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Connolly, Patricia K.

English

2006

MA

It is no secret that in Westem civilization's mind/body split, abstract and disembodied ideas are valued more than corporeal realities. As feminist theorists have repeatedly critiqued, it is precisely this dismissal of the body that perpetuates the phallocentric and hierarchical binaries our thought processes rely upon. For many feminists and academics, however, the relevancy of such a conversation has come and gone; whether it is dismissed as essentialist, or criticized for perpetuating a reductive analysis of the gender binary, a feminist discussion of the corporeal body is out of fashion to say the least. As argued by Elizabeth Grosz in Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism, the current lack of feminist discussion on the corporeal body perpetuates the body's devalued and objectified position in patriarchal culture, and it is therefore the purpose of this essay to initiate discussion on the development of a feminist philosophy of the lived body. Specifically, this piece is interested in how Luce Irigaray, Virginia Woolf, and Jeanette Winterson explore the concept of corporeal intersubjectivity--or ethical, egalitarian relationships between two embodied human subjects--in their writing as a way of resisting feminist compliance with phallocentric ideology. In Chapter 1, "Luce Irigaray: Utopic Visionary," I lay out her basic theoretical model and explore the limits of her theory by interrogating her framework with a Foucauldian notion of power relations. From here, I articulate in detail why and how I see Jeanette Winterson and Virginia Woolf productively in dialogue with her work; while their visions are similar, their fundamentally different notions of power and resistance call attention to their disparate depictions of corporeal intersubjectivity. Chapter 2, "We Are And We Are Not Our Bodies," illustrates how Woolf and Winterson highlight their dynamic sense of power relations by creating situations for their characters in which moments of corporeal intersubjectivity remain fragmentary and interrupted. With Woolf exhaustively exploring how language ultimately fails to rupture the subject/object relational field in To the Lighthouse and The Waves, and Winterson explicitly narrating how intersubjective goals easily slip into bodily obsessions in Written on the Body and Gut Symmetries, their fiction is saturated with attempts to resist oppressive knowledge systems. In my conclusion, "Radical Ruptures: Toward a Feminist Philosophy of Corporeal Intersubjectivity," I synthesize why and how I see the writings of Irigaray, Winterson, and Woolf to be resisting phallocentric complicities by actively writing against the profound feminist silence on the corporeal body, and how specifically their writing resists patriarchal conventions and ideology. From here, I briefly explore how this theory also holds relevance outside the purely feminist arena by offering exciting challenges to the sector of Westem philosophy that continues to uphold the Cartesian mind/body split.