Contemporary Feminist Body Theories and Mencius's Ideas of Body and Mind (original) (raw)

2000, Journal of Chinese Philosophy

eva kit wah man CONTEMPORARY FEMINIST BODY THEORIES AND MENCIUS'S IDEAS OF BODY AND MIND Contemporary Feminist Reading of the "Ontological" Body Most recently, feminist philosophers and biologists have been trying to destabilize the notion of "biological sex." Judith Butler is one of the former: Her famous argument is that the body positioned as prior to the sign is always "posited" or "signified" as "prior" and "precedes" its own action. If this is so, then there should not be a mimetic or representational status of language or signs that follow bodies, for the body is only signified as prior to signification. 1 The positing process also constitutes and conditions the "materiality" of the body. She states that what enables this positing is a problematic gendered matrix that ontologizes and fixes the "irreducible" materiality into a plethora of taken-forgranted discourses on sex and sexuality. 2 We can sketch at least a few ways these discourses are conducted. First, as Luce Irigaray argues, inasmuch as a distinction between form and matter is offered within phallogocentrism, there is an exclusion of the "female." Within the masculine-female (form-matter) binary, the masculine in fact occupies both poles, and the female is not an intelligible term. Irigaray further argues that the "female" is articulated through a further materiality acting as the impossible necessity that enables any ontology. 3 Second, aside from philosophy, the binding, forming, and deforming of gendered bodies through social prohibitions and the socalled cultural intelligibility criteria of sex also constitute and regulate the fields of bodies. According to Moira Gatens, the body politic uses the human body as its image, model, or metaphor. The body politic uses one type of body (male) to signify various items: diverse bodies; the opposition of the "self" to others; and many forms of oppressive ideologies. All human bodies are part of these systems of exchange, identification, and mimesis. 4 In addition, medical discourses have so far maintained the hegemony of heteropolarity by mapping differences onto bodies that illustrate gender, thereby eliding Foucault's suggestion of sociopolitical construction of bodies under particular kinds of needs and desires. 5