Sexuality, Feminism, and Women's Bodies in the Modern(izing) World

Abstract

Sexuality, Feminism, and Women's Bodies in the Modern(izing) World Jean H. Quataert and Leigh Ann Wheeler In this jumbo issue, you will find a rich collection of research in women's history, ranging from eighteenth-century Holland to twentieth-century colonial Korea, Imperial Japan, and the United States. The range here is broad and varied, but each article focuses on issues involving women's bodies, sexualities, and feminisms. Read together, they lead us to consider several major questions that illuminate the changing position of women throughout the modern world: How have women, including feminists, used their own body knowledge, science, law, the state, and colonialism to exercise agency? What compromises have these strategies required? In addition, what are the ways women's bodies have been turned into projects of state control and commercial development? By addressing these issues in intriguing ways, the authors featured here advance the substrata of historical analysis, whether rethinking the bases of periodization or the nature of resistance, accommodation, and agency. They raise provocative questions about feminism as a political project in the context of colonial and racial hierarchies and provide useful insights for the ongoing efforts to internationalize women's history. In "The Tactics of Menstruation in Dutch Cases of Sexual Assault and Infanticide, 1750-1920," Willemijn Ruberg shows how women who charged men with rape and women who were accused of infanticide strategically presented information about their own menstrual cycles as evidence of either their victimization or their innocence. Ruberg employs an array of theoretical models including historian Thomas Laqueur's notion of the socially constructed body, social scientist Michel de Certeau's concept of "tactics," and feminist philosopher Elizabeth Grosz's ideas about "embodiment" and "counterstrategic reinscription" as sources of agency to understand how ordinary women subverted "dominant meanings of menstruation in response to the overpowering strategy of the law." This fascinating article explores evolving ideas among Dutch medical practitioners about the causes and meanings of menstruation over more than a century, showing that it did not always "function as a designator of the female body"; nor was it always associated with fertility and pregnancy, although it was often considered a marker of sexual maturity and desire as well as illness, disease, and insanity. Ruberg demonstrates, however, that women frequently countered medical knowledge and drew on their own experiences, assumptions, and superstitions regarding menstruation to bolster their charges of rape and to defend themselves against accusations [End Page 7] of infanticide. Women in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth-century Netherlands thus "played with knowledge and ignorance" and employed "the tactics of representing menstruation" to advance their own interests in courts of law. Kirsten Leng also explores conflicts over medical knowledge about women's bodies in "Sex, Science, and Fin-De-Siècle Feminism: Johanna Elberskirchen Interprets The Laws of Life." Through the evolving work of an understudied lesbian scientist—Johanna Elberskirchen—Leng examines the limits and possibilities of science for "first wave feminists" in Wilhelmine Germany. Many feminists of the day deplored science, because they considered it a tool for establishing women's biological inferiority to men. But Elberskirchen turned contemporary claims about human sexuality and male and female biology on their head. Surrounded by a burgeoning feminist and sex reform movement, Elberskirchen argued for the superiority of homosexuality and of women. Concerns about prostitution first led her to criticize male heterosexuality and its role in oppressing women. From there, she went on to condemn the subjectivity of male scientists who proclaimed male biological superiority and insisted that the voices of female scientists possessed greater objectivity and authority. For Elberskirchen, the female body was superior to the male because of its ability to produce life and nourishment beyond its own needs and because it did not impose sexual demands on others. Despite this revaluation of the sexes based largely on the reproductive capacities of each, Elberskirchen considered homosexual love superior to its heterosexual counterpart. Whereas, she argued, the heterosexual takes responsibility for physical reproduction, the homosexual focuses on "spiritual and intellectual reproduction." Leng finds much to admire in Elberskirchen's challenges to male-dominated science, but she concludes with cautions about the ways that Elberskirchen's scientific approach discouraged political contestation...