ABSTRACT
The body has become increasingly important to feminist theory as scholars have rejected the liberal Enlightenment understanding of humanity. According to that model, reason and the intellect are the defining aspects of being human. The body is at best a superfluous casing for reason, at worst an impediment to reason functioning purely. By contrast, the feminist legal theorists in this section position the body as integral to our experience of being human. Their chapters emphasize the importance of material embodiment in any modern feminist legal project. Isabel Karpin and Roxanne Mykitiuk discuss the move within feminist theory
from thinking about sexual difference to thinking about embodied difference. Bodies that deviate from a constructed “normal” body are pathologized by both biological and legal discourses, which construct, reinforce, and only sometimes challenge a notion of the normative self and normative body (coded male). The authors point out that feminist legal theory has consistently and successfully challenged the notion that the self is bounded, independent, autonomous, and free to make rational decisions. The authors offer multiple illustrations of the fluidity, contingency,
and dependency of the embodied self: reproductive technologies that challenge normative notions of filial attachment, the contested line between self-other in pregnant bodies and conjoined twins, the “difference” attached to the disabled body. They argue that law should move beyond “regularizing, normalizing, and stabilizing” material bodies. Instead, following earlier feminist work, they reimagine the self, the body, and the connection between them (an embodied self). With the primacy of the “universal, white, male, able-bodied” subject effectively challenged by feminist scholarship, the authors see an opening for the law to reconceptualize the body as multiply different, to address needs specific to the differently abled, and to be capable of containing all embodied and vulnerable selves in its scheme of justice. Dorothy Roberts’ chapter focuses on how neoliberal policies in the US are
detrimental to women’s reproductive freedom. These policies discourage or punish poor, minority women’s childbearing, even as they promote the childbearing of wealthy, white women through reproductive genetic technologies.
Reprogenetics, often hailed as allowing women greater choice in selecting their children’s traits, should be understood as a regulatory mechanism that pressures women to have only certain kinds of children. Roberts argues that neoliberal policies encourage shifting responsibility for
poverty and systemic social inequities from the state to the individual and create a “stratification of childbearing” in the US. Wealthy women are encouraged to take responsibility for potential disability and/or illness in their children through genetic technologies, while poor women find their reproduction punished through government refusal to provide basic aid or services aimed at addressing poverty, inequity, and health care needs. Roberts views both these developments as policies that “obscure” the state’s
responsibility in addressing poverty and other social inequities. She encourages women to reject policies supporting a “reproductive hierarchy,” which are harmful to the reproductive freedom of wealthy and poor women. She calls on women to support policies that will “improv[e] the social conditions that determine children’s welfare.” Michael Thomson is concerned with the common construction of the male
body as bounded and invulnerable in opposition to the porous, vulnerable female body. The male body is typically taken as the “benchmark” body and even equated to the “body politic.” Thompson uses Fineman’s work on vulnerability as a starting point for his inquiry into why the male “enfleshed, lived body” attracts so little attention in feminist legal theory. His chapter explores the political effects of the social-discursive construction of gendered bodies as “in/vulnerable,” as well as attempts to move beyond the benchmark male body by challenging the normative conception and arriving at a fuller understanding of the lived male body. Thomson wants to avoid any ensconcing of “male victimhood” in his focus on
the male body. However, since it is constituted as “phallic” and “impenetrable,” “bounded” and “safe,” Thomson deems locating vulnerability in the male body as important. Concentrating on circumcision, he argues for a feminist exploration of the male body’s vulnerability. This exploration could go beyond normativity to allow renegotiation of social relations through the explanation of shared vulnerability. This new project, Thomson hopes, will help in “re-writing” the “in/vulnerable” male body in the larger context of multiple vulnerabilities.
