One Flesh, Many Bodies: Agency and Women’s Body

Abstract

This chapter is a sociological rendition of the body-mind issue explored within the context of feminism and agency. Being central to the entire ecology of the feminist claims, bringing the body back into the discursive field allows the appreciation of hitherto emerging insights from the ranks of feminist scholars, notably in the area of new materiality. Problematizing the classical divide between the body and the mind as distinct yet nested spheres of one’s social being pegs the discussion in the language of performance and demonstrability, thus highlighting the agency intrinsic to the body and its movements as a material facticity.

1. Introduction

Affirmation of the primacy of the body in human consciousness stretches back to the very beginnings of the discipline of psychology and, recently, sociology and the humanities. The perspectival evolution from physical reality to objective facticity to a sensate and thinking body (i.e., self). The body is traditionally seen as the container of the self. But now, it is being seen as the self itself, being the direct receiver, assessor, and meaning-making entity by itself. The meaning-making capacity of the body, however, is truncated by various social forces acting on it in historical periods.

The human body is a palpable reality. This means that its existence is something that can be demonstrated as it is a physical feature, hence, tangible. The senses could verify its presence given its shape and form, including the fact that it is capable of sensing and being sensed, therefore, experiencing a whole lot of emotions and events happening in its surroundings. It is in the “sensate realm” that the whole issue of the body and its gravitas in our philosophical musings and sociopolitical discourses becomes a flashpoint. Descartes’ (1596–1650) “cogito, ergo sum” (I think, therefore, I am) is a typical case in point. This notorious statement from one of the philosophical giants of the seventeenth century is not just about the attainability of knowledge as a product of the mind-body dualism, but an assertion of a belief (now a philosophy) that the body, however conceived, is wholly separate from the mind.

According to Descartes, two substances are distinct when each of them can exist apart from the other. Thus, Descartes reasoned that God is distinct from humans, and the body and mind of a human are also distinct from one another. He argued that the great differences between the body (an extended thing) and mind (an unextended, immaterial thing) make the two ontologically distinct. According to Descartes' indivisibility argument, the mind is utterly indivisible because “when I consider the mind, or myself in so far as I am merely a thinking thing, I am unable to distinguish any part within myself; I understand myself to be something quite single and complete” [1].

Some scholars find this Cartesian philosophy that binarizes the mind and body to be problematic [2]. This rationale for holding the distinctiveness of the two is questionable on two grounds: one is based on typology, and the other on phenomenology. Classifying the body and the mind as two distinct substances (or something with materiality). While the capacity of the body to sense (to feel) and be sensed (to be felt) is not solely ontological but experiential. The body learns from these events, and with such capacity comes the ontological aspect. The body could no longer be seen as a conduit—a mediator between experiencing and knowing, but both at the same time. It is at this point that embodiment and corporeality become both instructive and strategic in advancing a new corpus of insights (pun intended). What bridges corporeality and embodiment is the notion of materiality.

The mind-body problem is a classic philosophical debate that highlights the relationship between thought and consciousness, representing the human mind, and the brain as part of the physical body. The discourse on the body-mind nexus is normally pegged in terms of how the mind and body function chemically and physiologically. So far, the interactionist perspective gave the clearest position as it conceived the mind and body as distinct—an extended position based on the premise that the mind and the body are fundamentally different. From this notion, we think that it is not a question of dualism but of duality, highlighting the distinctive factuality of both. But again, duality does not solve the issue.

Our position is that the body and the self are one, and creating distinctions between the two conflates the very idea of corporeality based on the emerging discourse on new materiality. As early as 2004, Reischer and Koo argued in their piece entitled “The Body Beautiful: Symbolism and Agency in the Social World” that the body is a site for the construction and performance of gender. Reischer and Koo [3] echoed prominent scholars like Butler and emphasized that gender is nothing but a series of repeated performances, and what holds the act together is the enactment of the very body. This therefore clearly demonstrates that the self is conscious and agentic enough to perform based on some normative expectations. This follows the argument of Grosz (1994, in [3]), who opposed the dichotomization between the mind and body and emphasized that the body is not natural, ahistorical, or precultural. More recently, Harding et al. [4] problematized the materialities and materialization of working bodies. They realized the lack of literature on bodies in their materiality. They coined the term “body/flesh,” whereas the body is the cultural dimension and the flesh is the material/biological dimension. Harding et al. [4] argued that these two are indivisible, and they succeeded in revealing that the body/flesh becomes the mode of control in silencing and keeping women invisible, but there are ways to exercise agency by, for instance, interceding interpellations and breaking free from the norms.

