Embodiment

Abstract

This chapter argues that feminist bioethics has much to gain from feminist phenomenological studies and from feminist science and technology studies (“feminist STS”). While the former examines, e.g. the role of the singular lived body, of a particular sex and of a particular age, race, ethnicity or ability, for subjectivity and perception, the latter examines how scientific knowledge, healthcare practices, societies, and assumptions and norms about bodies are co-produced and co-emerge. Such differences can be put to productive work in examinations of norms about bodies and the role of embodiment, in ways that are important for feminist bioethics. A combined approach shows the value of careful analysis of knowledge production practices, with a focus on how bodies become positioned and understood, and explicates how norms about bodies can have far-reaching effects if they come to function as parts of the self’s pre-reflective lived body-world relation.