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Citations http://fty.sagepub.com/cgi/content/refs/1/1/59
59
FT
Feminist Theory
Copyright 2000
SAGE Publications
(London,
Thousand Oaks, CA
and New Delhi)
vol. 1(1): 5978.
[1464-7001
(200004) 1:1;
5978; 012011]
Abstract This article examines feminist agency in the light of MerleauPontys phenomenological account of the body subject. Stressing the
importance of embodiment to feminist agency (without reifying an
essential female body), I argue that bodies inhabit specific social,
historical and discursive contexts which shape our corporeal experience
and our opportunities for political contestation. Beginning with the
assertion that we cannot think of agency without the body, I examine a
historical instance of feminist agency in which womens bodies were
central to the articulation of political dissent, namely the British
suffragette movement. In particular, I focus on the suffragette career of
Mary Leigh and argue that it represents a feminist agency derived from
corporeal performance. Through daring acts of protest which drew
attention to the comportment and capacities of their bodies, suffragettes
like Leigh contested the constitution of the political domain and the
nature of citizenship.
keywords citizenship, corporeality, performance, phenomenology,
suffragette movement
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While Butler concludes that it should be possible for a feminist appropriation of Merleau-Ponty to offer accounts of embodied subjects which are
both sexually specific and historicized, subsequent feminist engagements
with Merleau-Ponty have not really borne this out. Iris Marion Youngs
phenomenological essays in Throwing Like a Girl considered aspects of
womens bodily existence from the Merleau-Pontian assumption that it is
the ordinary purposive orientation of the body as a whole toward things
and its environment that initially defines the relation of a subject to its
world (1990: 143). Young found, however, that female-specific forms of
embodiment such as pregnancy exposed the limitations of Merleau-Pontys
delineation of a unified subject (1990: 161). More recently, within what
Claire Colebrook has called the Australian project of corporeal feminism
(forthcoming: 10), there has been a sustained engagement with the work of
Merleau-Ponty and its possibilities for feminism. Rosalyn Diprose, in her
examination of biomedical ethics and womens bodies, draws heavily on
Merleau-Pontys emphasis on the lived bodys engagement with others in
the world but concludes that to the extent that phenomenology views a
change in the bodys integrity negatively as disruption and deviation from
the norm, [it cannot] account for the flexibility of our being-in-the-world:
the self-creativity inherent in corporeal change (1994: 11617). Cathryn
Vasseleu, in her fertile exploration of metaphors of vision and touch Textures of Light, writes positively of the impact of Merleau-Pontys phenomenological project which has yielded original and provocative analyses of
embodiment (1998: 25) but ultimately supports Irigarays critique that
Merleau-Ponty subordinates the tactile to the economy of the visual (1998:
68). Grosz includes Merleau-Ponty as a possible resource for her project of
a feminist philosophy of the body (1994: 21) but concludes in Volatile
Bodies that Merleau-Pontys inability to address the question of sexual
difference means that Feminists need to seriously question whether
phenomenological descriptions are appropriate for womens experience
and, if they are not, whether it is desirable that they should be (1994: 111).
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Body politics
If we begin with a notion of agency as necessarily embodied, what does this
mean for political agency? In Contingent Foundations: Feminism and the
Question of Postmodernism, Butler asks, Do we need to assume theoretically from the start a subject with agency before we can articulate the terms
of a significant social and political task of transformation, resistance, radical
democratization? (1992: 13; original emphasis). Traditional liberal accounts
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The practice of interjecting at political meetings is illustrative of the creativeness of dissident citizenship which, in address[ing] the wider polity
in order to change minds, challenge practices, or even reconstitute the very
boundaries of the political itself as Sparks puts it (1997: 75), must first of
all attract a public audience to persuade.8 Of course, such behaviour ran
the risk of being classified as simply illegitimate, of proving that women
were in fact not fit to be citizens because they did not follow the rules, and
this charge was levelled at the suffragettes throughout their campaign. But,
as Sparks argues, dissident citizenship needs to be recognized as a vital
form of legitimate political participation, as part of a recognition that discursive contestation and dissent are at the heart of citizenship along with
deliberation (1997: 87); in short, that the political agency of dissidents is
the agency of citizens (1997: 100).
Such a reconceptualization of citizenship, which assumes an irreducible
aspect of conflict within the political domain, is at odds with accounts of
citizenship which concentrate solely on citizen deliberation (Sparks, 1997:
75). Chantal Mouffes contention that Politics is about the constitution of
the political community, not something that takes place inside the political community (1992: 30) is well illustrated by the suffragette campaign of
activism and the states violent responses to it.9 In the case of the suffragettes, where contestation centred on who was entitled to citizenship,
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The grudging admiration for Leighs bodily strength and agility the
remarkable fact that she did not throw like a girl was juxtaposed in press
accounts with a deep anxiety about the agency of such a vigorous female
body. For instance, the Liverpool Daily Post stated that:
The gentle being who carried out this wicked and abominable outrage, according
to one of the officers who took part in the unpleasant and dangerous work of securing her, fought more like a cat upon the tiles than a human being. (quoted in
Votes for Women, 1909: 1110)15
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Three years later, readers were still being reminded of Leighs Winson
Green imprisonment and urged to emulate Leigh who, slight, delicate
woman as she is . . . set her will against the whole weight of the prison
system and overcame (Votes for Women, 1912: 750). The capacity of the
suffragettes body to withstand forcible feeding (and thus to win early
release from prison) allowed suffragettes to affirm the efficacy of feminist
agency, despite the reversals suffered during the long suffrage campaign.
