Eat or Be Eaten: A Feminist Phenomenology of Women as Food

Abstract

Young, and Sandra Bartky-among numerous others-have argued that our lived embodiment is philosophically important since it is subject to discipline, power, and contingencies. Our bodies are experienced through and conditioned by our social status, gender, race, and ability.Much of this work draws upon phenomenology, arguing that our bodies are not separated from our subjectivities but are one and the same. However, little feminist philosophical analysis has been done on the role of our bodies as food. I argue that paying philosophical attention only to how the body is shaped, viewed, and touched neglects a dimension of our materiality: what Val Plumwood calls "foodiness" and what I will primarily refer to as edibility. In this paper, I argue that seeing ourselves as edible, beginning with women as edible, can result in both a new ontoecological ethics and to a new understanding of the life/death/life cycle. I will pursue this argument first by contesting the traditional image of the food chain and of humans eating, through the works of Eva-Maria Simms and Val Plumwood. Both of these authors detail instances of philosophical importance that demonstrate how very edible the human subject is.Following this examination, I will formulate an extension of Maurice Merleau-Ponty's ontology, where just as visibility is essentially reversible, edibility is also a condition of our existence.