2. Materiality and the body

For the sake of clarity and brevity, let us offer an operational definition of materiality. From the base word “matter,” materiality is denotative of the physical components whose functionality and practicality in terms of purpose are the core considerations. The following quote concerning the etymology of the word is instructive:

matter (n.): 1200, materie, "the subject of a mental act or a course of thought, speech, or expression," from Anglo-French matere, Old French matere "subject, theme, topic; substance, content; character, education" (12c., Modern French matière) and directly from Latin materia "substance from which something is made," also "hard inner wood of a tree." According to de Vaan and Watkins, this is from mater "origin, source, mother" (see mother (n.1)). The sense developed and expanded in Latin in philosophy by the influence of Greek hylē (see hylo-) "wood, firewood," in a general sense "material," used by Aristotle for "matter" in the philosophical sense (https://www.etymonline.com/word/matter).

Given the above, it is the contention of this chapter that to address both the chasm and schism between the body and what it can accomplish, there must be a sociological accounting of their nexus. It is only through such accounting that we can have a fresh appreciation of the affordance of bringing the material, objective body back to the drawing board. The same, we believe, is made palpable by new technologies such as various social networking platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. These real-time visual artifacts re-position the physical body to different angles that reflect some sort of agency hitherto seen as such.

There are two options possible. One is to clarify the difference (and similarities) between corporeality and embodiment. The other is to reconceptualize their nexus in terms of what they intend to accomplish. The former will stabilize the distinctive traits of corporeality as opposed to embodiment, and this means recognizing both as anchored on the physicality of the sensate body. It can be accomplished by pointing out definitive features via their classic definitions. The latter will expand the ambit of their applicability in terms of how useful they are as far as the acting person (i.e., the acting body or the body in motion) is concerned. It can be done by reconceptualizing corporeality as a performance, on the one hand, and embodiment as a demonstration, on the other hand.

3. Corporeality as performance

A corporeal is a thing that has a physical existence and is capable of being seen and touched. Defining it this way, we can consider corporeality as a bodily representation seen through the functionalities of its organic parts. In one sense, the body is an object and something we are and is describable through a variety of “languages” such as biology, anthropology, medicine, and art. What we know about its components, functions, techniques, and capacities has developed and changed over time. In another sense, to be a body is subjective: It is the “fleshy” form through which we mediate, experience, and enact our lives. As emphasized by Harding et al. [4], when a call is heard and the body/flesh turns the very act of turning creates an embodied subject. In this way, our bodies connect us to the world, and we are subjected to the governing norms and power around us. However, while we all exist as bodies, our experiences of embodiment are not all the same.

One classic example would be the act of selfying. A selfie can be defined as a self-photograph taken using a smartphone. What makes selfies distinctive from other types of photographs is that they are taken by the persons themselves. The body positioning is done with the dedicated purpose to achieve a specific agenda in mind. While it is true that disembodiment happens online, Gonzalez’s [5] study shows that digital activism creates embodiment and connection. Selfying is a postmodern way of representing the self through the visible body. A selfie of myself represents me as a person and speaks to its viewers (mostly online viewers) of both having and being a body. That is, my body does not exist on its own—it is always connected to the world and its environments. It breathes air, it converts plant and animal matter into energy, and it is sustained (and challenged) by billions of microbes I will never see. At any given moment, my body is working hard in imperceptible ways to keep me alive, and throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, my corporeality reminds me that staying alive cannot be taken for granted.

The selfie is done primarily for an audience. The type and set of selfies posted on an Instagram account represent how the account holders want the viewers to see them as persons with an actual body (with a fair complexion and desirable shape, located in a lovely place). They are done primarily for them; hence, customized in the way they expect him/her to be (as a body). Looking at selfies this way, we cannot help but conclude that selfies as a corporeality are a form of performance prepared for a specific audience (see [6] study about feminism and political selfies).

