ABSTRACT
I have been arguing that justice, as the gift of other possibilities for sexual difference beyond sexual duality, involves paying attention to the way in which sexed identity is constituted as an embodied effect of social discourses and practices which position women as other to men. I have also suggested that, in a social context where a certain kind of male body is already the norm, an aesthetics of self, no less than democratic normalisation, is built against images of the feminine, images which compromise and restrict the reconstitution of women’s modes of embodiment. During that discussion and in previous chapters, I have addressed, in general terms, the assumptions underpinning ethics, that the individual identity comes prior to relations with others and that the individual’s relation to their body is one of ownership and control. What follows is a more concrete refutation of those assumptions in the context of matters raised in chapter 1: biomedical ethics and the ethics of reproductive practices. Using accounts of embodiment from the tradition of existential phenomenology, I will move from an analysis of the place of the body in biomedical ethics to a discussion of the ethics of reproduction and finally to an analysis of the role biomedical science may have in the constitution of sexed bodies.
