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Gender, Bodies, Freedom: Feminist Philosophy across Traditions

The five monographs that are the objects of my analysis here cross philosophical traditions and academic genres. They draw inspiration from diverse philosophers - Kant, Mill, Arendt, Merleau-Ponty, and de Beauvoir, for example. They also exemplify the intellectual cross-pollination typical of contemporary feminist philosophy - an inaptly named "specialization" that perhaps most deeply confounds what Judith Butler calls the boundary between the discipline of philosophy and its increasingly vocal "spectral double" that lies outside an institutionalized line. That is, these books draw on both so-called analytic and continental philosophy, as well as on political, sociological, psychoanalytic, and literary theory, in a way that happily refuses any typology of disciplines, as well as linking theory and practice. Further, these books are all, in one way or another, concerned with freedom - with what a feminist future might be like, how we sexed subjects might think ourselves differently, or how to construct a politics premised on respect for persons considered deviant or unworthy. They unabashedly take up problems in the world and, sometimes, their authors' relation to those problems. These texts address - in theoretical tone - political struggles from intersexuality to veiling to menstruation to lesbian utopia that, whether we know it or not, have implications for our self-understanding and our collective future.

The other theme that links the books is that of the body. In Herta Nagl-Docekal's words, "not only is my body a close object of empirical knowledge, but it also performs all my perceptions. The sentient body is not just an instrument for the perception of outer conditions. We are aware simultaneously of our body itself - from the inside" (12). This other strange doubling - of the body as the vehicle of our lived experience [in German, der Leib] and also as the medium for our interaction with the world (which simultaneously defines the body qua der Körper) - is another central problematic for contemporary feminist theorists. All are keen to deny any determinate consequence to the "facts" of sexed bodies, while also aspiring to maintain some philosophical significance for the grounding of gendered experience in embodiment. Can these two questions be brought together, to find ways that the (female) body can be not an impediment to freedom but its very condition? These books don't say, exactly. They do, however, show that ignoring one's phenomenological location cannot be sustained as a political-philosophical position.

The book that purports to offer the grandest overview is Nagl-Docekal's ambitious Feminist Philosophy. Nagl-Docekal is perhaps the best-known German feminist philosopher, and someone who has made considerable efforts to link her work to Anglophone traditions and literatures. Thus this book, as Alison Jaggar's short introduction attests, is an attempt to blend a continental tradition (with special reference to Kant) with some of the most familiar contemporary feminist philosophical interventions in English. Feminism, according to Nagl-Docekal, is the name for the response to the problem of discrimination against women (xv), and it should occupy a central, secure place in the discipline of philosophy. Her book claims to offer a "provisional assessment" of the inroads that feminist research has made into four central areas of philosophy: philosophical anthropology, aesthetics, philosophy of science, and political philosophy/philosophy of law. Nagl-Docekal hopes to pick out and critically examine "paradigmatic, influential figures of argumentation" rather than attempt a survey. The first essay in philosophical anthropology argues against the claims that the sexual division of labor is either given or wanted by nature. Suggesting that biologically determinist arguments cannot deploy any meaningful concept of choice (and hence action) in the face of social norms, Nagl-Docekal argues that those who would naturalize social roles can appeal only to instinct-governed behavior in human beings, not to the freedom of decision-making that characterizes any notion of morality.

