ABSTRACT ON WHITEHEAD'S “MATERIALIZING BODIES”

ABSTRACT ON WHITEHEAD'S “MATERIALIZING BODIES”

• Few feminist approaches work revealing the materialization of the male body, but mostly pointing to the body as a field of social determinations.
  • Some pledge that objectification of males bodies has equaled with female's one
  • Adonis complex – crisis of masculinity makes man pursue through muscles the lost masculinity
    • He opposes the equality of the objectifications on bases of the different power equations informing one and other.
• His first purpose is to explore some of the ways in which men's sense of themselves as embodied agents serves to inform their physical presence in, and relationship to, the world and to others.
• A second purpose is to consider the notion that the material form of the male body is inevitably inscribed with masculinities
  • Male's sense of embodiment informs and shapes their multiple physical-discursive materializations and relationships – to their own bodies, to others' bodies (male and female), to the spatial field in which they find themselves.
    • None of this is received or experienced unproblematically. He is rejecting both:
      a) The essencialist notion of sexed bodies;
      • He follows the third wave of feminists on analysing the ways in which identity and materiality connect with the body, both to constitute it and to discoursively exercise power and resistance upon and through it
      b) The discourse of harmony leading certain sexed bodies to fit certain gender categories.
      • His point is that all male bodies are places upon which masculinities become inscribed, but not in any predictable or linear fashion
        • He reveals how the gaze is policing the problematic development of one such relation
          • For that he highlights how notions of the male body are historically differentiated, temporally and spatially located and highly specific to cultural sites
            • “The bifurcation of women and men as embodied beings took a particular turn during the period of the Western Enlightenment, when the belief in the Cartesian body-mind dualism served to reinforce the biological essentialism at the heart of male power, not least by depositing a 'universal voice of reason' on sex difference”
            • He points that understanding the body can no longer rely on sociobiological accounts only, but should also include pressures of postindustrial capitalism, commodification, gendered experiences, cultural significations, and psychoanalitical processes, to produce a body in flux, frequently rendered anxious, yet always subject to some level of external regulation.
    • He refers to Merleau-Ponty phenomenology (study of the formation of the consciousness) of the body as the original subject that constitutes space.
      • If this is the case, then there is no space within the public-private that is not already prefigured by (gendered) bodies, marking out territories for inclusionand exclusion of the female and male
        • Irigary understands that not on the basis of essentialist bodies prviously determining spatialities but, instead, as an evidence that the body itself is a contested terrain to the extent that its own formations will settle all the fenomenological consciousness, all the other spatialities.
          • According to this understanding the appearance of the male body as a 'whole and complete' steams a powerful semiotics of presence in the social world which turns its illusion into materiality
            • This process, however, does not succeed on being hegemonic as Foucault proposes that the body is not unified but is a site of struggle between opposing discursive power regimes:
              • “Genealogy, as an analysis of descent, is thus situated within the articulation of the body and history. Its task is to expose a body totally imprinted by history and the processes of history's destruction of the body” (Foucault)
              • For Foucault the body is the ultimate surface upon which power and resistance operate
                • Foucault move us away from the Enlightenment split between body and mind
                  • Whitehead, however, problematizes which usage of Foucault suits better feminism as eventually the body is not seen as the starting point, as proposed by Merlau-Ponty, but rather the final point.
                  • He also problematizes using Foucault for his riginal concern was to understand the effects of capitalism and labour on their interconnections with the body.
                  • Thus he follows through the Foucauldian approach of Iris Marion Young and Judith Butler, who matches with Ponty's phenomenology to provide insights into the gendered body in ways that introduce the body as a contested plce, yet materialized in the social world through the dynamics of gender.
• Iris Marion Young
  • Young's argument is that most women experience their body as an object subjected to the gaze of another, as a fragile thing positioned in a gendered space, which serves to inform the degree and the extent ti which she may use it, exercise it, express it and receive it.
    • Her notion of space owes much to Merlau-Ponty to what ontology and subjectivity are located in the body, primarily through its orientation to the world
    • Young applies Beauvoir's existential feminism to Merlau-ponty's concept in order to produce an undertanding of feminine bodily existence – woman's motility and spatiality – as immanently positioned in a male dominated culture, where her very sense of being, self and subjectivity as Other arises from the fact of her bodily presence and entity being subject to restrictions and inhibitions
      • Basically the Beauvorian notion is that of 'women as man dennied to be', which is opposed to Butler's view of women as something unintelligible to the phallogocentric language.
        • Beauvoir posits woman and man as distinguished into one same linguistical system, while Butler claims that the very linguistic systems are distinct, and that woman are not intelligible to the masculinist language – they are abjected bodies.
      • Masculine ontology - dominant masculinities, and the sense of bodily presence and existence they suggest, do not position the male/masculine subject as timid, careful, restricted
        • Refers to the example of male kids playing through creating space for them (restricting space for others) while the women plays through intrsospection
      • She's not suggesting that behaviors are essentialists, but simply that gender constructions departs from a body contruction under the mark of lack, woman as the no-man. Thus she foresses the possibility of overcoming such differences as long as those body marks are not respected anymore.
        • Woman can escape one such typical situation of impediment in various degrees and respects.
      • She points that many man cannot sustain the display of their masculinities according to the ideal masculinist discourse upholding the masculinist spatialities they enjoy
        • The point, however, is less that certain man fail to have a constant symbiotic relationship between their bodies and dominnt discourses, but more about their permanent attempt to do so.
      • Young presents, in the overall, a clear link with gendered subjectivity, power, embodiment and materiality, but Whitehead prefers to shift her Beauvoirean understanding of woman towards a less essentialist and more discoursive approach which he considers capable of unfolding much more fragilities on the reproduction of masculinism. For that task he resorts to Butler.
