PIcturing Pregnancy In Early Modern Europe

 

 

 
When the womb began to appear in printed images during the 16th century, it was understood through analogy: a garden, uroscopy flask, or microcosm of the universe. Rebecca Whiteley explores early modern birth figures, which picture the foetus in utero, and discovers an iconic form imbued with multiple kinds of knowledge: from midwifery know-how to alchemical secrets, astrological systems to new anatomical findings.

           Detail of The Figure of the Child Turning Itself to the Birth, an engraving from James Cooke’s Mellificium Chirurgiae              (1693), which bears a striking resemble to the birth figures pictured in works by Eucharius Rösslin and Jakob Rüff 

          more than a century earlier.

 
Showing two nested bodies, the pregnant and the gestated, the birth figure is an image of something that, to the early modern viewer, was not just invisible but saturated with secrecy, mystery, and power. It shows the hidden world of the bodily interior, the secrets of life before birth, and the unfathomable powers, both human and divine, of generation. The first birth figures to be printed — illustrations by Martin Caldenbach for Eucharius Rösslin’s 1513 midwifery manual, Der Swangern Frawen und Hebammen Roszengarten (The Pregnant Women’s and Midwives’ Rose Garden) — contributed to a project that had already been ongoing for centuries, of exploring, defining, controlling, and making safe the pregnant body.
 
In the Rösslin depictions, the womb is represented simply and schematically, as a transparent, flask-shaped container. By rendering the organ exposed, and see-through, the images promise knowledge of the mysterious body, a peek into the still-living interior. The fetus is represented as a cherubic toddler, with curly hair, big eyes, chubby cheeks, and a self-conscious expression. With his head slightly inclined toward us, he seems to acknowledge our presence, our looking at what, by rights, shouldn’t be seen. The images might be understood as an attempt to make known the mysterious generative womb; certainly they formed part of a text that had the aim of spreading knowledge about the body and regulating midwifery practice. But the simplicity of these compositions — the human figure encircled — gives them the capacity to mean in many ways. They point to the universal importance of generation to early modern culture, drawing a link between the fetus in utero and the human in the world, and they neatly encapsulate the origins of human life. From this starting point, the birth figure as an iconographic form could be read for significance within a multitude of different spheres of culture and knowledge: anatomy, alchemy, mechanical physiology, medical professionalism, prayer, magic, midwifery practice, haptic knowledge, and portraiture, to name but a few.
 

            Woodcut birth figures by the draftsman Martin Caldenbach, from the first edition of Eucharius Rösslin’s Der                
                Swangern Frawen und Hebammen Roszengarten (1513)

   

         Woodcut birth figures by the draftsman Martin Caldenbach, from the first edition of Eucharius Rösslin’s Der Swangern 
              Frawen und Hebammen Roszengarten (1513)

 
Birth figures helped midwives to envision the body, and particularly the position of the fetus, in a newly concrete way. Working as a key to malpresentation, birth figures pointed to how a midwife might alter a presentation and physically guide labor. For many midwives not only was this a newly interventionist approach, it fundamentally reformulated midwifery as an active process of aid, rather than a passive attendance on an inherently invisible, mysterious, and uncertain event. But midwives were not the only people looking at and using birth figures. Their widespread popularity in vernacular books indicates their use by people of all kinds, from curious lay readers to learned doctors to pregnant women. For many of these viewers, the images were not primarily ones that provided an anatomically derived and spatially concrete system of knowledge about the body. They were at the center of many webs of knowledge: from humoral to microcosmic systems; from uroscopy to alchemy; from religion to the maternal imagination. Birth figures, in their iconographic simplicity, offered a flexible, adaptable tool for thinking about the body in many modes, often simultaneously.
 
The Birth Figure and the Universe
 
One of the most widespread and deeply naturalized systems for understanding the body in this period was the theory of the microcosm. The theory taught that man was a version of the universe or world in miniature. This idea led to the practical framework of analogy: things in the body and in the world that resembled each other or worked similarly were in fact more fundamentally connected. Not only could knowledge of one explain the other, but their inherent link meant that they could also influence each other. Knowledge of the stars and planets could, for instance, tell you about a person’s health, and the inherent links between celestial and corporeal bodies meant that the planets could also be used to effect healing. The human body was, in this system, the center of all things, as Michel Foucault describes it, “the possible half of a universal atlas” and “the great fulcrum of proportions—the centre upon which relations are concentrated and from which they are once again reflected.”
 
Foucault describes analogy as a fundamental part of knowledge until the end of the sixteenth century, but among lay people, and even informally among physicians and scholars, there is much evidence to suggest that an analogical worldview remained widespread throughout the seventeenth and even the eighteenth centuries. This understanding of man at the center of many circles of resemblance, his body mirroring and informing the universe, was something that learned readers would have been visually as well as textually familiar with. Astrological and microcosmic man illustrations common in medieval manuscripts showed a figure encircled by the zodiac or planets. Astrological and magical as well as microcosmic encircled figures continued in printed early modern books, describing the relations between man and the planets, or setting out horoscopes. In John Case’s The Angelical Guide of 1697, a circle with astrological figures and notations surrounds an oval containing a set of illustrations of the developing fetus borrowed from Theodor Kerckring’s Anthropogeniae Ichnographia. The image is accompanied by an English translation of Kerckring’s notes on the figures, which describe the age of the embryos and the anatomical parts, but no mention is made by Case of the astrological surround, or the four cherubs in the corners. The image shows how easy it was to combine new anatomical findings with old astrological systems — they did not even need to be mentioned. Case’s text discusses the human ovum with a mixture of physiological detail and mystical interpretation. This image makes the link between the circle of the heavens and the circle of the womb explicit, but the analogical resemblance was everywhere, present in birth figures as well as astrological figures. In the former, the circle of the womb could also stand for the world or the heavens. Indeed, looked at microcosmically, the birth figure becomes a summation of the microcosmic worldview: if the body was the world in miniature, then the unborn child was a microcosmic person in the world of the maternal body, as well as a person in the circle of the universe.

               Woodcut figure demonstrating anatomical and astrological relations, from John Case’s The Angelical Guide 

                      Shewing Men and Women their Lott or Chance, in this Elementary Life (1697)
 

 
The encircling womb was like the arch of the heavens and like the sphere of the world. The more three-dimensional and anatomical womb in Jakob Rüff's birth figures — originally appearing in both German and Latin editions in 1554 — draws out this comparison, not only situating the organ within contemporary knowledge gained from dissection, but also exploring its microcosmic resemblances to the verdant earth.
 
Field and Fruit
 
 
In the early modern period, pregnancy was perhaps most widely and fundamentally associated and interconnected with the daily processes of the rural agricultural life that most people led. Cyclical processes such as plowing, sowing, and harvesting were regularly used as frameworks for understanding pregnancy and birth, and are, arguably, at least as important in understanding the work birth figures did for early modern viewers as anatomical and practitional frameworks. Rüff’s images — produced for him by Jos Murer, which appeared in a 1637 English translation and many other midwifery manuals in the seventeenth century — look extremely fruitlike. The uterine wall and membranes resemble a skin or rind, protecting the tender flesh inside. The ovaries look like raspberries, and the vagina even resembles a stem or stalk. Rüff's anatomical images, too, are remarkably lush, with arteries and veins forming the trunk and branches of a bodily tree, on which organs are hung like fruits. Within this internal landscape, the fetus is simultaneously the “fruit” (a common verbal as well as visual analogy for children at this time) and a miniature person dwelling, hermit-like, in the maternal/arboreal environment. From farmers to physicians, this kind of verdant analogy was a powerful tool for thinking about the body. The child grew like a crop — it was fragile and important, a legacy and investment made by the parents. This kind of thinking gave ordinary people a sense of authority over the body, through association with work they knew. Good farmers husbanded land in order to produce healthy crops, and mothers did the same with the fetus.

 

          Woodcut figures of pregnant woman and foetus in utero from The Expert Midwife or an Excellent and Most Necessary               Treatise on the Generation and Birth of Man (1637), an English translation of Jakob Rüff’s midwifery manual,                             originally  published in German and Latin in 1554


 
Indeed, this kind of thinking was utilized not just by the rural laity but also by trained medical practitioners in their explanations and treatments of the body. The medically trained midwife Percival Willughby, for instance, frequently employed agricultural analogy in explaining the logic of his practice: “Let all midwives observe the wayes and proceedings of nature for the production of their fruits in trees, the ripening of walnuts, and almonds, from their first knotting, unto the opening of the husk, and falling of the nut, and considering their signatures, to take notice, how beneficiall their oiles may bee for use in their practice, for the easing of their labouring woman.” The midwife is enjoined to look carefully at the natural world, and specifically to look for signatures that related to the pregnant and laboring body. Here Willughby links the process of pregnancy and labor to the ripening of nuts. Of the process of labor, he writes: “as the fruit ripeneth, so, by degrees, this husk, of it self, will separate from the shell, which, at last, by it’s own accord, chappeth, and, with a fissure, openeth, and, by degrees, separateth from the fruit. Then doth the husk turn up the edges, and give way, without any enforcement, for the falling off the nut.”

  Woodcut birth figures from The Expert Midwife or an Excellent and Most Necessary Treatise on the Generation and Birth of Man (1637), an English translation of Jakob Rüff’s midwifery manual, originally published in German and Latin in 1554

At the time of Willughby’s writing, there were competing theories about how to ensure the safest labor. One held that the quicker the labor was, the better, and some authors, including Rösslin, advised that the midwife manually dilate the vagina and cervix to hasten delivery. Others, including Willughby, held that labor was safest when left to run its own course, however long that was. He enjoins his readers to wait, because “the fruit would fall off it-self, when that it was full ripe.” What was known to be true about fruit served also for the womb. His description of the ripening nut brings us back to Rüff’s birth figures. The peeled membranes enact this “natural” process of birth. The husk, or womb, slowly peels away, freeing the fetal fruit without need for violence or intervention. Thus, these openings, typically understood as an imagined anatomical cut, are perhaps better understood as symbolic of the natural capacity of the womb to open during labor.
 