In a second essay, Nagl-Docekal examines the operation of gender in western art. Starting from familiar questions about why women are underrepresented among great artists, she offers an exposition and critique of Freud, suggesting that his account of the lack of respect for women is circular: rather than being founded a priori in an anatomical lack, the girl's dissatisfaction could equally originate in her perception of the cultural value of the phallus; her ability to form a super-ego, and hence sublimate her drives in the service of artistic production, is limited not by her body but by her sexist bourgeois milieu. Equally critical of certain feminist responses to psychoanalytic accounts, Nagl-Docekal argues that attempts to articulate and defend distinctively feminine forms of creativity only reground gender polarization. Taking a similar methodological tack, the third chapter addresses "Reason: A Concept with Connotations of Masculinity." Nagl-Docekal's primary goal here is to separate out different targets of feminist critique, and to reiterate the familiar point that a challenge to reason must paradoxically rely on reason itself. She includes critiques of Irigaray, who is charged with associating women with the irrational, compounding the stereotype, and Butler, who is alleged to reflexively oppose universalizing claims without recognizing that her democratic demands rest on them. This latter challenge is primarily based on a reading of Butler's well-known essay "Contingent Foundations," and Nagl-Docekal suggests that Butler elides substantive accounts of equality with a purely formal Kantian universalism. "Feminist criticism generally cannot be articulated without appealing to normative foundations that are binding for everybody" (126). It would be useful to read this critique in light of Undoing Gender (see below), in which Butler's commitments to democracy and opposing exclusion are much more explicit, and the challenge hence more complex. Overcoming the masculinization of reason therefore, according to Nagl-Docekal, cannot require giving up practical reason, but will instead require severing it from its association with men. Finally, she offers a thoroughly Kantian defense of respect for persons capable of choosing their own ends. Nagl-Docekal rejects the suggestion that this position is itself a form of "essentialism" (although she does not really consider anti-Kantian feminist objections), and lines up against those who would posit a substantive shared identity for women as the basis of feminist politics.

This book is permeated with a profound skepticism about any claims concerning men or women, femininity or masculinity, especially as they might run together descriptive and prescriptive accounts. Again and again, Nagl-Docekal's preferred philosophical target is any theory (including any feminist theory) that appears to "polarize" debates by positing thick conceptions of gender. This move is motivated by a deep-seated commitment to Kantian universalism and its concomitantly thin concept of the subject. It is also in tension, however, with statements such as: "among those whose circumstances are defined by a patriarchally shaped feminine context of life, certain competencies and attitudes are so widely shared that they can be seen as characteristic for this group" (100). Nagl-Docekal wants to cover a lot of ground here, and her frequent assertions that she is bringing more philosophical subtlety to well-worked questions are not always borne out. Furthermore, I read the book in Katharina Vester's translation from the German, and couldn't help wondering whether the coldness of the text was an artifact of this process. Nagl-Docekal is translated predominantly in the passive voice - in the rather detached style that in fact many European philosophers favor - and this renders the book unnecessarily awkward. The summary style and the book's approach of hitting key philosophical controversies in which feminism is implicated make it a potentially useful book for teaching, but North American students are liable to find it dull unless mixed with contrasting texts and concrete examples.

Judith Butler's latest foray into gender politics is perhaps an improbable place to find such a foil, but Undoing Gender makes good on her wish (expressed in the 1999 introduction to the ten-year anniversary edition of Gender Trouble) to explore the consequences of her theory for emergent issues in feminist and queer life. Indeed, a number of the essays revisit her earlier ideas, expressing in a more heartfelt and first-personal voice Butler's desire for a politics of gender and sexuality that makes more lives possible. The eleven essays in Undoing Gender address diverse themes and vary in length and tenor; almost all appeared elsewhere in whole or in part. The theme that connects them is Butler's desire to explore the paradoxical nature of norms - their simultaneous constitution and undoing of subjects. Nancy Hirschmann's book poses the question of how a discursively constituted self can ever be free if the very norms that bring it into being are neither of its own making nor under its control. Butler refuses this implicit vision of autonomy and freedom (which Hirschmann tries to recuperate) to show the limits and possibilities for living in the context of what she calls the "New Gender Politics" - "a combination of movements concerned with transgender, transsexuality, intersex, and their complex relations to feminist and queer theory" (4). Individual essays address the concept of the human in the face of normalization, gender norms, the case of David Reimer, [1] the diagnosis of Gender Identity Disorder, "gay marriage" read through kinship (a return to the arguments of Antigone's Claim), Jessica Benjamin's work on recognition, the incest taboo, confession and psychoanalysis, sexual difference, survival and social change, and the state of philosophy. This is Butler writing in a more colloquial, though still densely academic, style; there is more of her in the text, and more of a sense of political urgency as she works through problems of democratic life and its unavoidable commitments to definitions of subjectivity, and hence to questions of citizenship.

