Feminist Theories of the
Body
KRYSTAL CLEARY
Indiana University, USA
To discuss feminist theories of the body is
in some ways to discuss feminist theory as a
whole, for “feminism has long seen its own
project as intimately connected to the body,
and has responded to the masculinist conventions by producing a variety of oftentimes
incompatible theories which attempt to take
the body into account” (Shildrick and Price
1999b, 1). Dominant Western intellectual
tradition regards the body suspiciously as
a source of unwieldy and base desires and
functions. Feminist theorists’ contention
with the mind/body dichotomy, however,
has been not only with its insistence upon
disembodied thought but also the devalued
body’s persistent correlation with femininity.
While many first-wave feminist thinkers in
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and
even more contemporary liberal feminists
have similarly devalued or ignored the body
in attempts to demonstrate women’s capacity
for reason and advocate for equality, others
reclaim and rejoice in the body as a site of
valuable knowledge production.
Feminist theory of the body as a collection of literatures is a complex tapestry
of interwoven thought traditions rather
than a monolithic, linear analytical thread.
Indeed, the several notable volumes that
have taken up the project of sketching the
literatures’ contours, such as Shildrick and
Price’s Feminist Theory and the Body: A
Reader (Shildrick and Price 1999a), each map
different genealogical histories and include
a diversity of voices. In tracing the historical development of feminist theories of the
body, Elizabeth Grosz outlines three camps
(Grosz 1994). The first, egalitarian feminism,
includes “figures as diverse as Simone de
Beauvoir, Shulamith Firestone, Mary Wollstonecraft, and other liberal, conservative,
and humanist feminists, even ecofeminists”
(Grosz 1994, 15). The female body in this
category is regarded by some as a barrier
to women’s access to the power afforded to
men in a patriarchal culture and by others
more positively as a unique site of knowledge; both iterations of egalitarian feminism,
in Grosz’s view, “have accepted patriarchal
and misogynistic assumptions about the
female body as somehow more natural, less
detached, more engaged with and directly
related to its ‘objects’ than male bodies”
(Grosz 1994, 15). Social constructionists,
Grosz’s second category, include those who,
like Julia Kristeva, Nancy Chodorow, Marxist
feminists, and psychoanalytic feminists, view
bodies as “the raw materials for the inculcation of and interpellation into ideology
but are merely media of communication
rather than the object or focus of ideological
production/reproduction” (Grosz 1994, 17).
Through this theoretical thread’s insistence
that it is not biology but rather the ways
in which that body has been imbued with
meaning that is oppressive to women, the
body becomes fixed, naturalized, and ahistorical. The last position, sexual difference,
includes thinkers such as Luce Irigaray,
Hélène Cixous, Gayatri Spivak, Monique
Wittig, and Judith Butler. In this camp, “the
body is crucial to understanding women’s
psychical and social existence, but the body is
no longer understood as an ahistorical, biological given, acultural object” (Grosz 1994,
The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Gender and Sexuality Studies, First Edition. Edited by Nancy A. Naples.
© 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2016 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
DOI: 10.1002/9781118663219.wbegss668
2
FEMINIST THEOR IES OF THE B ODY
17–18). The body is instead “interwoven
with and constitutive of systems of meaning,
signification, and representation”; this category, in which I include Grosz herself, is
generally wary of sex/gender distinctions and
“less interested in the question of the cultural construction of subjectivity than in the
materials out of which such a construction is
forged” (Grosz 1994, 18).
Menstruation, reproduction, the medicalization of women’s bodies, motherhood, body
image, beauty practices, disordered eating,
cosmetic surgery, sexuality, sexual assault,
women’s health, media representations, and
countless other thematics animate feminist
attention to the body. Although not academic
in nature, the Women’s Health Movement of
the 1970s and onward marks an important
moment in the history of feminist discourse
about the body in that it sought to disseminate accurate health information to women
and encourage them to become experts on
their bodies, health, and sexualities. Similarly
resisting individualistic and medical models
that pathologize disordered eating, in her
book Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western
Culture, and the Body, Susan Bordo contends
that disorders such as anorexia nervosa and
bulimia must be understood in relation to
the specific cultural contexts from which
they emerge (Bordo 2003). She asserts that
seemingly extreme and gendered disciplinary
body practices such as restrictive eating and
cosmetic surgery should not be viewed as
“bizarre or anomalous, but, rather, as the logical (if extreme) manifestations of anxieties
and fantasies fostered by our culture” (Bordo
2003, 15). In the same vein, Sandra Lee Bartky
employs a Foucauldian analysis of women’s
disciplinary body practices in her essay “Foucault, Femininity, and the Modernization of
Patriarchal Power” (Bartky 2003). The docile
body is often a feminized body wherein
women have internalized a patriarchal male
gaze through which they view their own
bodies, monitor their behaviors, and measure
the success of their femininity. Arguing that
feminist preoccupation with cosmetic surgery
expand beyond the internalized male gaze
theory, Victoria Pitts-Taylor’s book Surgery
Junkies: Wellness and Pathology in Cosmetic
Culture urges us to resist the binary of cosmetic surgery as oppressive/empowering and
elucidates “how in cosmetic surgery the body
becomes a zone of social conflict, coded on
the one hand as a sign of interior wellness and
self-enhancements and on the other hand as
a sign of moral, politics, or mental weakness”
(Pitts-Taylor 2007, 7).
