BERGOFFEN'S DISRUPTING THE METONYMY OF GENDER (original) (raw)
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Radical Philosophy Review, 2011
T he ego is first and foremost a bodily ego; it is not merely a surface entity, but is itself the projection of a surface." 1 Freud's famous claim has sparked a host of responses within psychoanalysis, phenomenology, and queer theory. Gayle Salamon's excellent new book addresses the ways in which these fields speak of the body. In order to highlight the scope and limits of embodiment and sexual difference, she examines how bodies that are not normatively sexed and gendered raise questions about relationships between the psychological and the material and how these relationships may be embodied and lived. Noting that a) the philosophical canon has only rarely addressed the challenge to traditional accounts of embodiment that gender variation poses, and also that b) the nascent field of trans studies does not yet utilize the theories of embodiment that phenomenology and psychoanalytic theory offer, Salamon aims in Assuming a Body to "bring psychoanalytic, phenomenological, and transgendered bodies proximate enough so that their similarities might become more visible and their differences might be brought into productive tension with one another" (10). This is not a book about why one thinker's theories can beat up another thinker's theories. There are not so much winners and losers as there are pieces of a puzzle that fit together 1. Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id, trans. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton, Inc., 1960), 26.
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Although Beauvoir’s notion of becoming a woman is frequently understood as a gradual and protracted process, Beauvoir also explicitly sees it as a brutal, immediate, and definitive transition. This alternative temporality becomes clear when we attend to Beauvoir’s repeated use of the reflexive verb se faire (to make oneself) throughout The Second Sex. In assuming the attitude of se faire objet (making oneself an object), a girl transforms the structure of her prereflective consciousness from a child’s consciousness where her body is at the center of her subjectivity to a double, divided consciousness that is both her own and the conduit for another’s desires. This opens a new ontology of sexual difference. Being a woman is not about taking on a construct, set of performances, or sexual style, but assuming a secondary perspectival configuration of prereflective consciousness that makes such styles and performances possible.
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Hypatia, 1999
The paper argues that the philosophical starting point of Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex is the phenomenological understanding of the living body, developed by Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. It shows that Beauvoir's notion of philosophy stems from the phenomenological interpretation of Cartesianism which emphasizes the role of evidence, self-criticism, and dialogue.
the Cambridge History of Christianity: Early Medieval Christianities, c. 600-1100, 2008
This chapter unearths vestiges of classical gender constructions embedded in the writings of early medieval churchmen, including Isidore, who served a new political and cultural context. The analysis centers on the body and its parts – mouth, vulva, and phallus – in order to reconstruct the medical and philosophical understanding of “sex” as well as the ideological use of “gender” in influential texts of the early medieval period. Although the focus here is clerical, priestly anxieties concerning bodily control and purity were transferred – often in highly competitive modes – to elite lay circles.
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