Reading Notes: Diprose, "Introduction" and "Ethics, Embodiment, and Sexual Difference"

[rax]

This is the introduction from and one chapter of a book called The Bodies Of Women.

This introduction --- thank heavens --- has a clear thesis statement: "Insofar as a moral code may maintain some semblance of order, this is at the expense of justice for women and that the usual approaches to ethics perpetuate and/or remain blind to such miscarriages of justice. My general aim then is to develop a general approach to ethics which takes sexual difference into account." On a first reading of these sentences, I was like "Well of course, that sounds great." Reading more closely --- which retyping these sentences makes me do, which is part of why I do it :) --- I noticed that implication that no moral code can avoid sexism. This is a bold statement.

The author is unconvinced that we can fix things with "dialogue with the other... community action and giving attention to context." Apparently in 1993 a man, entering as a cis man, won a regional branch of the Miss Australia pageants, and this incensed the author. Luckily she explains why: "Admitting men into the objectification process would seem to displace women as a target and make men the object of sexual subjection. But if this can be construed as a victory for feminist ethics, it is a hollow one: The only losers are women. One kind of injustice is only displaced for another..."  I can buy this argument, I think. "The moral, legal, industrial, and interpersonal evaluation of sexual difference is productive: it produces the modes of sexed embodiment it regulates." (a) I like this and (b) I need to keep an eye out for this use of "productive" in other contexts.

Chapter 1, which I won't be reading, is about how traditional "contractarian" ethics don't apply to "women's specific modes of embodiment" because of the structures of surrogacy and of giving birth. Chapter 2 leans heavily on Foucault and Irigaray to look at the way embodiment and identity are constructed "by social discourses and practices." I think the author intends to look at different ways to understand sexual difference, or maybe even different ways to construct it, so as to prevent "women's exclusion from social exchange." Chapters 3 and 4 look at Hegel and deconstruction of Hegel and suggest that we need to be careful about saying we've fixed the oppression of women because we probably missed som, except in theory words, presumably. Chapters 5 and 6 use the implied inferiority of female bodies to male bodies as a tool for exploring economy and bioethics, I think, this chapter summary made less sense to me than the others.

The end of the introduction roughly says "yeah I know focusing on motherhood leaves some of y'all out, tough shit." Uhhh... thanks? And now, the chapter!

...what is with "problematic" as a noun?

The stated theme of this chapter: "the need to rethink the production of individual identity and difference." Without reading the chapter, I can very much get behind that. The way that we determine identities is very much tied up in assumptions about what things are "correct" or "normal" and even when we're using those identities to disrupt normalized categories, we're often supporting the existence of those categories by acknowledging them as things that merit disruption. (This is one of the big catch-22s that I've struggled with in figuring out to explain myself, both to myself and to others.)

Ethics is not just about "moral principles and moral judgement" but is also about place and context. OK. "ethics can be defined as the study and practice of one's habitat, or as the problematic of the constitution of one's embodied place in the world." It's unpacking time! Study and practice of one's habitat, so where one lives both spatially and socially, sure. One's embodied place in the world --- so I'm living in my body, which is read as having XYZ attributes, which is located in Bloomington, IN, part of a set of nested statoids, yup. The constitution of such is the way that that's made --- the boundaries are defined by law, both of my body and of this administrative district, but my body is also constituted by other people's belief that my body is not part of their bodies, and so on and so forth. Googling around suggests that "problematic" as a noun means "the set of problems associated with," or something similar, so... yeah I guess I can see that.

"Our being and the world are constituted by the relationship in." OK, so this takes a similar tack to some of the subject/object stuff as last week's reading, saying that the separation between self and other is something constituted by the way we relate rather than something intrinsic. Someone has already thought about this, says Diprose, and that someone is MICHEL MOTHERFUCKIN' FOUCAULT. OK she doesn't say it quite that way, but... basically. "At least it's not Deleuze?" Huh: "...it is problematic to hold that on the one hand sexed identity is embodied and socially constituted, but that on the other hand one can either abstract from this embodied identity to take the other's position or secure freedom by moving outside the social context of which one is an effect." O RLY. Well, she says she's going to show this, so I should give her a chance, but I'm kind of unconvinced. I'm more willing to believe that you cannot secure freedom by moving outside the social context --- I don't know that there is an outside the social context. But I don't see why you can't take the other's position, yet.