One of the early fundamental contributions of feminist theory that remains central
to discussions of the body is the distinction
between sex and gender. This unhinging of
sex from gender enabled feminist theorists
to assert that sex has a frequently neglected
political aspect and that women’s subordination is the product of unequal social, political,
and economic relations rather than inferior
embodiment. Cleaving sex and gender,
although it has been analytically useful, can
falsely fix sex as a self-evident biological truth.
However, sex is not a precultural fact but, like
gender, a construction of cultural, political,
and scientific discourses that is ideologically
informed by the very gender norms it serves
to naturalize. Far from being natural truths
unearthed by objective methodologies, feminist analyses elucidate how the information
generated by the positivist, empiricist tradition of scientific knowledge production about
the body is actually socially constituted and
situated. For instance, in her piece “The Egg
and the Sperm,” Emily Martin analyzes the
ways in which heteronormative conventions
of sexuality and gender inform both scientific
and popular understandings of reproduction
and fertilization (Martin 1991). In a survey
of science textbooks, Martin finds that the
egg is described as passive “damsel in distress” while sperm are imagined as active and
FEMINIST THEOR IES OF THE B ODY
aggressive in ways that obscure the complex
biological processes at work. Moreover, Anne
Fausto-Sterling’s important scholarship illuminates how scientific knowledge about
gender, sex, and sexuality is not only constructed but has also become naturalized in
our cultural environment (Fausto-Sterling
2000). “The truths about human sexuality created by scholars in general and by biologists
in particular,” she insists, “are one component
of political, social, and moral struggles about
our cultures and economies. At the same
time, components of our political, social,
and moral struggles become, quite literally,
embodied, incorporated into our very physiological being” (Fausto-Sterling 2000, 5).
Fausto-Sterling’s argument that scientific
knowledge is both culturally constructed and
naturalized in the social milieu is perhaps
most clearly demonstrated in her discussions
of intersexuality. She discusses the arbitrary
distinctions between properly sexed and
abnormally configured genitals, as well as
the heterosexist assumptions that inform the
surgical “correction” of intersexed infants.
Scientific and cultural knowledge about sexual difference is therefore socially constructed
and, in the case of intersexed infants, literally landscaped on and in turn naturalized
through the materiality of the body.
The arrival of postmodern theory in the
1990s unsettled and expanded upon early
feminist sex/gender distinctions and examined the relationship between discourse and
materiality. Judith Butler’s work on gender
performativity has profoundly shaped feminist theory’s understanding of gender as a
discursive production. Butler notoriously
argues in Gender Trouble that gender “has no
ontological status apart from the various acts
that constitute its reality” (Butler 1990, 185).
Resisting the notion that one harbors a core
gender identity, she employs the example
of drag to illuminate how gender is “the
repeated stylization of the body, a set of
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repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory
frame that congeal over time to produce the
appearance of substance, of a natural sort of
being” (Butler 1990, 45). Gender, then, is a
verb – a series of acts and reenactments of
learned behaviors, dress, mannerisms, and
so on that only in their ongoing repetition
come to feel and appear to us as natural.
