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Abstract
The body, and corporeality, have become an enduring feminist and sociological concern. There is a growing acknowledgement of the problems that arise in theorisations of subjectivity that remain caught in the nature/culture binary. Through sociological engagement with the physical sciences it has become apparent that there is a complex interplay between the biological and the cultural in the production of the social subject. This contests any recourse to a theorisation of subjectivity as a purely psychical construction residing in a given, passive, bodily container.
There is also recognition that women (as a category) have different ways of being in the world than do men. However, we commonly explain these differences in terms of systemic inequalities or relations of domination and oppression, and this presents us with a quandary. If women are indeed oppressed by the underlying universal, phallocentric assumptions by which we organise society (for instance, standards of beauty or conventions of bodily comportment), why, for the most part, do they comply with the strictures of this patriarchal order?
Despite an appreciation of a physical-social implication, much work on bodies and corporeality is still coloured by an unstated investment in the division between nature and culture. Theorisations thus maintain that the body and sociality are external to each other, but can interact, which in turn raises its own questions as to how these two systems converse. The aim of this thesis is twofold. One line of enquiry investigates the evidence that Michel Foucault can be taken at his word when he declares that power is material - it manifests physically: power is not an imposition but is us, and we are it. What, then, is enabled if the writings of Judith Butler and Louis Althusser are similarly reassessed? Can they allow us to envisage a biology that performatively materialises its physical, social and historical conditions? If biology, environment, culture and ideas are consubstantial, then we live – we are – our socio-historical circumstances. If differences between women and men are embodied, historical, lived experience, this recasts the questions of power and domination, freedom and complicity.