Oh look it's a review of Foucault. Bodies are made by society to fit the needs of society, yup. Operation of power in order to do this, sure, emphasis on moral code, disciplinary power and self-knowledge through confession. (Dammit, I should really read all of Discipline and Punish one of these days.) "The health of bodies has become a question of economic management." Oooh, good call. Come back to the bottom of page 22 when I do a quick reread on this. "Neither party can easily extract themselves from [asymmetrical power relations] without attracting the condemnation of the community." Zing! Ooh, another one: "Those who would seek to ban surrogacy and reproductive technologies (feminists included) perpetuate ... exclusion of the maternal body from self-motivated social exchange." Zing! "Egalitarian discourses and practices do not produce equality or sameness between the sexes..." Zingaga.

There's a really good Spivak quote on p.28 that I'm not going to type out. Foucault says (paraphrased by Diprose) that "by working on our bodies, transforming our habits and expanding our capacities we can create ourselves differently without reference to the normalizing disciplinary structure and without domination or exclusion of the other." Diprose doesn't agree, and I'm skeptical too. Before I read her reasons, here are mine: How do we get out of the structure? If we're creating ourselves differently from what the structure created ourselves as, aren't we implicitly using the structure as a reference even if it's just as a contradiction? ...And if we're creating our _selves_ how can we not be excluding the other as a necessary part of that process? Diprose's objection is that the male body is already the standard work of art and that trying to put a female body into that context is inherently limited. ... I think we might be going different directions with this. Oh no she does come back to the relations with the other as a fundamental part of construction of the self, good, I'm not crazy. (Or she's not.)

Page 36 has interesting stuff on Irigaray and the interval --- "the interval is the distance or difference created between the subject and his others such that he can claim autonomous self-identity... in order that man can constitute his place in the world, woman is denied a place of her own." (And what, dear theorists, are we doing when we deny some women a place by insisting on difference?)

So, what's the goal here again? We were supposed to read this week's reading with an eye to how the transsexual disrupted the traditional ideas of Australian third-wave feminism. Here this is a little easier. While a focus on reproductive bodies alienates all women who cannot or choose not to have children, those women are still somewhat included in the rubric by virtue of societal parsing of them as potential mothers. For trans women (who do not or choose not to pass) this inclusion does not exist; Diprose notes transsexuality only in passing in her introduction to mention that "the literature on transsexualism, for example, is abundant with observations of how male to female transsexuals perform (male) ideals of feminine comportment better than women." Uhhhhh... maybe if you're Christine Jorgensen I guess but I would argue that contemporary observations of transsexualism can alternately focus on how poorly those ideals are met. (for example the whole Serano deceptive/pathetic duality thing) I think I start to see from this paper how the potential for people to cross sex boundaries with societally constructed approval throws a serious wrench into this theory.

Comments

[q10.livejournal.com]

‘I noticed that implication that no moral code can avoid sexism.’

isn't ‘no moral code can avoid _____-ism’, usually wrapped up in a few more layers for a bit more subtlety, sorta a major theme of many arguments in the critical theory of identity? you're obviously much more knowledgeable about this stuff than i am, but that was certainly always the vibe i got.

[rax.livejournal.com]

I am not as knowledgeable as you think I am --- I haven't thought about stuff in terms of morals and ethics much, I usually look more at history or literature. This philosophy stuff is a little heady for me, although I am enjoying digging into it.

[q10.livejournal.com]

the impression i typically get whenever i encounter this stuff, which is definitely an over-simplification, and which may be a radical misinterpretation, is that what they're saying is that any claim on the part of a proposed moral system to be equal-across-identity-groups is always a pretext for smuggling in the values and entrenched advantages of the historically dominant groups as presuppositions, and that therefore the only fair response is a to explicitly adopt a moral code that explicitly makes reference to culturally important identity categories (that is, which is literally ____-ist, albeit for progressive/compensatory/corrective sorts of reasons).

this line of argument always strikes me as resting on an equivocation between empirical facts about the moral orders of real societies (about which it seems largely sensible, give or take various qualifications, exceptions and footnotes) and sweeping claims about the nature of foundational principles in the theory of morality (about which it seems ridiculous and possibly evil).

[ff00ff.livejournal.com]

I'm almost certain that this quote "ethics can be defined as the study and practice of one's habitat" was cribbed from author Frank Herbert, and was probably attributed to his character Liet-Kynes, a planetary ecologist intent on using a tribal society of nomads to terraform a desert planet. The character is a mouthpiece for many pithy pithy statements on ecology as it relates to sociology.