The Womb and the Workshop
 
In verdant analogy the womb was a field, a tree, a fruit, a stone, but the system also worked for humanmade objects. Physicians and natural philosophers saw the organ in various pots, vases, jugs, and flasks associated with their disciplines. During the medieval period, the womb was widely compared to a cupping vessel, including in Muscio’s Gynaecia. Accordingly, in many birth figures from medieval manuscripts, the shape of the womb is rounder, with a wider mouth than in Rösslin’s first printed figures. By the sixteenth century, however, the comparison was more frequently made with the urine flask, which, like Rösslin’s figures, had a longer, thinner neck.
 
Uroscopy, or the examination of urine, was one of the most widely used diagnostic tools of the early modern era: the color, consistency, and sediments in urine were understood as indicators of sickness in the body, and of pregnancy. Michael Stolberg has recorded that uroscopy was particularly valued as a test for pregnancy that did not rely on the testimony of the mother, who might misinterpret or misrepresent the sensations she felt. Rösslin’s birth figures, in this visual context, flicker between test and embodiment, between pregnant womb and flask of urine.

           Birth figure engravings from an English translation of Eucharius Rösslin’s midwifery manual titled The Byrth of                             Mankynde, Otherwyse Named the Womans Booke (1545)

 

 
If the uroscopy flask analogically resembled the womb, it also resembled the alchemical flask. The two round-bottomed glass vessels were so similar that it is sometimes hard to distinguish the physician with his urine flask from the alchemist with his alchemical one in genre paintings. This flask was central to the special, complex symbolic language in which alchemical secrets and recipes were often recorded. In many alchemical illustrations, this symbolic marriage and birth happens inside a flask that is both the literal glass flask and a symbol for the generative womb. Anne-Françoise Cannella notes that the flask in alchemy was often understood as “mother” or “matrix”, that the two were analogically and symbolically intertwined, each standing for and explaining the other — both containers and both sites of generation. The macrocosmic generative earth, the microcosmic generative womb, and the artificial alchemical flask all enacted the same miraculous processes.
 
In the womb, according to some theories of conception, a process similar to the mixing and heating of sulfur and mercury was enacted. The male and female seeds met, mixed, and were heated and contained by the womb until they formed something finer and purer than the sum of their parts — a child. It would have been easy for an educated viewer to look at Rösslin’s birth figures and see both the womb and the flask, both the literal fetus in utero and the symbol of generation, alchemical and bodily. For the alchemically literate, birth figures would have been understood as a multifarious symbol of the generative faculty in the womb, in the world, and in the alchemist’s flask, and thus they symbolized the principle of generation itself, the power that spurred the turning of the universe.
 
To look at these images is to be confronted with what seem to us to be contradictions — images of medical practice, influenced by anatomy, that are also verdant and analogical, alchemical and humoral, even wondrous. Only by looking at these images as working simultaneously in multiple registers can we reconcile these seeming contradictions and gain a more thorough understanding of early modern body culture. The multiplicity, and the remarkably wide viewership, which makes it so hard to ascribe just one function or reading to these images, make them valuable sources for looking at a culture that was essentially inclusive, imaginative, and multifarious in its thinking about the body. Birth figures remind us that this was a period in which learned and vernacular, old and new, male and female ways of knowing met, interacted, and mingled at the site of the pregnant body. Just as the early modern woman could look at a birth figure as a window onto her own mysterious bodily interior, so we can approach these images as windows onto the rich and complex body culture of early modern Europe.
 
Adapted with permission from Birth Figures: Early Modern Prints and the Pregnant Body by Rebecca Whiteley, published by the University of Chicago Press, 2023.

Picturing Pregnancy in Early Modern Europe. By Rebecca Whitely. The Public Domain Review, March 8, 2023.

 

University of Chicago Press

The new monograph of Dr Rebecca Whiteley—British Academy Fellow at the University of Birmingham, member of The Bodies, Emotions and Material Culture Collective Manchester, and former Shreeve Fellow in the History of Medicine at the John Rylands Research Institute and Library—has now been published with Chicago University Press. Birth Figures: Early Modern Prints and the Pregnant Body has been praised as an “appealing book” that “extends reproductive, gender, and visual studies, as well as histories of art, medicine, and the body,” and as a book that “offers fresh, sophisticated, and nuanced interpretations.”
 
Edward Wouk, Reader in Art History and Visual Studies at Manchester, and Leah Astbury, Research Associate at the Wellcome Trust-funded project Sleeping Well in the Early Modern World, both members of the Collective, have taken the time to interview the author.
 
 Edward Wouk [EW]: What would you describe as the main take-aways from your book?
 
Rebecca Whiteley [RW]: When I first began researching ‘birth figures’ (the images of fetal presentation that are the focus of this book) my main aim was to stop scholars of medicine and childbirth calling them ‘babies in bottles’ and dismissing them as naïve, uninformative or even damaging to the practice of midwives. In fact, birth figures were packed with relevant, novel and extremely useful knowledge for early modern viewers.
 
And birth figures were not the only small, unassuming printed images in the early modern world that had surprisingly various meanings and uses. As recent scholarship in print history and visual culture shows, this was rather the rule than the exception. I hope my book contributes to this new recognition of the importance of non-elite print and visual culture in writing history. Birth figures can tell us much about cultures of pregnancy and childbirth as they were experienced by women and midwives, by people who could not read or did not own books. They illuminate how body knowledge was made by all kinds of people, with all kinds of priorities, outside of the circle of elite medical authors.
 
Leah Astbury [LA]: What might surprise readers about your book?
 
RW: Central to my approach is the idea that one relatively simple-looking kind of image could have a multivalent life in early modern England: it could mean in many ways. Readers looking for a history of medicine may be surprised to find not just anatomical knowledge and medical practice, but also social, affective, magical, alchemical, aesthetic, and political bodies of knowledge represented in birth figures.
 
 EW: Could you say a few things about the role that the artists played in constructing the group of images at the focus of your analysis?
 
RW: Artists are a consistent presence in this book, of course, but they move from the background to the foreground, from anonymity to individuality, as I move through time. For the early birth figures, we sometimes know the name of an artist or printmaker, but it is almost beside the point. These images were so widely copied and iconographically consistent in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, that I approach them, not as the production of one individual, but as a manifestation of a collective and collaborative printmaking culture. This is rather freeing, as established modes of thinking about the artist’s contexts, techniques and motivations must give way to thinking about the very wide and diverse audience, their interpretations and uses of images.
 
From the late seventeenth century onwards, as is treated in Parts 2 and 3 of the book, birth figures become more individualised and the identities of the artists involved necessarily become more important. Writers began to praise the specific abilities of their artist in seeing, understanding and representing body knowledge. There is an increasing body of literature on the role of artists in the production of ‘epistemic’ images and I hope my later chapters contribute to this. It was particularly rewarding to think about the famous images by Jan van Rymsdyk for William Hunter (though actually they weren’t all drafted, and only one was engraved, by him!). So much art historical scholarship has considered these images as indicative of the new medicalised childbirth culture of eighteenth-century Britain, yet they were only one style of image. Other contemporary birth figures by artists such as George Stubbs, as well as van Rymsdyk himself for other authors, present very different understandings of the pregnant body.
 
 LA: What would you say are the difficulties as a historian of art and the body in using birth figures given, as you point out, they were used in both sanctioned and unsanctioned ways?
 
RW: I actually found it liberating, rather than difficult, when I realised that I was going to have to look beyond what the medical authors said their images were for. As art historians, we are trained to centre our study on the image, to privilege it as a source. This allows us to see ideas and aspects of body knowledge that are not present in textual sources. Of course, there is a line to tread when describing ‘unsanctioned’ uses, between productive speculation, and support for your analysis. I was largely guided by a wider study of visual culture, and found drawing links between different kinds of images a rewarding and exciting way to investigate how birth figures worked for early modern viewers.
 
 EW: How did you strike a balance between using terminology from the time period whilst remaining sensitive to contemporary debates around terms relating to birth, gender and the body?
 
RW: Gender essentialism is something that, as historians, we have a responsibility to combat, particularly because over-simplified or simply misguided interpretations of historical cultures are often used to justify this approach in the world today. When editing my book, I thought hard about my use of ‘woman’ to describe the pregnant people depicted in birth figures, and the pregnant users of them. In the end, I decided to use this term in the body of the work because it was the one used at the time. It is true that for most early modern viewers of birth figures, the concept of womanhood was intimately tied up with the physical capacity to gestate a child. But this in no way makes early modern gender identity simple, nor was sex understood to be a concrete binary. People then, as now, had diverse and vibrant identities and dealt with cultural expectations around gender in many different ways. If birth figures equated womanhood with the womb, as some scholars have suggested, then by turning our attention to what individual users might have done with this statement, we can gain a better understanding of the period’s culture of gender. The author Justine Siegemund, treated in Part 2 of the book, could not have children and presents the birth figures she produced both as her biological children, and her intellectual offspring, creating an identity for herself as medical author that combined typically female and male attributes.
 
In the conclusion, I point out that birth figures persist in our own culture, where they can still perpetuate notions of the normal or standard body, against which individuals measure and define their own complex identities. Looking at the history of birth figures as cultural agents can help us to question essentialist or normative statements about the body in our own culture.
 
 EW: What was the role of The John Rylands Research Institute and Library in the making of this book?
 
RW: The initial research for the book was undertaken in the Art History Department at UCL, but its journey into a fully-fledged monograph happened during my time as the Shreeve Fellow in the History of Medicine at the John Rylands Research Institute. For a project so engaged with the material, affective and intellectual lives of books, this was the ideal environment. Not only was the community of book scholars and curators so diverse and interesting, but the medical book collections at the University of Manchester are enormous. I could access copies of many of my core works in the collections for both research and for photography. It is thanks to the photography department at the Rylands that my book is so well illustrated! The images they took for me are also now freely available via Luna and Manchester Digital Collections.
 
 LA: How does the book fit with the themes and interests of The Bodies, Emotions and Material Culture Collective at the University of Manchester?
 
