-Alice Notley, Mysteries of small houses, 134
i was thinking that maybe there should be a section for dissident bodies on the website? there has been such a wealth of great stuff published in the last ten years in the field of disability studies that has been invaluable in challenging my notions of bodies and knowledge. really reshaped my whole focus and made me reexamine all of my fundamental assumptions and opened my eyes to so many obscured power operations. i would also like to recommend the book Altered conditions: disease, medicine, and storytelling. a good study that explores how medical narratives are "instrumental in the production of embodied stories in the law, in social ideologies, and in human experience." looks a lot at hermaphroditism, birth malfunctions, and aids. - student Amanda St John
Did you know there is such a thing as a mirror twin? The embryo splits after some left and right characteristics are already established, so that although they look identical the resulting 'identical' twins are subtly opposite: one is left-handed and the other right-handed, for example. I read a story yesterday about twin girls called Maureen and Mavoureen who barely out of high school went into politics. Maureen ran for office and Mavoureen was her campaign manager. Maureen was elected onto San Diego City Council at 25 and later was mayor. Mavoureen remained her behind-the-scenes helper. Mavoureen is the left-handed one and one inch taller. One of their friends was quoted as saying Mavoureen is more fun, "maybe a little more daring when she plays, a little looser, a little more at ease. Maybe it's the fact that she drinks and Maureen doesn't." - packet correspondence |
I am saying embodiment rather than cultured bodies because I would like to see the culturedness of bodies nested as a subset within the bodiness of bodies, and that nested within the bodiness of the physical world.- faculty correspondence
Encultured bodies: sociology, psychology, anthropology, cultural studies
The care of the self from McWhorter, Bodies & Pleasures.
One of the four domains of human endeavor and technical innovation, according to Foucault's list, is that of self-cultivation. Part of the work of creating a way of life-the part that springs most readily to mind when we hear the word style-is the work of producing patterns of personal behavior, value systems, networks of intimate relationships, and both the practices that sustain them and the rules that govern them. Foucault refers to this work as "ethics." Ethics, then, is an activity-which may or may not include reference to a particular code. To engage in ethics is to establish patterns of conduct, routines that evince values and that create values. To engage in ethics is to create and enact a way of life.
At the level of an individual human life, ethics is probably the most important domain within which freedom is exercised. "[F]for what is ethics," Foucault asks, "if not the practice of freedom, the conscious [réfléchie] practice of freedom?" (ECS, 284). This is so whether the way of life one establishes avows its origin in freedom or denies it; in other words, this is so whether you acknowledge that to some extent you chose your way of life and take responsibility for it or you claim only to be following the dictates of some transcendent power. . . . If we could do nothing but obey some other person, some deity, or some sort of genetically programmed rules, we couldn't be ethical. Ethics has to do with actions and choices, not with mindless behavior. But freedom is not only a necessary condition for the possibility of ethics, as Kant claimed; ethics is the form that freedom takes. When people think about how to live, when they reflect upon their resources and options and consciously construct patterns of behavior for themselves, they are engaging in ethics and at the same time they are exercising freedom. Ethics is freedom stylized, shaped, given a form. Ethics is the work of the artist of freedom.
Obviously, the ethics (the set of practices) that we need to cultivate if we are to oppose normalizing regimes must be one that acknowledges its own contingency and affirms its origins in freedom. That kind of ethics-practices of reflective, artistic self-transformation-Foucault often refers to as "caring for the self." Care here is understood as cultivation and development of potential, capacities, talents, and strengths. But this cultivation does not take place in relation to the dictates of some ideal of "humanity" or some code of conduct imposed on us all by the gods or in relation to some essence hidden deep inside the self. Care goes beyond the mere drawing out of what was already there; in caring for yourself, you don't just coax the embryonic self to full maturity. There is no predetermined shape that maturity must take; there is no telos. Caring for ourselves is artistic work; it is self-stylization that is an affirmation of becoming other than we are.
But how would caring for ourselves help us to oppose networks of domination, whatever they might be?
