ABSTRACT
This chapter situates feminist cross-cultural comparisons of embodied practices in relation to broader critical analyses of gender, cultural difference and ‘the body’. I begin by exploring how we might understand comparative feminist approaches as linked to wider anti-cultural essentialist frameworks developed within multicultural, transnational and postcolonial feminist literatures. Indeed, feminist parallels drawn between embodied practices understood to be rooted in different cultural contexts, such as ‘African’ female genital cutting (FGC) and ‘Western’ body modifications, are frequently framed by a desire to counter cultural essentialism. In teasing out ‘hidden’ or disavowed similarities between practices, theorists seek to break down and resignify essentialist binaries which reproduce neocolonial assumptions of modernity, cultural progress and gendered agency. I argue, however, that, despite their productive possibilities, these rhetorical strategies often do not move sufficiently beyond the culturally essentialist binaries they seek to contest. Drawing on critical feminist perspectives on embodiment, I suggest that, in their rhetorical recourse to similarity or sameness, cross-cultural comparisons often elide historical, social and embodied particularities. They can also redirect attention away from the complex relations of power through which groups, practices and bodies are constituted as culturally, politically, and indeed morally, different from one another. The chapter also considers how feminist motivations for deconstructing
culturally essentialist representations may be linked to the idea of an ‘unfinished’ humanist project. Through highlighting discursive, motivational and experiential similarities between embodied practices, comparative feminist approaches seek to disrupt racialised depictions of particular groups or
subjects (such as ‘Africans’) as ‘barbaric’, ‘depraved’ and ‘non-human’. In place of such ‘othering’ discourses they construct a notion of underlying, cross-cultural human commonality. Yet, from (at least one strand) of a critical feminist perspective on embodiment, this prospect of a ‘new’ humanism may be inherently problematic. That is, no matter how much resignification of essentialising frameworks and categories takes place, constitutive social and psychic hierarchies will always function to exclude some bodies in delimiting what qualifies as ‘human’. The chapter examines how theorising the links among gender, cultural difference and embodied practice via the notion of a ‘relational economy’ may help to negotiate these counterposed anti-/new humanist perspectives while also enabling a move away from the sameness/ difference dualism which these positions sometimes slip into.
