The Value of a Second Skin

Abstract

The human person is never merely an individual but lives always in social relation. How we understand those relations affects how we act to change them. My work in the university and in communities outside it has been supported by thinking social relations through feminism, historical materialism, queer studies, and the ‘ good sense ’ of working people. Together they offer a powerful explanation of what it means to be human. All begin with the premise that human beings make history, though not necessarily under conditions of our own choosing. The continued survival of humans as a species depends on meeting human needs or what Marx referred to as the requirements of our ‘ species being’. Expanding upon Marx, some feminist social theorists have recently called this way of seeing human history ‘social ontology’ (Bakker and Gil, 2003: 17). Ontology in the philosophical sense involves the study of the nature of existence. The notion of social ontology conceptualizes the constituents of existence as social being; it underscores the social relations through which the needs of human ‘being’ are met. These relations span political economy, juridical and cultural forms: where work mediates the social and natural orders and becomes labour; where legal and disciplinary regimes regulate action, mobility, life and death; where individuals become subjects, and bodies become meaningful through and against normative prescriptions.