RW: The Collective, and the lecture series on Affective Artefacts, were enormously influential to the development of my book. Meeting the scholars in the Collective and attending seminars clarified for me that both affect and material culture were crucial themes for understanding birth figures. The image and the book as an object, and one that had physical as well as intellectual power over early modern users, came to be a central concept for me as I worked up my manuscript. Moving forwards with my research, I find I am increasingly working with material culture methodologies, in no small part thanks to the inspiration of the Collective!
 
 
Birth Figures: Early Modern Prints and the Pregnant Body. An Interview with Rebecca Whiteley. By
Stefan Hanß.  The University of Manchester,  March 6, 2023

Rebecca Whitely  The University of Manchester

The Unmodified Body Is The Key Principle Of Equality

 

Clare Chambers is a professor of political philosophy at the University of Cambridge. Her work deals with contemporary liberalism, social construction, feminism, and social justice. Her latest book, Intact (Allen Lane, 2022), is an analysis of the ways in which the body is a political site where the inequalities of sex, gender, race, disability, age, and class are reinforced. The book argues for the value of the ‘unmodified body’. The unmodified body is not an empirical concept, such a thing would be impossible in actuality (our bodies are undergoing constant revision and intervention). Rather, it is a political tool for resisting forms of coercion and oppression that would have us viewing our bodies as never good enough as they are, and thus requiring their modification, concealment, and conformance in myriad ways. However, the unmodified body cannot be viewed as a simple ‘body positivity’ any more than it can be asserted as an empirical concept. Rather, it is a new notion that cuts orthogonally across various ideals that we have previously held the body to: the natural, the normal, and the sovereign. Because of this orthogonality, these various ideals show themselves, under Chambers’ analysis, to have an ambivalent character. The book functions as both a political and cultural call to arms, and an astute analysis of how our bodies becomes ensnared in oppressive structures that inhibit the road to equality.
 
 
John C. Brady: At one point in your new book, Intact, you tell the reader that this isn’t a self help book, and what you’re trying to do, rather, is convince us that a problem exists and offer a certain way of thinking about it. So, to get started, what is that problem that Intact is addressed to?
 
Clare Chambers: We live in a culture which is increasingly focused on the visual. How we look matters. And that’s only getting more and more intense with the development of social media, selfie culture, and, of course, zoom culture, where we see ourselves on the screen when we’re having a meeting in a way we didn’t before. And feminists, in particular, have been criticizing this for a long time: the pressures that it places, particularly on women, to have a certain kind of concern for their beauty and for their looks. But what is really becoming clear, and what I want to emphasize in Intact, is that that context is creating serious harm.
 
It creates an environment of really serious mental health problems. Psychologists diagnose an epidemic of appearance anxiety, and that goes beyond some of the traditional topics that we may be used to thinking about, like simple beauty norms. It goes to all aspects of thinking about what our bodies should be like, how they fail, and how they are never good enough. And so many of these ideas about how our bodies should be, and what they have to be to be good enough, are also damaging to our equality. They’re very often discriminatory. They stem from entrenched hierarchies of gender and sex, but also race, disability status, age, and many more.
 
So I wanted to think about that context, and work out a way of analyzing what is wrong with it, and what it tells us about how we should think about our bodies. Does it mean that we ought to try to protect a very simple idea of the body as being something that we never change, that is intact in a very literal sense? But, of course, clearly that cannot be the goal, because the moment you start thinking philosophically about what it would be to have a literally unchanged or unmodified body, you very soon see that that’s a dead end. The very moment we eat, or we don’t eat; we exercise, or we don’t exercise, we sit or stand: everything we do to ourselves, all the time, changes how our bodies are. So I don’t defend an idea of an unmodified body as a literal, real thing that exists in the world. We’re thinking about a concept: a philosophical idea.
 
So, what could we say about our bodies that can show that they could be good enough just as they are, in a way that can help us to resist these harmful social pressures? With that thought in mind, I started to think about some of the philosophical concepts that tell us what it is for a body to be unmodified. In Intact I talk about three proxy concepts. First is the idea of a natural body, which is something we see a lot in popular culture. We talk about natural health, natural bodies, natural makeup, or natural hair. The idea of naturalness is often applied to the body. The second concept is the normal body. Here the idea is that what we want is for bodies to be normal, so that if they’re not normal then we might seek to change them. That kind of discourse very frequently crops up in a healthcare setting. We might want to have healthcare treatments that can restore or create normality to or for bodies. The third idea is the idea of the whole body, which is an idea associated with concepts of bodily integrity: there might be some value to leaving the body whole. And so in the book I work through each of these concepts, and I try to show that they each tell us something really important about what it is we should be valuing about our bodies.
 
But none of those concepts are good enough as they are, and they are all full of complexity. I try to explore that by looking at lots of examples of different kinds of body modification practices, and the different ways we approach them. There are many connections between the ways we heap praise and judgment upon our bodies, but there are also lots of inconsistencies.
 
There are surprising connections between different practices. One example I have in the book is the idea of natural bodybuilding. What is the idea of ‘natural’ doing in the natural bodybuilding example? I think there’s lots of connections between the way that naturalness is used in natural bodybuilding and what might seem like a different idea, that of natural childbirth. So there’s an example where we are using a concept in a really similar way.
 
But there are many times where we approach body modification practices, and the conceptual way we think about them, in ways that seem inconsistent. One example is the very different way that the UK National Health Service approaches two practices: breast reconstruction after mastectomy, and the removal of what’s called an abdominal apron. If you’re overweight, and you lose a lot of that weight, you may well be left with an overhang of skin around the belly. That’s called an abdominal apron. And that skin can be very painful and uncomfortable. It can even get infected. So in many ways, it’s a clinical problem. But most health service trusts here in the UK will not remove that as part of the National Health Service: they’ll say that it’s a cosmetic procedure. If you want to have it removed, that’s something to undertake privately. Whereas, if a woman has a mastectomy after having breast cancer, most NHS Trusts will provide reconstructive surgery – even though that’s also clearly a cosmetic procedure. So there are some really interesting inconsistencies. And I’ve tried to think about what might explain them and how we might bring some clarity.
 
Brady: Just to kind of spell it out, what precisely is wrong with this idea that our present predicament can be solved with a re-emphasis of nature? So just with the classic story that the problem is technological, cultural, social, too much simulacra, or so on?
 
Chambers: As you say, that seems like the obvious answer. And so that’s where I start the book, with this idea of the natural body. We find this idea of the natural being raised as a contrast to culture very frequently. It’s a counterpoint, a ‘natural’ way of using the concept of nature. Also, we tend to think of naturalness as being a good thing. You can see that in the way that we talk about natural health, but not natural disease. So we tend to apply that adjective of natural to things that we approve of.
 
But philosophers of many kinds have long been aware that the concept of nature is really difficult. It’s complex, and often inconsistent. In Intact, I think about how that applies specifically to the case of the body. What I show is that there are various different ways in which we use the idea of the natural body to apply to different practices or different body parts in ways that are completely distinct and that don’t use the same logic at all.
 
So, ‘natural’ bodybuilding is bodybuilding which does not use a very particular set of substances. Paradigmatically, it doesn’t use steroids. And it also doesn’t use other kinds of substances like human growth hormone and insulin. But natural bodybuilding will still use all kinds of artificial substances. Natural bodybuilders will frequently use creatine, whey powder, all kinds of other supplements. None of these are natural, in the sense of something like ‘clean eating’ or only eating plants. These are processed substances, deliberately designed to try to enhance muscle gain. Natural bodybuilders will also engage in very deliberate, difficult to follow, regimes of bulking up, putting on muscle, and then cutting, removing fat. It’s a very deliberate form of body sculpting. So what makes it natural? Well, I argue that the naturalness here, what nature means in this context, is about an idea of authentic masculinity. Steroids and growth hormones take users away from that authentic masculinity, because they create the masculine hormones artificially.
 
But if we look in other contexts, we see that we don’t use natural in that way. We use it in different ways. Think of ‘natural hair’. Natural hair is Afro-textured hair that hasn’t been straightened. As with bodybuilding, natural hair will often have lots of things done to it. It’s not hair that’s just left alone. People with natural hair won’t simply get out of bed and leave their hair and do nothing else, they will typically spend a significant amount of time and skill on maintaining and styling their hair, putting it into plaits or braids or locks, and caring for it in the way that best suits its texture. They may also color it, and they may also add other forms of decoration. So, again, it’s not natural in the sense of being untouched, or unadorned, or left alone. That’s not what ‘natural’ is doing here.
 
In the case of natural hair, I think the reason that straightening is picked out as something that undermines naturalness, conceptually, is because straightening is connected with an idea that Afro-textured hair is inferior. It’s inferior, according to that idea, because it’s not like the straight hair of people with white European backgrounds. It’s a racialized and a racist assessment of different hair textures. So, here, the idea of ‘naturalness’ in natural hair is very explicitly about a resistance to a culturally imposed, racist denigration of a particular body type, associated with a particular racialized group. In other words, it’s about trying to resist an oppressive social hierarchy in that context. So there you really do see ‘nature’ as being against ‘culture’. It’s a resistance to an oppressive culture.
 
But, of course, if we are defining ‘nature’ as the opposition or resistance to culture, then what that also means is that what nature is is absolutely determined by what culture is, because if nature is against culture, then we need to know what culture is to know what nature is. So they’re intertwined very strongly. And so what you see then is that the idea of nature can be used sometimes to help liberate us from oppressive discrimination or oppressive hierarchies, as in the natural hair movement: the resistance to a racist denigration of Afro-textured hair. But it can also be used to entrench ideas of how people ought to be, as in the idea that to be natural is to exhibit certain masculine norms and masculine body shapes and so on. So nature becomes really complicated. Sometimes it helps us resist, sometimes it locks us in further.
 
 
Brady: Do you think the term ‘nature’ is one label papering over two distinct things here? On the one hand it’s activated to uphold entrenched hierarchies, but on the other, available to resist those same hierarchies. I think the term you use is ‘frenemy’, right?
 
