Feminism and the body

512 Pages·2000·28.368 MB·English

by  Londa L Schiebinger

OXFORD READINGS IN FEMINISM
FEMINISM AND THE BODY
PUBLISHED IN THIS SERIES:
Feminism and Science
edited by Evelyn Fox Keller and Helen E. Longino
Feminism, the Public and the Private
edited by Joan Landes
Feminism and Politics
edited by Anne Phillips
Feminism and History
edited by Joan Wallach Scott
Feminism and Cultural Studies
edited by Morag Shiach
Feminism and Renaissance Studies
edited by Lorna Hutson
Feminism and Pornography
edited by Drucilla Cornell
Feminism and Film
edited by E. Ann Kaplan
OXFORD READINGS IN FEMINISM
Feminism and
the Body
Edited by
Londa Schiebinger

1
3
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6dp
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.
It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship,
and education by publishing worldwide in
Oxford New York
Athens Auckland Bangkok Bogotá BuenosAires Calcutta
CapeTown Chennai DaresSalaam Delhi Florence HongKong Istanbul
Karachi KualaLumpur Madrid Melbourne MexicoCity Mumbai
Nairobi Paris SãoPaulo Singapore Taipei Tokyo Toronto Warsaw
with associated companies in Berlin Ibadan
Oxford is a trade mark of Oxford University Press
in the UK and in certain other countries
Published in the United States
by Oxford University Press Inc., New York
Introduction and Selection © Oxford University Press 2000
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
Database right Oxford University Press (maker)
First published 2000
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press,
or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate
reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction
outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department,
Oxford University Press, at the address above
You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover
and you must impose this same condition on any acquiror
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Data available
British Library Cataloging in Publication Data
(Data applied for)
ISBN 0–19–873191–4
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Typeset in Minion
by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk
Printed in Great Britain by
Biddles Ltd., Guildford, Surrey
Contents
Notes on Contributors vii
Introduction 1
LONDA SCHIEBINGER
Part I. Scientific (Mis)representations
1. Skeletons in the Closet: The First Illustrations of the
Female Skeleton in Eighteenth-Century Anatomy 25
LONDA SCHIEBINGER
2. ‘Amor Veneris, vel Dulcedo Appeletur’ 58
THOMAS W. LAQUEUR
3. The Birth of Sex Hormones 87
NELLY OUDSHOORN
4. Doubtful Sex 118
ALICE DOMURAT DREGER
Part II. The Body Politic
5. Icons of Divinity: Portraits of Elizabeth I 155
ANDREW BELSEY AND CATHERINE BELSEY
6. Freedom of Dress in Revolutionary France 182
LYNN HUNT
7. Gender, Race, and Nation: The Comparative Anatomy of
‘Hottentot’ Women in Europe, 1815–1817 203
ANNE FAUSTO-STERLING
8. Hard Labor: Women, Childbirth, and Resistance in British

Caribbean Slave Societies 234
BARBARA BUSH
Part III. Embodied Ideals
9. The Slipped Chiton 265
MARINA WARNER
10. The Development of Horticulture in the Eastern
Woodlands of North America: Women’s Role 293
PATTY JO WATSON AND MARY C. KENNEDY
Contents
Part IV. Masculinities
11. I Could Have Retched All Night: Charles Darwin and His
Body 317
JANET BROWNE
12. The Jewish Foot: A Foot-Note to the Jewish Body 355
SANDER L. GILMAN
13. The Ideal Couple: A Question of Size? 375
SABINE GIESKE
Part V. Restrained Bodies
14. The Anthropometry of Barbie: Unsettling Ideals of the
Feminine Body in Popular Culture 397
JACQUELINE URLA AND ALAN C. SWEDLUND
15. Foot-Binding in Neo-Confucian China and the
Appropriation of Female Labor 429
C. FRED BLAKE
16. The Forbidden Modern: Civilization and Veiling 465
NILÜFER GÖLE
Further Reading 492
Index 497

