In September 2015, the lifeless body of Ālān Kurdî washed ashore on the beach of Bodrum in Turkey. The child, along with its family, had attempted to enter the country by sea illegally. Ālān’s body, limp among the waves, was immortalized by photographer Nilüfer Demir and quickly reignited the heated debate surrounding what the European Union generically termed the ‘refugee crisis.’ Yet, the power of this photograph extended beyond mere rekindling of discourse. Ālān Kurdî’s body sparked in some a desire to act.
Volunteers from an organization established during those years to aid asylum seekers confided to me that the widespread circulation of that photo had reignited a desire to assist, provide comfort, and support to individuals like Ālān Kurdî fleeing their homes. This account struck me, and I remember pondering precisely what power lay within that photo, within that body.
I still wonder, yet it seems to me that the power of Ālān’s body partly lay in giving a face to an issue that bureaucratic language tends to render abstract and impersonal. That body revealed that migrants are not merely numbers to be recorded in government reports or statistical tables. Those numbers had faces and bodies: those of a lifeless child on a Turkish beach. Processes of bureaucratic dematerialization tend to transform the lives of migrating individuals knocking on the doors of fortress Europe into digits to be added or subtracted on digital spreadsheets. Ālān’s body represents, visually and symbolically, a challenge to the coldness and neutrality of these abstractions. That body creates a sense of alienation because it invites us to engage in a different reflection from what we are accustomed to, a reflection stemming from emotions and encounters with the bodies of others rather than an abstract, rational reflection based on procedures, numbers, and statistics.
As I write these pages, I aim to bring attention back to Ālān’s body. This book is about Ālān’s body, its multiple meanings, and its power. Power here has a dual sense (Foucault, 2004; Spinoza, 1677). Power as potentia indicates power’s subversive and transformative capacity – Ālān’s body’s ability to critically question a worldview that privileges abstraction and rationality. Power as potestas, on the other hand, indicates the other side of power, namely the ability of power to dominate by classifying what and whom it subjugates (Butler, 1997a; Foucault, 2004). This potestas is also expressed in the constitution of value dualisms, such as the migrant–citizen dualism, in which one term is positioned as inferior (migrant) to ascribe superiority to the other term (citizen).
Ālān’s body expresses the power that governments and societies exert over individuals, a physical and, also, symbolic power (Bourdieu, 1991): the power to classify and, in doing so, to give or deny value and dignity (Butler, 2011).
When I first saw Ālān’s body, it brought to my mind some questions raised by the American philosopher Judith Butler in the pages of Bodies That Matter (2011). In those pages, Butler wondered which bodies matter, which do not, and which social norms define the value of bodies and their ability to live livable lives. These questions seemed important and fundamental to me in an era, our era, where multiple crises – health, climate, economic, migratory – expose the fragility of our bodies.
Resuming an expression by Braidotti (2020), it can be said that in these moments of crisis, ‘we are together, but we are not the same’ (p 465). The vulnerability of bodies seems to be a common condition that holds us together, but some bodies are more fragile than others, some lives are more viable than others.
Nevertheless, paradoxically, the question of the body has never seemed so insignificant. Our contemporaneity is characterized by digital labour and virtual worlds: the metaverse, cryptocurrencies, and
The philosopher Hilary Putnam asked in 1981: what if we were simply brains in a vat to which the outputs of a supercomputer transmit a given view of the world? What relationship does our body have with the reality we experience?
The ‘brains in a vat’ experiment served Putnam to inquire about the relationship our conceptual schemes entertain with the world and ultimately to refute the possibility of a ‘description of the world “from the point of view of God”, that is, an absolutely true description independent of the particular viewpoint of any observer’ (Nannini, 2006, p 144, my translation). This experiment is valuable because it suggests an openness to multiple possibilities for understanding reality.
Long before the questions raised by Judith Butler and Hilary Putnam, the issue of the body and its relationship with the mind has been central to the development of Western philosophical thought. Plato had already clearly distinguished the immortal soul (psyche) from the body (soma).1 Still, it is in the modern era, with Descartes, that thought (mens) becomes consciousness and reaches a status of substance independent of the body. According to the French philosopher, the latter is merely a mechanism, an extended substance that obeys the laws of physics and is inconsequential to consciousness, to the knowledge I have, even of myself.
