Some poststructuralist feminist theorists hold that the body is merely the product of cultural determinants and that gender is a free-floating artifice. I discuss how this "denaturalization" of gender and the body entrenches us yet deeper in the nature/culture dichotomy. The body, I maintain, needs to be "renaturalized" so that its earthy significance is recognized. Through a feminist reappropriation of Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of the body, I develop a noncausal linkage between gender and the body. I present the body as an (...) indeterminate constancy that is culturally and historically contextualized, on the one hand, yet part of our embodied givenness on the other. Interspersed throughout the paper are passages that describe my own bodily condition as I wrote the paper. (shrink)

Describes what the author sees as a suppression of the feminine in Western culture, technology, and philosophy and opens a feminist postmodern space from which fresh differences may emerge. This title explores underdeveloped themes in American and Canadian feminism. It offers a deconstruction of the phallocentric dichotomies of nature and culture.

Some poststructuralist feminist theorists hold that the body is merely the product of cultural determinants and that gender is a free-floating artifice. I discuss how this “denaturalization” of gender and the body entrenches us yet deeper in the nature/culture dichotomy. The body, I maintain, needs to be “renaturalized” so that its earthy significance is recognized. Through a feminist reappropriation of Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of the body, I develop a noncausal linkage between gender and the body. I present the body as an (...) indeterminate constancy that is culturally and historically contextualized, on the one hand, yet part of our embodied givenness on the other. Interspersed throughout the paper are passages that describe my own bodily condition as I wrote the paper. (shrink)

Throughout the paper, I intersperse intimate movement episodes where I respond through my body and personal self to Naess. In grounding his own ecosophy, Naess makes his stand on a very certain place high up in the mountains called “Tvergastein.” His ecosophy T springs directly from his personalhome. Engaging with his texts I find I am not merely immersed in the usual way into a symbolic realm of ideas detached from my body, but have the odd feeling that I must (...) tilt my head to one side and slightly back so I can listen from where he speaks up there on that mountain. Thinking on an incline like this, I become aware that I am listening from down here. But from where down here? From where do I respond? Where is my home? Reading Naess in his place compels me to place my own response more particularly, more intimately. (shrink)