Most of the essays read as if they were delivered as lectures or written quickly in draft, then never revised into more organized academic papers. Butler's writing is still circuitous, and she continues her habit of posing strings of rhetorical questions that she does not answer. Often the same questions are posed several times at different points in an essay; whole sections of argument are more or less repeated. Perhaps one dubious luxury of academic celebrity is that one's first drafts are considered publication-worthy, and the book would have benefited from more editing, not least because more economical and structured articulation of key points might well have brought Butler more quickly to the edge of her thinking on a particular issue, leaving a valuable polemical space for her to advance arguments that, as things stand, she is content merely to reiterate. For example, in her essay on the diagnosis of Gender Identity Disorder (a prerequisite of sex reassignment surgery for transsexuals), Butler repeatedly makes the point that the diagnosis has a double effect. On the one hand, it constrains, by insisting that would-be transsexuals undermine their own autonomy by submitting themselves to a regulatory psychiatric apparatus that insists on a scripted performance of gender identity clearly aligned with oppressive norms, and which perfectly matches no one's self-understanding. On the other hand, the diagnosis is enabling, creating a quasi-legitimate space and mechanism for the expression and uptake of deep disquiet and the desire to change oneself. This latter is a kind of freedom, says Butler, purchased at the cost of "sacrificing one's claim to use language truthfully" (91). Butler says this well; however, an artifact of her Foucauldian approach throughout the specific cases she examines in Undoing Gender is that she can only articulate the irreducible paradoxes of normalization, never suggest clearly marked normative solutions. Of course, with Foucault, she would deny the appeal for such a politics as imposing a new kind of norm that denies its own exclusions, thereby foreclosing the possibility of an uncertain future - denying the "abyss of freedom" that Linda Zerilli embraces.

This problem sits uneasily with Butler's more overt deployment of a language of the human, democracy, freedom, and autonomy. I have long been skeptical that this discourse is the exclusive property of liberal humanism, and so it feels important to read Butler powerfully invoking the problematic of what constitutes a livable life in the very real contexts of non-traditional kinship, gender and sex non-conformity, lack of reproductive autonomy, and so on. "What moves me politically, and that for which I want to make room, is the moment in which a subject - a person, a collective - asserts a right or entitlement to a livable life when no such prior authorization exists, when no clearly enabling convention is in place" (224). As she says, however, not every novel life is worthy of political affirmation; those that deserve pursuit are derived from "a radical democratic theory and practice," or "will help to fulfill ...the claims of universality and justice that we seek to understand in their cultural specificity and social meaning" (224-5). The violence of exclusion is bad, while countering exclusion is good. These are complex normative claims that need to be developed and explored in the context of the examples Butler invokes, otherwise she plays into the hands of critics, like Nagl-Docekal, who are liable to keep saying (with good reason) that Butler grounds her analysis in the very universalism she claims to eschew.

The body implies mortality, vulnerability, agency: the skin and the flesh expose us to the gaze of others but also to touch and to violence. The body can be the agency and instrument of all these as well, or the site where "doing" and "being done to" become equivocal. Although we struggle for rights over our own bodies, the very bodies for which we struggle are not quite ever only our own. The body has its invariably public dimension; constituted as a social phenomenon in the public sphere, my body is and is not mine. (21)

This philosophical claim finds existential phenomenological expression in Iris Young's book, On Female Body Experience, a collection of older, now-classic essays, bookended by newer and rather less compelling interventions into (at the beginning) the function of lived body versus gender as useful analytical concepts in feminist theory and (at the end) the merits of "home" as a feminist aspiration, and the wrongs of lack of privacy in old age homes. One previously unpublished essay - "Menstrual Meditations" - appears in the middle. Re-reading "Throwing Like a Girl," "Pregnant Embodiment," "Women Recovering Our Clothes," and "Breasted Experience," which were first published between 1980 and 1990, I remembered how brave and far ahead of their time they were. Each takes a bodily situation and shows how it is typically interpreted - in philosophical texts and the culture at large - as evidence of women's inferiority or deviance, before attempting to reclaim embodiment in a more positive feminist analysis.

