As for Grosz herself, when she is writing about her own ideas, she believes that the mind/body dualism in Western history is the source of Western philosophical and ideological degradation of women and wishes to come up with a new, liberating philosophy that is integrated with the body in a non-oppressive way. I actually think the oppression of women, minorities, etc., gives rise to the ideological justifications of oppression, but that doesn’t mean people shouldn’t develop philosophies that challenge the intellectual status quo. People need ways of making sense of the world so we can get on with our lives, and the better our sense of the world the happier and more productive our lives will be. I also think our male/female binary rose before mind/body dualism.
Of course, the world ‘better’ is vague. Do I mean more accurate, more optimistic, more progressive?
Yes.
I realize there have been studies showing that optimistic people have less accurate worldviews, but I am attempting to use those two words in more specific ways. When I say accurate I mean comparing our world view to the world itself, and when I say optimistic I mean thinking about how the world can be, especially if we push for more progressive politics.
She also asserts the position that meaning is inscribed upon our bodies above and beyond what our bodies are. How much of what we think of as ‘gender’ is really just ideological wish fulfillment? How much of our body is created by our culture?
My favorite example of our bodies being created by our cultural environment has to do with calorie counts. The more calories we ingest as children, the sooner we enter puberty. 150 years ago, your average American reached reproductive age about the same time they reached an age of economic adulthood. Most boys were going to be farmers or laborers and most girls were going to be their wives; in 1850 you could learn everything you needed to be a grown up by the time you were roughly 15 (unless you wished to enter “a profession”). But as our calorie intake rose, we entered puberty earlier, but at the same time our society and jobs became more complex, raising the age of economic independence. For the middle class, there is now a roughly 14 year gap between the desire to have sex and the economic ability to raise a child, hence a powerful disruption to our moral code.
Grosz argues that our body shapes are cultural rather than natural, for every body reacts to our environment which is more cultural than natural. Body building and anorexia are extreme examples of people responding to cultural pressures by obsession with control over our bodies. What does a natural body even look like anyway? Someone who never eats processed food, walks everywhere, and from time to time climbs a tree or a mountain or kills an animal with pre-gunpowder weaponry. Sound like anyone you know? Should we break out our old “National Geographics”?