Bodies of the future: Embodied labour and lived difference
Sheena Vachhani, Manchester Business School
“The explosion will not happen today. It is too soon…or too late.” (Fanon, 1986:9)
How can the human world live its difference? This is the question Homi K Bhabha raises in 1986 when speaking about the work of Frantz Fanon (see Bhabha, 1986). This is a question that continues to be asked, or perhaps continues to be forgotten or elided in our present and with redolence will haunt us in our future(s). We have lived the future since 1986, but what does the notion of difference continue to hold for us in these post-feminist, post-colonial and hyphenated times and how will our manifold differences be manifest in our future(s)?
We have troubled gender and enclaved feminism but how can difference as a scholarly and practicable concept be progressed in order to understand the organisational world? This paper explores the body as both an active and inscriptive site and by exploring Grosz’s corporeal phenomenology I examine how the body cannot only be seen as an atomic aggregate but rather as a lived experience. Theories of the body have long garnered attention in sociological fields as well as feminist studies (Hughes and Witz, 1997; Witz, 2000) and have had increasing attention within organisation theory (cf. Hassard, Holliday and Willmott, 2000; Holliday and Hassard, 2001). This paper seeks to add to these debates in which embodiment is central and allows an appreciation of difference that is not simply understood through exclusion, such as the regulation of bodies, but uses the thought and writing of Irigaray (and her figurative writing strategies) in order to see the future of difference, writing from the body and more pertinently, how we can think and live difference in organisation.
With special reference to popular culture especially fictionalised medical dramas, I explore lived difference and how bodies “appear” in the discourses of popular culture often through a denial of difference by which the body surfaces in unexpected and unlikely ways. Briefly returning to debates concerning essentialism and materialism in gender, difference is here not what was once seen as feminism’s desire to read “woman” as a privileged space of a general alteriry (cf. the work of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, see also Kirby, 1991) but that which disturbs the familiar alignment of dualisms (such as self/other, male/female) in social scientific thinking.
References
Bhabha, HK (1986) – “Foreword: Remembering Fanon Self, Psyche and the Colonial Condition”, in F. Fanon Black Skin, White Masks, trans. CL Markmann. London: Pluto Press.
Fanon, F (1986) - Black Skin, White Masks, trans. CL Markmann. London: Pluto Press.
Grosz, E (1994) - Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism. Indiana: Indiana University Press.
Hassard, J, Holliday, R and Willmott, H (Eds) (2000) – Body and Organization. London: Sage Publications.
Holliday, R and Hassard, J (Eds) (2001) – Contested Bodies. London: Routledge.
Hughes, A and Witz, A (1997) – “Feminism and the Matter of Bodies: From Beauvoir to Butler”, Body & Society, 3(1): 47–60
Kirby, V (1991) – “Corporeal Habits: Addressing Essentialism Differently”, Hypatia – A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, Vol 6(3)Fall: 4-24.
Witz, A (2000) – “Whose Body Matters?: Feminist Sociology and the Corporeal Turn in Sociology and Feminism”, Body & Society, 6(2): 1-24.