Abstract
The human body can be regarded in at least two ways: objectively, as a physical and organic body; and subjectively, as the center of orientation and lived affective unity. However, this distinction can lose sight of the fact that the ‘lived body’ is not reducible to subjective idiosyncrasies. Trans-individual norms are embodied too, as Michel Foucault and Judith Butler have shown. Phenomenological investigations of normalization and habitualization help bring these two important dimensions of embodiment together and overcome simplistic oppositions between phenomenological and poststructuralist approaches. These investigations lead into issues of female body optimization and control that we take to be characteristic of contemporary neoliberalist embodiment.
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- 1.
Cf. Judith Butler , Frames of War. When Life Is Grievable (New York: Verso 2010), 33.
- 2.
Merleau -Ponty emphasizes that the body schema is not the result of associations established during experiences, but has to be understood as a Gestalt, that is, a meaningful whole that is irreducible to its parts. Cf. Maurice Merleau -Ponty: Phenomenology of Perception (New York: Routledge, 2012), 114.
- 3.
According to Plessner, this results in a constant de-centering that gives us an ‘eccentric positionality’. Cf. Helmuth Plessner, Die Stufen des Organischen und der Mensch. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1975.
- 4.
Merleau-Ponty 2012, 252.
- 5.
See, for example, Thomas W. Laqueur, The Making of Sex. Bodies and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). Londa Schiebinger (ed.), Feminism and the Body (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
- 6.
Cf. Edmund Husserl , Analysen zur passive Synthesis, Hua XI (Dordrecht: Springer,1966), 214–215; Edmund Husserl , Die Lebenswelt, Hua XXXVIII (Dordrecht: Springer, 2008), 638, 648ff., 662.
- 7.
Because I am my body but also have it as an object, I assume this to be the case for other embodied subjects. That means that the perceived body of the other is never perceived by me purely as a physical object, but as a lived body that is owned and lived through by a subject with similar capacities and feelings. Therefore, I am able to (imaginarily) put myself in the place of the other, and to immediately assume that she has a bodily perspective that would be the same if I were in her place. An even more direct empathic relation can be seen with regard to feelings that are directly expressed through the body, such as pain, anger, or happiness (cf. Merleau -Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception).
- 8.
Edmund Husserl , Die Lebenswelt, 640; Edmund Husserl , Analysen zur passiven Synthesis, 215.
- 9.
Husserl , Die Lebenswelt, 657. In the same way, Husserl discusses constant cases of abnormal perceptions as borderline cases; he counts the experience of blind people, mad people, children, and animals among these cases.
- 10.
Although one could imagine a color-blind population (cf. Husserl Ms. D 13 XIV, 31), at the moment that they meet a population of color-seeing people, Husserl believes they would acknowledge that perception with color will be better suited for a differentiated and true perception of the world. The color-blind person’s perception is in this sense less optimal (Husserl , Die Lebenswelt, 658).
- 11.
This aspect is often overlooked in the research literature . For example, while otherwise giving a very clear and concise presentation of normality in Husserl , Taipale does not discuss the aspect of optimality critically in Joona Taipale, Phenomenology and Embodiment. Husserl and the Constitution of Subjectivity (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2014). The same holds true for Steinbock’s groundbreaking analysis in Anthony Steinbock, Home and Beyond: Generative Phenomenology after Husserl (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1995).
- 12.
Gail Weiss, “A Merleau-Pontian Legacy to Feminist Theory”, in: Continental Philosophy Review 48 (2015), 84. The way we (can) move and explore our environment can also be restricted in various ways due to social and political circumstances. And I cannot is thus not a neutral description of individual disabilities , since it is relative to specific social and cultural situations.
- 13.
Iris Marion Young , “Throwing Like a Girl: A Phenomenology of Feminine Body Comportment Motility and Spatiality”, in: Human Studies 3/2 (1980), 153.
- 14.
Weiss, “A Merleau-Pontian Legacy to Feminist Theory”, 79.
- 15.
This difficulty in elaborating one’s body schema, or better, the dissymmetry in favor of a body image, is also characteristic of racial embodiment: Here, the white gaze of the French colonist alienates the native Antillean from her own body. See Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press 2008).
- 16.
Weiss, “A Merleau-Pontian Legacy to Feminist Theory”, 81–82.
- 17.
Not only acts of signification may be called performative (Cf. Judith Butler , Gender Trouble (New York: Routledge, 1990)), but so may the activities of the body. Every acquisition of skill implies the body’s participation and the active discovery of its abilities and its environment. These processes are not fully regulated or fixed but entail transformations and changes, and even the discovery of new forms of movements and skills.
- 18.
Often, what is considered to be ‘normal’ embodiment or bodily comportment for women is judged as deviant from the ‘optimal’, male norm of embodiment.
- 19.
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish (London: Vintage, 1991), 137.
- 20.
Cf. Maren Wehrle, “Normative Embodiment. The Role of the Body in Foucault’s Genealogy: A Phenomenological Re-Reading,” Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 47 (2016), 56–71.
- 21.
As Oksala concisely puts it: ‘Habit forms the normative mechanism that produces a stable and enduring pattern of being and creates an illusion of a permanent gender core or essence.’ Oksala , Feminist Experience, 114.
- 22.
Weiss, “Uncosmetic Surgeries in an Age of Normativity”, 105.
- 23.
Sandra Lee Bartky : “Foucault , Femininity and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power,” in Feminism and Foucault: Reflections of Resistance, eds. I. Diamond & L. Quinby, (Boston: Northeastern University Press 1988), 75.
- 24.
Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control”, October 59. (Winter, 1992), 3–7.
- 25.
Michel Foucault, 4 Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984 (London: Penguin Books, 1994), 217.
- 26.
Oksala , Feminist Experience, 126.
- 27.
For illuminating discussions of a ‘good health imperative’, see: Talia Welsh, “Fat Eats: A Phenomenology of Decadence, Food, and Health.” In Food and Everyday Life, ed. Thomas Conroy (New York: Lexington Books, 2014); and “Unfit Women: Freedom and Constraint in the Pursuit of Health,” Janus Head 13, no. 2 (2013): 58–77.
- 28.
Both Weiss, “Uncosmetic Surgeries in an Age of Normativity”, and Phipps, The Politics of the Body: Gender in a Neoliberal and Neoconservative Age, highlight the moralism that increasingly accompanies the neoliberal ideology of ‘free choice’. While the choice of optimization is initially considered ‘free’, it is also the only ‘rational’ choice. Those who fail to make it, thus, easily become seen as ‘irrational’, which makes them immediately vulnerable to charges of moral failure. Phipps in particular stresses how thus neoliberal and neoconservative processes of normalization come to reinforce each other.
- 29.
Michel Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).
- 30.
Paul Virilio , The Information Bomb (London: Verso, 2005).
- 31.
Cf. Judith Butler , The Psychic Life of Power (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 9.
- 32.
Pirkko Markula , “Governing Obese Bodies in a Control Society”, Junctures 11 (2008), 53–65.
- 33.
Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing, (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1997), 180–194.
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Jansen, J., Wehrle, M. (2018). The Normal Body: Female Bodies in Changing Contexts of Normalization and Optimization. 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_3
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