Accompanying this dualism of body and mind is the idea, inherited from Descartes by contemporary thought, of a superiority of abstract thought over everything that is matter and body. For Descartes, consciousness-thought delimits specific and valid knowledge, while the body is associated with the false and deceptive. Whereas matter is inert and mechanical, abstract thought is rational and superior by virtue of its capacity to sublimate the body and matter and its privileged access to reality.
Since the modern era, this mind–body dualism has been articulated in terms of a moral, ontological (that is, the mode of being), and epistemological (that is, the mode of knowing) superiority of the mind over the body. This dualism has long founded an alleged superiority of philosophy over other disciplines that have as their subject matter, such as biology and physics, and it has delayed the development of an integrated vision by Western medicine (Scheper-Hughes and Lock,
Similarly, another series of dualisms is based on this distinction, such as those opposing activity to contemplation, work to leisure, production to play, beauty to utility, and logical-scientific knowledge to aesthetic-intuitive knowledge (Gagliardi, 2007). These dualisms still today constitute the grid through which we, more or less unconsciously, interpret the world.
These dualisms of value also underpin a conception of work and organization dominated by the paradigm of rationality. The latter is among the most intriguing derivatives of Cartesian dualism, which, by establishing the inert and mechanistic character of body–matter, exalts reason as the only and privileged instrument of access and production of knowledge.
This rationalism informs the particular vision of the sciences – including managerial science – that accompanies our lives. We find it, for example, in Max Weber, a great theorist of bureaucracy, according to whom organizing is configured as a process of abstraction and rationalization of work. Not bodies and relationships but numbers and procedures will make the modern enterprise efficient and profitable. Similarly, we find in the reflection of Frederick Winslow Taylor, the father of the scientific management paradigm, a division of labour that reproduces this dualism by separating manual labour from intellectual labour and in the reduction of workers to machine-bodies to be disciplined (Bahnisch, 2000). Likewise, accounting has developed as a practice of abstraction to offer a ‘neutral and objective’ valorization of work (Alawattage and Wickramasinghe, 2018). Thus, the development of capitalism and the concomitant flourishing of managerial and accounting sciences in the modern era, in some way, bring us back to this simple and magnificent question of the relationship between mind and body.
It would be too ambitious and undoubtedly unrealistic to think of reconstructing the facets of this complex history. My exploration of the power of bodies will focus only on a story, an episode, or a recess of this tortuous path. In the pages of this book, I will explore the question of the body and the relationship that this entertains with the mind and with reality, as it has been addressed by feminist thought. As noticed by Kevin (2009), ‘by definition, feminism is concerned
And here, attentive reader, you might grumble and challenge my use of the word ‘feminist’, which seems to suggest something clear, defined, and unambiguous. As I write these pages, the media, academia, and civil society in Italy comment on the historic rise of the first Italian woman to the highest spheres of political power. Some describe this event as a feminist conquest. In contrast, others see it as confirmation of the irreducibility of feminism to the feminine, that is, the achievements of a person assigned female at birth do not represent, tout court, a feminist achievement. This national debate reflects a broader international conflict between antagonistic feminist discourses that see political parties and movements of civil society vying for ideological hegemony.
In this conflict, abortion and its opposite are defined as ‘feminist’, assisted procreation and its prohibition are ‘feminist’, and positions favourable to adoptions by LGBTQI+ people, as well as critical positions that challenge this possibility, are both ‘feminist’. Feminist movements like the Italian Se Non Ora Quando? (If not now, when?), which include theoretical positions that elevate women to the unique and privileged subject of feminism, coexist with the recent transfeminist movement, the LGBTQI+ movement, and the universe of the so-called pro-life movements that claim a ‘feminism’ of motherhood.
In short, along with the resurgence of the term ‘feminist’ in public discourse, a term that has long been considered anachronistic, outdated, and politicized (Bell et al, 2019), we are witnessing a series of reappropriations of this term to construct radically different modes of social living. The term ‘feminism’ becomes an empty signifier whose meaning is fluctuating, subject to reappropriation by different groups aimed at legitimizing particular worldviews (Laclau and Mouffe, 2014).
