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Expressing the World: Merleau-Ponty and Feminist Debates on Nature/Culture

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New Feminist Perspectives on Embodiment

Part of the book series: Breaking Feminist Waves ((BFW))

Abstract

Feminist critical engagement with those sciences which have been put to work to legitimise oppressive social relations, made explicit the cultural situatedness of science and its mediation by the imaginaries in which scientists are placed. In response, what has been termed the ‘new materialism,’ claims to bring ‘the materiality of the human body and the natural world into the forefront of feminist theory and practice,’ in the face of, what it suggests were, overly constructivist accounts emerging from such feminist critique. I link these discussions to the writings of Merleau-Ponty. I suggest that the picture which Merleau-Ponty offers, of our bodies expressing the world, provides a metaphysics which undercuts the apparent opposition of these schools of thought.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Fausto-Sterling, A. Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality, (New York: Basic Books, 2000); Cameron, D., The Myth of Mars and Venus, (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2007); Bleir R., Science and Gender: A Critique of Biology and its Theories on Women. (New York: Pergamon Press, 1984); Butler , J. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. (New York and London: Routledge, 1990).

  2. 2.

    Alaimo , S. and Hekman , S. eds. Material Feminisms. (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2008), 1.

  3. 3.

    The claim of new materialists that previous feminism has been dominated by constructivist accounts has been disputed. See, for example, Ahmed , Sara. “Some Preliminary Remarks on the Founding Gestures of the New Materialism” European Journal of Women’s Studies 15, no 1 (2008): 23–39.

  4. 4.

    Toadvine, T. “The Silence of Nature and the Emergence of Philosophy” The Irish Phenomenological Circle Inaugural Conference Nature, Freedom and History: Merleau-Ponty after 50 Years, University College Dublin June 2011, 7.

  5. 5.

    Baron-Cohen, S., The Essential Difference, Men Women and the Extreme Male Brain. (London: Allen Lane, 2003), 11. Baren-Cohen does, however, accept that sometimes female brains are found in male bodies and vice versa, which raises the question of what makes these female brain types?

  6. 6.

    Cameron, D., The Myth of Mars and Venus, (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 2.

  7. 7.

    The accounts offered for these supposed differences currently utilise three, often interwoven, strands of theory. One is evolutionary psychology. The second is research into differences between male and female brains. The third is ethology or animal studies. For discussion, see: Fehr, Carla. “Feminist Philosophy of Biology” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2011 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.): http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2011/entries/feminist-philosophy-biology/.

  8. 8.

    Baron-Cohen, The Essential Difference.

  9. 9.

    Cameron, The Myths of Mars and Venus, 43.

  10. 10.

    Fine, C. Delusions of Gender: The Real Science behind Sex Differences, (London: Icon Books, 2010), 176.

  11. 11.

    Bleir R. Science and Gender: A Critique of Biology and its Theories on Women. (New York: Pergamon Press, 1984), 52.

  12. 12.

    Fausto-Sterling, A. Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality. (New York, Basic Books, 2000), 241.

  13. 13.

    Stone, A. An Introduction to Feminist Philosophy. (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007), 44.

  14. 14.

    Oudshoorn, N. Beyond the Natural Body: An Archaeology of Sex Hormones. (London: Routledge, 1994), 13.

  15. 15.

    Fausto-Sterling, Sexing the Body.

  16. 16.

    Fausto-Sterling, A. “The Five Sexes: Why Male and Female are Not Enough” The Sciences, 33, no. 2 (1993), 20–25. The scientific scepticism of ‘binary’ sex—that is, the idea that there are men and women and they can be clearly distinguished—started even earlier. In 1968, the Journal of the American Medical Association carried an article by biologist Keith L. Moore, listing nine different components of one’s sexual identity: external genital appearance, internal reproductive organs, structure of the gonads, endocrinologic sex, genetic sex, nuclear sex, chromosomal sex, psychological sex, and social sex.

