Just Life: Bioethics and the Future of Sexual Difference ed. by Mary C. Rawlinson (review)

It may seem perplexing to read a book that ranges from a fresh interpretation of the myth of Demeter and Persephone to a detailed sensuous discussion of the smell, taste, production, and the regional localities of French cheeses; that moves from a new reading of Antigone—one that challenges many standard feminist readings and argues that the real hero of the play is Ismene—to a critique of corporate capitalism with its relentless drive to commodify everything, including our body parts; that begins with a close reading of Hobbes and Rousseau and concludes with the “right to joyful.” Yet, I hope to show that there is a deep thematic unity that underlies Mary C. Rawlinson’s varied discussions.

Just Life: Bioethics and the Future of Sexual Difference is not only about the celebration of life and generativity; it performs a celebration of life in its full concrete sensuousness; it is about a new way of imagining “humanbodies.”¹ Rawlinson characterizes her orientation as critical phenomenology that starts from the idea that universality appears in multiplicity and difference. “More than one narrative will be necessary to do justice to life. Women’s experience (and there will be others) is just as much an opportunity for the appearance of the universal as is Man’s. Critical phenomenology resists both abstract universalism and cultural relativism” (x). Although much of the book is concerned with the distortion and repression of women’s experience throughout the ages, Rawlinson rejects reifying a new dualism: man vs. woman. On the contrary, she wants to highlight the dynamic fluidity of experience that has universal significance for all humanbodies.

Rawlinson imaginatively and critically appropriates themes from Irigaray, Foucault, and Baudrillard, but, in the background, there are resonances of Hegel’s battle against abstract universalism, his sense of dynamic fluidity, and his sensitive recognition of differences. Critical phenomenology challenges the narratives that have and continue to shape our identities; it shows us how we can construct new and different narratives that focus on generativity as a new starting point for ethics and politics. “Critical phenomenology takes up the ‘critique of what we are’ as an ‘historical analysis of the limits imposed on us,’ but the ‘experiment with the possibility of going beyond them’ requires the critique be joined to the thought of the irreducibility of sexual difference” (72).

“What we are” is not some eternal ahistorical essence. Rather, it is the sedimentation of contingent historical and philosophical narratives that have powerfully influenced every aspect of human life where the figure of “Man” dominates. But if one is to create the space for new, more humane counter-narratives, then one must first focus on the genealogy of those myths that are so well-entrenched that we rarely question them. Imagining new narratives of generativity is necessary to shatter the biostructures and institutions of contemporary global capitalism that turn everything into commodities—including our bodies and even our body parts. The task of Rawlinson’s critical phenomenology is to make what is familiar strange. This is why she begins part one, “Critique of Rights,” with a close reading of Hobbes and Rousseau. Despite their striking differences, each, in his own way, reinforces the image of women as subservient to Man, as little more than Man’s property, who, by “nature” presumably, lacks the ability, temperament, and talent to engage in public life.²

Rawlinson cites Irigaray’s claim that “man seems to have wanted, directly or indirectly, to give the universe his own gender” (28). When early modern thinkers speak of rights, it is the rights of the abstract universal person that is produced by a complex of exclusions:

The mythology of consent invokes a moment when a promise is made among all those who will be subject to it, but women, savages, and children never enjoyed any absolute liberty to yield in the first place. The myth of the covenant secures Man’s claim to the...