Chambers: The reason I use that idea of the ‘frenemy’ is because a frenemy is somebody who is sometimes your friend and sometimes your enemy, and you’re never quite sure which they’re going to be. And I think with nature you really get that, because it’s not just that we use the idea of nature in sometimes helpful and sometimes harmful ways across different practices, but that we’ll even do this within a particular practice. The claim that a practice is natural can sometimes liberate, and sometimes oppress. The example that I think of here is breastfeeding. In one context, imagine that a mother is trying to breastfeed and is struggling, or perhaps doesn’t want to and is considering giving up breastfeeding, and she’s told ‘breastfeeding is natural’. That very much implies that she ought to breastfeed, that there is something wrong if she doesn’t breastfeed, that she ought to persevere, that there is something inferior about formula feeding. And so for a woman who’s really struggling with breastfeeding, and finding that very distressing, then saying that it’s natural is going to feel really oppressive. But, if the context is different, if the context is that the woman is worried about whether to breastfeed in public, and she wants to breastfeed in public but she feels that she might be criticized or told to stop, well, then ‘breastfeeding is natural’ is a reassurance. It means ‘don’t worry, it’s natural, of course you should be able to do it in public, it’s no problem’. It’s something that all mothers should have the ability and the right to do. So even the very same phrase, saying ‘breastfeeding is natural’ to a mother who is breastfeeding, can itself be used as a friend and as an enemy.
 
Brady: It really does turn on a dime there.
 
Chambers: Absolutely. And so when we think about the natural body and the concept of nature, you see how, within feminism in particular, it has sometimes been seen as necessary to destroy the idea that nature is in play, because concepts of nature have been used throughout centuries to put women in their place: to say that women are naturally inferior, and that their natural biological differences translate into natural inferiority, which translates into social hierarchy. That line, from allegations of a natural body to allegations of a natural place in hierarchy, is something that feminists have had to resist incredibly strongly. But, equally, you see within feminism the idea that we have to pay some attention to natural bodies, or to the female body, because part of feminist analysis has been to say that embodied experience matters. It makes a difference to how structures of gender, sex, equality and inequality operate socially. So feminism too has this struggle of what to do with nature. We don’t want to give into the idea that women’s nature determines their social position. We don’t want to get into a reductive biological essentialism. But we don’t want to abandon the idea of nature entirely and say there’s nothing to bodies, that bodies don’t matter, because we want to recognize the significance of embodied experience. So nature is such a complex concept, both when we think about what it means, but also when we think about how it’s deployed politically.
 
Brady: The book feels incredibly timely. But perhaps one could also be forgiven for thinking that all these dynamics that you’re investigating concerning the body have been around since forever. And here lurks the reply that on a number of metrics, things are much better now: the corsets have been thrown away, along with foot binding, and so on. So, in what ways do you see that recent decades have exacerbated the particular predicament that you’re trying to tease out in the book?

 
Chambers: We’ve discarded some practices, and we’ve taken on a whole lot of new ones. One area where you can really see this clearly is cosmetic surgery: both the prevalence of cosmetic surgery, and the number of people having cosmetic surgery. The number of procedures being done is going up and up, obviously with some interruption over COVID. But generally, as a trend line, it’s been increasing. And what’s also increasing is the number and types of procedures being offered. It’s a marketized process. So surgeons and private cosmetic surgery companies are constantly developing new procedures, identifying new body parts that can be enhanced. There’s an interplay between demand and supply that means we now have to worry about body parts that we never might have worried about before. Body parts that have recently become key targets for cosmetic surgery include things like buttock enlargement, whereas only a decade or so ago we wouldn’t have thought about the buttocks as being an area for cosmetic surgery. Likewise with cosmetic surgery on the genitals, labiaplasty, again, perhaps 10 years ago that would not have been something that would have been a mainstream surgery, whereas now it very much is. And there are developments of different kinds of procedures – not only things we might be familiar with, like Botox on the face, but fillers and various other high tech ways of injecting things and removing things, and doing all kinds of things to our skin and our bodies. So, there’s a huge increase in the technologies we have available, and the sophistication of those technologies.
 
Also there’s been a real cultural shift in the idea of what cosmetic surgery is for. Again, not too long ago, cosmetic surgery would have been thought of as the preserve of the rich and famous, a particularly elite practice, and also something that perhaps you would have done very much in secret. You wouldn’t want anyone to know that you’d had work done. But now it’s absolutely mainstream. We see it all the time in popular culture, media, on TV shows. The idea that you would have cosmetic surgery is a completely mainstream idea for many people, and the invasive cosmetic procedures like fillers and Botox and so on are even more mainstream. There’s been a really remarkable shift in the way that cosmetic surgery has become entrenched, and the parts of the bodies that it reaches.
 
I mentioned earlier the inexorable rise of visual culture, connected to social media. Online life is just so clearly something that matters here. You know, we see ourselves online, we post photographs of ourselves, those photographs are ranked or filtered or have gone through various kinds of photoshopping enhancement. And so we have this very clear sense that how we look is always something we should think about: that we should be taking a selfie of ourselves in every kind of context, that we always have cameras in our pockets, and that the photographs are instantly available to be seen. So, again, a shift in technology causes a shift in behavior.
 
Actually, when the pandemic first began, and we were all suddenly in lockdown, not going out, there was a question in my mind about which way that was going to go. Was that going to mean that we paid less attention to our looks and more attention to our physical health? And also, if we don’t have to go out and meet people, we’re working in our pajamas, then maybe we can focus less on our appearance! But I think in fact that’s not what’s happening. We are focusing on our appearance as much or more than before, because we are now operating even more of our lives online.
 
Brady: I recall a piece by JiaYang Fan in the New Yorker, concerning, among other things, the rising popularity of plastic surgery in China. At the center of the article is this app, MeiTu, which is for modifying and beautifying your face in photos. It’s become absolutely ubiquitous here in China. And what she discovered, talking to plastic surgeons, was an increasing number of young girls coming in ordering surgeries, but using the terminology from the app. Like, I want a nose job that’s like preset number four, or something like this. I wonder if this is a sign of things to come more globally.
 
Chambers: I’m sure it will be. And that kind of app is promoting a number of myths about our relationships with our faces. One is that a surgeon can, in fact, create the exact nose or the exact face that you want, rather than facing constraints of the flesh and the bone structures that you have. A nose job is actually one of the procedures that cosmetic surgeons find the most difficult – not necessarily because it’s technically the most difficult, but because the nose is right in the center of your face. Changes to your nose are very profound: they make a huge difference to how you look, and to how you see yourself. Quite a lot of surgeons have told me that, when they do a nose job on somebody, there’s a serious chance that, even if the outcome of the operation is clinically perfect (as the surgeon intended, and understood that he or she could do within the constraints that were outlined) still the recipient can feel deeply unhappy with it. Either they had in their mind an image of something that could never have been achieved with their particular face, or the outcome creates the nose that was intended, but the feel of the face is so alien, and so different, that it just feels wrong, not like their face.
 
This is something which is really important. With all body modification practices, but particularly cosmetic surgery, there are two things going on. There’s what we think our bodies will look like after we undergo the practice, and there’s what we think we will feel like after the practice. Those two are so complexly bound together, it can be very difficult to tease them apart. So, I think what I want to do is to have my nose look like this, and that will make me feel like that. But even if my nose does look like this, how will I feel?
 
There’s very little evidence of the long term psychological effects of cosmetic surgery. Most people who have cosmetic surgery have a follow up with their cosmetic surgeon quite soon afterwards, and usually they will say that they’re happy with the outcome. But most cosmetic surgeons do not do long term follow ups, so there’s not enough evidence of the long term effects. What evidence there is suggests that there perhaps isn’t a long term sustainable psychological benefit from having cosmetic surgery in many cases. The appearance anxiety doesn’t go away, it just shifts to a different target. So, after surgery, you may become more happy with that particular body part, but you don’t necessarily become happier with your body as a whole. So I think those kinds of apps are part of that idea that you can simply change one part of your body, and then that will be finished and that will be perfect. But, sadly, I think that’s not an evidence-based perspective.
 
Brady: Still on the topic of recent decades, you point out a subtle shift in Intact when you are discussing the ‘get your body back’ post-pregnancy discourse, especially focussing on that ‘back’. The question becomes, which body is being returned to? Seemingly some mid-20s form that occupies a fleeting instant in the context of a person’s entire life. You point out a difference emerging here, from an ideal body to be aspired to, to now an authentic body that ties in with who one is, which needs to be ‘unearthed’, ‘returned to’, through work and modification. This seems a troubling shift, insofar as ideals, in their distance from us, can be more easily resisted than some notion of an internal, authentic perfection that fully represents us. What is driving that transformation in the discourse?
 
Chambers: There’s a lot there. I’m glad you pulled out the ‘getting your body back’ phrase, because I find it fascinating. The idea is not ‘you’ve been pregnant, you’ve had a baby, now you need to get fit,’ or ‘now you need to look good,’ or ‘need to look sexy’. It is getting your body back, reclaiming it. There’s a language of empowerment there, which I think is very appealing. And the perspective is: you are getting it back for you. You are reclaiming it, partly, from your baby, which reflects the dominant cultural idea that it’s very important for mothers to have an identity that is not only motherhood, that we need to reclaim an identity that is not purely motherhood.That reclamation is connected to ideas of femininity and womanhood as being related very strongly to appearance, sexual identity, and being sexually attractive, which perhaps motherhood, in the popular imaginary, is not.
 
So there’s lots of really deep resonances there, connecting into anxieties about what it is to be a woman, to be feminine, to be sexy. Is being a mother enough, or is it something you need to separate yourself from? I think that connects clearly to the ways in which we deal with women, as mothers and women in the workplace, and women as sex objects, and the way that women are supposed to try to negotiate all of these and combine them all successfully without letting any of them take over. In particular, motherhood is not supposed to take over: we’re all supposed to maintain careers and sexual attractiveness as well as being mothers.
 
And then there’s this idea of authenticity, which we can pick out in other contexts too. The idea that there is some kind of authentic self which your body should reflect is something we find in lots of contexts. And it’s very interesting, because the idea is not that, as it were, your self, your identity, is determined by your body. It’s not that once you have a body, that fixes your identity and you have to follow it. It’s that your body and your identity should match, they should align in some way. But the idea is that the body needs to change to match the identity, not that the identity should change to match the body.
 
