ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces and examines the key conceptual tools I employ throughout the book. In Chapter 1, I argued that feminist rhetorical strategies that link embodied practices across cultures are problematic when they fail to take into account historical, social and discursive differences which affect how practices have been constituted, experienced and mobilised. When these comparative approaches collapse into sameness they can prevent in depth analysis of the specific processes through which cultural essentialism and racism are perpetuated with respect to embodied practices such as FGC, cosmetic surgery, veiling and anorexia. They may also paradoxically reify the racialised hierarchies that anti-essentialist theorists claim to want to disrupt. Thus the key question guiding this chapter is, what critical frameworks can we draw on to theorise the contingent particularity of embodied practices – as well as the constitutive links between them – without falling into the traps of cultural essentialism or disembodied, ahistorical sameness? My analysis engages with feminist, postcolonial and queer approaches to
intersectionality, relationality and embodiment. Drawing on a selection of key texts, I examine the critical tools each set of literature offers my own project while also exploring their limitations. My focus throughout is on mapping the fruitful ways in which intersectionality, relationality and embodiment overlap with, complement and critique one another. The overlaps are illustrated by my selection of texts for discussion, such as those of Chandra Talpade Mohanty (1991, 2002), Judith Butler (1999/1990, 1993, 2004a) and Sara Ahmed (2000, 2004a, 2006), which straddle and productively integrate insights from two or more of these areas of analysis. Through probing both the differences between such literatures and the ways in which they merge and intersect, I aim to flesh out a critical, feminist framework for addressing how particular embodied
practices and/or their imagined subjects have been compared or analogised within feminist literatures, and the potential theoretical, social and political effects of these rhetorical strategies. This interpretive framework will inform my critical analysis of feminist cross-cultural strategies in Chapters 3 and 4, as well the alternative relational approach I develop in Chapter 5.
