Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism

Theories of Representation and Difference

by Elizabeth Grosz

"The location of the author's investigations, the body itself rather than the sphere of subjective representations of self and of function in cultures, is wholly new.... I believe this work will be a landmark in future feminist thinking." — Alphonso Lingis

"This is a text of rare erudition and intellectual force. It will not only introduce feminists to an enriching set of theoretical perspectives but sets a high critical standard for feminist dialogues on the status of the body." — Judith Butler

Volatile Bodies demonstrates that the sexually specific body is socially constructed: biology or nature is not opposed to or in conflict with culture. Human biology is inherently social and has no pure or natural "origin" outside of culture. Being the raw material of social and cultural organization, it is "incomplete" and thus subject to the endless rewriting and social inscription that constitute all sign systems.

Examining the theories of Freud, Lacan, Merleau-Ponty, Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida, etc. on the subject of the body, Elizabeth Grosz concludes that the body they theorize is male. These thinkers are not providing an account of "human" corporeality but of male corporeality. Grosz then turns to corporeal experiences unique to women — menstruation, pregnancy, childbirth, lactation, menopause. Her examination of female experience lays the groundwork for developing theories of sexed corporeality rather than merely rectifying flawed models of male theorists.

Genres: Feminism, Philosophy, Nonfiction, Theory, Academic, Gender, Gender Studies

250 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 1993

About the author

Elizabeth Grosz is a professor at Duke University. She has written on French philosophers, Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Luce Irigaray and Gilles Deleuze.

Grosz was awarded a Ph.D. from the Department of General Philosophy at the University of Sydney, where she became a lecturer and senior lecturer from 1978 to 1991. In 1992, she moved to Monash University to the department of comparative literature. From 1999 to 2001, she became a professor of comparative literature and English at the State University of New York at Buffalo. She taught in Women's and Gender Studies at Rutgers University from 2002 until joining Duke University in 2012.

(from Wikipedia)

Reviews

[Myriam · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is an interesting read concerning the materiality of gender. Grosz's reading of Merleau-Ponty is so engaging it leads one to want to read the original; Merlau-Ponty might be better know to readers of Fanon -- which is why it is curious that for all of her investigation of the body as an "inscriptive text," Grosz fails to pay any attention to race on pretty much any level of her reading of "women." In this sense, a disappointing read. In terms of mainstream feminist thought (prior to the over taking of the field by J. Butler), it is thoughtful and well realized.

[Michael A. · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great introduction to embodiment and feminism. I feel that this book is deeply unsatisfying in some ways. Namely that: Really not buying into sexual difference as something preontological and preepistemological. To put a different way, unsure of what seems to me a neo-Spinozist framework that precludes any notion of sublation, which leaves us with no possible bridge of communication between sexes - how is communication in general even possible if some irreducible alterity is the constitutive element of ontology? This seems to me a problem of my own ignorance rather than her framework, however. There is transphobia here. She does note that intersex people exist, but to me they (and trans people) are relegated to the excremental position she notes in chapter 8... their position in Grosz's model is that of dirt, the flows that upset the order of things. It is also very telling that she sees the 'transsexual' as essentially male... a lot of underwhelming (to put it mildly) stuff here, and I do hope she has rectified these shortcomings in some way (this book was written in the late 80s/early 90s after all). Another reviewer noted that the 'woman body' here is white, I think it is undoubtedly cis as well. Though her transphobia is repugnant, it is mercifully contained (?) to a paragraph towards the end of the book. Interesting project would be to see if this project rests on transphobic presuppositions. Personally I feel she gives us plenty of materials to account for their existence without pathologization, so her blind-spot here to me is probably more a personal distaste/dislike than anything that necessarily follows from her premises.

I guess to put it succinctly, I am still not entirely convinced by differential ontology, but I need to read more before I render any sort of definitive, even if provisional, judgment.