vi
Notes on Contributors
C. Fred Blake is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Hawaii. His
research interests focus on how modalities of cultural meaning, such as mem-
ory, ideology, and aesthetic compositions, are produced, embodied, and
understood in discursive practices that mediate various historical formations.
His work mostly deals with China and its diasporic communities.
Andrew Belsey is Lecturer in Philosophy at Cardiff University. In addition
to recent publications on ethical issues in journalism, he is author of many
papers on philosophy, literature, and the history of ideas. With Catherine
Belsey he has also written ‘Christina Rossetti: Sister to the Brotherhood’,
Textual Practice, 2 (1988).
Catherine Belsey chairs the Centre for Critical and Cultural Theory at
Cardiff University. Her books include Desire: Love Stories in Western Culture
and Shakespeare and the Loss of Eden.
Janet Browne is Reader in History of Biology at the Wellcome Institute for
the History of Medicine, London. She is author of Charles Darwin: Voyaging;
The Secular Ark: Studies in the History of Biogeography; and editor of the
British journal, History of Science.
Barbara Bush is Principal Lecturer in History at Staffordshire University.
She is author of Slave Women in Caribbean Society, 1650–1938 and Imperial-
ism, Race and Resistance: Africa and Britain, 1918–1945.
Alice Domurat Dreger, Assistant Professor of Science and Technology
Studies in the Lyman Briggs School of Michigan State University, focuses her
research on the biomedical treatment of people born with unusual anatomies.
She is author of Hermaphrodites and the Medical Invention of Sex and editor of
Intersexuality in the Age of Ethics. Her essays on the human origins and
impacts of science and medicine appear occasionally in the ‘Science Times’
section of the New York Times.
Anne Fausto-Sterling is Professor of Medical Science at Brown Uni-
versity. She is author of Myths of Gender: Biological Theories about Women
and Men and Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Human
Sexuality.
Sabine Gieske is Assistant Professor at the Institut für Europäische Ethnol-
ogie und Kulturforschung in Marburg (Germany). Her prize-winning disser-
tation was entitled ‘Johann Gerhard Trimpe (1827–1894), Neubauer und
vii
Notes on Contributors
Weltbürger: Zum gesellschaftlichen und kulturellen Umbruch auf dem Land’.
She is editor of Lippenstift: Ein kulturhistorischer Streifzug über den Mund and
Jenseits vom Durchschnitt: Vom Kleinsein und Grosssein.
Sander L. Gilman is Henry R. Luce Distinguished Service Professor of the
Liberal Arts in Human Biology and Chair of the Department of Germanic
Studies at the University of Chicago. He is the author or editor of over fifty
books, most recently Love + Marriage = Death, and Other Essays on Represent-
ing Difference and Creating Beauty to Cure the Soul: Race and Psychology in the
Shaping of Aesthetic Surgery.
Nilüfer Göle teaches in the Department of Sociology at the Bogazici
University in Istanbul, Turkey, and is the author of The Forbidden Modern:
Civilization and Veiling.
Lynn Hunt is Eugen Weber Professor of Modern European History at the
University of California, Los Angeles. She is author of The Family Romance of
the French Revolution and Telling the Truth about History (with Joyce Appleby
and Margaret Jacob), and editor of Histories: French Constructions of the Past
(with Jacques Revel). She is now working on the origins of human rights.
Mary C. Kennedy is Curator of Collections at the Schingoethe Center for
Native American Cultures at Aurora University. In addition to gender in pre-
history, her interests include the archaeological uses of radiocarbon dating
and Native American material culture, past and present.
Thomas W. Laqueur is Professor of History at the University of California,
Berkeley. In 1981 he spent a year in medical school on an ACLS training grant.
He is author of Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud and
editor (with Catherine Gallagher) of The Making of the Modern Body: Sexual-
ity and Society in the Nineteenth Century. He continues to work on the history
of sexuality and is also engaged in studies on the history of death, of memory,
and of human rights.
Nelly Oudshoorn is Professor of Philosophy of Science and Technology at
the University of Twente and Lecturer in the Department of Science and
Technology Dyn amics at the University of Amsterdam. Her research interests
include the social and material shaping of gender, bodies, and technol-
ogies. She is the author of Beyond the Natural Body: An Archeology of Sex
Hormones.
Londa Schiebinger is Professor of History of Science at Pennsylvania State
University. She is author of The Mind Has No Sex? Women in the Origins of
Modern Science, the prize-winning Nature’s Body: Gender in the Making of
Modern Science, and Has Feminism Changed Science? She was awarded a
Humboldt Forschungspreis to pursue her current research on gender in the
European voyages of scientific discovery.
viii
Notes on Contributors
Alan C. Swedlund is Professor of Anthropology at the University of
Massachusetts, Amherst. His research interests are in historical epidemiology
of the United States and the history of physical anthropology. Recent publica-
tions have focused on infant mortality in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-
century America, and the discourses of health reformers, eugenicists, and
statisticians.
Jacqueline Urla is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Director of
Modern European Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She
is co-editor (with Jennifer Terry) of Deviant Bodies and is completing an
ethnography on language revival and cultural politics in the Basque Country
of Spain.
Marina Warner is a historian, critic, and novelist. She has published
widely on myths and fairy tales, including Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and
Cult of the Virgin Mary, From the Beast to the Blonde, and, most recently,
No Go the Bogeyman: Scaring, Lulling and Making Mock. In 2000, she will be
Visiting Professor at Stanford University.
Patty Jo Watson, Edward Mallinckrodt Professor of Anthropology at
Washington University in St Louis, earned her MA and Ph.D. degrees in
Anthropology at the University of Chicago. She has carried out archaeological
fieldwork in Iraq, Iran, and Turkey; Arizona, New Mexico, Kentucky, and
Tennessee. Her research foci include agricultural origins in Western Asia
and Eastern North America, as well as ethnoarchaeology and archaeological
theory and method.

ix