Feminism and the Biological Body

by Lynda Birke

What is a body? What are our perceptions of our inner bodies? How are these perceptions influenced? In recent years, thinking about the body has become highly fashionable. However, the renewed focus, while certainly welcome, seems to always end at the corporeal surface. While recent sociological and feminist theory has made important claims about the process of cultural inscription on the body, and about the cultural representation of the body, what actually appears in this new theory seems to be, ironically, disembodied. If this newly theorized form has interiority, it is one that is explained predominantly through psychoanalysis. The physiological processes remain a mystery to be explained, if at all, only in the esoteric language of biomedicine. As a trained biologist, Lynda Birke was frustrated by the gap between feminist cultural analysis and her own scientific background. In this book, she seeks to bridge this gap using ideas in anatomy and physiology to develop the feminist view that the biological body is socially and culturally constructed. Birke rejects the assumption that bodily function is somehow fixed and unchanging, claiming that biology offers more than just a deterministic narrative of how nature works. Feminism and the Biological Body brings natural science and feminist theory together and suggests that we need a new politics that includes, rather than denies, our flesh.

Genres: Feminism, Gender

224 pages, Paperback

First published October 20, 1999

About the author

LYNDA BIRKE is a feminist biologist who has written extensively on the connections between feminism and science. She is the co-founder of two feminist groups and author of several bookps including Women, Feminism and Biology: The Feminist Challenge; Feminism, Animals and Science: The Naming of the Shrew; Rethinking Biology: Respect for Life and the Creation of Knowledge (co-edited with Ruth Hubbard);and, Common Science? Women, Science and Knowledge (with Jean Barr).

Reviews

[Dee · Rating 4 out of 5]

I had bought Birke’s book in grad school and finally got around to reading it. It’s a very well-written and clear, if now dated, investigation of how feminist theory can counteract reductionist narratives put forth by the natural sciences, particularly biology. I was impressed by how much Birke anticipates (but not quite inhabits) feminist theory of science’s posthumanism while constantly insisting on the necessity to retain the organism as foundational category. Her famous chapter on scientific metaphors of the heart was great!