Body

Though seemingly an encasement or outer shell that houses our experiential existence – our soul, psyche, consciousness, emotions, and senses – during our lifetimes and fused by laws of nature and biological systems, the body exceeds such a description. Appearing as sexual difference that justifies and secures our social place, the body is, instead, a mix of organic parts, matter, history, language, and social relations. It is not only a working part of a division of labor supporting our productive system; it is also integral to social reproduction, a register of identities (race, class, gender, sexuality, age, capacity), and the repository of pre-conscious gestures, dispositions, and comportments that affirm social hierarchies as natural, real, and necessary. Feminist theory seeks to disrupt fixity, contending that the body&s;s realness (the social assumptions seemingly embedded in it) is an effect of social power and that it might, instead, span more broadly across space, imagination, phantasy, and social relatedness. Feminist theory reconceives the body as an entanglement of matter and thought, flesh and image, sensibility and language. Writers discussed in this chapter include Elizabeth Grosz, Luce Irigaray, Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu, Jasbir Puar, Iris Marion Young, Sarah Ahmed, Jane Bennett, Elizabeth Wilson, and Judith Butler.