That being said, this book opened me up to a new way of thinking. Her tracing of the history of the body and subjectivity and the Mobius strip relationship they have in Freud/Lacan, Merleau-Ponty, Nietzsche, Kafka, Foucault, Deleuze & Guattari, Irigaray, and Kristeva is top notch. Her writing is clear and intelligible, which is especially impressive given the difficult subject matter.

I deeply appreciate books that get me to think in a new way and that open new avenues of thinking, regardless of the deep flaws they may contain.

[Farren · Rating 2 out of 5]

I have a body, etc.

[Rachel · Rating 3 out of 5]

One start down for the really bizarre and out-of-place transphobia at the end, which actually seemed to contradict the argument of the rest of the book and didn't match the rest of the text's thoughtfulness and nuance.

[Stef Rozitis · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was difficult and Grozs acknowledges the difficulties of her task and the resultant imperfections of her theory. One problem I had was at the end there was a completely needless transphobic moment, we certainly could have done without that. For the rest of it she runs through various theorists, mostly (thankfully) to critique them and leave them behind but she gets stuck on Deleuze and Guattari, which she shows to be problematic yet useful.

I want more development on some things. Grozs is very clear about wanting neither a binary vision nor monism but I feel at the end (especially in the transphobic paragraph) she returns to a binary a woman and man as ultimately unknowable to each other. It seems that we have then travelled all that way for nothing? I felt the mobius strip had some potential but needs to be developed more. Similarly she critiques woman as liquid (menstruation, milk etc), man as solid (erection) and I agree with her, everything she critiques is limiting and partial but she does not really begin to show another perspective. It's one of those bits of writing that deconstructs but then leaves you bereft in the ruins.

I suspect the original plan was to use this as a foundation to write more but then other theorists (eg Butler) took over the field. Still I wish someone would develop theory of embodied differences, not to erase gender-fluidity but to help make sense of bodies that do menstruate and risk pregnancy and such!

[Jenn Avery · Rating 5 out of 5]

Grosz is one of my favorite theorists today. She has such an incredible way of pushing the envelope of ways of thinking about the self, the body, or the world yet she can also break complexities down to bite-able bits. I revisit her works when I design any course centered on body politics or gender theory. She cuts my prep time in half.

[Sarah Brewer · Rating 3 out of 5]

So this is a good book on feminist theory at points. It spends a lot of time discussing what last theorists have said and how that relates to feminist theory. I found the second half of the book to be better than the first half. It took a while for new theory to be talked about instead of just recapping and explaining what other theorists have said in the past. I do think that this book led the groundwork for Judith Butler to become a contemporary feminist/gender theorist. I do think that Butlers work is more valuable in terms of understanding where gender theory is at today.

[Madelyn · Rating 3 out of 5]

“My hypothesis is that women’s corporeality is inscribed as a mode of seepage” (Grosz 203) ; “the metaphorics of uncontrollability, the ambivalence between desperate, fatal attraction and strong revulsion, the deep-seated fear of absorption, the association of femininity with contagion and disorder, the undecidability of the limits of the female body (...), its powers of cynical seduction and allure are all common themes in literary and cultural representations of women”

[Ioana Fotache · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was really educational and I loved the multiple historical perspectives on the body, but then the author had to drop a transphobic comment towards the end it and it kind of ruined it for me. How can you write a book criticising the lack of inclusion and variety within the analysis of the body and just completely dismiss bodies like that?

[samantha · Rating 5 out of 5]