I found it so useful, when thinking about this idea, to read the work of James Partridge, who is a man who suffered from really serious burns all over his body, including on his face, when he was a teenager. He died quite recently, having lived a long, full life. He recounts in his work, both his written work and his work with Changing Faces, the charity he set up, how an enormous part of what he had to do to come to terms with his incredibly different face that he had as a result of these burns, was the idea that this face could be his face, that he had to accept it as being his face. At a certain point, having undergone a long series of plastic surgery operations to make his face as good as it could be, he had to say ‘That is enough. Now, at this point, I need to do the work on myself, to accept the face that I have and to live in the face that I have.’ I think we do often have to do work on ourselves, to accept the bodies we have, rather than only work on our bodies to make them fit who we think we ought to be. But that’s a very countercultural idea.
 
There’s also some really fascinating work that helped me think about this from sociologists. Deborah Gimlin did a lot of sociological analysis of women undergoing cosmetic surgery, but also with women at the hairdresser, women undergoing all kinds of beauty practices, from the more extreme to the more everyday. And, again, there she finds there’s a real sense amongst people undergoing those practices that they need to have the body that reflects their selves: that their class identity, their gender identity, who they feel they are inside, should be reflected in what their body looks like. And so I think that’s a very strong idea that we have at the moment that we can see played out in lots of different contexts – sometimes with helpful effects but very often, I think, in a way that adds to our feelings of shame and anxiety and inadequacy, in ways that are really quite damaging.
 
Brady: This ties nicely into your examination of forms of ‘self-objectification’ whereby we switch from internal and external perspectives on ourselves, and that these two perspectives have their own modes of normalization, or what it means to be ‘normal’. From the internal perspective what it means for my body to feel normal, versus when I look at myself, from an external perspective, the normality of my body takes on a new meaning. But I was wondering how these two perspectives interact, perhaps in a constitutive way, or, at the very least, how they become confused? How does the normativity of the external perspective get mixed up with the normativity of our internal perspective?
 
Chambers: So, just to summarize, the external perspective is when we ask ‘are we normal as compared to others?’ And the internal perspective is when we ask ‘are we normal as compared to how we normally are?’ Do we feel normal inside? Does this feel normal for us? And these two things clearly can come apart. Somebody who has a physical difference, a disability or impairment from birth, might be very different to others, so what might not feel normal compared to others can feel entirely normal for them, because they’ve always lived with that body. And that’s an example I develop in the book.

 
But what you’re asking is when our ideas of what’s normal for us become shaped by what’s normal for others. And that’s exactly it. I think we have a real concern whether our bodies are normal. I begin one chapter with the question ‘is your body normal?’ That’s a chapter that I’ve talked about with various audiences. And one person in the audience once said to me ‘I found that question incredibly difficult. Because I wanted to say both ‘well, of course not,’ and ‘of course, and what do you mean anyway?’ This idea of normality is so incredibly powerful and compelling. We all really, really want to be normal, not abnormal. But we don’t want to be just normal, we want to be normal or better. So sometimes normal is average, the same as everybody else. Sometimes normal is a baseline and we want to exceed it. Sometimes normal is a target we want to achieve. It has all these different resonances.
 
And what we think of as normal is very often shaped by guesswork. One example I think shows this really well is the example of labiaplasty: cosmetic surgery on the female genitals. Many women and girls who seek this surgery will say that they want to have it done because they don’t feel that their genitals are normal. They’re worried that they’re not normal. And I have a quotation in the book, which was from a respondent to an anonymous survey done by the Nuffield Council on Bioethics. This woman had had labiaplasty as a teenager because she had felt that her labia were not normal. She was worried they were not normal, and had therefore had the surgery. But then, as an adult, she now realized that actually her original labia had been perfectly normal, and she wished she hadn’t undergone that surgery, because she now knows that she was fine. So whether we’re normal compared to other people is something we might not know. And very often, what we’re doing is developing our own ideas of whether we feel normal: whether we feel right in response to what we imagine is a standard that applies universally, but may just be our imagination or our anxieties. So normality is a concept, like nature, which does so much and can sometimes be reassuring (‘don’t worry, it’s normal’) but can sometimes create this real deep sense of fear and shame.
 
Brady: Perhaps that’s where the play of images, again, creeps in to affect and drive things here because of that guesswork of what is normal. We’re piecing that together through television screens and looking out through the world on the internet, and content ranking algorithms, building a sense of there being a public consensus, or an average that exists. A post with 500,000 likes or something is almost like a stamp of the ‘normal’, when it may be garnering so much attention initially for the exact opposite reason.
 
Chambers: Right. And that’s also where we get drawn into a slippery slope, an arms race. The more the images that we see have been doctored using filters or Photoshop, or are of bodies that have been doctored using clinical surgery and other kinds of procedures, the more those become normal, and the more our bodies have to change to be normal. And the standard of normality is constantly shifting and moving away from us and out of our grasp. That absolutely is a part of what’s going on, and part of why this cultural moment is perhaps different than the times, as you mentioned earlier, of footbinding and so on, where you don’t have that ready access to images of bodies from all around the world, constantly changing.
 
Brady: The book is keenly engaged, as we’ve been discussing, with the present predicament and the urgency of that. But how does it speak to potential near future technologies? I’m thinking here of things like CRISPR targeted genetic modification. Coming fresh from your book, my basic feeling is, with things being how they are right now, it’s probably not a good idea for us to have access to these tools, considering how present technologies are being used. What’s your take on these sorts of technologies?
 
Chambers: Like you, I’m not particularly optimistic at this moment, I think we are just at a time of such overwhelming technological change and development in so many different contexts, in the context of climate change, in the context of the incredible expansion of surveillance. We’re all experiencing the ways that technologies are governing our lives, taking our attention, and demanding our focus. We’re very unequipped, I think, to deal with that. That’s really why I end this book with a call for cultural resistance. I don’t ask you to resist doing anything to your body, to stop changing your body, or not to undergo any particular practice. But what I really do think we need to resist is a culture that is constantly looking for ways to tell us our bodies are wrong. It’s not that I want people to go away and stop caring about how they look, or stop caring about how their bodies are, but what I do want people to think about is how we can say ‘no’ to a culture that tells us that we ought to be doing that all the time: that we ought to be concerned and worried about our appearance, and that we ought to associate our appearance and our bodies with our identity, with our worth, and with our status. That’s what we need to put a stop to.
 
Now that doesn’t mean that I’m optimistic about how we can do that. It’s going to need collective action. We have to come together to think about how to deal with this overwhelming culture of shame that we attach to our bodies. Technology perhaps could be used to help but, at the moment, it doesn’t seem to be doing that.
 
It’s really difficult to know, to move slightly away from your question, what the right kind of public health methods are here. It’s really important when thinking about actual public policy methods to have an eye to the evidence. Lots of public policy methods that might seem like they will be good are not necessarily successful. One example is the idea that perhaps any image online, or in mainstream media, any place where regulation is possible, should have a little mark in the corner that shows whether or not it’s been subjected to photoshopping or alteration. And this seems like it might be a good idea, because you could look at an image and you could see whether it’s been photoshopped and so is not a real face, or whether it hasn’t been photoshopped, and so that’s what faces can really look like. But some of the researchers that had this idea found that it actually doesn’t help. If you see an image which has been photoshopped, it doesn’t matter that it’s photoshopped. You still see the image as being an image to aspire to. You still get the message that this is how you should look, and this is how you should want to look. And so you’re still getting that visual diet of perfection. On the other side, if you see the mark that says this image hasn’t been photoshopped, well, then, if the image is still of a person who fits a very particular beauty ideal, then what you feel looking at it is that you don’t look like that, whereas the model looks like that without any help. So, again, as a viewer, your appearance, your face, your muscles, your body, whatever it is, is not adequate. You get that message either way.
 
It seems like one of the things that makes a difference is simply having a much more diverse set of images circulated, to actively look for diverse bodies and to have representation of diverse bodies. And not diversity that just means a body might be able to be an older person’s body, say, but still be slim, smooth, wrinkle free, beautiful, but actually to have bodies that completely differ from the standard. That seems to be one thing that does help. But, generally speaking, it’s not always obvious what measures will actually make a difference. It’s a really complex problem that now needs a lot of research and policy work to develop.
 
Brady: You’re also quite engaged in this, taking part in government committees looking into these issues. I’m curious, what role do you think the philosopher has to play in policy?
 
Chambers: I think philosophers have a really crucial role here. As we’ve seen in our conversation, there is so much complexity, and a really important part of the philosopher’s role is to try to make complex things simple: to try to bring order into the chaos, to analyze and give a framework for understanding and thinking about complexity. I also think that the philosopher has a job the other way round: of making simple things complex, showing how some things that might seem really obvious to us, very simplistically true or not, are much more difficult than we might think. We’ve talked today about ideas of what is natural and what is normal, and philosophers show the complexity in those kinds of concepts.
 
I also think we philosophers have to hold the line that what is essential is thinking through debate, disagreement, alternatives, and objections, holding that critical space. So one thing I try to do throughout the book is challenge myself with objections, with contrary positions, and different perspectives on an issue. That aspect of philosophy is essential. We must always think about how opposing views can help us work towards a better understanding of an issue. I think that kind of analysis, that kind of openness to uncertainty, openness to contestation, the search for clarity, along with a recognition of deep complexity, that’s what the hallmark of philosophy is, and it’s essential to making good policy.
 
 
Intact Bodies: The Ambivalence of The Natural and The Normal.  John C. Brady in conversation with Clare Chambers. By John Brady. Epoché Magazine, February  2022.

In 'Intact: A Defence of the Unmodified Body' political philosopher Clare Chambers argues that the unmodified body is a key principle of equality. While defending our right to change our bodies, she argues that the social pressures to modify sends a powerful message: you are not good enough. The body becomes a site of political importance: a place where hierarchies of sex, gender, race, disability, age and class are reinforced.

 In a thought-provoking conversation, Chambers and Julian Baggini unpick what the unmodified body is, what influences our choices, the power dynamics that structure our society, how modifying our bodies for health can be counterproductive, how to have challenging conversations about sensitive topics, and much more.

 

Clare Chambers: What Is the Unmodified Body and Why Does It Matter? Bristol Ideas, April 22, 2022. 