This method is now somewhat unfashionable in feminist theory for fear of latent essentialism (or, I would posit, fear of the abjection that writing about lived experience, especially one's own, can generate). It is to Young's credit that these essays stand up so well to a new intellectual environment, although it also perhaps explains the tentative opening to the new essay in the genre, "Menstrual Meditations." Young initially invites the reader to reflect on the uncomfortable or annoying aspects of menstruation. These, she implies, are deeply inflected by, but cannot be reduced to, the imposed shame and lack of accommodation that shape "the social oppression of women as menstruators" (97). Young cleverly details the philosophical bases of menstrual shame (for example, the challenge to "psychic security systems" generated by leaky bodies, as elaborated by Kristeva's account of abjection), as well as mechanisms (such as inadequate employment law on sick leave and absenteeism or punitive policies in institutions such as schools and factories that limit women's ability to use bathrooms) that constitute what she labels "the menstrual closet." Later in the essay, Young relates Heidegger's account of mood and temporality to the awareness of self, state of mind, time, and narrative that menstruation can generate. These latter insights sit uneasily with the sense that for Young menstruation is simply and essentially annoying and unwanted. This latter is a dangerous claim, I think, because it dovetails so well with the philosophical framework in which women's bodily experiences are abstracted from intersubjectivity to have inherent (negative) meaning. On the other hand, Young may be simply reflecting the Zeitgeist that has more and more women wanting to be - or actually being medicated to be - "menstruation free."

Sometimes I don't share Young's lived experience, but in such cases it doesn't seem quite right to say that I disagree with her argument. For example, in "Women Recovering Our Clothes" she talks of bonding with other women while shopping for clothes. Her account recalled for me the extraordinary anxieties of clothes shopping with my mother or friends when neither of us can find the right size or cut or flattery in any item of clothing, and when we get stuck - despite our feminist commitments - in endless commentary on the failings of our bodies that don't look good enough in anything we try on. "[O]ften [women] walk out of the store after an hour of dressing up with no parcels at all," writes Young, "the pleasure was in the choosing, trying, and talking, a mundane shared fantasy" (71). This cheerful sentence may describe many women, but for me it is emotionally inconceivable. Another way of approaching this difficulty with the essays is to make the critique Young herself anticipates and suggest that there is an unacknowledged narrowness to the "constituted subject" of the bodily situations she describes. The centrality of the breast to a singular femininity in "Breasted Experience," for example, assumes a different point of view than that of the "rather butch lesbian in San Francisco" Butler describes, who opted for a double mastectomy because her breasts "did not form an important part of her gendered or sexual self-understanding" (86), whose experience differs again from an FTM transsexual. This reaction perhaps implies that these essays need to be read and responded to in feminist community, not as definitive theoretical accounts of "women's experience," but as suggestions about how we might think ourselves as experiential subjects and simultaneously public bodies. They would all be excellent teaching essays, especially for their playful juxtaposition of canonical philosophers with feminine and female body experience.

To give Young her due, she also proposes that

there is a certain freedom involved in our relation to clothes, an active subjectivity .... Sartre proposes imaginary consciousness as a modality of freedom .... In imagining, I am aware of an unreal object and aware that the object is unreal. The pleasure of imagining derives from just this unreality, for the unreal object has no facticity, no givenness that constrains us. No brute physicality that freedom must deal with or face the consequences. (73)

This notion of freedom is central to Linda Zerilli's highly original and philosophically challenging Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom. Zerilli argues against the tendency in feminist philosophy to see every question of freedom as oriented around the subject. Thinking with Arendt, she reorients feminist political thinking away from subject-formation and worries about agency, toward "the world" - "the space in which, when we act politically, we encounter others who, too, act and take up the effects of our action in ways that we can never predict or control with certainty" (14). This orientation moves freedom away from sovereignty of the I toward the uncertainty of acting in a plural, democratic world. In a series of chapters on Judith Butler, Monique Wittig, the Milan Women's Bookstore Collective, and Hannah Arendt, Zerilli explores the "abyssal" nature of freedom, as against the demands in much recent feminist theorizing for accounts of the gendered subject or for epistemological certainty. In each case she offers a recuperation and critique of moments in these authors' work that take up freedom as a practice (rather than a state of the ideally sovereign subject).