[spacehawk.livejournal.com]

The way that we determine identities is very much tied up in assumptions about what things are "correct" or "normal" and even when we're using those identities to disrupt normalized categories, we're often supporting the existence of those categories by acknowledging them as things that merit disruption. (This is one of the big catch-22s that I've struggled with in figuring out to explain myself, both to myself and to others.)

THIS.

[eredien]

"The moral, legal, industrial, and interpersonal evaluation of sexual difference is productive: it produces the modes of sexed embodiment it regulates." (a) I like this

Forgive me, but this idea--that discussions and evaluations of sexual differences ultimately build on, create, and reinforce those differences, as well as the speech we can use to think and talk about those differences, and hence regulate those differences--is hardly a new idea. That's not to say that you--or anyone--shouldn't like the idea. I like it myself. But I'm not sure what you see in this idea that you haven't seen before, elsewhere.

Chapters 5 and 6 use the implied inferiority of female bodies to male bodies as a tool for exploring economy and bioethics,

Did you ever read The Sexual Politics of Meat? There is also a new one called "The Pornography of Meat."

we're often supporting the existence of those categories by acknowledging them as things that merit disruption.

And of course, even when we choose not to acknowledge such categories, we support their existence through our silence and refusal to acknowledge, which in and of itself is an acknowledgement (just because a space is an emptiness, a negative space, does not mean that it does not exist).

I think that one of the things that so disturbs people when they learn about therianthropy is that it's human-embodied beings acknowledging that the category of "human-embodied being" merits disruption. People don't like to see that category as a category, much less an acknowledgement that it can (or should be) disrupted.

perpetuate ... exclusion of the maternal body from self-motivated social exchange.

Is "self-motivated social exchange" shorthand for "you can make decisions (moral or otherwise) and take social actions on your own behalf, as opposed to making decisions on behalf of others, or yourself and others?" I just want to clarify.

Page 36 has interesting stuff on Irigaray and the interval --- "the interval is the distance or difference created between the subject and his others such that he can claim autonomous self-identity... in order that man can constitute his place in the world, woman is denied a place of her own." (And what, dear theorists, are we doing when we deny some women a place by insisting on difference?)

(Or insisting that there are no differences, or that what differences there are do not matter?)

t I would argue that contemporary observations of transsexualism can alternately focus on how poorly those ideals are met. (for example the whole Serano deceptive/pathetic duality thing) I think I start to see from this paper how the potential for people to cross sex boundaries with societally constructed approval throws a serious wrench into this theory.

Yeah, it must be kind of hard for Diprose to go on "develop[ing] a general approach to ethics which takes sexual difference into account" which forthrightly ignores the sexualit(ies) and gender(s) of those who cannot be socially parsed as possible mothers, at a time when those very same ignored people are working to gain "societally constructed approval" in terms of ethics, sexuality, and gender.

don't have time to engage in detail with all of this right now but

[rax.livejournal.com]

But I'm not sure what you see in this idea that you haven't seen before, elsewhere.

Sometimes a new phrasing connects an old idea up in a new place; that's what happened for me here. Also I've chewed on enough of this stuff that it's not all necessarily in the front of my head at once. :)

[spacehawk.livejournal.com]

"Egalitarian discourses and practices do not produce equality or sameness between the sexes..." Zingaga.

= facially neutral procedural rules, rationales and discourses do not result in equal impact?

(For any axis of difference across which there is a power differential?)

[rax.livejournal.com]

It certainly applies to more than sex, and I like your rephrasing.

[spacehawk.livejournal.com]

Thank you!

We talked a lot about this in law school, with respect to race, gender, sexual orientation, socioeconomic class, disability, etc.

[coffeekitty.livejournal.com]

completely orthogonally - do you play Go?
I could swear that I saw your name on the Mass Go Association member list when I was counting how many women members they had (six) after witnessing an exchange between a woman visitor and some regular members that pretty much guaranteed that she wouldn't ever be back. feh.

[rax.livejournal.com]

Not seriously --- I used to play chess seriously and picked up go as a sideline at one point. The group of go players I spent time with hung out at the Diesel and included other women --- not sure they were all members of the club, though. I think I got some intro membership deal for a year? I went a few times and didn't have bad experiences, but I was always there with the Diesel people. The chess club... there were some great people, but I stuck around as long as I did because I really loved chess, not because the environment wasn't super sexist.