About News Subjects Available Guided Tour For Authors Subscriber Services Site Help Contact Us Personal Profile:

sonal Profile: Sign in or Create

Search

Browse by Subject My Content (1) My Searches (0)

Subscriber sign in Body Politics

Username The Oxford Handbook of Gender and Politics
Username Edited by Georgina Waylen, Karen Celis, Johanna Kantola, and S. Laurel Weldon

Password Print Publication Date: Mar 2013 Subject: Political Science Online Publication Date: Aug 2013

Password

Forgot password? View PDF Go to page: GO

Sign in
Don't have an account?

Sign in via your Institution Seemingly personal issues associated with the body—such as rape, contraception, hair and clothing styles,
pregnancy, or sexual harassment—were not traditionally seen as “political” and thus were seen as outside the
Sign in with your library card provenance of political science. But bodies are at the core of the political order as markers of status and
power. Contemporary societies tend to segregate not only access to political power but also work, religious
life, domestic work, and intimate relationships according to the sex and race of the bodies they organize. Our
Sign in
social, economic, and political worlds are organized to reflect these habitual and legal patterns. The corridors
of power are structured to accommodate the associated characteristics of male, heterosexual bodies of
In This Article
dominant racial and ethnic groups. Advancement requires assimilation to the norms associated with powerful
bodies: women must dress like men and warehouse their babies far from the breasts at which they feed; the
schedules upon which they work are not accommodative of parental responsibilities; African American women
and men straighten, cut, or otherwise downplay their distinctive hair; family laws assume and restrict relations
of intimacy and the structure of families according to the sex, race, and religion of bodies. In many countries
female bodies may not be warriors, those perpetrators of violence, but are marked as vulnerable to violence,
as women are the disproportionate victims of rape and intimate violence. Violence polices the boundaries of
approved sexual relations, as deviations from normative heterosexuality, racial hierarchies, and approved
modes of (p. 162) masculinity and femininity are punished with harassment, bullying, battering, and sexual
assault. Bodies are powerful symbols and sources of social power and privilege on one hand and
subordination and oppression on the other.

Bodies are sources as well as subjects of knowledge production; for example, researchers increasingly
recognize that survey researchers and interviewers will get different answers from their interlocutors
depending on their race, sex, sexuality, and the like in many contexts. More importantly, our bodies shape the
questions we ask and the realities against which we measure the answers (sometimes called standpoint
epistemology). The National Academy of Sciences, for example, has concluded that a more diverse
professoriate produces more robust, objective science. More generally, some bodies are associated with
authoritative knowledge and enjoy more deference and presumptions of reasonableness while “other” bodies
(mostly female, racialized, classed bodies) are dismissed as overly emotional or otherwise inappropriate for
serious pursuit of knowledge. As Judith Butler (1993) suggests, the hierarchy of bodies shapes and is shaped
by our processes of knowledge production.

We start our discussion of gender and politics by examining body politics to emphasize how bodies are at the
core of our families, economies, and social and political institutions more generally, shaping states, civil
society, and citizenship. The four chapters in this section collectively illustrate how a focus on the body can
transform both what we study and how we study it in political science.

Mainstream political science has tended to treat bodies as an unproblematic category stemming largely from
a presumption that bodies are part of nature, hence “natural” and, furthermore, apolitical and unchanging. We
now know, though, that bodies are not determined by or determinative of “human nature”: there is evidence
for the fluidity of sexual and racial categories, and we increasingly learn that physical features of bodies (such
as brain structures) are shaped by the social context, further blurring the nature–nurture dichotomy. Ironically,
popular discussions of science have continued to emphasize or even amplify the nature–culture dichotomy,
pushing the category of “women” closer to the nature, equating women to their bodies, and painting them as
less rational and autonomous than men. This in turn has served to justify the continued exclusion of women
from the public sphere of politics.

While the chapters in this section represent different approaches and topics in relation to body politics, they
share a focus on intersectionality: the way that gender intersects with race and ethnicity, sexuality, disability,
age, class, religion, and other categories or axes of difference to illustrate that bodies are at intersections of
different identity markers and powers. Such approaches widen the scope of what is studied in politics even
further. The chapters talk about the role that contemporary debates surrounding abortion, AIDS,
contraception, population control, gender-appropriate norms, and sexual rights play in politics and how bodies
that are targeted by related policies are shaped. Body politics is also closely tied together with broader
processes of sovereignty, empire building, citizenship regimes, Westernization, globalization, and
neoliberalization.

(p. 163) Diana Coole’s chapter on “The Body and Politics” starts the section by analyzing the history and
development of feminist thought in relation to bodies. The chapter points to the diversity within feminist
thought in relation to bodies by covering phenomenological, materialist, and poststructural approaches to
bodies, among others. At the same time, it effectively illustrates that bodies have been and continue to be a
difficult topic for feminists due to the antipathy that women’s close association to bodies created. When
mapping out the most recent developments, Coole shows how theories about bodies have experienced a
postmodern turn to language and then back again to theorizing materiality and embodiment.

Amy Lind’s chapter, “Heteronormativity and Sexuality,” interrogates the concept of sexuality as a category of
political analysis and a form of power. Sexuality is of course closely related to the questions about the body: it
is a seemingly private—even apolitical—matter but in reality is fiercely regulated by state practices and
discourses. These, in turn, serve to uphold the dominance of heterosexuality. Lind’s chapter illustrates how
sexuality continues to be an even more a difficult topic for mainstream political science than the body. Yet
feminist research in the field points to the amount of power that it takes to uphold the heterosexual matrix and
its attendant assumptions, for example, about sexual citizenship and the family. The chapter also makes
visible the multitude of ways sexuality shapes the workings of institutions and informs the ways people
organize.

Veronique Mottier’s chapter on “Reproductive Rights” discusses yet more political battlegrounds that relate to
gendered bodies and norms. Like the issue of violence, reproductive rights and control have been central
tools for states and international actors in governing and gendering bodies and upholding norms about
appropriate femininities and masculinities. Mottier’s chapter covers a wide range of topics from eugenics,
forced sterilization, and abortion to new reproductive technologies. The deeply gendered eugenic policy
making in Western Europe and the United States shows how the categories of gender, class, race, and
ethnicity intersect to subordinate some women in the name of states reproducing nations and protecting
welfare services. Political mobilization around abortion rights and forced sterilization, in turn, illustrates how
different women and feminists approach the issue from deeply diverging perspectives. Feminist thinking and
theory around the topic has also transformed significantly as demonstrated by the issue new reproductive
technologies.

As noted, violence polices the social organization of bodies, and R. Amy Elman’s chapter focuses on the
ways that violence, as well as laws and policies on violence, reflect and shape women’s subordination and
mobilization against that subordination. Political action on violence preceded the study of violence in the field
of political science, demonstrating the way that the focus on traditional subject matter has occluded our
understanding of state action. The chapter shows how research on gender violence within the field of political
(p. 164) science generates insights about responsiveness of states to women’s movement demands, about
patterns of women’s political organizing around the topic and how these are shaped by processes of
globalization and neoliberalization, and the role that transnational actors, such as the European Union and the
United Nation, play in national contexts and vice versa. Such research both explains national variation in state
policies on gender violence and also points to the role that gender violence plays in constructing nations and
conducting wars.

Copyright © 2021. All rights reserved.

Cookie Policy Privacy Policy Legal Notice Credits Accessibility