THE 'MATERIALIST' BENT IN CONTEMPORARY FEMINIST THEORY

Abstract

Since the late eighties, feminist literature has produced a great number of contributions on the body. It has forgotten, however, its more properly biological dimension. Despite the desire to reconcile nature and nurture, this oversight has been encouraged by the fear of falling into some forms of essentialism and the difficult dialogue between social sciences and natural sciences. In recent years, however, some authors have tried to restore the body’s material dimension to center stage. This has happened because neuroscience and genomics have revived, in a more or less hidden way, a biological conception of race and sex. In this new context it has become more and more urgent to strive for an alliance between the natural sciences, the social sciences and feminism able to confront the challenges of the current phase of biocapitalism and biocolonialism. A new feminist materialism seems necessary to contrast the present form of reductionism, a molecular reductionism that decomposes the body into molecules, manipulable and exploitable bits of informational sequences that are transformable into “biovalue”. As Sarah Franklin maintains: “This instrumentalism has become inseparable from the capitalisation of life itself” (Franklin, 2000: 189).