Women’s bodies are a political necessity and an inconvenience. Paradoxically, women’s reproductive work is the fundamental necessity to the continuation of the modern state and to state power, power from which women themselves have historically been excluded. Her own bodily sovereignty disavows and threatens the state, ideas rooted in our western imaginations through classic texts. From Plato, Aristotle and Galen all the way to Hobbes, the male obsession with managing and policing the female body, denying its full humanity and autonomy, continues to inform modern patriarchal governance and the political processes it supports. States know that only by policing the female body, considering her body to be half a male body, can they solidify their imperialist, transnational power and authoritarian agendas. Political and social opposition to the existence of the female body both as a political corpus and an individual person, to the value of woman beyond her physical body, are rooted in the medical, scientific and cultural values that still draw blood from the ancient Mediterranean world. Dictatorial and even democratic governments gain oxygen through compulsory heteronormativity and heterosexuality, and the denial of the full bodily autonomy and sexuality of women. This paper examines how classical ideas of women’s bodies support the current body politic, the insistence of the organic state as a integrated organism with a head that dominates and coordinates its subordinate parts (citizens or subjects), establishing hierarchical political structures through biological analogy. I argue that without facing and reworking our unexamined learning from classical texts, that

Authors:
Christin Campbell, John Cabot University, Italy

About the Presenter(s)
Professor Campbell is currently adjunct lecturer in the Department of English Language and Literatures at John Cabot University in Rome, Italy.

See this presentation on the full schedule – Sunday Schedule

Bookmark