  17. 17.

    Butler , J. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. (New York and London: Routledge, 1990); Butler , J. Bodies that Matter: on the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ (New York and London: Routledge, 1993).

  18. 18.

    Butler , Gender Trouble, 8.

  19. 19.

    Butler , Gender Trouble, 8.

  20. 20.

    Jagger, G. “The New Materialism and Sexual Difference” Signs 40, no. 2 (2015).

  21. 21.

    The writings are called new materialism to distinguish them both from reductive materialism , which sees scientific facts as determining culture, and from Marxist historical materialism .

  22. 22.

    Alamo, Material Feminisms, 98.

  23. 23.

    See: Alcoff, L. “Gender and Reproduction” and Lennon, K. “Biology and the Metaphysics of Sex Difference” in eds. Gonzalez-Arnal, S., Jagger, G., and Lennon, K., Embodied Selves. (Basingstoke, Palgrave, 2012).

  24. 24.

    Grosz , E. “Darwin and Feminism: Preliminary Investigations for a possible alliance” in eds. Alaimo , S. and Hekman , S. Material Feminisms. (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2008), 24.

  25. 25.

    Grosz , “Darwin and Feminism”, 28.

  26. 26.

    Grosz , “Darwin and Feminism”, 44.

  27. 27.

    Grosz , “Darwin and Feminism”, 44.

  28. 28.

    Here, the Marxist insight that humans moved from evolution into history, and its connected insistence that what becomes nature for us is made available within that history, seems lost.

  29. 29.

    Grosz , “Darwin and Feminism”, 44.

  30. 30.

    Grosz , “Darwin and Feminism”, 44. Also problematically, 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. She quotes approvingly Darwin’s anchorage of ‘differences between the races of man … in sexual selection.’ Darwin : ‘[F]or differences between the races of man … there remains one important agency, namely Sexual Selection, …It can be shewn that the differences between the races of man, as in colour … etc., might have been expected [from] … sexual selection.’ Quoted in Grosz , “Darwin and Feminism”, 35.

  31. 31.

    Lane, R. “Trans as Bodily Becoming: Rethinking the Biological as Diversity not Dichotomy” Hypatia 24 no.3 (2009): 137.

  32. 32.

    Fausto-Sterling, Sexing the Body, 108/9.

  33. 33.

    Here, of particular importance are the writings of Danna Haraway (see the following endnote,) and Karen Barad . See “Posthumanist performativity: Towards an Understanding of How Matter comes to Matter” in eds. Alaimo , S. and Hekman , S. Material Feminisms. (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2008), 120–156.

  34. 34.

    Haraway , D. Primate Visions: Gender, Race and Nature in the World of Modern Science. (New York and London: Routledge, 1989); Haraway , D. “Cyborgs at large: interview with Donna Haraway .” In eds. C. Penley and A. Ross Technoculture, (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press: 1991a), 1–25; Haraway , D. Simians, Cyborgs and Women: the Reinvention of Nature. (New York and London: Routledge, 1991b); Haraway , D. Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan©_ Meets_OncoMouse™: Feminism and Technoscience. (New York and London: Routledge, 1997); Haraway , D. The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007); Haraway , D. ‘Otherworldly Conversations, Terran Topics, Local Terms’, in eds. Alaimo , S. and Hekman , S. Material Feminisms. (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2008).

  35. 35.

    Haraway , D. “Cyborgs at large: interview with Donna Haraway .” In eds. C. Penley and A. Ross Technoculture, (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press: 1991a), 1–25.

  36. 36.

    Haraway , D. ‘Otherworldly Conversations, Terran Topics, Local Terms’, in eds. Alaimo , S. and Hekman , S. Material Feminisms. (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2008).

  37. 37.

    See her accounts of contemporary bio-technology in: Haraway , D. Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan©_ Meets_OncoMouse™: Feminism and Technoscience. (New York and London: Routledge, 1997).

