Teaching Gender in Social Work - MailChimp

Wave of Feminism. Reclaiming the power to control and manage one’s body
is a theme that features prominently within both women’s activist groups and
feminist theory. The history of women is a story about their bodies, for they
have long been regarded as nothing more than mere bodies. 5 Women must
begin to speak about their bodies themselves, thereby changing longstanding
beliefs. They can do so with the help of sexual difference theories, which are
aimed at deconstructing or “undermining the idea of the ‘natural’ cornerstones
of socially encoded differences, the system of values and representations”. 6
It is important to determine how the body is affected by social relations,
processes and institutions, as physicality derives from social phenomena. Foucault’s
analysis of discipline, punishment, insanity and sexuality reveals that power is
inherent in the discourses that construct human embodiment. Foucault described
his work as constituting a history of bodies, central to which is a mapping of the
body and the effects of power upon it. His theory of knowledge suggests that
the body is constructed through various discourses; it ceases to exist beyond the
discursive, disappearing as a material phenomenon. 7 Human physicality can
never be fully defined, as the body is constantly deferred behind a grip of
previously existing meanings which have been imposed by various discursive
practices. The relationship between the mind and the body determines the
manner in which the body is contained within modern disciplinary systems,
with the mind consequently taking over as the location for discursive power.
Braidotti distinguishes between the gender discourse and the sexual
difference discourse. Gender theoreticians focus predominantly on how
gender is influenced by cultural and social processes, whilst the sexual difference
discourse involves the unconscious or the desire and identification. Historically,
the relation between the genders has been dominated by power relations.
These have determined the social position of the genders throughout time,
with women experiencing the impact of such disqualifications in their physical
existence. Regardless of whether one believes in a pre-social body which is free
of any meaning and available for the recognition of its true nature, or rather
maintains that such essentialist approaches can only form part of the prevailing
discourses about women, the basic convictions about sexual difference or the
5
Catherine Fouquet, “The Unavoidable Detour: Must a History of Women Begin with the History of Their Bodies?”
in Writing Women’s History, ed. Michelle Perott (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984), 51–61.
6
Rosi Braidotti, “Koncept spolne razlike” (Concept of sexual difference). Delta vol. 4, no. 2-3, (1998), 59–71.
7
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison (New York: Random House, 1975).
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