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MARGRIT SHILDRICK
LEAKY BODIES AND BOUNDARIES: Feminism, Postmodernism and (Bio)Ethics
2 “And in so far as Western ethics has based itself not simply on the exclusion of women as moral
agents, but makes transcendent disembodiment a condition of agency, then a new approach will
insist on re-inscribing the bodies of women
...
And
that notion speaks precisely to my second feminist marker: the insistence that discursive
deconstruction should not entail dis-embodiment
...
” 13c Sint Elizabeth of spalbeck

Fear of submittal to the corporeal 16 “What I have in mind is both the especial immanence of the
female body, as it is frequently represented in ontological theory, such that it enmeshes women
themselves; and its putative leakiness, the 17 outflow of the body which breaches the boundaries of
the proper
...
”
Foucalt Birth of the Clinic “one did not think first of the internal structure of the organized being, but
of the medical bipolarity of the normal and the pathological” (1973: 35) (198) medical thought is
fully engaged with the philosophical status of man
20 “What characterizes the per-modern holistic model of the body was its construction as an
abstract entity, marked by the humours of corresponding to the cosmos, for example, but known
not individually, not through singular observation, but through the guidance of authoritative texts
...
”
Because of reproductive system women unable to transcend material body
26 “
...
”
“It is as though bodies could somehow interfere with moral thought, instructing the mind, rather
than the other way round as is the case with men
...
”
Specifically the area of “reproduction which grounds the differential account of female and male
agency”
“Not surprisingly the post-Englightenment emphasis on difference, focused on the binary of male
mind and femaly body, extended to the biological differences between bodies themselves
...
”
34 “In monthly menstruation both the loss of vital blood and the confirmation of an internal build-up
of noxious waste material further underlined the dissipation of women’s bodily vigour and their
reduced intellectual capacity
...
”
Women unlike self-contained men leaked
34 “The issue throughout Western cultural history has been one of female lack of closure, a negative
coding all too evident in one of Sartre’s many derogations of the gross materiality of the female
body: “[t]he obscenity of the female sex is that of everything which ‘gapes open’” (1958:613)
...
”
Pregnancy both self and other simultaneously
Galenic anatomy female embryoys, right ovary passed through kidney so blood cleansed, left was
not so unpure and cold
“well into the Renaissance” 35
“post-enlightenment devaluation of bodies” left flesh and blood mark of feminine and intellectual
mark of man
Inner and outer body in diagrams discontinuous
Foetus depicted as deconnected from womb 38
Quasi-emptiness

43 “Women are castrated men, their bodies marked by lack, and what is hidden is just a hole
...
” Psychoanalysis
Freud 1985a: 48 “Nothing to be seen is equivalent to having no thing
...
”
Luce irirgay Speculum of the other woman
“The leaks and flows in the corpus are – as I shall explore in more detail later – the markers of a far
more troubling lack of form: a resistance to closure which threatens disruption ultimately to the
whole structuration of the Western logos”
Foucalt 1988 110-111 “how is it in a society like ours, sexuality is not simply a means of reproducing
the species, the family, and the individual?
...
”
Period one of “series of relationships which consistently devalue female emobidiment”
“What the use of Foucaldian analytics exposes is that the nature of embodiment is defined with
reference to the normative binaries of male/female, health/ill, able-bodied/disabled, and so on
...
”

CHAPTER 2 FOUNDATIONS
63 “…morality is highly mediated by gender”
CHAPTER 3 FRACTURES
97 “The claim that women are somehow deficient in reason – dates back at least to the work of
Aristotle
...
Not only was the determinant criterion of rationality
compromised in the case of women, but they were also in general more closely associated with the
passions which the self-determining individual was supposed to transcend
...
”
Enlightenment man of reason 99 “In the convention women lack not simply the ability to exercise
full moral agency but, it is implied, the very capacity for it
...
”
“…the historically persistent belief that the female sex is disqualified from full agency by its
supposedly closer identification with Nature; that women somehow being more embodied than
men, are thus less capable of the rational, detached thought necessary for a mature personal
morality
...
”
Language key tool of deconstruction
101 “…it is difficult to use poststructuralism or postmodernism in the pursuit of value”
102 “my use of the term will lie in the shifting and strategic area between an acceptance of sexual
difference as material and irreducible, but not (necessarily) foundational, and the notion of plural,
fluid and local differences
...
”
difference with accent difference and deferral meaning is not just a matter of difference but that it is
always deferred or detoured
103 “Derrida’s claim is that every signifier carries within it the trace of the other” closure is not
possible
104 “the other is always already the absent presence”
Undermines certainty of fixed dualities and essentialist differences
105 “postmodernist feminism sees in such scepticism the opportunity both of challenging male
authorised certainties and of avoiding an equally damaging reliance on female alternatives”this
distiniguishes postmodern feminism from liberal feminism
Binary opposities, hierarchical structure
Cartesian metaphysics mind and body, reason and passion
“What emerges is a complex system of opposites set in a hierarchical relationship to each other
within each pair
...
”
Phallocentric discourse
Elisabeth Porter – Women and Moral Identity
Self-in-relations rather than relational self
Genevive Loyd – The man of reason

155 “…the recognition that the humanist subject is discursively constructed, but never fully
determined, by a nexus of exclusionary practices should allow us to resignify the parameters of
agency
...
So for a woman it is not a matter of installing herself within this lack, this negative, even
by denouncing it, nor of reversing the economy of sameness by turning the feminine into the
standard for ‘sexual difference’; it is rather a matter of trying to practice that difference”
Irigay women are the necessary but excluded ground of the symbolic, women the mirror whose
function is self-reflection
Thus her writing is in blood, they can only see blood in her?
168 “…women are deemed to live their bodies in ways that men are not, and this constraint on
transcendence is alone sufficient to disqualify them from full subjectivity”
Women must reaffirm emobidement
169 “…those things which for women constitute the suual lifelong and continuous capacities of, and
changes to, the body – such as puberty, menstruation, reproduction, lactation or menopause – are
characteristically posed nevertheless as medical problems”
173 “Differences are represented only in so far as they define the boundaries of the same
...
”
178 “male symbolic move of recognising women only within the relations of (re)production
...
” Sepeculum
206 “Irigaray is engaged fundamentally with the fluidity of boundaries, and because of her strategic
concerns there is a way in which her work forms a bridge between a wholly essentialist account and
the quite different problematic yielded by the alternative readings, which I offer now, of the
meaning of reproduction
...
”
211 “What will necessarily entail the feminist foal of valorising women is the deconstruction of the
very meanings that have seemed to guarantee the moral status of the individual
...
”
217 “What matters…for the ethical affirmation of the feminine, is that an acceptance of the
leakiness of bodies and boundaries speaks to the necessity of an open response

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