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In Writing on the Body: Female Embodiment and Feminist Theory (1997) erinnern uns Katie Conboy, Nadia Medina und Sarah Stanbury daran, dass es Simone de Beauvoir war, „die aufzeigt, dass die Trennung zwischen Selbst und Anderem, Mann und Frau und Geist und Körper den Ansatz für alle binären Gegensätze liefert, die dem Westen so vertraut sind.“
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So our minds are not valued. But the world is excessively interested in our bodies. Somehow our bodies have been focused on, targeted, and most ‘othered’ of all, even from ourselves. Traditionally seen as primeval, irrational, vulgar and essentially fearful in the West, the body has been subjugated to the mind, in line with the way that women have been positioned in relation to patriarchy. In Writing on the Body: Female Embodiment and Feminist Theory (1997) Katie Conboy, Nadia Medina and Sarah Stanbury remind us that it was Simone de Beauvoir who “ultimately demonstrates that the self/other, man/woman, mind/body division provides the basis for all the binary oppositions so familiar to Western culture”. Capitalism too, exacerbates this, privileging the educated mind over the physical activity of the labourer and giving one the tools to control and exploit the other. And women have been understood as somehow more essentially dug into their embodiment than men. The facts of menstruation, pregnancy, childbirth and breastfeeding mean that a woman is unavoidably located in her body’s experience, and whether or not women actually have children; the reproductive function remains physically and emotionally a significant aspect of their lives. But somehow the Western world, and the workplace, has been set up to view this fact as essentially limiting women’s potential for being fully functional members of society. The Equal Pay Act and Sex Discrimination Act have done little to prevent maternity leave–or even the perceived possibility of it–seriously jeopardising women’s careers in the UK. Although employers are legally prevented from asking women outright at interview whether they have plans of becoming pregnant it is well known that this is the predominant reason for preferring to employ men on permanent contracts. “Women should not be penalised for having babies” said Anna Ford simply and very reasonably asked, “Whose babies do they have?” Yes, many women have babies. Yes, it is a massive experience for the body. Yes, it alters the mind-body relationship–acutely for a limited period, and permanently in subtler ways. But does it make us essentially less useful? Only in a society which is unable to acknowledge and support this experience within appropriate social and economic structures and a morality that essentially fails to value equality and difference.
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