hdh-feminism

//This was a fascinating article. This was written by someone who __wants__ to be understood.//
 * Elizabeth Wilson - Gut Feminism - 2004**

66. In 1893 Sigmund Freud published a paper that compared organic and hysterical paralyses... the paper documents Freud’s transition from one mode of analysis (neurological) to another (psychological). What was the nature of that conceptual transition? And why does it matter to feminists interested in biology?

67. Freud enacted a conceptual distinction that would be very influential on feminist theories of embodiment: he detached the hysterical body from the anatomical body.

68. conversion hysteria is the transformation of psychic conflict into somatic symptoms

69. It is not my intent to dispute the power of Freud’s account of hysteria or to imply that all feminist repudiations of biology can be traced to Freud. Most of all, I do not mean my critique to count as a rejection of Freudian methodologies. On the contrary, I begin with Freud precisely because of the importance of his work for thinking biology dynamically.

What this approach does not pay attention to, however, is the role played by biology that is not damaged; that is, how the everyday, minute-by-minute, routine action of biological systems (e.g., surges of biochemicals; metabolic activity; synaptic communication; muscular contractions) might be caught up in, and contributing to, hysterical symptomology.

It is my concern that we have come to be astute about the body while being ignorant about anatomy and that feminism’s relations to biological data have tended to be skeptical or indifferent rather than speculative, engaged, fascinated, surprised, enthusiastic, amused, or astonished.

70. Too often, it is only when anatomy or physiology or biochemistry are removed from the analytic scene (or, in what amounts to much the same gesture, these domains are considered to be too reductive to be analytically interesting) that it has been possible to generate a recognizably feminist account of the body... this paper argues that biological data are indispensable to feminism’s **//conceptual and political efficacy//**.

71. In these later years Ferenczi was troubled by how to treat trauma analytically. He was concerned that the conventional analytic stance of neutrality and abstinence would be ineffective—or worse—when dealing with traumatized patients

Ferenczi remained more interested in biological explanation than did Freud... Ferenczi was becoming fascinated with the biological material itself: Can we explain the mechanism of hysterical conversion in biological terms?

Ferenczi signals two important provocations to the classical Freudian project: (1) an engagement with psychosis and (2) an interest in the phylogenesis of the human psyche

73. The aid given by the musculature of the intestines is not that of passive substrate awaiting the animating influence of the unconscious but, rather, that of an interested broker of psychosomatic events

78. There has been a tendency (largely unrecognized) in feminist theory to act out this troublesome distinction between the bodily and the organic... much of the feminist work on embodiment seems to gesture towards a fl at organic realm elsewhere as a way of securing a more valuable or dynamic account of the body closer to home.

80. the gag reflex, this seemingly rudimentary biological action, is a very useful place from which to start thinking about the organic character of disordered eating.

the soft tissue at the back of her throat (as with Robinson and Grossi’s bulimic patients) has become alive to a number of different ontogenetic and phylogenetic possibilities (i.e., to what Ferenczi calls the biological unconscious). Here, standard anatomical texts help orient us to the primal nature of the throat’s substrate.

In humans, the pharynx is particularly important as an instrument of speech. The back of the throat is a local switch point between different organic capacities (ingestion, breathing, vocalizing, hearing, smelling) and different ontogenetic and phylogenetic impulses.

81 the rectum communicates its retentiveness to the bladder; the bladder communicates its liberality to the rectum

82 it is unclear why antidepressants are so effective in the treatment of bulimia; there is no agreement in the literature as to how the relationship between mood and binging should be understood.

82-83 First, some researchers (e.g., Pope and Hudson) use the data to argue that bulimia is, in fact, a mood disorder. That is, bulimia is a variant of depression, and if depression is treated successfully, the bulimic symptoms will likewise fade away.

A second explanation for the effectiveness of antidepressants in reducing bulimic symptoms is that these pharmaceuticals have a direct effect on appetite, independent of their antidepressant effects

Perhaps the lability of eating and mood—their tendency to align and dissociate under the infl uence of certain medications—speaks to an ontological organization that is at odds with organic rationality.

84 The binging and purging of bulimia, and its alleviation by the administration of antidepressants, is not explainable until, at the very least, a connection has been made to organic thought and to the amphimixic inclinations of the substrata involved—that is, until a more plastic model of digestion, respiration, antiperistalsis, neurotransmission, and mood has been established.

I am not arguing that organs are indistinguishable from one another, or that psyche and soma are the same thing. Rather, I am claiming that there is no a priori, fundamental demarcation between these entities.

85 I am arguing that antidepressants alleviate bulimia because there is no radical (originary) distinction between biology and mood. Mood is not added onto the gut, secondarily, disrupting its proper function; rather, temper, like digestion, is one of the events to which enteric substrata are naturally (originally) inclined.

in addition to thinking of disruptions to eating as symptoms of depression, it may also be useful to think of depression as a kind of nutritional disorder.