In response to critiques that her theory of
gender performativity fell into the postmodernist trap of focusing on the discursive at
the expense of seriously considering lived,
embodied experience, in Bodies that Matter
she elaborates that “the regulatory norms
of ‘sex’ work in a performative fashion to
constitute the materiality of bodies and more
specifically, to materialize the body’s sex, to
materialize sexual difference in the service of
the consolidation of the heterosexual imperative” (Butler 1993, 2). Much of Butler’s text is
in conversation with other feminist theorists
such as Fausto-Sterling as she argues that
sex has been gender all along in so far as the
materiality of the body and its sex difference
are always already inscribed with gendered
meaning. In Bodies the Matter, Butler also
contributes the concept of the heterosexual
matrix, which outlines the appropriate binaristic categories of sex, gender, and sexuality
as well as the socially acceptable combinations of the aforementioned, and determines
who is within the realm of intelligibility.
Those who fall outside this realm of intelligibility are the objects of heteronormativity.
The fear of the abject prompts a distancing
from it and therefore a reaffirmation of gender/sexed/sexual normalcy for those who
are within the heterosexual matrix. Moreover, those who occupy the social location
of abjection have difficulty accessing what
Butler calls a livable life, which includes social
and political recognition, the support of loved
ones, access to employment, and so forth.
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FEMINIST THEOR IES OF THE B ODY
Postmodern feminist theorizations of
the body and their preoccupation with discourse, however, have been both widely
embraced and fiercely challenged. In Material
Feminisms, editors Stacy Alaimo and Susan
Hekman argue that the body occupies an
absent presence in contemporary postmodern theory. “Ironically,” the editors observe,
“although there has been a tremendous outpouring of scholarship on ‘the body’ in the
last twenty years, nearly all of the work in
this area has been confined to the analysis
of discourses about the body” (Alaimo and
Hekman 2008, 3). This volume argues that
feminist theory has also been captured and
constrained by postmodernism’s rejection
of materiality. Material feminism seeks to
combat the linguistic turn without throwing
the discursive baby out with the postmodern
bathwater. Instead, material feminist thinkers
in this collection seek to forge a rejuvenated
attention to materiality and nature while
still recognizing the importance of language,
representation, and discourse. The authors
collectively insist that “The new settlement
we are seeking is not a return to modernism.
Rather, it accomplishes what the postmoderns failed to do: a deconstruction of the
material/discursive dichotomy that retains
both elements without privileging either”
(Alaimo and Hekman 2008, 6).
Whereas much attention is often paid to
postmodern feminist theory, the contributions of women of color to foundational
feminist theories, particularly those of the
body, are often forgotten. The insistence that
feminist theory not be a monofocal project
can be traced to the interventions made by
feminists of color who have demanded (and
continue to stress) that feminist scholarship
examine the ways in which gender intersects
with other systems of domination and is
therefore experienced differentially among
women across race, class, and sexuality. In
Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa’s collection This Bridge Called My Back: Writings
by Radical Women of Color, the editors state,
“What began as a reaction to the racism
of white feminists soon became a positive
affirmation of the commitment of women
of color to our own feminism” (Moraga and
Anzaldúa 2002, 1ii). The feminist thinkers,
activists, and artists in this original 1981
collection reject not only the expectation
that women of color take on the burden
of bridging racial differences in feminist
spaces but also the reproduction of disembodied knowledge production in feminist
theory. This germinal collection unabashedly
proclaims the body as a site of knowledge
in its focus on “the ways in which Third
World women derive a feminist political
theory specifically from our racial/cultural
background and experience” (Moraga and
Anzaldúa 2002, 1iii). Similarly, Patricia Hill
Collins’s identifies black feminist thought as
“specialized knowledge created by African
American women which clarifies a standpoint of and for black women. In other words,
black feminist thought encompasses theoretical interpretations of black women’s reality
by those who live it” (Hill Collins 2000, 22).
Collins’ Black Feminist Thought, originally
published in 1990, reclaims black women’s
intellectual tradition and articulates an afrocentric feminist epistemology that is rooted
in everyday experiences and resists Eurocentric, masculinist knowledge validation.
Queer of color critique, such as that pursued
by E. Patrick Johnson and Mae G. Henderson,
continues this work of destabilizing static and
binaristic conceptualizations of identity and
rejuvenates intersectional analyses where the
complex embodied experiences of race and
sexuality have been undertheorized.
