The normal body

female bodies in changing contexts of normalization and optimization

Julia Jansen

Maren Wehrle

pp. 37-55

in: Clara Fischer, Luna Dolezal (eds), New feminist perspectives on embodiment, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2018

Abstract

The human body can be regarded in at least two ways: objectively, as a physical and organic body; and subjectively, as the center of orientation and lived affective unity. However, this distinction can lose sight of the fact that the "lived body' is not reducible to subjective idiosyncrasies. Trans-individual norms are embodied too, as Michel Foucault and Judith Butler have shown. Phenomenological investigations of normalization and habitualization help bring these two important dimensions of embodiment together and overcome simplistic oppositions between phenomenological and poststructuralist approaches. These investigations lead into issues of female body optimization and control that we take to be characteristic of contemporary neoliberalist embodiment.

Cited authors

Foucault Michel

Butler Judith