The political philosopher Clare Chambers and I faced the same dilemma: how much should we dress up for an event when the topic of the talk was body modification? It shouldn’t matter, I knew, whether as the chair I wore make-up and high heels or turned up in tracksuit bottoms with unbrushed hair. The whole point of Chambers’ book, Intact: A Defence of the Unmodified Body, which she was at the Cambridge Literary Festival to discuss, is that our bodies should be acceptable as they are.
 
But knowing that didn’t help me shake the feeling I really ought to have at least put on some mascara before addressing a room of paying guests. Chambers, speaking to me conspiratorially in the green room beforehand, said she felt the same.
 
This tension – the myriad societal pressures to improve and enhance the bodies we inhabit – is at the heart of Chambers’ work. Of course, the truly unmodified body cannot exist in real life (we all need to eat, exercise, clean ourselves and wear clothes). Instead, Chambers, a bestselling author and fellow at Jesus College, Cambridge, prefers to think of it as a philosophical ideal.
 
“What I’m trying to capture with ‘the unmodified body’ is the idea that there is something valuable in allowing your body to be good enough, just as it is,” she said. “And that seems like a really simple idea. But it’s actually incredibly difficult, and I think it’s also incredibly radical, because there are so many structures, norms, pressures, influences, constantly telling us that no matter what our bodies are like, they’re never going to be good enough.”
 
To demonstrate her point, Chambers noted that if she asked everyone in the audience what aspect of their bodies they’d most like to change, we would all be able to think of something instantly. More interestingly, if anyone refused and insisted their body was perfect as it was, the rest of us would likely find them arrogant and delusional. “So shame is built in; we’re supposed to feel shame all the time.”
 
Indeed, in the introduction to her book, Chambers cites a survey that found that “only 16 per cent of women and 27 per cent of men reported liking what they see when they look in the mirror”. “If all of us feel bad about our bodies, perhaps it’s not our bodies that are the problem,” she told the audience at Cambridge.
 
It is hardly revolutionary to point out that we feel insecure about how we look, especially given social media’s ever-growing influence on our lives. But Intact is about far more than unrealistic Instagram beauty standards or the pernicious power of Photoshop. It’s about what we mean when we idealise what’s “natural”, the judgements we make when others deviate from unspoken norms of presentation, and how to balance valuing our unmodified selves with supporting self-expression and personal choice. There is sociology, feminism and politics in the book as well as philosophy – Chambers coined the term “shametenance” to encompass the myriad ways, from bikini waxing to anti-ageing creams, we perpetuate the idea that our unmodified bodies are shameful. Intact is huge in its scope, beginning with bodybuilding, make-up and female grooming, before confronting the murky ethics of the cosmetic surgery industry, gender reassignment procedures and even treatment for disabilities.
 
Most people, I suggested to Chambers, would agree that the trend towards hyper-niche beauty “solutions” for things that weren’t previously viewed as problems (labiaplasty, anyone?) is troubling. So too is the emotive example with which she opens the book, of a 14-year-old girl gifted pro-bono surgery to fix her apparently oversized ears, who ends up with an unasked-for nose job and a chin reshape as well. What is more controversial is the way Chambers places such examples on a continuum that includes a range of modifications usually regarded as far less objectionable: fitness regimes, male circumcision, post-mastectomy breast reconstruction, cochlear implants for deaf children. Surely these can’t be treated within the same philosophical and ethical framework as a nose job?
 
“Of course there is a difference: we can give clear examples of modifications that do nothing other than increase health and flourishing, and modifications that do something which isn’t about well-being but is about appearance,” she replied. “But I don’t think it’s as simple as to say, ‘Therefore all the stuff that’s to do with health is unproblematic and not worth thinking about.’”
 
To explain, Chambers pointed out that while we might believe cosmetic procedures on children to be abhorrent, we’re hardly consistent in that view. “For example, we’ll often provide on the NHS surgery to remove an additional finger, even if that finger is fully functioning,” she said. Similarly, surgically “correcting” ambiguous genitalia in infants – cutting healthy tissue from a child who cannot consent – is considered a medically valid choice for parents to make in the UK. Female genital mutilation, in contrast, very much is not. Male circumcision is treated differently again. “So there are all these kinds of intuitions we have about what is and isn’t acceptable – it’s not always obvious why.”
  
She was clear that her intention is not to condemn people for the modifications they make, to themselves or their children. Rather, she wants to interrogate the assumptions that modification is in our best interests, whether it’s making a child look “normal” by tweaking their ears or genitals, or buying into the drive to “get your body back” after pregnancy.
 
“I did the sums, and I think in the UK the average life expectancy for a woman is 83,” she explained. “So if your real, authentic body is the one you have post-puberty and pre-pregnancy, that’s ten to 20 years of an average woman’s life. It’s under a quarter of your life. Why is that your authentic body? Why is the idea of getting it back so compelling and why is there so much shame attached to the idea that you haven’t got that body back?”
 
The most moving moment of the talk came during audience questions, when a woman in her fifties asked Chambers for help: when she looked in the mirror and saw a face unrecognisable from her younger self, she felt shock, shame and regret. What should she do?
 
“When we look in the mirror and we confront our ageing selves, we’re really stymied because we don’t have images of ageing to compare with; we don’t know what others look like,” Chambers replied, adding that we judge ourselves against an ideal that is not only unrealistic, but impossible. She described her own panic at noticing grey hairs in her thirties, thinking: “Women don’t go grey until their sixties or seventies, because I’d never seen women with grey hair apart from that age.” Our bodies all change as we get older, but perfectly normal ageing is perceived as premature and shameful. Realising that, and acknowledging the futility of obsessing over how we compare to unrepresentative societal “norms”, is a simple yet radical act.
 
“I talk in the book about whether we can try to think about allowing our bodies to be normal for us,” Chambers said. “That this is my body for me, this could be normal for me – and whether there’s some potential in allowing that idea to be reassuring.”
 
I thought of the grey streaks in my hair that started appearing when I was just 19. The weight I gained during the first lockdown, which I’ve been unable to shift two years later. The blemishes on my skin I hadn’t covered with concealer and the lines on my forehead that are getting harder to ignore. Chambers’ philosophical defence of the unmodified body can’t fix any of those things any more than it can ease the cultural pressure to address them. But if Intact hasn’t made me feel better about my body, it has at least made me feel better about how I feel about my body. And by the end of the event, I was glad I’d foregone the mascara.
 
The philosophical case for not wearing make-up :  Cambridge academic Clare Chambers explains why we need to get more comfortable in our own, unmodified skin. By Rachel Cunliffe. The New Statesman, May 11, 2022. 

Prof Chambers is a political philosopher specialising in feminism, contemporary liberalism, theories of social justice, and social construction.

 Within feminism she is particularly interested in the body and beauty norms, marriage and personal relationships, the family and the gendered division of labour, the intersection of gender and culture, and concepts of femininity and masculinity.

 Within liberalism she is particularly interested in liberal theories of autonomy and equality, multiculturalism and religion, the debate between political liberalism and comprehensive liberalism, and the work of John Rawls.

 Her interests in social construction include radical theories of social construction within feminist and post-structural thought, as well as analytical accounts.

 Professor Clare Chambers: Freedom, Choice, and the Unmodified Body. Alpine Fellowship, September 2022.

I don’t care that much about my appearance. I don’t waste time chasing after arbitrary beauty standards. I get my hair done, though, and I’ve started to have it coloured since I turned 40, but that’s very low maintenance: four times a year, £150 a time. And it only needs to be washed and blow-dried two or three times a week.
 
I have a skincare regime, because who doesn’t? Very simple: just wash, serum, sunscreen in the morning; cream cleanser, gel cleanser, retinol treatment and face oil at night. But I don’t wear makeup every day: just a light layer, three or four times a week, which takes about five minutes. (A full face takes 20 minutes, but I’ll only bother with that once a week.)
 
Leg and underarm shaving is optional — hey, I’m a feminist! Once or twice a week. It’s just nice not to be hairy if I’m going to the gym, which I do three times a week for about an hour a time, but that’s about fitness as much as appearance. It’s not like I’m having fillers or Botox or plastic surgery. I love myself the way I am. I just spend hundreds of hours and thousands of pounds every year to achieve it.
 
Listing everything I do for beauty makes me sound, I know, unserious. If you’re a man, you may feel incredulous at this litany of vanity. Possibly you’re wondering how I have the time or the money for these commitments. If you’re a woman, though — even if you’re a woman who has opted out of all this stuff — then you will recognise the pressure to go along with it.
 
Nora Ephron called it “maintenance”, in a 2005 essay: “Maintenance is what you have to do just so you can walk out the door.” More recently, the philosopher Clare Chambers has coined a new word for the daily effort we expend on our bodies. In her new book Intact: A Defence of the Unmodified Body, she calls it “shametenance”.
 
But what’s so shameful about the unmaintained face? Many men insist that they prefer the “natural look” in women; then again, far fewer men demonstrate a preference for women with grey hair, wrinkles and hairy armpits. When a female celebrity gets papped without makeup, it’s a conspicuous enough event to make the Mail’s sidebar of shame. A bare female face is an invitation to ask: can she get away with it?
 
 
This, though, is a time of exceptional frankness about the work of femininity. Maintenance is no longer cloistered in dressing rooms, but out there in Instagram stories and TikTok tutorials. Actresses no longer pretend their extended youthfulness comes only from nothing but sleep and hydration; instead, they try to sell us things.
 
Being obviously beautiful can now be a full-time job. Very few influencers bother with the tedious fiction that their desirable “skinny-thicc” figures (narrow waist, full hips, big tits and behind) are the lucky outcome of good genes and exercise. Instead, they put up sponsored posts about the surgeon who did their Brazilian butt lift (BBL).
 
And so, if honesty about beauty can eliminate some feelings of inadequacy, it only replaces them with a shopping list for becoming adequate. If the idea of the “natural look” has been debunked, it’s only allowed the most extreme and graphic plastic surgery to be normalised. Meanwhile, the “shametenance” list grows ever longer. These days you can get fillers at your family dentist.
 
