Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body (12 page)

Granted, the medieval saint was utterly uninterested in attaining a slender appearance. But it does not follow that the contemporary obsession with slenderness is without deep "spiritual" dimensions, and that these cannot share important—that is, illuminating—affinities with the ascetic ambitions of medieval saints. Here, one anorectic explicitly makes the connection: "My soul seemed to grow as my body waned," she recalls. ''I felt like one of those early Christian saints who starved themselves in the desert sun."
53
This is not to say that the meaning of selfstarvation for the fasting nuns

of the Middle Ages can be simply equated with its meaning for adolescent anorectics of today. But in the context of enduring historical traditions that have dominantly coded appetite, lack of will, temptation, and, indeed, the body itself as female, surely we would expect that women's projects to transcend hunger and desire would reveal some continuous elements.

The shallow and unanalyzed conception of slenderness as merely "an external body configuration
rather than
an internal spiritual state,"
54
an ideal without psychological or moral depth, still predominates in the literature on anorexia and bulimia. Why? One explanation is that so long as eating disorders remain situated within a medical model, those who are entrusted with the conceptualization of anorexia and bulimia will be medical professionals who have little experience in or inclination toward cultural interpretation and criticism. But more important is the fact that to begin to incorporate such interpretation and criticism within the medical model would be to transform that model itself. Susceptibility to
images
can still be conceptualized in terms of a passive subject and a mechanical process. To acknowledge, however, that meaning is continually being produced at all levels—by the culture, by the subject, by the clinician as well—and that in a fundamental sense there
is
no body that exists neutrally, outside this process of making meaning, no body that passively awaits the objective deciphering of trained experts, is to question the presuppositions on which much of modern science is built and around which our highly specialized, professionalized, and compartmentalized culture revolves. Or, to put this another way: it is to suggest that the study of the disordered body is as much the proper province of cultural critics in every field and of nonspecialists, ordinary but critically questioning citizens, as it is of the "experts." This audacious challenge is the legacy of the feminist reconceptualization of eating disorders.

Many people, both in academic and nonacademic circles, have come to regard feminist arguments concerning the biases and exclusions of Western culture either as outmoded by progressive changes in gender relations, or as paranoid delusions, fueled by a mania for "political correctness" rather than truth. These notions persist despite increasingly strong cultural evidence to the contrary. As the Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill hearings demonstrated, images of the woman as lying temptress still triumph in this culture over women's rights to an equal hearing under the law. Women still earn significantly less than men for equal work. And the feminist ideal of an egalitarian domestic division of labor so far appears no match for an ideology that insists women must continue to bear the major responsibility for cooking, cleaning, and childcare even when they are also working fulltime in jobs and professions formerly reserved for men.

Some of the most resilient inequalities in our legal and social treatment of women lie in the domain of reproductive control. But despite the highly publicized and turbulent nature of the battles that have been fought in this domain, the most glaring inequalities have yet to receive the exposure and emphasis they deserve. This omission results at least in part, I would argue, from the fact that, although abortion rights are a prominent issue, both prochoice and prolife arguments are locked into rhetoric and strategies that fail to situate the struggle within the broader context of reproductive control. In this essay I will attempt to locate the struggle over abortion rights within that context.

The first three sections of the essay will be largely devoted to exposing and interpreting some remarkable, pernicious contradic

tions in legal and medical practices concerning the protection of the "subject" and to examining some of the cultural ideology, metaphors, and images that animate those contradictions. Although law and medicine claim to have a unified and coherent tradition concerning individual rights, in fact two different traditions have been established, one for embodied subjects, and the other for those who come to be treated as mere bodies despite an official rhetoric that vehemently forswears such treatment of human beings. I will also explore the expression of this practical metaphysicsthis deeply sedimented, cultural duality—in more everyday arenas, and as it has crystallized in movements for fetal and father's rights. In the last section of the essay I will briefly consider some implications my analysis holds for feminist

discourse on reproduction.

My examinations of the legal double standard concerning the bodily integrity of pregnant and nonpregnant bodies, the construction of women as fetal incubators, the bestowal of "supersubject" status to the fetus, and the emergence of a father'srights ideology will reveal, I believe, that feminist anger and frustration are far from paranoid or anachronistic. I hope they will demonstrate, as well, that the current terms of the abortion debate—as a contest between fetal claims to personhood and women's right to choose—are limited and misleading. In the context of my analysis in this essay, the current battle over reproductive control emerges as an assault on the personhood of
women.

Our legal tradition officially places a high—some might say inordinately high—value on bodily integrity. As the United States Supreme Court acknowledged over one hundred years ago:

No right is held more sacred, or is more carefully guarded, by the common law, than the right of every individual to the possession and control of his own person, free from all restraint or interference of others, unless by a clear and unquestionable authority of law. As well said by Judge Cooley, "The right to one's person may be said to be a right of complete immunity: to be let alone."
1

Bodily integrity and the "right to one's person" are philosophically knit together by the Cartesian conception of the human body as the

"home" of the person—the "ghost in the machine," as Gilbert Ryle has called it
2
—the selfconscious, willing, desiring, dreaming, creating ''inner" self, the "I." The historical influence of this construction on Western modernity, especially on legal conceptions of bodily integrity, privacy, and personhood, has been sweeping and profound. Yet, as we will see, the "ghost in the machine" is not always the legislating metaphor in concrete social practice; sometimes entirely mechanistic conceptions of the body dominate, conceptions from which all concern for the inner self have vanished. In practice, our legal tradition divides the human world as Descartes divided all of reality: into conscious subjects and mere bodies (
res extensa
)
.
And in the social expression of that duality, some groups have clearly been accorded subjectstatus and its protections, while others have regularly been denied those protections, becoming for all medical and legal purposes pure
res extensa,
bodies stripped of their animating, dignifying, and humanizing "subjectivity."