This is a dense and closely argued book, so let me focus on the chapters on Butler and Wittig. The former offers an important counterpoint to Butler's own struggles in Undoing Gender, as Zerilli challenges the widespread assumption in feminist philosophy that political claims must be redeemed epistemologically - through cognitive processes involving doubt and certainty that frame practices of justification (especially rule-following). In Wittgensteinian language, she shows how foundationalism and antifoundationalism with regard to gender are both held captive by the same epistemological picture. There is a (commonplace) way of following a rule that consists not in interpreting the rule, but merely in grasping it, says Wittgenstein. On Zerilli's critique, Butler assumes that the self-conscious application of "ways of going on" with gender will reveal that drag is a deviant citation of a norm, just as ordinary gendered behavior sediments the self-same norm. Yet, just as one can teach students that there are intersexed bodies without seeming to actually shake their faith in the mutually exclusivity of only two sexes, one can watch drag without drawing any conclusions about the performative nature of gender: "whether we find ourselves raising doubts involves broad questions of context that the focus on a generic object (like drag or gender or woman) viewed by an individual subject tends to conceal" (57). The political potential of drag, or any other phenomenon, lies in the nature of the public space it generates - its audience, their relation to the performance, the relationships among audience members, and so on.

In Undoing Gender, Butler asks: "How do drag, butch, femme, transgender, trans-sexual persons enter into the political field? They make us not only question what is real and what 'must' be, but they also show us how the norms that govern contemporary notions of reality can be questioned and how new modes of reality can become instituted" (29). This claim to some extent marks a continuation in her later work of the problematic assumptions Zerilli identifies. It also, however, appears in the context of a text much more concerned with "the world" and its democratic politics than Gender Trouble was. To think beyond questions of truth and falsity and genuinely institute "new modes of reality" also requires imagination - a notion Zerilli elaborates (going beyond Young's allusion to Sartre) and acknowledges as latent in Gender Trouble's own analysis. Butler's contribution is not, Zerilli suggests, her antifoundationalism so much as her creation "of a figure of the newly thinkable" (61) (e.g. drag as subversive) that can reorganize our experience of "seeing." This generation of new ways of thinking the world, this transformative aspect of practice, leads to "the abyss of freedom" - a fundamental uncertainty about how to continue to act politically, or what will come of those actions, coupled with a commitment to doing rather than knowing. Reading Undoing Gender in light of Zerilli's critique thus reveals it as a text manifestly struggling with the difficulty of moving beyond the antifoundationalist frame and into how we might count new forms of life as part of our common world by extending and reframing the norms that bound our understanding.

In Gender Trouble, Butler articulated a widely admired critique of Monique Wittig's famous claim that lesbians are not women and are thus outside the heterosexual matrix. Butler argued that Wittig's implausibly radical disjuncture between hetero- and homo- sexuality, and the internal coherence she attributes to each category, make her claims about lesbian utopia into a form of humanism in denial of its own philosophical legacy. Just as Zerilli rereads Gender Trouble to show a certain potential for political imagi- nation, so she rereads les guérillères over and against Butler's critique of Wittig. She interprets this piece of experimental lesbian fiction as denying the teleological narrative form typically found in utopian writing, and that indeed other commentators attribute to the text. If the form of our ideal future is always implicitly given by our analysis of our past oppression, then interpretation of Wittig must center on her account of subjectivity - usually, on her alleged humanism, in which the category of sex is destroyed in favor of a post-patriarchal lesbian "third term." In an reinterpretation of Wittig that runs counter to many tired analyses of her creative writing, Zerilli argues instead that the strategy of renversement (overthrow, reversal) marks not the founding of a newly institutionalized political society, but rather of "a mode of interacting with others in a wide array of settings whose sole principle is freedom" - "the desire not to be dominated," "the desire not only for an end to slavery but for a space in which one can move in word and deed among equals" (81). Renversement, exemplified in the circular style of narrative, the recurrent appearance of ∘ in the text, and the constant, untranslatable invocation of elles, continually starts this practice of freedom over again, refusing the fixity of a feminist subject and the certainty of her political liberation, in favor of a contingency and uncertainty that is the very stuff of freedom. Both chapters (on Butler and Wittig) should be on any syllabus in which these authors - who are quite often taught together - appear, as an antidote to critiques that have both of them denying the possibility of freedom by denying that currently existing subjects can ground normative judgment.

