[Framework Post] Week 11: Feminist Discourse.

Moira Gatens’s Power, Bodies and Differences (1992) is a liberating discourse on the revision of body-politics history on which much of today’s body of knowledge has been built upon. This problematises any feminine discourse uses any part of that body of knowledge as a platform from which to depart as these platforms would already be on unequal levels. In revision, Gatens calls for a new body-political approach:

Using Foucault’s approach, the imaginary body can be posited as an effect of socially and historically specific practices: an effect, that is, not of genetics but of relations of power. It would be beside the point to insist that, none the less, this imaginary body is in fact the anatomical body overlaid by culture, since the anatomical body is itself a theoretical object for the discourse of anatomy which is produced by human beings in culture. There is a regress involved in positing the anatomical body as the touchstone for cultural bodies since it is a particular culture which chooses to represent bodies anatomically. Another culture might take the clan totem as the essence or truth of particular bodies. The human body is always a signified body and as such cannot be understood as a ‘neutral object’ upon which science may construct ‘true’ discourses. The human body and its history presuppose each other. (131-132)

But as liberating as Gatens’s proposal might be, it also places almost all other preceding feminist discourse in a questionable light, destablising everything we have come to think or even accept as an improvement. Whilst Gatens means little to “belittle” (123) them, it is her concern that “if previous feminists had not attempted to use dominant theories to explicate women’s socio-political status, the difficulties inherent in that project would not have come to light” (123). Effectively, this piece of writing is to be understood as only, in its purest sense, a critique.

This to me is highly problematic. What then comes out of this critique? And if there were an alternative, a new path in which the advancement of feminist discourse can or must take, where does one go? Gatens speaks clearly and specifically on differentiating and locating body-politics in their rightful context, to break from the false binaries of male/ female, body/ mind, fact/ value, etc so as to discover nuances that all deserve a place in this social structure. While this search for nuances has led many gender researchers to the uncover what is known as the third sex, and an even more complicated gender-sexuality discourse by researchers of gay, lesbian, bisexual, transsexual theories, social advancements based on this discoveries are less than as progressive.

The problem lies in two folds: for one, much of society’s engines are meant to cater to a binary regardless of how liberal the definitions of each participatory term in a pair might be. A generalised idea allows for easier flow and production—even reproduction, some argue. Distinguishing every member of the society as a full and singular bodied entity as deserving its own place alongside established norms whilst would be optimum is a difficult task that society is unable to deliver. Secondly, in order for a true revolution to occur, it seems that everything we know today requires a revision because the very foundation of our wide body of knowledge has been declared false. This is almost a crisis as great as when Copernicus declared the earth not as the centre of this universe. And if every history we have come to known is not a centre by which further works were made, what then do we make of our world? These are exciting times, but nobody said it would be easy.



References:

1. Gatens, Moira. “Power, Bodies and Difference.” Destablising Theory: Contemporary Feminist Debates. ed. Barrett, M, and A Phillips. Cambirdge, UK: Politiy Press, 1992.