[PEN-L:10099] Body as Self-Property, Not Commodity (was Re: Abortion & Bargaining)

[Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1@xxxxxxx>]

Hi Sam:
>Abortion is not morally wrong  if you hold the principle of
>self-ownership. I have a property right in my own body&mind. Central to
>a property right is the right of disposal.

Rosalind Petchesky presents such a view in her "The Body as Property: A
Feminist Re-Vision" (in _Conceiving the New World Order: The Global
Politics of Reproduction_ [1995]), especially with regard to reproductive
politics, but also in relation to women's liberation in general.  You might
be interested in reading it.  It's a sophisticated philosophical reply to
feminist and postmodernist critics of the concept of the body as property.
Petchesky argues that those feminist and postmodernist critics (such as
Carole Pateman [see _The Sexual Contract], Farida Akhter, Irene Diamond &
Lee Quinby [see _Feminism and Foucault_), etc.) are themselves trapped in
the Lockean paradigm "through which 'property in one's person' signifies
radical individualism, instrumentalism, and a dualism between the body as
commodity and the 'person' as transactor" [lots of isms!].  She instead
asks us to consider that the Lockean paradigm was itself a bourgeois
redefinition of a more radical conceptualization of property in one's
person advanced by, among others, Leveller women & men.

According to Petchesky, "_The Women's Petition_ of 1651 to
Cromwell...asserted 'that we have an equal share and interest with men in
the Commonwealth':'Are any of our lives, limbs, liberties, or goods to be
taken from us more than from Men?  Would you have us keep at home when
men...are...forced from their Houses?'"  Leveller leader Richard Overton
wrote in Newgate Prison in 1646: "To every individuall in nature is given
an individuall property by nature, not to be invaded or usurped by any: for
every one as he is himselfe, so he hath a selfe property, else could he not
be himselfe."  Even after the Lockean redefinition of property--away from
the idea of the exclusive right to use of one's own "lives, limbs,
liberties" to the notion of the right to alienate for exchange--a more
radical conceptualization of self property persisted and helped various
dissidents articulate their own bodily integrity and freedom from coercion.
"That it [the Lockean redefinition] didn't succeed entirely is evidenced in
a statement by a young man arrested for homosexuality in England twenty-two
years after Locke died: 'I did it because I thought I knew him,...and I
think there is no crime in making what use I please of my own body."  (In
these passages, Petchesky draws upon Patricia Higgins, "The Reactions of
Women, with Special Reference to Women Petitioners," in _Politics,
Religion, and the English Civil War_, ed. B. Manning [1973], Christopher
Hill, _The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas during the English
Revolution_ [1972], and also another book by Hill, _The Collected Essays of
Christopher Hill_ [1986].  All engrossing reads.)

Also, in 1568 in the Calivinist Geneva [!], a woman from Lyons, accused of
sleeping with her fiance before marriage, defiantly retorted to the Geneva
elders: "Paris est au Roy et mon corps est a moy!" (Petchesky 390-1).  Here
the woman is articulating her exclusive right to own her own "sensual and
sexual experience" and defend herself against repression, transforming by
analogy the vocabulary available to her (the principle of sovereignty).
(Here, Petchesky's sources are Natalie Zemon Davis's _Society and Culture
in Early Modern France_ and "Boundaries and the Sense of Self in
Sixteenth-Century France" [in _Reconstructing Individualism_, ed. T.G.
Heller, et al, 1986].)

To sum up, Petchesky argues for the use of the concept of self-ownership in
a qualified sense: "owning our bodies depends integrally on having access
to the social resources for assuring our bodies' health and well-being..."
(Petchesky 403).  In this sense, the idea of body as self-property may
belong to a great political vocabulary fit for the Leftist use.

Yoshie

P.S. Also take a look at Petchesky's _Abortion and Woman's Choice: the
State, Sexuality, & Reproductive Rights_.