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Books > Social sciences > Sociology, social studies > Gender studies > Women's studies > Feminism
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Elemental Difference and the Climate of the Body (Paperback)
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Elemental Difference and the Climate of the Body (Paperback)
Series: Studies in Feminist Philosophy
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In nineteenth-century Europe, differences among human bodies were
understood to be matters of scientific classification. At the
height of scientific acceptance, it was unthinkable that race or
sex or diagnosis or indigence were invention. Today, however,
differences among human bodies are understood as matters of social
construction. The philosophy of social construction understands
differences among humans to be matters of human imposition. Social
constructionism's way of understanding the origin of differences
among humans is so well-established as to have no currently viable
alternatives, even among new materialists, social constructionism's
most ardent critics. This book argues that new materialists and
social constructionists share a distinction between the political
and the ecological. Emily Anne Parker centers her argument on the
philosophical concept of the polis, according to which there is one
complete human form. It is this form that is to blame for our
current political and ecological crisis. Political hierarchies and
ecological crises are often considered to be two different
problems: for example, many speak of parallel problems, climate
change and racial injustice. Parker argues that these are not
parallel crises so much as one problem: the polis. The philosophy
of the polis asserts that there is one complete human body, and
that body is meant to govern all other things. In that sense there
are not two crises, but instead one concern: to perceive the ways
in which this tradition of the polis constrains the present.
Elemental difference in the polis is appreciated in the fact that
"empirical bodily non-identity," an Aristotelian concept, can be
called upon to elevate one group of bodies among the rest. Parker
builds from Sylvia Wynter, who argues that the very idea of
empirical bodily non-identity begins with the modern science of
racial anatomy, or what Wynter calls biocentrism. Parker argues
that biocentrism is a feature of the polis, according to which the
one complete body was defined by its capacity for disembodied
thought. The sciences of racial anatomy are a more explicit
commitment to biocentrism, but the ranking of matter with respect
to one complete human, a body that is the site of supra-natural
thinking, is a practice that has always characterized the polis. In
this way, the polis is responsible for both political and
ecological hierarchy. It is as responsible for what is
euphemistically called climate change as it is for the political
hierarchy that constitutes it. Elemental Difference and the Climate
of the Body ultimately bridges the insights of social
constructionism and new materialisms to create a philosophy of
elemental difference. Difference, rather than needing to be either
dismissed based on its social construction or reified in keeping
with the hierarchies of the polis, is crucial for addressing
contemporary crises of the polis.
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