The Political Body

Abstract

The feminist ‘personal is political’ mantra stems from Carol Hanisch and her commentary on the consciousness raising groups of the women’s movement in the late 1960s. Interestingly, Hanisch (1970) referred to these regular women’s meetings as ‘political therapy’ where one of the most important discoveries was that ‘personal problems are political problems. There are no personal solutions at this time. There is only collective action for a collective solution.’ In this statement, Hanisch has captured the mutual influence between individual and society. Moreover, just as each individual physical organism constantly strives for regulation and equilibrium, so too does the social body, in an attempt to construct knowledge and ‘truths’ about human sexuality and gender. Thus, my intent in this chapter is to argue that bodies are intersectional places; bio-psycho-socially imbued and therefore necessarily politically implicated. I refer to the political in terms of power relationships and that our experiences of power or disempowerment are invariably embedded in our bodies and compounded by our everyday lives and social contexts. As a result, our ‘political body’ is a body developed from deep personal experiences, which in turn, significantly shapes our environment.