  38. 38.

    Haraway provides us with detailed accounts of how particular biological theories emerge. Reflecting in a lecture on the ‘enzymes of the electro transport system … biological catalysts in energy-producing cells,’ she concludes, ‘Machine, organism and human embodiment all were articulated – brought into particular co-constitutive relations-in complex ways which [were] …historically specific’ (Haraway , “Otherwordly Conversations”, 162–163). The agency of the human, manifest in the articulation, narrative and visual, of the process, required the agency (as she terms it, in a use of the term agency without a suggestion of intention) of the organism , and that of the machine, in ‘past and present … socio-technical histories’ (Haraway , “Otherwordly Conversations”, 163).

  39. 39.

    Merleau-Ponty, M., Phenomenology of Perception, trans Donald A. Landes (London and New York: Routledge, 2012), 30.

  40. 40.

    Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 195. This is not simply the point that emotions, for example, are about things, are intentionally directed at a world; it is that the quality of the emotional state is provided by the way in which the world manifests itself.

  41. 41.

    Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 193.

  42. 42.

    Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 200.

  43. 43.

    Merleau-Ponty, M., “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence”, in The Merleau Ponty Aesthetics Reader ed. Johnson, G. A. (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1993), 104.

  44. 44.

    Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 404–407.

  45. 45.

    Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 405.

  46. 46.

    Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 406. See also the discussion in Hass, L. Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2008).

  47. 47.

    Hass, Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy, 231.

  48. 48.

    Merleau-Ponty, ‘Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence’, The Merleau Ponty Aesthetics Reader, 112.

  49. 49.

    Merleau-Ponty, ‘Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence’, The Merleau Ponty Aesthetics Reader, 89.

  50. 50.

    Merleau-Ponty, ‘Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence’, The Merleau Ponty Aesthetics Reader, 94.

  51. 51.

    Heidegger , M. “The Origin of the Work of Art” in Poetry Language Thought, trans Albert Hofstadter (Harper Collins, New York, 1971).

  52. 52.

    Merleau-Ponty, M. Institution and Passivity, trans. Lawlor and Massey, with a foreword by Claude Lefort. (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2010).

  53. 53.

    Merleau-Ponty, Institution and Passivity, 6.

  54. 54.

    Lefort forward to: Merleau-Ponty, Institution and Passivity, xi.

  55. 55.

    Merleau-Ponty, Institution and Passivity, 11–12. See the discussion in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews (11).

  56. 56.

    Merleau-Ponty, Institution and Passivity, 6.

  57. 57.

    Merleau-Ponty, Institution and Passivity, 9.

  58. 58.

    Merleau-Ponty, Institution and Passivity, 49–50.

  59. 59.

    Merleau-Ponty, Institution and Passivity, 49–50.

  60. 60.

    Merleau-Ponty, Institution and Passivity, 15.

  61. 61.

    Forimages,seehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jwk2__Qn3_0&noredirect=1

  62. 62.

    The instituted/instituting framework of linguistic practices is what those insisting that trans women are not real women seem wholly unaware of. For recent debates, see Jenni Murray, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/03/05/jenni-murray-transgender-women-not-real-women/, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/news/chimamanda-ngozi-adichie-transgender-women-channel-four-a7625481.html.

  63. 63.

    Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 195.

  64. 64.

    Merleau-Ponty, M. Nature: Course Notes from the Collège de France trans. Dominique Séglard (Evanstan: Northwestern University Press, 2003), 206 (translation modified Toadvine 2011).

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  1. University of Hull, Hull, UK

    Kathleen Lennon

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  1. University College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland

    Clara Fischer

  2. University of Exeter, Exeter, United Kingdom

    Luna Dolezal

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Lennon, K. (2018). Expressing the World: Merleau-Ponty and Feminist Debates on Nature/Culture. 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_7

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