Just recently, I have started to delve in to modern feminist literature [Judith Butler, Anne Fausto-Sterling, Foucault, etc.]. All of this reading is brand new to me---never before have I read such articulate academic accounts of feminism and suggestions for how to advance feminism given certain problems and limitations that the ideology faces today. I'm not going to get into the details of these arguments, but if you're at all interested in learning more I strongly encourage you to pick up and read Fausto-Sterling's Sexing the Body. Even if you don't agree with everything argued, the history and science alone are fascinating and informative [plus, it's especially important to consider views that counter your own so that you can be a well-rounded person].
I definitely fall into the category of not agreeing with everything proclaimed in these modern works, yet I find the books to be very stimulating and encouraging of fruitful reflection. One of the most intriguing suggestions I've encountered so far was the argument is that masculinity is defined for the most part without reference to the physical nature of maleness whereas femininity is historically defined [at least in part, if not totally] by the woman's physicality, especially the capability of being a mother [see: Gender Trouble]. Before reading Butler, I'd never thought about the construct of maleness and femaleness in a comparative fashion...I mean, it's always made sense to me that part of being a woman is motherhood, but I'd never before considered what the comparison was with men or even whether there was a common, cultural comparison to men or not.
Butler proceeds in her book to argue that women need to be "disembodied" so that they are viewed in the same [non-physical] light as men. This, she maintains, is the only way to resolve this apparent problematic in understanding human sexuality. While I think this is an interesting solution, I think there is perhaps a better alternative: Why not turn around and "embody" the men? That's right---do to men what has been done to "us" over thousands of years.
As I sat back and pondered this idea, I began to realize that women have actually been practically and historically acknowledged as more fundamentally human [fallible, limited by our bodies] than men. Why is this the case? I speculate that because men have historically been dominant in the field of philosophy, it has been culturally and intellectually easier to posit theories of human limitedness on "other" people who are not men and theorizing. Basically, men didn't want to acknowledge their own discoveries and theories of humanity. If this is the case [and it seems to me that it very well may be], then isn't it necessary, given modernity's graces of greater equality and women's abundant presence in academia, to now understand men as human rather than "super-men" who somehow miraculously escape the fundamental aspects of human nature? [The right answer is, "Yes."]
Of course, I have no idea as to how such a philosophy might be put into practice [I suppose it could be through a new academic literature on masculinity and fallibility or a renewed understanding of what it means to be fully human---both a body and a soul]. This being said, I hold that Butler's idea of erasing women's embodiment faces even greater challenges, because I think it's pretty hard to completely ignore our bodily existences. In fact, I think it's fundamentally wrong to argue that a totally discarnate concept of humanity is possible [just read Aristotle: those who are perfectly virtuous and infallible are not humans but rather gods---we're not gods]. The understanding of humanness as essentially embodied and spiritual is an historical and fundamental understanding that we'd be hard-pressed to entirely erase from history and general approaches to the world...
We just need to admit human fallibility [for all people] and put this into practice. Maybe then we can become a world more truly equal and loving of one another, because right now, we are not loving one another but rather our ideas of what people are as disembodied beings. We must admit our fallibility to encourage genuine acceptance, respect, and love to flourish.
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