This is not merely a linguistic issue (I use the adjective ‘mere’ here to refer to positions distant from mine, which reduce the linguistic issue to a mere question): these discursive conflicts about what feminism is and does raise relevant questions of both a political and economic nature, two analytically distinguishable but deeply interdependent
In light of this political antagonism accompanying the recent feminist awakening, this book aims to partially restore the complexity and variety of feminisms that have developed mainly in recent decades (Jeanes et al, 2012). However, I will use the term ‘feminist’ in the singular when I want to indicate what, in my opinion, unites these feminisms, which is an aspiration to the emancipation of the subject historically constructed as the Other.2 The Other reinforces the superiority of the subject it is related to. We will see that the boundaries of this Other are porous and, over time, with the emergence of alternative feminist views, have expanded to embrace the Other woman, the Other LGBTQI+, the Other native, the Other disabled, the Other non-White, the Other migrant, and the Other nature and environment.
My reflection on this dialectic of the Other adopts the body as an analytical lens, concept, metaphor, and material to be interrogated. The relationship between bodies and feminisms intertwines with the Cartesian dualism that ascribes superiority to mind over body and the symbolic association of femininity with the receptive matter. The latter has historically been expressed through a ‘chain of equivalences’ (Laclau and Mouffe, 2014, p xviii) body–matter–generation–receptacle–woman that, even before Descartes, has origins in the Platonic reading of matter as receiving matter (Butler, 2010).
These theoretical perspectives, which resurface, albeit in other forms, in the contemporary debate, have their roots in philosophies of reality and experience that permeate the millennia-old history of Western thought. In attempting to critically interrogate the existing link between philosophy, feminisms, and the multiple ways we organize
In this sense, it is important to emphasize that feminist thought expresses a need to overcome Cartesian dualism that unites different theoretical systems that have emerged in recent decades. The 20th century, in particular, saw the flourishing of theories aimed at overcoming a dualistic view of the individual and knowledge (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980). For example, Csordas (1990) explains how this need to overcome dualism unites the reflections of diverse thinkers such as Bourdieu and Merleau-Ponty. Bourdieu (1977 [1972]), drawing on Mauss (1938, 1950), proposes the notion of habitus to indicate bodily, unconscious, and collective dispositions that generate and are generated by communal life practices. Male domination, for example, manifests itself in practices of masculinizing the male body and feminizing the female body through which male domination becomes bodily and becomes habitus. For Bourdieu, the body is always also habitus (Bourdieu, 2001 [1998]). Similarly, Merleau-Ponty (1945) collapses the subject–object dualism by articulating the primacy of perception and phenomenology. Consciousness is already always embodied, in the world, experienced and perceived. Whereas Descartes claimed privileged access of thought to truth, for Merleau-Ponty there is no knowledge outside of my situated and bodily perception of reality. The body is not an object, as it was in the Cartesian reading, but already a subject.
This phenomenological approach focused on embodiment has critical methodological implications that Csordas (1990) highlights in their analyses of religious rituals and that will also become central in studies of work and organizations that have addressed the gender issue, with particular attention to the trans experience (see Chapter 4). However, it is on Spinoza (1677), especially on a recent reinterpretation of Spinoza’s thought, that my reflection will dwell on explaining how the body has been theorized in relation to the feminist political project in a radically different way from Cartesian dualism. Of particular interest for this reflection are the recent interpretations of Spinoza’s thought (Deleuze, 2010; Thanem and Wallenberg, 2015) that have provided the theoretical foundations of one of the analysed feminisms, that is, post-human feminism (Braidotti, 2022). Anticipating recent theoretical developments in physics and philosophy of mind, Spinoza’s
According to Spinoza, abandoning the idea of a rational mind as autonomous and independent from passions does not mean falling back into the irrationality of passions. There exists a relational rationality that arises from harmony with nature, and it is rational precisely to the extent that it feeds on bodily passions (Thanem and Wallenberg, 2015). Of particular relevance for the feminist project are the ethical-political implications of this Spinozian theorization of the body, reason, and affect and how these can be reinterpreted not from a dualistic perspective but from a monist one (Thanem and Wallenberg, 2015).