4. Embodiment as demonstration

To emphasize the affordance of embodiment within the discursive universe of materiality, allow us to quote William James [7] as to his sentiment regarding the centrality of the body in amassing social experience:

The world experienced (otherwise called the ‘field of consciousness’) comes at all times with our body as its center, the center of vision, center of action, center of interest (…) The body is the storm center, the origin of coordinates, the constant place of stress in all that experience trains. Everything circles around it, and is felt from its point of view (p. 89).

Embodiment as a conceptual tool has generated a renewed interest within the philosophy of cognitive science over the past 20 years. Nonetheless, despite such excited innuendos, there remains much disagreement about just what it means to say that cognition is embodied. Kiverstein [8] came out with three-fold taxonomy of the body-cognition nexus (apologies for the extended quote):

In one view, which I will call body-functionalism, the body is understood as playing a role in implementing the computational machinery that underpins our cognitive capacities. A second view attempts to deflate talk of embodiment by arguing along traditional lines that the body contributes to information processing only by supplying inputs to the brain, or by executing motor instructions sent out from the brain. I will label this position body-conservativism as it seeks to preserve the traditional approaches to cognitive science in the face of calls for revolution and reform from the philosophers of embodiment. A third, somewhat heterodox and radical view, entirely eschews the computational theory of cognition on account of its alleged failure to explain how representations can provide an agent with commonsense knowledge of the world. In this third view, the body is understood as the source of meaning. I will call this view body- enactivism, as it is concerned with articulating how the body can enact or make a situation means to an agent (p. 741).

The trifocal categorization of body cognition quoted above is strategic in our articulation of new materialism because it tacitly prospects the agency that is lodged within the body itself. In its basic sense, the body is no longer reduced to a sensate body, leaving it as a mere receptacle and processor of experience. Rather, the body becomes the thinking flesh, the self in actuality. As such, cognition and action are no longer separate but an integrated continuum. This conception verges on the model of enactivism. Enactivism was developed as a theory describing cognition as a mental function that arises from the dynamic interaction of the organism with its environment. The concept understands mental faculties to be embedded within neural and somatic activities and to emerge through the actions of the organism. Actions are proposed to not merely constitute responses to environmental stimuli but to instantiate expectations about the valence, sequence, and form of the organism's environment. Imputing rational impulses to body movements provides new room for entertaining a new notion of agency rooted in bodily materialism.

5. Agency: a mode of thinking with the body

Before outlining the key findings of this data, it is necessary to recall a distinction Husserl [9] drew between the body-as-subject (Leib) and the body-as-object (Körper). Bodies are both physical structures and lived experiences; something we are and something we have. Thus far, such a model has paid more attention to how we think about the body than how we think about the body. However, this literature remains interesting since the two facets are not independent: exploring social representations of the body can often be a particularly direct way of enlightening how first-person bodily experience interacts with social knowledge.

The body of a woman offers nuanced impacts on how this thinking-with the body. Although flesh in its constitution and form is similar to that of a man, the materiality of a woman’s body has been subjected to various and diverse cultural, political, religious, and literary discourses. Her body movements have been the focus of such discursive pontifications. Under such duress, her body movements have been deprived of such virtue, even though her motivations for such actions are almost on par with those of men [10].

Women are more demonstrative in terms of how they conduct their movements compared to men, who are more performative in theirs. An example of this is how men perform power in maintaining their relationships. Performance is driven by the sheer desire to have the audience see what they want to see and what they want to feel. Hence, men’s body postures are meant to show off such performances for the sake of their audience.

Women’s bodies, on the other hand, tend to move (as in body motion) based on what they feel and towards self-discovery [11]. Their audience is themselves and, in many ways, they challenge the stereotypes, take back control of their bodies, and build a community and social support [12, 13]. Hence, motivations are demonstrated through body movements. From this vantage point, she could easily demonstrate what she truly feels rather than perform what is expected of them. Demonstrative actions are more agentic than performative ones. The former is anchored on internal conversations, as if thinking with the body. The latter is girded by the spectacle of showmanship.