Introduction
The wager of the book: that subjectivity can be thought, in its richness and diversity in terms quite other than those implied by various dualisms. Dualism is the belief that there are two mutually exclusive types of "thing," physical and mental, body and mind, that compose the universe in general and subjectivity in particular.
FEminists and philosophers have ignored the body, put it in subordinate or dependent position. Remained uninterested in or unconvinced about the relevance of refocusing on bodies in accounts of subjectivity
The objective of the inversion attempted here is to displace the centrality of mind, the psyche, interior, or consciousness (and even the unconscious) in conceptions of the subject through a reconfiguration of the body. If subjectivity is no longer conceived in binarized or dualist terms, either as the combination of mental or conceptual with material or physical elements or as the harmonious, unified cohesion of mind and body, then perhaps other ways of understanding corporeality, sexuality, and the differences between the sexes may be developed and explored which enable us to conceive of subjectivity in different terms than those provided by traditional philosophical and feminist understandings.
The wager is that all the effects of subjectivity, all the significant facets and complexities of subjects, can be adequately explained using the subject's corporeality as a framework as it would be using consciousness or the unconscious.
All the effects of depth and interiority can be explained in terms of the inscriptions and transformations of the subject's corporeal surface. Bodies have all the explanatory power of minds.
This project does not involve the abandonment of the terms associated with the subject's psyche or interior. It is not part of a reductionist endeavor. It does not claim that notions such as agency, reflection, consciousness-indeed, all the categories of interiority-are unnecessary, useless, or wrong or that these terms are capable of ready transcription into other terms. Rather, {interiority} can be re-mapped, refigured, in terms of models and paradigms which conceive of subjectivity in terms of the primacy of corporeality, which regard subjectivity on the model not of latency or depth but of surface. It is for this reason that I have sought out models and conceptions of corporeality that, while nondualist as well as nonreductionist, remain committed to both a broad, nonphysicalist materialism and an acknowledgment of sexual difference.
This book is about sexuality. This has four definitions
1. Drive, impulse or propulsion, directing a subject toward an object.
2. An act, a series of practices and behaviors involving bodies, organs, and pleasures, usually but not always involving orgasm
3. Identity. The sex of bodies, no commonly described by term gender, designates two different forms, understood by means of the binary opposition of male and female
4. Refers to set of orientations, positions, and desires, which implies that there are particular ways in which the desires, differences, and bodies of subjects can seek their pleasure.
As a concept, sexuality is incapable of ready containment: it refuses to stay within its predesignated regions, it seeps across boundaries into areas that are apparently not its own. It renders even the desire not to desire as sexual; it leaks into apparently nondrive-related activities through what Freud described as sublimation, making any activity a mode of its own seeking of satisfaction.
It is excessive, redundant, and superfluous in its languid and fervent overachieving. It always seeks more than it needs, performs excessive actions, and can draw any object, any fantasy, any number of subjects and combinations of their organs, into its circuits of pleasure.
Sexual difference is thus a mobile, indeed volatile, concept, able to insinuate itself into regions where it should have no place, to make itself, if not invisible, then at least unrecognizable in its influences and effects.
She’s engaging theorists whose work is good but none of whom explicitly develop a theory of the body. At most, conceptions of corporeality are presumed by them, or they refer to the body without making it the center of focus.
THESIS This book is a refiguring of the body so that it moves from the periphery to the center of analysis, so that it can now be understood as the very "stuff" of subjectivity. The subject, recognized as corporeal being, can no longer readily succumb to the neutralization and neutering of its specificity which has occurred to women as a consequence of women's submersion under male definition. The body is the ally of sexual difference,
The body has thus far remained colonized through the discursive practices of the natural sciences, particularly the discourses of biology and medicine. It has generally remained mired in presumptions regarding its naturalness, its fundamentally biological and precultural status, its immunity to cultural, social, and historical factors, its brute status as given, unchangeable, inert, and passive, manipulable under scientifically regulated conditions.
I hope to show that the body, or rather, bodies, cannot be adequately understood as ahistorical, precultural, or natural objects in any simple way; they are not only inscribed, marked, engraved, by social pressures external to them but are the products, the direct effects, of the very social constitution of nature itself.
I will deny that there is the "real," material body on one hand and its various cultural and historical representations on the other.
These representations and cultural inscriptions quite literally constitute bodies and help to produce them as such
The body is a most peculiar "thing," for it is never quite reducible to being merely a thing; nor does it ever quite manage to rise above the status of thing. Thus it is both a thing and a nonthing, an object, but an object which somehow contains or coexists with an interiority, an object able to take itself and others as subjects, a unique kind of object not reducible to other objects.
It is this ability of bodies to always extend the frameworks which attempt to contain them, to seep beyond their domains of control, which fascinates me and occupies much of this book.
MOBIUS STRIP MODEL
In seeking to invert the primacy of a psychical interiority by demonstrating its necessary dependence on a corporeal exteriority, I have tried to avoid many of the common metaphors that have been used to describe the interactions of mind and body, metaphors of embodiment, of containment, machine metaphors, two-sided coins, hydraulic models-models which remain committed to dualism. I do not believe, for reasons I will make explicit in the first chapter, that monist models, which rely on a singular substance with the qualities and attributes of both mind and body, provide satisfactory representations of both the articulation and the disarticulation of mind and body, the resonances and dissonances that characterize subjectivity. I have taken a model that I came across in reading the work of Lacan, where he likens the subject to a Mobius strip, the inverted three-dimensional figure eight.
Bodies and minds are not two distinct substances or two kinds of attributes of a single substance but somewhere in between these two alternatives. The Mobius strip has the advantage of showing the inflection of mind into body and body into mind, the ways in which, through a kind of twisting or inversion, one side becomes another. This model also provides a way of problematizing and rethinking the relations between the inside and the outside of the subject, its psychical interior and its corporeal exterior, by showing not their fundamental identity or reducibility but the torsion of the one into the other, the passage, vector, or uncontrollable drift of the inside into the outside and the outside into the inside.