And the more routine these interventions seem, the more people want them, even at considerable risk. If you can’t afford Botox from a medical professional in a clinic, an unqualified practitioner working in their living room can inject an unlicensed alternative into you instead. Victims of this black market suffer infections, sores and permanent scarring. For every 6,000 women who have a BBL, one or two will die as a result. It’s still the fastest-growing cosmetic surgery in the world.

 

Maybe there’s an argument that the BBL is at least a rejection of the “waif” beauty standard formed in the Nineties and Noughties. In Sexual Revolution, Laurie Penny writes: “Today, the ideal woman takes up as little space as possible. She is fragile, breakable, thin and hungry-looking.” But that is not what the “ideal woman” looks like in 2022. If it were, women would not be spending thousands of pounds for a big bum and a non-zero chance of an embolism.
 
If the thinness of the waif was the point, then the skinny-thicc look ought to be liberatory: it’s all about having an ass that takes up as much space as possible. But the difference in the ultimate appearance of these ideals is irrelevant. What matters is that both advertise, through their exaggerated aesthetic, the effort that went into them: a waif is waifish because she scrupulously manages her food intake, a skinny-thicc is skinny-thicc because she’s put in the hours on the operating table.
 
In 2004, the sex advice columnist Dan Savage was asked about another fashion in female body shape: why weren’t women in porn getting enormous, “bigger-than-your-head” breast implants anymore? And this is what he replied:
 
           “The sudden appearance of women with ridiculously huge boob implants was arousing in part because of its shock value. There was the shock of women with such exaggerated racks, of course, but there was also the more important and, sadly, the infinitely more arousing shock of women finding a novel new way to imperil their health in order to attract the attention of men.”
 
The point of all these extremes is their demonstration of commitment to being beautiful — to fulfilling the assumption, as Chambers describes it, that “to be a woman is to be sexually attractive, or at least to be sexually available, or at least open to judgement for being or not being sexually attractive and available”. It’s not that these physiques are universally desired by men at the times they become popular. It’s that they become the accepted symbol of a woman’s willingness to reshape her body in order to be pleasing.
 
 
Trends are cyclical: an aesthetic gains ascendency, spreads to ubiquity, is pushed to absurdity in the competition for attention, and then collapses under the physical limitations of the body to be replaced by the next standard. When the thing after skinny-thicc begins to emerge, it might feel like an escape, but it won’t be. It will go through the same process, have the same distribution of winners and losers, exhaust itself the same way.
 
Women’s bodies, in other words, will always be a problem to solve. They will never be acceptable. That’s what makes Chambers’s position in Intact so appealingly radical: she argues that bodies do not need to be modified. Your body is valuable just as it is, because it is you. And I agree — while being enormously grateful that Chambers leaves enough flexibility in her thesis for me to agree without having to change any of the habits I’m attached to.
 
Intact is not absolutist. Sometimes, writes Chambers, modification is justified — for reasons of health or happiness. So it’s okay to spend £150 getting my hair done, because it’s a pleasure. (I’m a primate: it’s nice to be groomed. The sociological term for this is “the beauty touch”, says Chambers.) It’s okay for me to lift weights in the gym; so long as steroids aren’t involved: “bodybuilding can be good for both body and soul.” My tattoos are perhaps a more challenging case, but they too are defensible for Chambers as acts of “self-expression”.
 
In fact, any kind of body modification turns out to be acceptable in the end, because “the principle of the unmodified body asserts a premise, not a goal”. This saves her from doing anything as gauche as telling other people what to do with their bodies, but it does set her argument a little adrift: her book is part passionate defence of physical integrity, part “you do you” shrug.
 
Chambers is also careful to make a fine distinction between “unmodified” and “natural”, pointing out that the latter is an unhelpful concept because “if being natural means being without human interference, then no human and no body can ever be natural”. Everything you consume, every movement you make, can alter the appearance of your body. How can a woman decide what to do with her body when every possible choice is loaded with value?
 
I’m not as scared of being censorious as Chambers is. As far as I’m concerned, wanting to change your appearance is part of being human, and one of the ways we signal status and group loyalty. But not all modifications are equal, and the ones we should be wary of are, first, the ones that infringe on the body’s ability to be a body: that destroy its capacity for function or pleasure (labiaplasty), that attack its self-reliance by turning it into a permanent patient (fillers that must be endlessly refilled so the stretched-out cavity won’t sag).
 
We should also be suspicious of modifications that distort our idea of the average. If you want Botox and can afford the good stuff, I do chafe at the idea of banning it. However, and as Chambers argues, we should not pretend the ethics here end with individual choice: if you eliminate your fine lines, you will change how others feel about theirs. When you’ve seen enough strangely ageless faces, your own normal creases begin to feel like deformities.
 
And finally, we should query modifications that are displays of pure female submission — by which I mean the extreme and dangerous forms of plastic surgery, but which arguably includes a great many of the less intrusive things I do. Chambers describes makeup as the ultimate in self-objectification, because when we wear it, “we see ourselves as others see us, and treat their perspective as the one that counts”.
 
I baulk at this — my face is a means of communication, and makeup is a fun way to play with the vocabulary of expression — but I should, at least, accept the possibility that I might be wrong. Beauty may be laborious. But declining to do beauty is its own kind of hard. In a society that judges women in particular so harshly on the way they look, it’s an announcement of non-compliance, and it’s often met with hostility.
 
The point is, even when a woman decides she will not make a statement with her body, she is making a statement. The point is, this is exhausting. The point is, it’s supposed to be: even on the days I’m not spending hours in a salon or carefully painting wings along my lash line, I’m still distractedly thinking about how I look at least some of the time. And if I stopped thinking about it? Someone else would still be thinking about it for me, judging me. The point is, there is no way out. We’re damned if we care, and damned if we don’t.
 
Women can’t be beautiful : Whatever we do to our bodies, it's wrong. By Sarah Ditum. Unherd, February 28, 2022. 

Oppressors, as a rule, deny oppressed people their own ‘native’ standards of beauty,” Susan Sontag once wrote. Intact: A Defence of the Unmodified Body is the Cambridge philosopher Clare Chambers’s attempt to take aim at the ideal the oppressors have cooked up for women. In place of the usual thin, buxom blonde, she presents an alternative idol—“the unmodified body,” a physique that has not been winnowed by diets, enhanced by plastic surgeries, or chiseled by grueling exercise regimens. The unmodified body may not be especially thin; it may eschew makeup and feminine clothing; it may even openly menstruate. The unmodified body takes as many forms as there are people, but each iteration is distinguished by being “good enough just as it is”—the moral leitmotif that echoes throughout Intact.
 
Chambers is well aware that body modification is by no means forced upon us: in her first book, Sex, Culture, and Justice (2008), she emphasizes that “women comply with appearance norms to an extent because doing so is, in myth and reality, pleasurable.” Here, as elsewhere, she is less concerned with overt coercion, which is easy enough to identify and condemn, and more distressed by the subtle pressures that skulk in the vicinity of our ostensible choices like predators waiting to pounce. Women appear to choose diets and uncomfortable shoes, but do they really? And must we respect a choice that is sufficiently degrading? The antagonist of Sex, Culture, and Justice is traditional liberalism, which the book caricatures rather uncharitably as worshipful of any state of affairs that comes about by choice. Yet, Chambers counters, we have only to think of women with eating disorders to see that some freely undertaken modifications are still ethically suspect. Hence the need for a feminist renovation of the liberal shibboleths: we should not honor choices fomented under patriarchal conditions or choices incompatible with human dignity, even if no one is holding a gun to anyone else’s head.

 
In Intact, the enemy is no longer traditional liberalism and its defenders but demeaning choices themselves—that is, choices made with an eye to improvement or beautification. Chambers defends her rubric in three lengthy sections: “Natural,” “Normal,” and “Whole.” While naturalness and normalcy do not perfectly overlap with the unmodified body, they are not unrelated. Chambers calls both concepts “frenemies,” insofar as they are sometimes politically profitable and sometimes apt for abuse. (We might ask, what concept isn’t?) The natural hair movement, which encourages Black women to celebrate their distinctively textured hair, is a friend, but the natural makeup movement, a trend encouraging women to apply inconspicuous cosmetics, is an enemy; removing the stigma of menstruation by deeming the phenomenon “normal” is a friend, while efforts to denigrate disabilities as “abnormal” are enemies. Matters come to a head in the “Whole” section, which tackles the question of how we should approach the decision to modify both our bodies and those of our dependents.
 
The writing along the way can be animated—unlike most philosophers, Chambers ventures out of the arm chair and into the fray, interviewing plastic surgeons, attending bodybuilding competitions, and speaking to women who have had mastectomies—but it can also be needlessly scholastic, laden with gratuitous distinctions and embarrassing coinages like “shametenance,” a portmanteau of “shame” and “maintenance.” Readers may lose track of the plot as they are dragged off on long digressions that that never make their way back to the book’s central thesis.
 
Even without the excurses on feminist critiques of the natural, however, the book’s central thesis would be maddeningly difficult to locate. Is the unmodified body a standard-bearer for real bodies, a regulative ideal that actual anatomy can at best approximate, or something else altogether? And whether it is ethereal or effluvial, is it interesting or useful?
 
Chambers cannot quite decide what the unmodified body amounts to: it is “not only something that exists in the world as a real, material object,” she writes in Intact’s introduction; “it is also an idea that is constructed by political processes.”
 
But what “real, material object” is ever “unmodified”? Time alone is sufficient to sag the skin, and even bare maintenance requires alteration. “Everything we do, or don’t do, has an effect,” as Chambers acknowledges. Whether we eat or don’t eat, tan or don’t tan, shower or don’t shower, cut our hair or let it grow, the flesh bears testament. How, then, can the proprietor of an “unmodified” body afford to eat, age, or exercise? And what about medical treatments? For Chambers, only some modifications end up counting as such, and medical interventions are generally exempt from opprobrium: she concedes that “heart attacks, cancer and infectious diseases are matters of health” in want of treatment, yet she neglects to explain why these afflictions merit modification when others do not, or whether there is any general metric for distinguishing acceptable interventions from illicit ones.
 