Most of the body’s serotonin (about ninety-five percent) is to be found in the complex neural networks that innervate the gut. footnote 25: See Wilson, Psychosomatic (ch. 2) for an extended discussion of this datum.

antidepressants do not have effects on mood simply by influencing the brain; they also directly enliven the viscera—in the case of bulimia, calming distress that is more enteric than cerebral in character.

86 In alliance with the biological sciences, feminism could build conceptual schemata about the body that are astute both politically and biologically—schemata in which it is possible to imagine that in cases of severe and chronic bulimia, the capacity for organic thought saturates the more familiar ideational, cognitive, unconscious, and cerebral mechanisms. I have provisionally called this method gut feminism—a feminism that is able to think innovatively and organically at the same time.

(page #s refer to PDF page numbers) 2. Sedgewick and Frank suggest that the theoretical habits ad procedures of such projects - specifically their compulsive antiessentialism - have become not merely routinized but naturalized. That is, arguments driven by critiques of essentialism… have become the foundational supposition of many contemporary critical projects.
 * Elizabeth Wilson - Neural Geographies - 1997**

3-4. Betraying a zelous but disavowed moralism against the miscagenation between science and its others, readings such as these tend to deliver tired rearticulations of antiessentialist, antibiological, antiscientific axioms, and thus promote a kind of interpretative - eugenics that breeds out the bastard children of any liaison with biological or scientific systems.

5. What interests me is not the computational, industrial, biomedical, or technical utility of networks in general, but what connectionism offers to a rethinkng and reinstatiation of cognition.

7. Neurological plausibility has been a major component in the marketing of connectionism.

9. Can we think the subtlety of neurology and cognition on their own terms?

Despite an avowed interest in the body, there is a persistent distaste for biological detail.

10. That the sciences (here neurology) could generate politically useful perspectves for feminism (as distinct from politically useful data) is unthinkable for both Bleier and Rogers. They are unable to think scientific politics outside the routinized critical expectation that the sciences are either objective sites of truth or oppressive forces of social control...

11. a crucial part of the rethinking the politics of feminist psychology will be rethinking the utility of gender, especially as it is formulated against biological sex.

there are at least 2 important gestures being made here 1. resistance to tje routinization of theories of the body 2. naming viscera... as the matter of feminist criticism opens such criticism up to the challenge of theorizing feminism in the absence of any explicit reference to women or sexual difference

How does such a seemingly benign and indispensable notion (cognition) act in the service of phallocentric authority?

12. it is deconstruction's calculated refusal to produce a circumscribed project or clear polticial platform that confounds and vexes its critics [occupy]

13. rather than negating, excluding, or preventing classical political and epistemological projects, deconstruction is engaged in an examination of the conditions that make such projects possible and the implications and effects of their operations. As Spivak notes, the issue is not that deconstruction cannot found a political program while other modes of analysis can,but rather that deconstruction can articulate the problematic foundations articulate the problematic foundations of our currently founded political programs. //<>// //[this sounds good but have there been any new political movements? occupy? anarchism? these are not new post-deconstruction ideas…]//

14. It is an interrogation of the enabling limits of metaphysics, not their eradication that is deconstruction's goal.

15. Our relation to any metaphysical concept is complex: Neither able to rid ourselves of it (as it enables our very critique) nor able to accommodate its violences, we are forced into an endless negotiation with its constitutive and constraining effects. The double gesture of deconstruction could be understood as the conjunction of the necessary and the impossible.

16. //I think art is interesting here as it can use the material of something to critique it...//

(page #s refer to PDF page numbers) 2. The sphere of language has become a privileged domain in which to interrogate the cause and effects of social injury.
 * Judith Butler - Excitable Speech - Sovereign Performatives - 1997**

4. the victim (of hate speech) becomes a stateless person.

5. The state produces hate speech… the category cannot exist without the state's ratification.

7. Figuring hate speech as an exercise of sovereign power implicitly performs a catachresis by which the one who is charged with breaking the law (the one who utters hate speech) is nevertheless invested with the sovereign power of law.

8. This sexualization takes place in and as the act of speech. In speaking Hill displays her agency; in speaking of sexuality, she displays her sexual agency; hence any claim made against the sexualization of discourse from that position of the active sexualization of discourse is rhetorically refuted by the act of speech itself...

9. the argument against pornography seeks to limit the 1st amendment rights of pornographers but also to expand the sphere of 1st amendment protection for those depicted and (hence, ostensibly) "addressed" by pornography: pornographic representation discredits and degrades those whom it depicts - mainly women - such that the effect of that degradation is to cast doubt on whether the speech uttered by those depicted <>