Feminist Theory

This chapter focuses on one example (Gayle Rubin’s influential work on gender and sexuality) that illustrates how feminism has placed biology at a distance from its conceptual and political interests. The chapter begins by working through a small section of Rubin’s “Thinking Sex” to map out some of the conceptual and political effects of Rubin’s aversion to biological explanation. In particular, it is interested in how the belly and antibiologism figure in Rubin’s attempts to forge new directions for feminist theory. The implications of this for feminist theory are canvassed via Melanie Klein’s theory of phantasy (and its relation to infancy and physiology). The centrality of the gut (particularly the stomach/belly) for the emergence of mind in Klein’s work is used to argue for the psychic nature of the organic interior. This chapter makes the case that feminist theory could be more directly engaged with such biological theories of mind.