Female body and philosophical feminism. For a strategic “body”

Abstract

The tradition of thought in its long history has conceptualized the body in various ways. If we review, even somewhat summarily, the different perspectives we see that they have all had in common the association of the body with the feminine. And this association, which survives in the social and individual imaginary of our world, contributes to the establishment of a well-differentiated idea about female and male bodies, namely: the idea that women are bodies, while men carry a body. Starting from this result, which can only be
reached with a quick historical review, this work aims to analyze how a critical-feminist vision of the female body is expressed. A vision that in fact is not homogeneous and that gives rise to very differentiated theoretical elaborations. Thus, it is possible to detect a clear confrontation in this critical-feminist vision between the theses on the body with a more materialist orientation versus those with a clearly constructivist direction. To illustrate this theoretical discrepancy between bodily materialism and constructivism, we start here from the theoretical positions of the philosophers Rossi Braidotti and Judith Butler respectively. In the conclusions, an intermediate path is proposed between both conceptual extremes, which involves rethinking the female body as a “strategic” place.