1 SUMMARY an attempt to explain the relevance and impact of rethinking bodies for the ways in which both philosophical and feminist thought conceive themselves
2, 3, and 4 SUMMARy discuss psychoanalytic, neurological, and phenomenological accounts of the lived body or body image, the ways in which the body must be psychically constituted in order for the subject to acquire a sense of its place in the world in connection with others.
5, 6, and 7 explores a further inflection of the Mobius strip, this time from the corporeal to the psychical, from surface to depth. Explores the body as the site of the subject’s social production, as site of proliferation of the will to power, of docility and resistance, of becoming and transformation.
8 focuses on the elision of fluids in the male body and the derogation of the female body in terms of the various forms of uncontrollable flow.
1. Refiguring Bodies
Both feminist and philosophers see human subject as made up of two dichotomously opposed characteristics: mind and body, thought and extension, reason and passion, psychology and biology. And this dichotomous thinking hierarchizes and ranks two polarized terms so that one becomes the privileged term and the other its suppressed, subordinated, negative counterpart. The subordinated term is merely the negation or denial, the absence or privation of the primary term, its fall from grace; the primary term defines itself by expelling its other and in this process establishes its own boundaries and borders to create an identity for itself
More insidiously, the mind/body opposition has always been correlated with a number of other oppositional pairs. Lateral associations link the mind/body opposition to a whole series of other oppositional (or binarized) terms
OTHER BINARIES: reason and passion, sense and sensibility, outside and inside, self and other, depth and surface, reality and appearance, mechanism and vitalism, transcendence and immanence, temporality and spatiality, psychology and physiology, form and matter, and, male and female. Man=mind/female=body. Representationally aligned
Philosophy and the body
Somatophobia ingrained in W philosophy. Body as interference in, and danger to, operations of reason.
Plato’s forms has matter denigrated and imperfect–body is betrayal of and prison of soul.
Aristotle’s chora has matter as mere housing, receptacle, like a mother–passive and shapeless to the father’s shape and contour.
Christianity: Christ was man whose soul/immortality is derived rom God but whose body and mortality is human.
Descartes didn’t separate mind from body but separated soul from nature. Thinking substance (mind) versus extended substance (body). Descartes, in short, succeeded in linking the mind/body opposition to the foundations of knowledge itself, a link which places the mind in a position of hierarchical superiority over and above nature, including the nature of the body. Descartes instituted dualism
Dualism
DEF: Dualism is the assumption that there are two distinct, mutually exclusive and mutually exhaustive substances, mind and body, each of which inhabits its own self-contained sphere
Separation puts consciousness outside world, outside body, outside nature, with no direct contact with other minds and sociocultural community. At its extreme, all that consciousness can be sure about is its own self-certain existence.
REDUCTIONISM: Cartesian dualism establishes an unbridgeable gulf between mind and matter, a gulf most easily disavowed, however problematically, by reductionism. To reduce either the mind to the body or the body to the mind is to leave their interaction unexplained, explained away, impossible. Reductionism denies any interaction between mind and body, for it focuses on the actions of either one of the binary terms at the expense of the other.
Rationalism and idealism are the results of the attempt to explain the body and matter in terms of mind, ideas, or reason; empiricism and materialism are the results of attempts to explain the mind in terms of bodily experiences or matter (today most commonly the mind is equated with the brain or central nervous system). Both forms of reductionism assert that either one or the other of the binary terms is "really" its opposite and can be explained by or translated into the terms of its other.
Mutually excluding mind/body is not the move though
Cartesian heirs: ways the body is investigated now
1. Body is regarded as object of natural sciences
2. Body in terms of metaphors that construe it as instrument, tool, or machine at disposal of consciousness, a vessel occupied by an animating, willful subjectivity. The body is possession, property of a subject, who is thereby dissociated from carnality and makes decisions and choices about how to dispose of the body and its powers
3. Body considered signifying medium, vehicle of expression, mode of rendering public and communicable what is essentially private (ideas, thoughts, beliefs, feelings, affects). on one hand, it is a circuit for the transmission of information from outside the organism, conveyed through the sensory apparatus; on the other hand, it is a vehicle for the expression of an otherwise sealed and self-contained, incommunicable psyche. It is through the body that the subject can express his or her interiority, and it is through the body that he or she can receive, code, and translate the inputs of the "external" world. Here, too, the body is passive and transparent. A mere medium of info that comes elsewhere (the deep interior or the exterior)
Spinoza’s Monism
Spinoza's most fundamental assumption is the notion of an absolute and infinite substance, singular in both kind and number. If substance is infinite and nondivisible, it cannot be identified with or reduced to finite substances or things. Finite things are not substances but are modifications or affections of the one substance, modes or specifications of substance. An individual entity (human or otherwise) is not self-subsistent but is a passing or provisional determination of the self-subsistent.
Infinite substance-God-is as readily expressed in extension as in thought and is as corporeal as it is mental.
The Spinozist account of the body is of a productive and creative body which cannot be definitively "known" since it is not identical with itself across time. The body does not have a "truth" or a "true nature" since it is a process and its meaning and capacities will vary according to its context. We do not know the limits of this body or the powers that it is capable of attaining. These limits and capacities can only be revealed in the ongoing interactions of the body and its environment.
Problems here
1. Psychophysical parallelism cannot explain interactions of mind nad body. He insists they’re interlocked–how do they interact then?
2. His notion of the body as total and holistic, a completed and integrated system is iffy. No room for fragmentations, fracturings, and dislocations that crucially orient bodies and body parts towards other bodies and body parts.
Feminism and the body
Summary of the issue: Patriarchal oppression, in other words, justifies itself, at least in part, by connecting women much more closely than men to the body and, through this identification, restricting women's social and economic roles to (pseudo) biological terms. Relying on essentialism, naturalism and biologism,ls misogynist thought confines women to the biological requirements of reproduction on the assumption that because of particular biological, physiological, and endocrinological transformations, women are somehow more biological, more corporeal, and more natural than men.
How do feminists deal with this?
1. Egalitarian Feminism. NATURE/CULTURE Beauvoir, Firestone, Wollstonecraft. The specificities of female body are both limitation on women’s acce

