Notes Towards a Corporeal Feminism

Australian Feminist Studies

Volumn 2, Issue 5, 1987, Pages 1-16

  Grosz, Elizabeth ^a  

^a NONE   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 84878325867     PISSN: 08164649     EISSN: 14653303     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/08164649.1987.9961562     Document Type: Article

References (11)

1. M. Blanchot The Writing of Disaster (University of Nebraska Press), Lincoln, 1986, p 45
2. For a feminist critique of egalitarianism, see M Thornton, ‘Sex Equality is Not Enough for Feminism’, in C Pateman and E Gross Feminist Challenges Social and Political Theory (Allen and Unwin), Sydney, 1986
3. This seems to be one of the major implications of Foucault's ‘genealogical’ analyses, in for example, Discipline and Punish (Pantheon) New York, 1976 and The History of Sexuality Vol 1 An Introduction (Pantheon) New York, 1977
4. For example, in R Descartes ‘The Meditations’ in E Anscombe and P T Geach (eds) Descartes Philosophical Writings (Nelson) Edinburgh, 1954
5. 20th century positions tend to be reductionist rather than momst Most commonly, modern proponents of mind/body split advocate reducing one to the terms of the other Where the body is explained in terms of mind, idealism results, and where the mind is explained in terms of the body, materialism is the consequence Reductiomsm in both forms simply explains away the ‘other’ term instead of integrating them or explaining their connections Today, the materialist reduction of mind to body — particularly the reduction of the mind to the brain — is the most typical ‘answer’ to the problem of dualism
6. The psychoanalytic material is located in the various papers centred on the preoedipal period — including ‘On Narcissism An Introduction’ (S E Vol 14) ‘The Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuaity’(S E Vol 7) and ‘The Ego and The Id’(S E Vol 19) in Freud's work, and the conception of the ‘imaginary anatomy’ in Lacan's work on the mirror-stage, especially ‘The Mirror Stage As Formative of the Function of the I’ in Ecnts A Selection (Tavistock), London, 1977, and ‘Some Reflections on the Ego’, International Journal of Psychoanalysis, Na 34, 1953 In the case of Merleau-Ponty and phenomenology, the concept of embodiment is forcefully outlined in The Primacy of Perception (Northwestern University Press), Evanston, 1964
7. The infant's perception of space is not yet structured in terms of adult notions It has not yet learned to distinguish virtual/specular from real space (Spitz, Merleau-Ponty) - It does not understand perspectives or the relations between figure and ground, which require oppositions that the child has not yet acquired For the infant, space is not yet conceived as a regular grid into which objects are placed or from which they can be removed. Space, in other words, is never ‘empty’, simply subsisting without objects This requires an abstraction from its expenences and an ability to position itself as an object available for inspection by others Instead, the child perceives within a preoedipal space which is largely orally or kinaesthetically, not visually, structured The child perceives a ‘space of adherence’ (Merleau-Ponty), a space that clings to objects and images without distinguishing them
8. Rather surprisingly this preoedipal space — which is occasionally invoked in dreams — is close to mathematical and physicist views which develop non-Euclidian notions of space — Reimannian space, the curved space-time of Einsteinian physics, the impossiblee space of the Mobius strip and the Klein bottle, Finsler's space are all ‘impossible’ notions on a Euclidean model.
9. See, for example, Irigaray's comments on the spatialisation of time and the temporalisation of space in her analysis of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, in her text, L'Ethique de la difference sexuelle, (Edition de Minuit) Paris, 1984.
10. cf. in J. Allen and P. Patton (eds.) M. Gatens ‘A Critique of the Sex Gender Distinction’, in J. Allen and P. Patton (eds.) Beyond Marxism? Interventions After Marx (Intervention Publications) Sydney, 1983, pp. 143–162.
11. For a discussion of the conditions under which the body is claimed as one's own, see E. A. Grosz ‘Language and the Limits of the Body: Kristeva and Abjection’ in Futur* Fall. Excursions into Post-Modernity, (Power Foundation), Sydney, 1987.