The title of Spinoza’s work, the Ethica ordine Geometrico Demonstrata (Spinoza, 1677), indeed, reminds us that the lenses through which we interpret reality and know it also represent our ethical compass. The differences between various feminisms are thus also to be understood in terms of differences between ethical systems. For example, some ethical principles of Stuart Mill and John Locke’s thoughts find expression in the neoliberal feminism analysed in the first chapter, particularly in that liberal political project that represents its roots. Marxist thought, on the other hand, underlies the critical-socialist feminist interpretation, just as Hegelian dialectics and psychoanalysis have offered key components of Butlerian reading of gender and their ethical reflections. Finally, post-human feminism takes up and precisely elaborates Spinoza’s ethics, thus offering a reading of reality different from the Cartesian one and ultimately allowing for a radical de-centring of human subjectivity and redefining the ethical responsibilities of contemporary organizations.
Exploring bodies from a feminist perspective, and with a view to the ethical-philosophical systems underlying various feminisms, allows us to problematize the multiple regimes of meaning ascribed to the body in the social sphere (Kevin, 2009). In particular, I will explore those specific regimes of meaning that have constructed the body as (un)productive, (re)productive, (pre)modern, and (pre)human. In addressing the issue of the body and materiality in relation to the feminist political project, my reflection will take up Butler’s invitation to problematize the process of othering some bodies; that is, I will inquire into how power and control are exercised in the organization of bodies to define some of these bodies as Other bodies and, as Other bodies, abject and sub-human. The possibilities and limits of this ‘body politics’ (Martin, 2002, p 866) and of these regimes of intelligibility
Bodies, feminisms, but also work and organizations underpin the stages of this narrative journey. This book, in fact, aims to infuse the essence of the feminist political project into the very fabric of organizing. In this sense, the book questions how these feminisms can help us develop a different understanding of work and its organization. The challenge, while familiar, is recent. The philosophical systems of modern thinkers like Kant and Descartes represent the backbone of modern scientific thought and have contributed to the birth of the rational organization of labour, of which Taylorism and Fordism were the first expression, but which persists in new and more sophisticated forms of control and valorization (Alawattage and Wickramasinghe, 2018; Pitts, 2020).
The centrality that instrumental rationality has assumed in organizational, economic thought and the process of (de)materialization of labour organization that characterizes the most recent evolution of capitalism in the form of biogenetic and cognitive capitalism are integral parts of contemporary politics of bodies and have (had) important implications in terms of the inclusion/exclusion of sexualized, racialized, and naturalized Others.
However, various feminisms have given different and sometimes conflicting readings of the particular relationship that exists between capitalism and feminism, between capitalism and bodies. These readings develop from a different valorization of the individual, labour, difference, life, and the world. In this sense, valorization comes to configure itself as that process of organizing value that reveals the failure of every attempt to separate economics from ethics (Graeber, 2001, 2011; Skeggs, 2014). In other words, the relationship between feminism and capitalism does not appear contingent but rather necessary since the attribution of economic value is, by definition, a social process and, as such, an expression of the moral values that guide our practices and relationships (Pitts, 2020). The distinction between value (economic) and values (ethical) is primarily analytical; in practice, there is a relationship of close interdependence (Zelizer, 2005). The exploration of the relationship between feminisms, work, and organizations will, therefore, necessarily raise critical ethical questions about what value is and to whom/what it is recognized/denied.
In weaving the fabric of this narrative, the book aspires to draw a map to navigate the discovery of these different territories of feminism
I read the intricately woven plot by the Argentine writer as an invitation to humility, urging us to recognize the inherent limitations of all science and knowledge. It also serves as a call to question the purpose, the telos, behind every attempt to generate them. As Italo Calvino writes on the pages of his The Traveller in the Map (2014 [1984]), the enduring lesson gleaned from the annals of cartography is invariably one of tempering human ambitions. The map does not arise from the aspiration of an exhaustive and totalizing representation of reality but rather from the desire to guide the traveller in exploring that reality. The first maps were scrolls, expressing both the linear time of the journey and the space.
Cartography, Calvino explains, teaches us that every attempt at representation, at guiding others in explorations, remains open to doubt and error; it has more to do with discovering gaps and less with acquiring certainties. Every map is not only incomplete and indeterminate but is also a projection of our own ‘interior geography’ (Calvino, 2014 [1984], p 24). So, a subjective impulse is ‘always present in an operation that seems based on the most neutral objectivity such as cartography’ (Calvino, 2014 [1984], p 22). Calvino also adds that cartography concerns the unexplored elsewhere and the discovery of what is close and familiar, including ourselves.
