The Site of the Battle: Historical Conceptions of the Female Body as Political Space (original) (raw)

The question of self-ownership, the assertion of sovereignty over one's self and one's body, has been at the heart of historical and political discourses over gender throughout time and place. Given most obviously the legal tradition of women as lacking a comparable legal personhood with men, and thereby having their personhood rendered primarily as an extension of a man's (usually their husband or father), this is not a terribly surprising area of focus. Moreover, perhaps the most deep and profoundly felt form of oppression is that which alienates a person from having a fundamental autonomy over one's actions, and a near-total denial of the validity of their agency and desires. The writing of a history of women, particularly of racialized women, thereby requires an engagement with the multitude of examples of struggle to assert, champion and ultimately regain autonomy and ownership in the face of social oppression. This history, too, is bounded up with both the shifting and positional nature of the identity vectors of both race and gender, fluid as both were across time and place, as well as the similar struggles for autonomy which existed amongst other groups. It is no coincidence that the language used by advocates for women's equality often mirrored that of the wider discourses on social rights in the times and places they were written. In the seventeenth century, for instance, " women writers were acutely conscious of the need to establish their claims to enter full humanity, and to do so by demonstrating their intellectual capacities " (Riley, 1988). This fit in with wider European trends towards Enlightenment rationalism which saw reason and the ability to engage intellectually as the highest human virtues, making the demonstrating of such faculties amongst women a pressing sociopolitical priority. At the same time, these claims to an essential equality by similarity, or equality by non-differentiation between men and women1, often elide the very real and concrete differences in life experiences by gender. Even if it is proper to " historicize rather than take as self-evident the identities of those whose experience is being Carter Vance 1 1 Keeping in mind, of course, that neither of these categories should be viewed as inherently fixed in terms of either constituting characteristics or " essences " of being. Indeed, it is striking to note that certain activities can be defined as " female " or " male " more by social context than the essential activity itself. This is the difference between a " chef " and " homemaker " cooking, for instance.