Abstract: Mechthild Hart
The Bodiless Spirit of Patriarchal Capitalism, Real Bodies, and Corporeal
Feminist Resistance
This paper discusses how the bodiless, pure sprit of mobile finance capitalism
feeds into the patriarchal dream of eventually replacing a self-recreating
nature with "pure" money, the "pure" essence of life. In the nightmarish
reality of this dream real bodies do real, place-bound, physical work.
Real life is extracted from them by trading them as disposable sex toys
or disposable domestic workers. Their bodies feed the pure spirit of financial
speculation, and their impurity has to be kept in check. The power of
the uterus, the female body's capacity to let new life ripen in its interior
and give birth to it needs to be usurped. Genetic engineering promises
us custom-made children and a birthing machine that disposes of the need
for substitute birthing bodies. In the meantime, substitute motherbodies,
and the bodies of live-in or live-out maids, sex workers, and those laboring
in sweatshops, belong mostly to women of color, to Majority World, poor
women. They exemplify the impure aspects of life whose unruliness remains
a threat. The "phallic-father-money" (Vaughan) of the financial stratos
dwellers therefore makes real, organic, imperfect bodies do at gun point
what is profitable (or pleasurable), penetrates them, and disposes of
them when they are not longer useful. How can we move from a (global)
culture that glorifies virtual techno-bodies in corporate cyberspace and
extracts the life out of real, flesh-and blood bodies that keep moving
from place to place, picking up after the lords of cyberspace? This paper
discusses how corporeal feminist resistance can make us stay grounded
in our physical, bodily, place-bound reality and reach across vast geographical
and cultural distances.
Biographical Information
Mechthild Hart moved from Germany to the United States in 1972,
worked in a number of women's and community organizations, and has been
teaching and mentoring at DePaul University's School for New Learning
in Chicago since 1987. She has published articles, book chapters, and
two books on social, local, regional, and global divisions of labor, with
special emphasis on motherwork.
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