Renaturalizing the Body (with the Help of Merleau-Ponty)
- 1 January 1991
- journal article
- Published by Cambridge University Press (CUP) in Hypatia
- Vol. 6 (3) , 54-73
- https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1527-2001.1991.tb00255.x
Abstract
Some poststructuralist feminist theorists hold that the body is merely the product of cultural determinants and that gender is a free-floating artifice. I discuss how this “denaturalization” of gender and the body entrenches us yet deeper in the nature/culture dichotomy. The body, I maintain, needs to be “renaturalized” so that its earthy significance is recognized. Through a feminist reappropriation of Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of the body, I develop a noncausal linkage between gender and the body. I present the body as an indeterminate constancy that is culturally and historically contextualized, on the one hand, yet part of our embodied givenness on the other. Interspersed throughout the paper are passages that describe my own bodily condition as I wrote the paper.Keywords
This publication has 4 references indexed in Scilit:
- The Essence of the Triangle or, Taking the Risk of Essentialism Seriously: Feminist Theory in Italy, the U.S., and Britaindifferences, 1989
- Feminism and DeconstructionFeminist Studies, 1988
- Deconstructing Equality-versus-Difference: Or, the Uses of Poststructuralist Theory for FeminismFeminist Studies, 1988
- The shallow and the deep, long‐range ecology movement. A summary∗Inquiry, 1973