Patriarchal Territories: The Body Enclosed

Abstract

To examine the body's formation is to trace the connections between politeness and politics. But because these connections are never simply given, the body can itself become the site of conflict. To analyze the habits of the body, then, is not only to trace the individual development of the subject but also to investigate what Pierre Bourdieu calls "the insignificant details of dress, bearing, physical and verbal manners" as the inscribed principles of "the arbitrary content of the culture. The adoption of handkerchiefs, forks, separate eating bowls in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was a means of establishing social purity through bodily purity. The enclosure of the body, the "cleansing" of the orifices, emphasized the borders of a closed individuality at the same time as it separated off the social elite from the "vulgar". In the process, "woman", unlike man, is produced as a property category. The conceptualization of woman as land or possession has, of course, a long history.

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