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Zoe L Tongue, Chris Dietz, Mitchell Travis, and Michael Thomson (eds), A Jurisprudence of the Body, Medical Law Review, Volume 29, Issue 3, Summer 2021, Pages 574–579, https://doi.org/10.1093/medlaw/fwab022
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Extract
Feminist theorists have long focused on the body as a site of difference and identity. What it is to be a woman, from this perspective, comes from lived bodily experiences, including social meanings around gender (and race, class, disability, and sexuality), which are imposed on bodies. Theorising from the body rejected the ‘biology is destiny’ formulation of womanhood to recognise, instead, the lived experiences of moving through the world in one’s particular form. Iris Marion Young discerned the categories of gender and race as shorthand for a set of structures that position people in line with societal rules; in contrast, the idea of the lived body recognises subjectivity and can account for historicised understandings of different bodies and the socio-cultural norms and expectations that shape identity.1 The idea of the lived body can capture individual experience, subjectivity, identity, and more importantly, gendered and racialised social structures.2 The lived body is relational, non-static, and shaped by interaction within these structures; Toril Moi wrote that to consider the body as a ‘situation’ is to ‘consider the fact of having a specific kind of body and the meaning that concrete body has for the situated individual’, indicating that there is a ‘fluctuating experience of ourselves in the world’.3 This maps onto the framework of intersectionality, as developed by Kimberlé Crenshaw, to account for how different aspects of one’s identity co-produce subjective lived experiences.4 The lived body is thus critical in feminist scholarship, critical race theory, queer theory, and disability studies, but is often missing from law and legal scholarship outside of these fields.