First let us examine the tradition regarding embodied subjects. This is one in which bodily integrity is privileged so highly that judges have consistently refused to force individuals to submit without consent to medical treatment even though the life of another hangs in the balance. So, for example, in the case of
McFall v. Shimp
(1979), Shimp's bodily integrity was legally protected to the extent that he was permitted to refuse a procedure (a bonemarrow extraction and donation) that could have prevented his cousin's otherwise certain death from aplastic anemia. (McFall did indeed die two weeks after the decision was handed down.) Other similar suits have been equally unsuccessful, including highly publicized ones such as that pressed by a Seattle woman to have the father of her leukemic child donate his marrow, and that of an Illinois father who sued the mother of his son's twin halfsiblings to have tests done to see if their marrow matched his son's.
3
Many of us—and I include myself—may find Shimp's action and similar refusals morally repugnant. They are, however, thoroughly sanctioned by law, which insists on
informed consent
for any medical procedure, and which permits us to be Bad Samaritans in the interests of preserving
principles
that are viewed as constituting (in the words of the
McFall
decision) "the very essence . . . of our society."
4

The doctrine of informed consent is, in a very real sense, a protection of the
subjectivity
of the person involved—that is, it is an

acknowledgment that the body can never be regarded merely as a site of quantifiable processes that can be assessed objectively, but must be treated as invested with personal meaning, history, and value that are ultimately determinable only by the subject who lives "within" it. According to the doctrine of informed consent, even when it is "for the good" of the patient, no one else—neither relative nor expert—may determine for the embodied subject what medical risks are worth taking, what procedures are minimally or excessively invasive, what pain is minor. When that meaningbestowing function is in danger of being taken away from the subject, the prevailing ideology (and the accompanying legal response) conceptualizes the situation as a violent invasion of the personal space of the body. For example, physicians performing unconsentedto treatment are legally guilty of battery.
5
Or consider the impassioned justification for his decision given by the judge who ruled on
McFall

v. Shimp:

For a society which respects the rights of
one
individual, to sink its teeth into the jugular vein or neck of one of its members and suck from it sustenance for
another
member, is revolting to our hardwrought concepts of jurisprudence. Forcible extraction of living body tissue causes revulsion to the judicial mind. Such would raise the specter of the swastika and the Inquisition, reminiscent of the horrors this portends.
6

The key metaphor of this description, vampirism, not only evokes the pulsing, flowing,
vital
nature of the human body but suggests that to invade it is tantamount to parasitism, a stealing of the inner essence of the person. The body here, clearly, is no mere physical entity but a self embodied, or (to put it the other way around) a body suffused with subjectivity. The system which would countenance its invasion is likened to Nazi Germany and the Inquisition, or (as in
Rochin v. California
[1952]), to medieval torture:

Illegally breaking into the privacy of the petitioner, the struggle to open his mouth and remove what was there, the forcible extraction of his stomach contents—this course of proceeding by agents of government to obtain evidence is bound to offend even hardened sensibilities. They are methods too close to the rack and the screw to permit of constitutional differentiation.
7

Rochin, a suspected drug dealer, had merely been made to regurgitate two capsules he had swallowed. Moreover, the invasion of

Rochin's privacy falls within a clearly recognized category of possible exception to the protection of bodily integrity: invasion of a minimal nature may be permitted when it is required to promote the state's interest in the prosecution of criminals.
8
So, for example, bloodalcohol tests may be required of drivers suspected of intoxication.
9
But even for suspected criminals, the law has emphatically drawn the line at major surgery. In
Winston v. Lee
(1985), law enforcement authorities needed a bullet, lodged in the defendant's chest, as evidence against him. Both the circuit court and the Supreme Court ruled against the state, the Supreme Court arguing that "surgery without the patient's consent, performed under a general anesthetic to search for evidence of a crime, involves a virtually total divestment of the patient's ordinary control over surgical probing beneath his skin." Both the circuit court and the Supreme Court, interestingly, were especially emphatic concerning the degrading and "demeaning" nature of "drugging" this citizen "into a state of unconsciousness" against his will.
10

In contrast to all this privileging of the hallowed ground of "the subject's" body
11
is the casual and morally imperious approach medicine and law have taken to nonconsensual medical interference in the reproductive lives of women—particularly when they are of nonEuropean descent, poor, or nonEnglishspeaking. In this arena we see racism, classism, and sexism interlock virulently, whether we are looking at the history of involuntary sterilization in this country, the statistics on court ordered obstetrical intervention, or the Supreme Court's
Rust v. Sullivan
decision, which forbids doctors in federally funded clinics to discuss or offer information about abortion or to indicate where such information might be available, even when a woman has no other access to medical advice.
12

The history of involuntary sterilization, overwhelmingly aimed at the "mentally defective" ("feebleminded," "retarded," "mentally ill") and one of the most blatant examples of medical and legal disregard for the personhood of certain groups in this country, has been strongly shaped by the politics of race, class, and gender. From 1900 to 1960, 60,000 persons in the United States were sterilized without their consent, many never even informed of the nature of the operation.
13
Initially fueled by nineteenthcentury versions of evolutionary theory (almost invariably racist) and the eugenics