Response+to+Wilson

CFD: Connectionism, Feminism, Deconstruction GF: Gut Feminism

Quotes are in **bold**

In both essays, Wilson is arguing that feminist theory, and “critical” theory in general, is based on a methodology of **“compulsive antiessentialism” (CFD 1)** that reduces the types of problems they are able to take on. She recommends taking a more interested and less dismissive view toward biology and the life sciences. In the introduction to //Neural Geographies//, she suggests feminists take another look at neuroscience; in “Gut Feminism,” she suggests a novel way of looking at the “biological substrate” itself that, it seems to me, would both change the way feminists look at the body—but potentially the way biologists do, as well.

The following passages is helpful for understanding Wilson’s issue with the current understanding of the body in feminist theory:


 * “In most of these projects on ‘the body,’ the body in question is pursued in its socially, culturally, experientially, or psychically constituted forms, but rarely in its physiologically, biochemically, or microbiologically constituted forms, the idea of //biological// construction having been rendered either unintelligible or naïve…the body at the center of these projects is curiously abiological…when we feminists, we theoretically schooled critics, speak of ‘the body,’ we mean something other than ‘this (biological) body’” (CFD 15).**

It is easy to think of times when thinking of the body “socially, culturally, experientially, or psychically” has been extremely productive, and helped to liberate thinking about the female body from oppressive essentialist formulations. I recently read //Mismeasure of Woman//, and Tavris’s first chapter is all about attempts to mobilize biology to “prove scientifically” the inferiority of women. The uncovering she performs in her book is so obvious to one even slightly acquainted with the “compulsive antiessentialism” and paranoia of critical theory that it seems rather unsurprising or unremarkable.

But given readings like Tavris’s (when accepted unthinkingly), and the still male-dominated structure of scientific institutions, it is easy to feel certain that any attempt to understand the female body biologically will almost necessarily become an attempt to again “prove” some innate difference between the sexes that could be used to perpetuate male dominance. However, I think Wilson is calling for us to realize that this is not //inherent// in the essentialist nature of biological science; rather, biology is being hijacked for these ends. And, as Spivak says (and Wilson alludes to), we can be essentialist sometimes, too, if it is helpful.

She also attempts to show the absurdity of completely disconnecting the body and biology. She recounts Vicki Kirby’s story of a speaker at a feminist conference **“who explains Irigaray’s notion of the morphological body through the exasperated gesture of pinching herself and declaring, ‘Well, I certainly don’t mean //this// body’” (CFD 15).** Wilson quotes Vicki Kirby: **“Can we remain comfortable with an insistence that there is nothing natural about women?” (CFD 14).** At a certain point, how can we claim a theory of the body is useful it doesn’t refer to “this body,” to the physical stuff of the body, at all?

Wilson proposes a new relationship between feminism and biology and neurology:


 * “These maneuvers within Freudian theory are indicative of a more widespread imperative to force a disjunction (or enforce a hierarchy) between science and criticism, between biology and politics—the end effect of which has been to cripple our critical abilities and thereby blunt the cogency, force, and political efficacy of the readings that we produce” (CFD 4).**


 * “I will argue that the neurological facets of connectionism are indispensable to rethinking cognition, psyche, and biology…its reinjection into that field, while risking a generalized reductionism, also promises to refigure and rejuvenate cognition” (CFD 13).**

Though I am in general interested in such proposals, and the immediate absurdity of avoiding talk of “this body” resonates with me, I still think it would be helpful if she gave some specific examples of how the “critical abilities” of feminists have been “crippled” by the avoidance of essentialism (perhaps she does in the rest of the book). Similarly, from the introduction to //Neural Geographies// alone, it is unclear what her “rejuvenated cognition” looks like, and how it will be of political use for feminism. The same argument applies to “Gut Feminism”:


 * “The efficacy of antidepressant medications in the treatment of bulimia can best be explained in a conceptual field where the relations between head and gut; between thinking and eating; among serotonin, appetite, and mood; among disgust and antiperistalsis and the esophagus; among anger and hunger and loneliness and the stomach are more than juxtapositions or utilitarian relations of otherwise disjunct realms. Feminist theory is very well positioned to generate just these kinds of conceptual models—if only it could be in a more open and generative relation to biological data, if only it could allow a less antagonistic, a more amphimixic relation between itself and the life sciences” (GF 86).**

This seems so promising, without any particular explanation of //how// exactly. Let’s go back to this wacky Farenczian understanding of the biological substrate:

Quoting Ferenczi: **“In other words the capacity to be impelled by motives, that is, the psyche, continues to exist potentially in substance as well. Though under normal conditions it remains inactive, under certain abnormal conditions it can be resurrected…in such moments, when the psychic system fails, the organism begins to think” (GF 75).**

Quoting Ferenczi: **“Such ‘semisubstances’ would then ahe the extraordinarily or wonderfully pleasing quality of being both body and mind simultaneously, that is of expressing wishes, sensations of pleasure-unpleasure, or even complicated thoughts, through changes in their structure or function (the language of organs)” (GF 76)**

There is some strange combination of the will to power and a rebellious biological version of the Liebnizian monad here. Each organ, each cell possesses “psychic” potential, can be //active// and self-directing, can strive independently of the “whole” or contrary to the directing of the homunculus. The scale at which this occurs (each organ? Each cell?) is left unclear (hence the monad resemblance, I think).


 * “Behind what he calls the façade of conventional biological description there is a biological unconscious…there is no way to purify organs of their psychic cathexis in the same way that there is now ay of cleansing cognitive processing of the influence of the unconscious” (GF 77).**


 * “His bioanalysis is an attempt to bring depth and dynamism to conventional, two-dimensional (‘flat’) biological science so that it is no longer possible to automatically align a biological hypothesis with literal-minded reductionism” (GF 76).**

And here is the current relationship between Ferenczi and conventional biology: they are //not// the same//.// For the record. Conventional biology is flat; it does not consider the dimension of the biological unconscious. If it did, suggests Wilson, it may be less reductionist; and therefore more useful for feminist theory.

But how could it be more useful? How could feminism understand the body in terms of a not-yet-existent three-dimensional biology? **“I suspect…there are not yet enough conceptual tools available to help readers assess biological hypotheses as something other than wholly reductionist” (GF 76).** We must make the tools. But how?

This suggests the interesting idea of learning how to open up communication with our organs. Ferenzci says there is a “language of the organs.” There is a biological subconscious. Also:


 * “The gut is sometimes angry, sometimes depressed, sometimes acutely self-destructive; under the stress of severe dieting, these inclinations come to dominate the gut’s responsivity to the world. At these moments any radical distinction between stomach and mood, between vomiting and rage is artificial” (GF 84).**

We seem to think we know something about accessing “emotions” and “moods.” If they are really entangled and indistinguishable from the organs, then we need to go seek them there as well. I picture the parliament of the organs, I picture listening to my stomach through a stethoscope. These things seem absurd. What does she suggest?

She suggests (quoted above): **“a more open and generative relation to biological data, if only it could allow a less antagonistic, a more amphimixic relation between itself and the life sciences” (GF 86).**

I don’t think this is enough. As I pointed out, conventional biology is //not// Ferenczian biology. It is not three dimensional. It has no way of doing what she suggests, of breaking down the artificial distinction between “stomach and mood, between vomiting and rage.” To turn to it would not do feminism much good, it seems to me. So why does she simply suggest that, instead of “a more open and generative relation to //a new biology//, with new tools, that we must invent as we go”?