• Judith Butler
  • Sex-gender distinction is an artifice
    • There's no pre-discursive sexed body
      • In feminist postructuralist terms, this binary operates in the service of a field of power relations through which is concealed the cultural invention of such truths and knowledges
    • She criticizes Beauvoir on what her – Beauvoir – suggestion that one is not born a woman, but, rather, becomes one implies a degree of agency, wherein choice of gendered embodiedness is avaiable
      • Irigary, who argues that the phallogocentric logic of a masculinist signifying economy, emcompassing both ontological and espistemological structures, signals that woman is 'marked off' from the domain of the signifiable; her very existence is mediated through men whereby she emerges as 'masculine woman'.
        • Butler moves beyond and criticizes even Irigary on what she proposes a non-definable “feminine feminine” representation, which offers women the opportunity to stablish a discursive space outside the dominant phallic epistemology
          • Butler questions any claim to a universal womanist epistemology
          • Butler sees the body in Foucauldian terms – materialized through power.
            • He stresses that Foucault and Bulter are not strictly constructivists on what, for them “there is no power that acts, but only a reiterated acting that is power in its persistence and instability (…) a process of materialization that stabilizes over time to produce the effect of boundary, fixity, and surface we call matter”
            • Materiality designates a certain effect of power or rather, is power in its formative and constituting effects
              • In poststructuralist terms the 'I' that speaks has no presence and is not knowing beyond its discursivity. However, the 'I' that speaks does occupy a political position, for in speaking it makes claim to forms of knowledges that are themselves associated with particular political categories
                • These categories are discursive and, thus, enabling and not simply regulatory. And they are categories which, in extreme situations (for example, full gender reassignment), bodies can move across.
                • But for the most part they are categories, or power regimes, into which discourses materialize an embodied entity, not a unity of identities and not a stable, constant sovereign subject, but a politicized physical presence nonetheless.
                  • From this standpoint Whitehead moves to debate how, despite its existential status as Subject, the male body has other potential inscriptions, many of which render ir precarious and serve to position as Other (in such cases the male body shifts from the observer on the panopticon to the individual being observed)
• In gender terms we can see the gaze applied to both women's and men's bodies, whereby the discursive subject comes to discipline and manage her/his body as self-surveillance
  • The gaze itself is not neutral but invested with powers, in so much as it comes with a set of moral, social and cultural codes or assumptions; an economy of looks that places values on the body
    • While accepting that for many feminists the authoritative gaze is male, it is also important to recognize that male bodies are not outside of he gaze, but, indeed, also subject to multiple gazes, including that of the female
    • He proceeds revealing some examples:
      • Race man
        • For black men, stylizing their bodies can be understood as the exercise of power and the practice of resistance. However, the notion of a singular black masculinity is problematic, not least because it can be used to naturalize differences between black and white men
          • The black subject is idealised as the embodiment of its aesthetic ideal
            • He point to the gendered processes by which modes of thought surrounding African American men acquire dominance
            • 'Race man', Carby argues, becomes a black signifier of American society, but it is a signifier constructed from male-centered assumptions leaving women, sexuality and gender as a 'decorative function'
              • This signification of the black through the Race man keeps the phallogocentric discourse reifying woman's Otherness unaltered.
              • This signification also keeps the black man located as the Other through the institutional and authoritative gaze of the white male
                • Despite the multiplication of ideals of white man on current times, and the creation of a black male, the white male far from being displaced from the centre of discourse by a myriad of postmodern voices continues to predominate in the control of the image.
                  • The power of the gaze lies on its multiplicity, for it is through these multiple authoritative gazes that the paradoxes of embodied masculinity become apparent, as much for those who gaze as for those who are gazed upon.
      • A gay body of men
        • He points that the gaze of the gay body of men exemplifies how subversive potentials can underlie the regulatory mechanisms themselves
          • It's subversive potential lies on what it can makes strange and blurs stereotyped views.
            • Photographer Robert Mapplethorp is known for his evocative portrayals of black gay nude males
              • The imagery is almost impossible to categorize, for it depends on the gazer's subjectivity as to whether one sees the photographs as erotic, pornographic, aesthetic, emotive or simply beautiful.
              • Similarly the black male models can be understood to be both objectified and dignified by the process of being gazed upon
              • His pictures are a site of struggle, the arena being dominant notions of representation and truth, the contestants being both the gazed upon and the gazing
              • Mapplethorpe's photographs do not provide an unequivocal yes/no answer to the question of whether they reinforce or undermine commonplace racist stereotypes – rather, he trows the binary structure of the question back at the spectator, where it is torn apart in the disruptive shock effect
                • I find this reactionary on what he neglects the horizons of gender directing the shocking effects to homofobic reactions.
          • Gay men can occupy numerous meterialities, some of which may, apparently, conform to dominant understandings of how gay man might position himself as an embodied presence in the world.
      • Men's aging bodies
        • Whatever men's responses to growing older, it can be stated with some confidence that if men's bodies and the masculinities inscribed upon them are made precarious by multiple gazes, then they are, like women's bodies, rendered particularly insecure through aging. For if masculinity is about occupation, vigour, activity, mastery and overcoming space, then aging is the inevitable process that puts under question such dominant representations of maleness
          • Masculinity is not static and unchanging over a male's life; it changes just as the body moves in time and space
          • Some man are privileged with means for aging but still keeping virility, strenght and, in such cases, having the additional benefit of free time
            • This however is the privilege of a minority
          • Apart from economics and health, a further and related key variable in the ability of older men to manage later life transformations appears to lie in their sense of masculinity and its inability to acknowledge dependency on the help of others
• Thus the gze is not simply about reifying bodies; the gaze politicizes bodies, rendering them into numerous political fields of truth and knowledge, of which race, sexuality and age are but three.