[George Fragos · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have only read the introduction, in which she distinguishes herself from her predecessors, sets up her ontological/anthropological framework and sets up her project. My review is based solely on this introduction, which although gives you good idea of what is to come.
It's a neo-spinozist, binary-abolishing, conception of the body as a continuum of nature and culture, namely, the transcendence of both biologically essentialist conception of the body purely as nature, and social constructionism, which views the body as the result of the meaning and determination of society inscribed on the body. Grosz claims that we shouldn't view this relation in binary terms but view the body as both embodied psychology and psychological body. Both as an inscription of culture onto the body but also viewing nature as a precondition determining this inscription in a mutually-determining interaction. It's monist in this sense, yet criticizes the shortcomings of Spinoza's anthropological thought.
I am very curious to read the rest, when I find the time, because her project is to utilize this new conception of the body not just to rethink feminist politics, but also examine the way that the body is a factor which conditions the production of thought: she explicitly says that the body and embodiment is conditions certain "knowledges" and having a look in this rather peculiar "transcedental" (yet not farm from universal) epistemology is very intriguing, at least for me.
If you want to see how Spinoza's unity of substance, anthropological monism and antiessentialism can be revitalized today in inventive and progressive ways, this book is for you. She even has a subchapter on Spinoza contrasting him with Descartes and his dominant tradition. Just Lovely.