In drawing this map of feminist land, I have both projected and discovered my interior geography. A geography that is precisely a journey, stages, and encounters, a geography that is a narrative. ‘In short, a geographical map, even though it is a static object, presupposes an idea of narrative; it is conceived on the basis of a journey; it is an Odyssey’ (Calvino, 2014 [1984], p 19).
The narration of this exploratory journey and map requires the adoption of a ‘feminist écriture’, a feminist writing (Fotaki et al, 2014, p 1239). Feminist writing reappropriates the negative terms of the dualisms that characterize modern scientific research. Where modern writing privileges objectivity, neutrality, and detachment of researchers from the world, feminist writing breaks this dualism by denying the possibility of an analysis of the world outside the world (Grosz, 2013);
One of the essential aspects of feminist writing is that it is called upon to see multiplicity (Deleuze and Guattari, 1980), where language yields unity or value dualisms that organize, categorize, and often exclude. Thus, rather than speaking of a body, I will talk of bodies, and just as multiple are the interpretations of these bodies. In particular, the first stage of this journey offers a critical reading of neoliberal feminism, which, by virtue of its synergy with the value systems of contemporary society, has managed to establish itself as hegemonic (Rottenberg, 2018).
In a dialectical logic, this feminism has strengthened an opposite and contrary feminism (analysed in Chapter 3), which I will call critical-socialist. This feminism has been able not only to develop another interpretation of the relationship between feminism and the economy but also to stimulate collective and local resistance to neoliberal feminism (Fraser, 2016). The notion of body-territory theorized by activist Veronica Gago (2022 [2019]) will allow for an interrogation of this perspective. Both of these feminisms will be explored with particular attention to their ethical-political implications for labour and organizational practices.
The fourth chapter offers a theoretical discussion of the work of the US philosopher Judith Butler, who has better articulated the post-modern response to the violence of the heterosexual matrix on bodies, thus bringing the claims of the LGBTQI+ movement from the margins to the centre of feminism (Tyler, 2019b). Butlerian lenses will allow for an interrogation of organizational literature on the theme of the body and materiality and a problematization of the link between organizational practices and the politics of bodies.
Finally, the fifth chapter explores the main contributions of post-human feminism, particularly in the formulation of this feminism developed by Rosi Braidotti, to understanding the body and the recent changes that have affected the organization of work. By combining and challenging the claims of ecological and techno-scientific feminism, post-human feminism claims the critical-affirmative contribution of feminism to an understanding of the multiple contemporary crises.
The construction of this map of contemporary feminisms concludes with the attempt to outline the contours of an ethical theory that can bring together, in dialogue, some of the fundamental contributions of the explored theoretical approaches. This is not the elaboration of a normative ethical model but rather an invitation to continue questioning the values guiding our practices and common living. My reflection seeks to draw some ethical-political coordinates to help you navigate the contemporary feminist multiverse, challenging existing practices and imagining new ones.
Like any journey, this book is characterized by a series of encounters that took place during my research fieldwork. Encounter is a term from Late Latin: incontra meaning ‘in front of’, from in ‘in’ plus contra ‘against’. Every encounter is a movement, both toward and against. It can become a ‘joyful encounter’ (Thanem and Wallenberg, 2015, p 244) or turn into a conflict; it is often unexpected. However, the prefix ‘in’ offers a place and time for the encounter, to move toward each other. Thus, the movement implies that one must leave a place, one’s own place, for the encounter to happen. Therefore, to meet, one must question one’s interpretive schemes and the familiar vision of the world, take risks, and understand how the world can be seen from another place and through the eyes of another. Drawing again from Calvino, there is a continuous relationship between cartography that looks elsewhere and cartography that focuses on a familiar territory (Calvino, 2014 [1984]). Each encounter offers a creative and, at the same time, destructive opportunity for ‘de-familiarization’ (Braidotti, 2013), that is, to critically analyse and experiment with what is familiar to us. In Hegelian reading, the encounter is configured as a scene of recognition, in which the Other, by meeting me, simultaneously makes me exist and allows me to recognize myself (Butler, 2010). For Spinoza, encounters can empower us through joy (1677, Part III).
These encounters give meaning to the narrative journey as they offer both you and me the opportunity to distance ourselves from the interpretive grids we use in everyday life and to question them, rediscovering and empowering ourselves in the encounter with the Other.
