Revealing Male Bodies

Preface: What’s a Nice Girl like You Doing in a Text like This?

P R E F A C E What’s a Nice Girl like You Doing in a Text like This? n a n c y t u a n a This text takes its origin from an absence and a presence. My research in feminist philosophies of the body had made me aware of the lack of attention to male bodies in the newly emerging feminist studies of the body and embodiment. Being a feminist who has always believed that our revolution will not be successful unless our concerns and methods address and are embraced by men as well as women, I saw this as a serious omission in the literature. At the same time that I became aware of this lack, I moved to the University of Oregon, where I quickly found myself in the unusual situation of working with a group of male graduate students who were specializing in feminist philosophy. This bodily presence presented me with the opportunity both to support their interest in feminist philosophy and to work with them on developing feminist readings of male embodiment . Revealing Male Bodies is the culmination of our five-year collaboration . Our work on this anthology has been a model of collaboration in its richest sense. Before putting out our call for papers, we spent two years researching scholarship in the philosophy of the body. In that process, each of us found our own work and interests transformed. For example, when I sat down to write a paper on the sex/gender distinction, rather than my typical emphasis on female bodies and practices, I focused the lens of my analysis on male bodies; this shift in perspective helped me tend to the materiality of embodiment. In another case, our research into the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty created opportunities for collaboration beyond the scope of this editorial project. When both Maurice Hamington and Greg Johnson framed their dissertations around MerleauPonty ’s philosophy of the body, they not only were influenced by work done in our editorial group, but turned to group members for philosophical advice and support. x / Nancy Tuana The editorial work for this volume was also collaborative. We worked together at each step of the review process, making every effort to insure that all voices were heard and that each of us participated in all stages of the development of this volume. Nonetheless, there was an issue of hierarchy . Only one of us, and the female one at that, was a professor—and not just any professor. I was the dissertation advisor for all but one of the editorial board, and a senior member of the faculty. Yet I was, at the same time, the member with the least direct knowledge of male embodiment. Navigating the Scylla and Charybdis of this presence and absence, though sometimes difficult, enabled us to put our feminist politics into practice on more than one occasion. My decision to work with a group of male graduate students was seen by some as being in tension with my commitment to feminism.1 Why, I was asked, should I single out men? Why not include female graduate students? Although part of my answer to this question had to do with pragmatic concerns (even five is an unwieldy number of editors for a volume) there was a deeper philosophical commitment behind my decision. I believe that phenomenologies of male embodiment can best be undertaken by those who have moved through the world as men, and who thus have the requisite experiential base for such accounts. It does not follow from this that those of us who are not male cannot then use these accounts to add to the literature. Indeed, Susan Bordo’s early ‘‘Reading the Male Body’’2 provides a perfect model: an excellent study of male embodiment by a female, feminist scholar, based on her careful reading of male accounts of male sexuality . Nor does it follow from this belief that male embodiment is somehow hegemonic or even very clearly delineated. As a scholar who has argued that the sex/gender and the male/female dichotomies are problematic, I believe that transgender experiences provide yet another important lens for accounts of embodiment. It would be a mistake on our part or on the part of our readers to hope that one anthology could provide all the perspectives that should be included in an account of male embodiment. Still, we see this volume as an earnest first step toward developing a new...