While embodiment continued, so did the capacity to intervene (and therefore resist) in a given situation, even in an extreme situation such as Leigh
described.
Leighs statement (published in Votes for Women) provided suffragette
readers with a narrative in which state-sanctioned torture was represented
as another instance of feminist agency centring on the suffragettes body.
The female body represented in Leighs account contradicted the culturally
valorized feminine characteristics of weakness, silence and passivity.
Leighs embodiment of feminist agency confounded the traditional association of female specificity with political exclusion because her bodily
resistance is figured as dissident citizenship. Suffragettes were not, of
course, the only dissidents to deploy hunger striking as a tactic29 but this
form of protest had a unique resonance when enacted by female bodies
whose feminine specificity was the grounds for their political exclusion. In
effect, suffragettes like Leigh relentlessly corporealized the political; they
insisted that their citizenship be recognized as female citizenship, refusing a model of citizenship consisting solely of disembodied deliberation.
Conclusion
Beginning with a phenomenological emphasis on what the body does, to
borrow Crossleys phrase (1995: 43), I have focused on Mary Leigh here to
provide an account of a feminist agency in which the body is crucial to/for
political contestation. While the suffragette campaign was an important
historical instance of embodied political dissent, many subsequent feminist campaigns also deployed forms of protest which emphasized female
embodiment in their contestation of the political domain, the women of
Greenham Common being just one recent example (see Harford and
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Notes
This paper results from a Visiting Fellowship to the Institute for Womens
Studies, Lancaster University in 1998. I am very grateful for the support of staff
and students there.
1. By the British suffragette movement I am specifically referring to the
Womens Social and Political Union (hereafter, WSPU), formed by the
Pankhursts in Manchester in 1903, which was the main organization of the
militant suffrage campaign active between 1905 and 1914.
2. Bodily experience forces us to acknowledge an imposition of meaning
which is not the work of a universal constituting consciousness, a meaning
which clings to certain contents. My body is that meaningful core which
behaves like a general function, and which nevertheless exists. . .
(Merleau-Ponty, 1962: 147).
3. The following quotation is a good example of how Merleau-Ponty
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4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
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23.
24.
25.
26.
27.
28.
29.
Wilding Davison, whose first act of post-box sabotage was carried out in
Leighs name (Daily News, 22 December 1911, Yeoman, Vol. II).
On this point, see Cheryl Jorgensen-Earp (1997).
Discursive contestation of the meanings of Leighs actions can be found,
for instance, in The Freewoman, in which feminists hostile to the WSPU
used Leighs Dublin protest as the basis of an attack on the WSPU
leadership and its exploitation of courageous women like Leigh as
cannon-fodder: The leaders extol war, and run away. Mrs Leigh and a
handful of like-minded, wage the conflict (1912: 264). In this account,
Leighs corporeal protests signified her individuality and differentiated
her from other WSPU suffragettes. See also Stanley and Morley (1988) on
Leighs relationship with the WSPU leadership. Leigh, always a
committed pacifist, was clearly untroubled by the military connotations
of her WSPU uniform: until at least the mid-1960s she wore it to the
annual Labour Day marches in London (Mitchell, 1965).
Any discussion of conflicting significations of a salute must, of course,
acknowledge the influence of Roland Barthes discussion of an Algerian
soldier saluting the French tricolour in Mythologies (1972: 12538).
Little is known of Mary Leighs life. The only biographical information
found in suffragette literature on Leigh focuses exclusively on her life as a
suffragette. The Fawcett Library holds a small archive of material on
Leigh but access to this material is not yet permitted (despite the
entreaties of the researcher!). Michelle Myall records that Leigh, born in
Manchester, became a schoolteacher prior to her marriage to a builder
(1998: 174). In her Dublin trial, Leigh also mentioned her experience in
sweated labour (Votes for Women, 1912: 744).
See the prison accounts of Lucy Burns and Dorothy Shallard, Votes for
Women (1909: 1080).
Leigh seemed to have had an unflagging capacity for resistance: when
interviewed in 1965, she had recently been ejected from the public
gallery in the House of Commons for heckling during a debate on old-age
pensions (Mitchell, 1965).
See, for example, Ellmann (1993) on the IRA hunger strike in Long Kesh
in 1981.
References
Barthes, R. (1972) Mythologies. London: Paladin. (Orig. 1957.)
Butler, J. (1989) Sexual Ideology and Phenomenological Description: A
Feminist Critique of Merleau-Pontys Phenomenology of Perception,
pp. 85100 in J. Allen and I.M. Young (eds) The Thinking Muse: Feminism
and Modern French Philosophy. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Butler, J. (1990) Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity.
New York: Routledge.
Butler, J. (1992) Contingent Foundations: Feminism and the Question of
Postmodernism, pp. 321 in J. Butler and J. W. Scott (eds) Feminists
Theorize the Political. New York: Routledge.
Butler, J. (1993) Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex. New
York: Routledge.
Butler, J. (1996) Gender as Performance, pp. 10926 in Peter Osborne (ed.)
A Critical Sense: Interviews with Intellectuals. London: Routledge.
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