Australian feminist philosophers Elizabeth Grosz and Moira Gatens have endeavoured to develop a corporeal feminism which rethinks sexual difference without resort to essentialism. Grosz is perhaps the more influential of the two, so I shall discuss her ideas. Corporeal feminism relies largely on Jaques Lacan’s interpretation of Freud. Women are seen as the representation of difference, but there is no content, or essence, to this. They are simply ‘not masculine’.To overcome this dualism Grosz (1994) suggests that there is a need to go beyond Euclidean notions of space, to adopt more cyclical or rhythmical instead of linear appreciations of time, to rethink ideas about power, to reformulate the ways in which women are represented, and to redesign knowledges about the body. This is a highly ambitious project (Howson, 2005: 118). A Euclidean model of space must be superseded because its hierarchical relating of bodies within a point-by-point system of coordinates (think X, Y and Z axes) is the basis of patriarchal representations of the body. Adopting different understandings of bodies in relation to space will at least show that there are other possibilities. Similarly, to use alternative conceptions of time which are more cyclical might better represent the processes located in women’s bodies. At least it will challenge the goal-oriented, progress — obsessed usual models and yet allow a consideration of the generation of difference through repetition. Power also needs to be rethought so that bodies are seen as both instruments of power and objects of resistance. This means seeing power as producing and not simply inhibiting embodied people and their actions. In addition, ways of representing women require changing. New languages and types of knowledge are needed which acknowledge the particular interests and limitations of all perspectives instead of pretending to be disinterested. For example, biology could be rethought so that women are understood as active instead of as passively related to men. Finally, in order to achieve a representation of women as actively embodied subjects, knowledge about bodies must be redesigned. Disciplinary and other boundaries need crossing in order to better appreciate bodies as both biological entities, which we experience, and as products of social meanings and structures which we use in living our bodies. In constructing this alternative approach to thinking about bodies there needs to be particular attention to the specificity of women’s bodies, without falling back into the idea that women’s behaviour is determined by their biology. Grosz gives the example of menstruation. She argues that women’s experiences of menstruation need to be understood as them responding to biological hormonal processes, but also to social meanings. In patriarchal culture menstruation has negative meanings and this makes it highly likely that women will experience it as unpleasant. Grosz’s point is that if we recognize the way women experience their bodies as producing social meanings, but also being produced by them, then we can consider how those meanings might be changed for the better and how their embodied experiences could be very different from what they are at present.
Grosz (1994) sees embodiment as not entirely reducible to the social. It is through bodies that the social can come to exist. The bodies she invokes are sexually differing bodies. She says (and see Gatens, 1991) that there is not one neutral body but at least two types. However, she is referring to these bodies as imagined, rather than as real bodies with essential properties. This is one way in which she draws on Lacan. However, he is criticized for his failure to support adequately his suppositions about subjectivity with reference to clinical cases from his psychoanalytic practice. He is taken to task for thinking too much in universals. These problems transfer to corporeal feminism, which struggles to deal adequately with the particularities of gender as a historical production (Howson, 2005: 137—8). However, Grosz does somewhat rework his ideas in ways that challenge gender hierarchies and their privileging of the masculine as the norm (Beasley, 2005: 67—70). She argues that women represent difference and that making present the embodied experiences of women challenges visions of the social based on a masculine disembodied norm as superior. While this has possibilities, the psychoanalytic aspect of her ideas means they remain immersed in the inevitability of a gender hierarchy with which we have to engage in order to gain selfhood. And her focus on sexual difference neglects other forms of social categorization of bodies which impose hierarchies; for example ‘race’ and class (Beasley, 2005: 70).
Grosz’s concerns have been thought overall to be over-philosophized and over-theorized in ways that disconnect her work from the everyday experiences of women (Howson, 2005:121). Grosz makes some efforts to deal with embodied experience via phenomenology, but other scholars have more fully engaged with that perspective to explore gender.