For Zerilli, the problem of the subject that has preoccupied "third wave" feminist philosophy has thus occluded the question of whether and how women can come together to constitute political collectivities in the service of freedom. Nancy Hirschmann's thematically parallel book, The Subject of Liberty: Toward a Feminist Theory of Freedom, is in many ways the implicit object of Zerilli's critique. The political subject, according to Hirschmann, is "socially constructed" - a pivotal claim elaborated as "choices and the selves that make them are constituted by context, discourse, and language; such contexts make meaning, selfhood, and choices possible" (ix); or, "there is no such thing as 'human nature"' (75); "social constructivism ...suggests that the values that we hold in the modern era, the meanings we give to words like 'freedom' ...are in no way essential or natural but rather the product of particular social formations and relationships that have developed through time" (76). Hirschmann thus starts from the important but obvious contention that if freedom is a matter of making uncoerced choices (in light of Zerilli's argument, a more controversial definition than she seems to realize), then those choices are conditioned by factors both internal and external to the subject. However, what would it mean to think that freedom as a property of the subject was not constrained and enabled by context? Surely to characterize freedom solely as a feature of desire or will springing unmediated from within is to set up a straw position? In part presumably to show that this critique has an object, Hirschmann briefly reads Locke, Rousseau, Kant, and Mill to argue that none, contra other interpretations, is indifferent to internal barriers to freedom, such as poor self-concept or miseducated will, and that this double interest in the internal and the external can replace readings of each as "naturalists" about freedom. These interpretations, argues Hirschmann, also stand in tension with each philosopher's expressed views about the education, autonomy, and rationality of women.

Ideology represents a false material reality (level one social construction), according to Hirschmann, at the same time as it creates it (level two). She rehearses, third, a broadly poststructuralist understanding of the discursive constitution of social meaning, appearing to endorse it, only to then retreat to a model in which an ontologically prior subject is the agent of choice. The problem here is that Marxian and poststructuralist approaches to the subject would appear to be fundamentally at odds, rather than offering compatible "levels" of "social construction" (a descriptor that many of the figures discussed - including Butler and Foucault - would surely reject). Hirschmann doesn't really take on the challenge of finding a capacity for agency within poststructuralist accounts of the subject, although she certainly recognizes the philosophical problem. Furthermore, freedom is framed by Hirschmann, to use Zerilli's words, through "an instrumental and adjudicative conception of politics that minimizes the possibility of freedom as action" (10). Zerilli goes on to argue that "political freedom in this sense of world-building ...must involve, from the start, relations with a plurality of other people in a public space created by action, that is, by the very practice and experience of freedom itself" (16). The theoretical chapter of The Subject of Liberty thus provides an unpersuasive framework for the case studies that follow (on the freedom of battered women, women on welfare, and veiled women). These case studies are, however, well researched and full of important facts and edifying narratives, sensitively written, and, in fact, concerned in large measure with practices of freedom in public space, and thereby with Arendt's emphasis not only on 'I-will' but also on 'I-can,' as Zerilli deploys it. The sense that Hirschmann has not found a philosophy to match her empirical work is supported by the fact that her examples argue toward fairly familiar feminist conclusions that are more intuitive than theoretically driven. For example, institutional, social, and cultural settings, Hirschmann shows, are relevant considerations in evaluating a woman's ability to make choices in a violent relationship, while patriarchal discourse around women as property constrains the forms of freedom typically imagined for women. These chapters would make good examples for undergraduates about how to think in a feminist vein about issues that often meet with knee-jerk understandings of freedom ("why don't battered women just leave?").

There could be as many reviews of these five books and their interconnections as there are reviewers, and the interpretive frame I have advanced here takes on only a very small part of the intellectual terrain the authors define. These books will be read and taught within their authors' disciplinary homes (political science and government, rhetoric, and philosophy), as well as in, for example, comparative literature, women's studies, health sciences, and sociology. The centrality and urgency of the questions they take up for the political theoretical canon and for political life generates resonances far beyond the corral currently occupied by feminist theory. Indeed, opening the gates of that corral might itself constitute a practice of freedom of the kind these books explore.

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[1]David Reimer was born in Winnipeg in 1966 as an identical male twin. His penis was accidentally ablated in infancy during a routine circumcision, and his parents were advised that his genitalia should be surgically reconstructed as female, and he should be raised as a girl. He subsequently rejected this gender assignment and lived as a man, until committing suicide in 2004 at the age of 38. The case of David/Brenda and his twin brother, long notorious in the medical literature, was made famous by John Colapinto in his book As Nature Made Him (New York: HarperCollins, 2000), and by subsequent documentaries, interviews, and academic analyses.

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