In the same spirit of challenging feminist
theory to think intersectionally, a myriad of
fields such as the aforementioned queer of
color critique, and also transgender studies
FEMINIST THEOR IES OF THE B ODY
and feminist disability studies, have emerged
that make vital contributions to and profoundly transform feminist theorizations
of corporeality. For example, pioneering
transgender studies scholar Susan Stryker’s
1994 essay “My Words to Victor Frankenstein
Above the Village of Chamounix: Performing
Transgender Rage” argues that trans people
possess a queer relation to nature; “while doctors landscape the aesthetic of naturalness on
their skin, their very existence highlights that
the ‘natural’ itself is a fabrication” (Stryker
2006). The lesson that trans people have
to share, Stryker insists, is that nature and
the body are constructed and technological
products for all people. Feminist disability
studies attempt to challenge, expand, and
transform the ableism of feminist theory
and feminist philosophy more specifically
by putting it into conversation with the
emergent field of disability studies and the
lived embodied experiences of people with
physical disabilities. In The Rejected Body,
Susan Wendell writes, “The more I learned
about other people’s experiences of disability and reflected upon my own, the more
connections I saw between feminist analyses of gender as socially constructed from
biological differences between females and
males, and my emerging understanding of
disability as socially constructed from biological differences between the disabled and
the non-disabled … It was clear to me that
this knowledge did not inform theorizing
about the body by non-disabled feminists
and that feminist theory of the body was
consequentially both incomplete and skewed
toward healthy, non-disabled experience”
(Wendell 1996, 5). Echoing Wendell’s call,
Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s essay “Integrating Disability, Transforming Feminist
Theory” arguably inaugurated the field of
feminist disability studies in 2005 when it was
published in the NWSA Journal (GarlandThomson 2011). Garland-Thomson critiques
5
disability studies’ reinvention of the wheel
through its failure to engage with feminist
theory as it developed its own study of identity. In addition to disability studies’ failure to
engage meaningfully with concepts of gender
and feminist theory, feminist theory fails
to recognize disability. Feminist disability
studies, as Garland-Thomson asserts, are not
simply an additive endeavor; instead, feminist disability studies not only draw from and
critique both fields, but also emphasize that
the integration of disability can and should
transform and expand feminist theorizing
on representation, the body, identity, and
activism.
SEE ALSO: Body Politics; Cosmetic Surgery in
the United States; Eating Disorders and
Disordered Eating; Feminist Disability Studies;
Gender Performance; Mind/Body Split; Sex
Versus Gender Categorization
REFERENCES
Alaimo, Stacy, and Susan Hekman. 2008. In Material Feminisms, edited by Stacy Alaimo and
Susan Hekman, 1–22. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press.
Bartky, Sandra Lee. 2003. “Foucault, Femininity,
and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power.”
In The Politics of Women’s Bodies: Sexuality,
Appearance, and Behavior, edited by Rose Weitz,
25–45. New York: Oxford University Press.
Bordo, Susan. 2003. Unbearable Weight: Feminism,
Western Culture, and the Body, 10th anniversary
ed. Berkeley: University of California.
Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble: Feminism and
the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge.
Butler, Judith. 1993. Bodies That Matter: On the
Discursive Limits of “Sex.” New York: Routledge.
Fausto-Sterling, Anne. 2000. Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality.
New York: Basic Books.
Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie. 2011. “Integrating
Disability, Transforming Feminist Theory.” In
Feminist Disability Studies, edited by Kim Q.
Hall, 13–47. Bloomington: Indiana University
Press. First published 2005.
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FEMINIST THEOR IES OF THE B ODY
Grosz, Elizabeth. 1994. Volatile Bodies: Toward
a Corporeal Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press.
Hill Collins, Patricia. 2000. Black Feminist Thought:
Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of
Empowerment. New York: Routledge. First published 1990.
Martin, Emily. 1991. “The Egg and the Sperm: How
Science Has Constructed a Romance Based on
Stereotypical Male–Female Roles.” Signs, 16(3):
485–501.
Moraga, Cherríe, and Anzaldúa, Gloria, eds. 2002.
This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical
Women of Color, 3rd ed. Berkeley: Third Woman
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Pitts-Taylor, Victoria. 2007. Surgery Junkies: Wellness and Pathology in Cosmetic Culture. New
Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
Shildrick, Margrit, and Janet Price, eds. 1999a.
Feminist Theory and the Body: A Reader. New
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Shildrick, Margrit, and Janet Price. 1999b. “Openings on the Body: A Critical Introduction.” In
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York: Routledge.
Stryker, Susan. 2006. “My Words to Victor
Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix:
Performing Transgender Rage.” The Transgender Studies Reader, edited by Susan Stryker
and Stephen Whittle, 244–256. New York:
Routledge. First published 1994.
Wendell, Susan. 1996. The Rejected Body:
Feminist Philosophical Reflections on Disability.
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