard McKeon The Basic Works of Aristotle. New York: Random House, 1941: 1132 1254 5–15, my emphasis.
- 11.
For example: Paul Schollmeier. “Aristotle and Women: Household and Political Roles” Polis 20, no. 1–2 (2003): 22–42.
- 12.
Sigmund Freud. “Femininity” in James Strachey (ed.) The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (The Standard Edition), vol. 22, pp. 136–157. (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1976).
- 13.
Luce Irigaray. Speculum of the Other Woman. Trans. Gillian C. Gill. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985): 28.
- 14.
Quoted in: Irigaray , Speculum of the Other Woman, 88.
- 15.
Irigaray , Speculum of the Other Woman, 89.
- 16.
Simone de Beauvoir . The Second Sex. Trans. Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010), 443.
- 17.
Simone de Beauvoir . The Ethics of Ambiguity. Trans. Bernard Frechtman. (Secaucus, NJ: Citadel Press, 1997).
- 18.
See: Jean-Paul Sartre . Being and Nothingness. Trans. Hazel E. Barnes. (New York: Washington Square Press, 1984).
- 19.
Frantz Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Trans. Richard Philcox. (New York: Grove Press, 2008): 95.
- 20.
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 119, 95.
- 21.
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 96.
- 22.
Maurice Merleau -Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception. Trans. Donald A. Landes. (London: Routledge, 2012): 191–192.
- 23.
Merleau -Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 139.
- 24.
Gail Weiss. Body Images: Embodiment as Intercorporeality. (New York: Routledge, 1999).
- 25.
Weiss, Body Images.
- 26.
Emmanuel Levinas . Totality and Infinity. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969): 194.
- 27.
Levinas , Totality and Infinity, 194.
- 28.
Levinas , Totality and Infinity, 194.
- 29.
Levinas , Totality and Infinity, 197.
- 30.
Judith Butler . Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. (London: Verso, 2004): 135.
- 31.
Eva Feder Kittay. Love’s Labor: Essays on Women, Equality, and Dependency. (New York: Routledge, 1999): 28.
- 32.
Butler , Precarious Life, 42.
- 33.
Debra Bergoffen . Contesting the Politics of Genocidal Rape: Affirming the Dignity of the Vulnerable Body. (New York: Routledge, 2012): 78–79.
- 34.
Ellen Feder. Making Sense of Intersex: Changing Ethical Perspectives in Biomedicine. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014): 183.
- 35.
Bergoffen , Contesting the Politics of Genocidal Rape, 2.
- 36.
Bergoffen , Contesting the Politics of Genocidal Rape, 101.
- 37.
Bergoffen , Contesting the Politics of Genocidal Rape, 101–102.
- 38.
Friedrich Nietzsche . On the Genealogy of Morals. Trans. Michael A. Scarpitti. (New York: Penguin Books, 2014).
- 39.
Cynthia Willett . Interspecies Ethics. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014).
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Further Readings
Alcoff, Linda Martín. 2006. Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Brison, Susan. 2002. Aftermath: Violence and the Remaking of a Self. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Butler, Judith. 2005. Giving An Account of Oneself. New York: Fordham University Press.
———. 2009. Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? London: Verso.
Campell, Sue, Letitia Meynell, and Susan Sherman, eds. 2009. Embodiment and Agency. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.
Diprose, Rosalyn. 2002. Corporeal Generosity: On Giving with Nietzsche, Merleau-Ponty, and Levinas. Albany: SUNY Press.
Dreger, Alice Domurat. 1999. Intersex in the Age of Ethics. Hagerstown: University Publishing Group.
Doyle, Laura, ed. 2001. Bodies of Resistance: New Phenomenologies of Politics, Agency, and Culture. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
Garland Thomson, Rosemarie. 1997. Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature. New York: Columbia University Press.
Gordon, Lewis R. 1995. Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism. Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press.
Heyes, Cressida. 2007. Self-Transformations: Foucault, Ethics, and Normalized Bodies. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Huffer, Lynne. 2013. Are the Lips a Grave: A Queer Feminist on the Ethics of Sex. New York: Columbia University Press.
Kittay, Eva Feder, and Ellen Feder, eds. 2002. The Subject of Care: Feminist Perspectives on Dependency. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.
Lee, Emily S., ed. 2014. Living Alterities: Phenomenology, Embodiment, and Race. Albany: SUNY Press.
Mann, Bonnie. 2014. Sovereign Masculinity: Gender Lessons from the War on Terror. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Miller, Sarah Clark. 2012. The Ethics of Need: Agency, Dignity, and Obligation. New York: Routledge.
Murphy, Ann V. 2012. Violence and the Philosophical Imaginary. Albany: SUNY Press.
Nussbaum, Martha. 2011. Creating Capabilities: The Human Development Approach. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Salamon, Gayle. 2010. Assuming a Body: Transgender and Rhetorics of Materiality. New York: Columbia University Press.
Smith, Bonnie G., and Beth Hutchison. 2004. Gendering Disability. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
Sullivan, Nikki. 2001. Tattooed Bodies: Subjectivity, Textuality, Ethics, and Pleasure. Westport: Praeger.
Yancy, George, ed. 2004. What White Looks Like: African-American Philosophers on the Whiteness Question. New York: Routledge.
Young, Iris Marion. 2005. On Female Body Experience: Throwing Like a Girl and Other Essays. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Zeiler, Kristin, and Lisa Folkmarson Käll, eds. 2014. Feminist Phenomenology and Medicine. Albany: SUNY Press.
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Weiss, G. (2018). A Genealogy of Women’s (Un)Ethical Bodies. In: Fischer, C., Dolezal, L. (eds) New Feminist Perspectives on Embodiment. Breaking Feminist Waves. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72353-2_2
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