Power and Desire: The Embodiment of Female Sexuality

Abstract

In recent years the study of the body has blossomed from a neglected area of social science to a focus of attention from feminists and others (e.g., Turner, 1984; Featherstone etal. 1991, Sawicki, 1991; Shilling, 1991; Scott and Morgan, 1993). Recently, feminists have been attracted to the work of Foucault and others which emphasizes that although physical bodies exist, bodies are primarily social constructions (e.g., Bordo, 1988). Looking on the bodies which engage in sexual activities as socially constructed has been a very productive way of thinking about how femininity and masculinity can be inscribed on the body. It has seemed to offer an escape from the trap of seeing sex as essentially biological. Feminists, however, have disagreed quite profoundly on how to take account of the physicality or embodiedness of social encounters (Ramazanoglu, 1993). There has been a tendency to associate any sense of bodies as material with a naive biological essentialism. This has pushed feminist theorists away from thinking about sex as both a gendered and an embodied experience, in which female embodiment differs from male embodiment (Bartky, 1990:65). The perceived opposition between essentialism and poststructuralism perpetuates a conceptual dualism between a natural, essential, stable, material body and a shifting, plural, socially constructed body with multiple potentialities. We do not have space to explore the debates over essentialism, but Fuss usefully points out that theories of the social construction of female sexuality do not escape the pull of essentialism: one can talk of the body as matter without assuming that matter has a fixed essence (1989:5, 50). In this paper we argue that there is no simple conceptual dualism which allows us to distinguish the material, biological, female body from the social meanings, symbolism and social management of the socially