[Alexander Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

Being entirely enthralled by Spinoza and Deleuze, Grosz has been exactly the introduction to a monist feminism that I needed. This directly answers many of the questions I had about feminist theory in the language I hold most close to my nature.

In particular, I am fascinated by the mobius strip metaphor and the textualization and marking of the body as an explanation for how I think about bodies in an information science context. This is also a way to introduce potential geographers and socio-technical scholars to feminist developments of body. This would be very interesting to compare with Actor-Network Theorists.

I look forward to reading more of Grosz.

[Michaela Corning-Myers · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was especially helpful in opening up lines of inquiry!
If I could give it 4.75 stars I would. It was so fascinating and actually pretty fun to read. And then we get to those three very unhappy paragraphs very close to the end of the book. Other readers will know what I’m talking about. Grosz, WHY???? Why did you have to do this???? Can we please live in a world where we can read and write books as fabulous as this one and have just an ever so slightly more flexible understanding of sexed bodies? I feel like I was brought right up to the edge of something huge and then I was asked to take a half step back. Help!

[Nadia · Rating 3 out of 5]

Maybe the book misses that Deleuze and Guattari admit that there is no question that the denigration of 'woman' and the valorization of men have been constant in societies, therefore they believe the woman/man dualism is real. It organises society. Their question is how can we move beyond this?

[Lisa · Rating 2 out of 5]

I don’t object to the premise: the critique of mind body dualism as it relates to feminism. But I am unsure why you would pick a framework so preferred by male scholars and end in such a wishy washy way.

[Rhonda · Rating 4 out of 5]

Academically invaluable

[Peter Herold · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good in historical context, easy to read

[Rebecca Gross · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my favorite theoretical companions to the lit I read

[Riley Holmes · Rating 4 out of 5]

Liz Grosz is an incredible synthesizer, taking complex ideas from many different philosophers, and weaving them together with carefully selected quotations and her own insight. She writes from a feminist perspective but the interest of these issues is universal.

Richard Boothby is a similar author taking the "neutral" (AKA masculine) perspective on the same topics. I recommend reading from both.

If you're interested in the ideas of Merleau-Ponty, Lacan, Foucault, Deleuze, Irigaray, Kristeva, Derrida, etc, but don't have the time or attention span to read the original works, then a good commentator is a real life-saver. Grosz has spent her career delving in and bringing it all together.

[Marie Wynhoff-Naramore · Rating 2 out of 5]

Brilliant! Extremely theoretical, but an astonishingly original treatment of bodily theory. The writer seems to be cognizant of her lack of any positivistic theory for feminine readings of the body and that lack is noticeable. As a text for bodily theory as a whole however, Grosz proves to be my new go-to!

[Michelle · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing observations and insight. It should be on every book shelf of those interested in gender and feminist theory.

[Heather Wright · Rating 5 out of 5]

Game changing.

[Jack · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting analysis of the body and depth.