Foucault notes a couple of factors that work against our making care for the self a priority. One amounts to a sort of perversion of care for the self . . . Our society encourages not so much care for the self as another process, one we often hear called "self discovery." . . . a kind of self-absorption that attaches significance to the minutiae of personal life [coffee, brand name jeans, etc.]. . . This kind of self-absorption is in effect a refusal of creative processes. . .
. . . care of the self need not be anti-social. It is even possible that putting care for one's self above all else might mean developing the competence and self-confidence that make true generosity possible, the peace of mind that makes real sharing possible, and the desire for community that makes honesty, patience, and cooperation paramount.
. . . [But] . . .
There are no guarantees. . . . [No] one engages in any sort of ethical practice-no one establishes routines, values, systems of meaning-alone. Self-transformation and creation (as well as self-destruction) occur in contexts, in networks of power and knowledge already in place. . . . And [one's] ethics has got to be sustainable within those subcultures to which I remain tied.
From Hypatia 16.3 (2001) 98-105 Symposium Reading Ladelle McWhorter's Bodies and Pleasures by Ellen K. Feder:
McWhorter argues that Foucault's work in no way precludes agency. In her fifth chapter, "Natural Bodies: Or, Ain't Nobody Here but Us Deviants," she provides an account of embodied agency through a genealogy of the Western philosophical tradition. The tradition that advances a "conception of bodies as ahistorical givens distinct from minds" (McWhorter 1999, 142) functions, she shows, to define political questions in Lockean terms of "ownership." Within this framework, bodies are understood as property to be owned, that is, they are not "political agents or well-springsof political strength; they are simply sites of domination, much like geographical territory or natural resources" [End Page 101] (McWhorter 1999, 143). Of course, understanding the conceptualization of the body in these terms does not minimize the powerful effects of normalization as McWhorter experienced them. But in providing a detailed account of how subjugation works, genealogy provides a means to understand how bodies might be differently conceived, how political questions can be transformed, and how lives may be differently lived.
McWhorter takes up the challenge of undertaking to "practice [a different] knowing of myself as a minded body" (McWhorter 1999, 161), beginning with the unlikely practices of gardening and line dancing. The experience of gardening for the first time brings to McWhorter a transformed regard for the maligned Platonic chora that she relates first to the dirt in her yard, and then to her own body (McWhorter 1999, 166). Literally creative, active, and self-perpetuating, chora, dirt, and her body are not things to be "overcome," as Western philosophy has it. Line dancing effects a similar transformation in her regard for her body and its capabilities. The experience of line dancing teaches her the joy of the experience of a disciplined body. Line dancing also provokes unexpected questions concerning McWhorter's recognition of her whiteness. While McWhorter writes that she does not fully understand "that feeling" of whiteness she encounters in the moment of pulling up her boots, she does understand that the implication of her own genealogy with a dualist conception of minds as separate from bodies encourages her to ignore her whiteness in her daily life. And it is this same genealogy, she sees, that makes race matter in her daily life. . . .
Fittingly, McWhorter elaborates on Foucault's distinctive understanding of the possibilities for opposing "normalizing regimes" in the final chapter entitled "Counterattack: An Ethics of Style." Ethics comprises "the work of producing patterns of personal behavior, value systems, networks of intimate relationships, and both the practices that sustain them and the rules that govern them" (McWhorter 1999, 194). For Foucault, it is in and through ethics that freedom is exercised:
When people think about how to live, when they reflect upon their resources and options and consciously construct patterns of behavior for themselves, they are engaging in ethics and at the same time they are exercising freedom. Ethics is freedom stylized, shaped, given a form. (McWhorter 1999, 195)
When McWhorter engages in practices that move her to live differently than regimes of sexual or racial normalization demand that she live, when she stops taking for granted the rules that had unreflectively ordered her life, she exercises freedom. When she lobbies her congressional representatives as a member of Virginians for Justice, or when she pulls on her boots for a night of line-dancing at Babe's, she experiences herself "as other than what [I] have been made to be" (McWhorter 1999, 195). 1
Accessed: http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/hypatia/v016/16.3feder.html