Author: Julia Levin
Publisher:
Published: 2008
Total Pages: 274
ISBN-13:
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My dissertation is about embodiment, feminism, and liberation from oppressed ways of bodily being. My primary claim is that a feminist theory of embodiment must account for the phenomenology of multiple and varied embodied persons in multiple and varied social situations, for the genealogical history behind such positions/embodiments/subjectivities, and for the possibility of positive, progressive, liberatory change on both a personal and a political level. This work is important because women, non-whites, the differently abled, gays and lesbians, and others whose embodiments do not conform to the white-straight-male norm of the traditional, Western philosophical canon are still disadvantaged and excluded in many ways that are harmful and wrong. A better theory of embodiment will show why such exclusions and harms are wrong, and will indicate ways to go about righting these wrongs. I approach a liberatory theory of embodiment using two traditionally divergent but in my view complimentary approaches: the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty and the postmodern/poststructuralist approach of Foucault. I argue that Merleau-Ponty and Foucault are both key figures who can serve as resources in the endeavor to construct the liberatory theory of embodiment that I seek, and I further argue that a feminist theory of embodiment will be stronger and more thorough if it draws on both than on either alone. Despite seeming conflicts between the two, their positions can be harmonized into a compelling, robust, and politically useful feminist theory of embodiment. I argue that it is possible to read Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology in concert with Foucault's postmodernism by showing where there are similarities and showing that their differences are complimentary rather than contradictory. For example, Merleau-Ponty reconfigures the concept of subjectivity away from the traditional category that Foucault's postmodernism calls into question in such a way that the two are more in agreement on the concept of subjectivity than is generally recognized. Furthermore, their different approaches can strengthen areas that are lacking in the other: Foucault's genealogical approach to matters of sexuality, for example, provide a destabilization of what could be read as overly sedimented in Merleau-Ponty alone, while Merleau-Ponty's emphasis on bodily knowing and doing point to avenues of potential progressive transformation. My claim is that both figures actually present similar theories of subjectivity as fundamentally embodied and contextualized, yet with different foci that offer different necessary components of a full theory: Merleau-Ponty focuses on the concrete, material aspects of embodied being in his discussions of habits, body images, and the like, while Foucault focuses on the discursive, cultural, historical forces that contribute to a body-subject's construction. Read together, the two provide a theory of embodiment as discursive yet still material; historically and culturally situated, yet still capable of agentic, liberatory transformation. A feminist approach to embodiment that fully draws on both Merleau-Ponty and Foucault has not yet been attempted. Most feminists see either the phenomenological or the postmodern approach as flawed and argue for rejecting one in favor of the other. My claim is that in so doing, they eliminate potentially valuable insights that I find in both Merleau-Ponty and Foucault and thus weaken their theories. In my dissertation, I seek to show that feminist and other liberation theorists will benefit from drawing on the strengths of both Merleau-Ponty and Foucault.