Intact is rife with richly sketched and entertaining examples, but they are never sorted according to precise principles. Chambers vehemently disapproves of breast enlargement, but she ambivalently supports the small but growing number of women who choose to tattoo their bare chests in the wake of mastectomies, though both procedures are not medical but aesthetic. Despite her enthusiasm for the natural hair movement, Chambers concedes that “natural” coiffure is in fact no more “natural” than subtle eye shadow styles, given that both are require effort and artistry. Sometimes, Chambers claims that we must intervene to restore the body to its unmodified state; for this reason, she is in favor of reconstructive surgery for patients who are suddenly disfigured. Yet she never tells us why the body that exists prior to an accident should qualify as any more “unmodified” than the same body in its aftermath. If our physiques are in constant flux, why should a person’s condition immediately before an injury count as her baseline? Why isn’t the default her body after her mishap, or her body when she was sixteen? Instead of venturing any answers, Intact makes a virtue of its refusal to take a stance. From the knotty case of cochlear implants, which endow deaf children with a sense that approximates hearing at the cost of isolating them from the Deaf community, Chambers infers “there is no simple answer to the question of whether a modification is valuable.” She is right, of course, but we turn to philosophy not for pat reminders of complexity but for some measure of clarification.
 
Often, when Chambers is pressed to issue a verdict about a particular procedure, she beats a hasty retreat to abstraction, claiming that the unmodified body is “a complex political concept, not a simple material thing.” She goes so far as to deem it a “principle,” though she offers no straightforward statement of the principle it is. (There is also no explanation of how something as ethereal as a principle can be transubstantiated into a “real, material object.”) Chambers is perhaps at her most perspicuous when she writes, “my argument is not that modification is always wrong, or even that it is presumptively suspect.” Rather, her argument is that “we must take collective action against the pressures to modify.” We might extrapolate that the principle of the unmodified body permits only freely chosen interventions, but Chambers directly contradicts this interpretation elsewhere, insisting in the introduction that “the unmodified body should be defended as a default” and, later, that “the whole body should be treated as the default that it is.” So is modification presumptively suspect, or isn’t it? Is the “intact” body an idea or a sack of blood and bones?
 
Whether this mysterious construct turns out to be an incorporeal concept or a tangible tangle of ligaments, the core imperative of Intact is that we must regard it as good enough, however difficult it may be to inhabit. Chambers provides several rationales for this injunction. The first is that there is a necessary connection between valuing a person’s physique and valuing a person: because “the body is us,” “treating people equally means asserting the political principle of the value of the unmodified body.” The second is that “rejecting the concept of nature and the realities of bodies makes us unable to theorize the way that those bodies operate in the world.” Although the natural body is not quite the same as the unmodified body, the two notions are neighboring—and, according to Chambers, only by embracing some hybrid can we confront our materiality.
 
How, then, are we to honor the body as “good enough as it is”? If we are not required to reject modifications out of hand, what are we required to do? Chambers emphasizes that individual actions are not enough to reform a culture that is collectively constructed and sustained, but she does not really reckon with the aesthetic hold that others retain over us, and she provides little guidance as to how broader reforms—especially of “the political and economic structures that set us up to feel bad”—might come about. Instead, she urges us to express respect for our trappings (and thereby ourselves) by scrutinizing our reasons for craving modification; should we discover that we are acting in deference to undue social pressure, we should suffer to remain as we are.
 
About others’ bodies, we are called upon to exercise even more caution: if we find ourselves in a position to make decisions for those who cannot consent to medical care, such as children, we can opt for modification only if “1), the evidence that the intervention is in [the patient’s] best interests is beyond reasonable doubt, or 2), there is clear and convincing evidence that the intervention best secures that person’s right to an open future.” As Chambers sees it, that means we are obligated to keep a child alive, but we are not permitted to give trans children hormone-blockers, to circumcise Jewish and Muslim babies, or to pierce a pre-verbal infant’s ears. In the last section of the book, which is dedicated to practical prescriptions, we appear to have exited the domain of principle and returned once again to the concrete question of when to consign someone to a flesh-and-blood body that she finds unbearable.
 
By the end of Intact, it is hard to escape the conclusion that Chambers has gerrymandered the conceptual terrain so as to exclude modifications that peeve her and permit modifications that please her. Why should hormone therapy—a course of treatment that strikes many physicians (not to mention parents) as quite resoundingly in the “best interests” of trans children, indeed as necessary to ensure them an “open future”—come in for special censure, when plenty of comparable procedures are not even mentioned? There is no obvious reason to regard the body of an infant wearing an unwieldly brace to correct scoliosis as any more “intact” than that of a child on hormone blockers—or, for that matter, a child on supplements, a child using skin creams to combat eczema, and so on and on.
 
Indeed, I am skeptical that there is such a thing as an “intact” body, even in principle. It is hard to imagine a way of shaping our offspring’s lives—enrolling them in dance classes or sports, feeding them more or less nutritious diets, slathering them with sunscreen at the beach, offering them vegetarian fare instead of meat or meat instead of vegetables, paving their mouths with orthodontic correctives, rewhirling the whorls of their brains by making them fiddle with Rubik’s Cubes—that does not also shape their bodies. But if the unmodified body is a patent impossibility, why should we waste time aspiring to realize it?
 
Chambers might respond by reminding us that the unmodified body is an idea without viscera. But she is the one who infers from the principle—together with her own interpretation of the available evidence—that we should not provide real children, who are not unfeeling principles but embodied persons, with gender-affirming care. And while there is surely such a thing as a fruitful fiction, for instance a predictively effective model in science, the unmodified body remains wrongheaded even when it has been demoted from material to myth. All of the nominal benefits of Chambers’s view can be captured without appeal to an entity so dubious. If the problem is not modification itself but undue pressures to modify, then we would do better to articulate an alternative principle—the principle of the freely modified body, for instance, or perhaps the principle of unpressured modification. Nor do we need to accept a person’s body in its current form in order to regard her as a political equal, any more than we need to embrace everything about someone’s personality in order to hold her in high regard. To suggest that a friend should be more considerate toward her partner or more diligent in her studies is not to suggest that she is worthless or without moral dignity. Even if “the body is us” (the avid italicization is Chambers’s), the notion that we ought to change some things about ourselves is perfectly compatible with the notion that we are deserving of fundamental respect.

 
Chambers frets that “rejecting the concept of nature and the realities of bodies makes us unable to theorize the way that those bodies operate in the world”—but declining to make a fetish of the “natural” (or the unmodified) is not equivalent to rejecting “the realities of bodies.” A modified body is still a body, still a locus of sensual attention. I would go so far as to suggest that many modification practices are part and parcel of giving physicality its due. The bodybuilders to whom Chambers devotes a chapter spend hours each day enhancing their physiques, and they are more achingly aware of their musculature as a result. Many of my favorite drag queens apply ornate makeup and thereby come to stand in a painterly relation to their faces, yet it never occurs to Chambers that successful self-stylization is sometimes an aesthetic achievement, a way of elevating raw anatomy to art.
 
Occasionally, Intact is not just theoretically inert and artistically bankrupt but outright regressive. Chambers sounds like the worst sort of conservative paranoiac when she concludes,
 
“”if the morally privileged baseline were the modified body as opposed to the unmodified one we would be locked into a duty to seek constant modification, constant enhancement, unending surgery or self-improvement or technological advance. There would be no principled end.””
 
But slopes are not always slippery: this inference is simply specious. To conclude that some scintilla of body modification is inevitable, and that freely endorsed modifications can be positive, is certainly not to impose a duty for unending modification on anyone. Worse still, such conspiratorial fear-mongering often forms the basis of maudlin and all-too-familiar elegies to finitude that have frequently shaded into screeds against reproductive autonomy (contraception is evil), gay sex (what’s next, bestiality?), and, especially today, gender-affirming surgery (which is the first step, we are told, on the road to transhumanism). Chambers is apparently unbothered by her argument’s resemblance to these insidious insinuations, yet they are of a piece. Few conservatives insist that we must decline cancer treatment in order to embrace our vulnerability, but plenty argue that women who use contraception are asserting technocratic dominance over the natural order of things rather than heroically confronting the fact of human limitation. Chambers makes similarly invidious arguments, condoning cancer treatment but condemning treatments for gender dysphoria, without justification. She might as well follow feminist-turned-reactionary Louise Perry, who laments, in a recent polemic about the ills of the sexual revolution, that liberalism “seeks to free individuals from the external constraints placed on us by location, family, religion, tradition, and even (and most relevant to feminists) the human body.”
 
But just as it is false that liberals who hope to protect some kernel of autonomy aspire to exert total sovereignty over the world, and just as it is false that providing trans people with gender-affirming care will usher in an era of cyborgs, it is false that rejecting the standard set by Intact is to succumb to rampant, ceaseless modification. When it comes to assessing a bodily intervention, the degree to which the body will be modified is not the right metric—which is not necessarily to say that there is no metric or that anything goes.
 
The right standard is not that of bodily purity but that of aesthetic agency. Sontag identified the crux of the matter when she observed that oppressors impose beauty standards on the populations they colonize. The problem is not that we modify our bodies at all, a tic we could scarcely excise so long as we go on exercising and excreting, but that most people have little power over the standards by which their modified bodies are to be assessed. As Wordsworth writes in a supplement to the “Preface to Lyrical Ballads,” “every author, as far as he is great and at the same time original, has had the task of creating the taste by which he is to be enjoyed.” The true injustice of the present norms is that women and people of color are enmeshed in a net of their oppressors’ poor taste.
 
Of course, it is no trifling matter to determine which of our aesthetic propensities are really our own (or at least, enough our own), nor is it easy to relinquish the standards of our milieu, even on the rare occasions when we have succeeded in disentangling them from the snarled skein of desire. Chambers is right to worry that women in particular face obstacles to the cultivation of aesthetic agency, as well as plenty of material incentives to accept patriarchal blueprints demanding they shrink their waists and inflate their busts.
 
But if women are tyrannized by dint of having no hand in crafting the criteria by which they are judged, then even well-meaning paternalism is not a solution. The content of Chambers’s proposal may be less punishing than that of the patriarchal project (at least for some), but she is merely substituting a more benign dictatorship for a more barbarous one. Instead of embracing a presumption against modification, we should embrace a commitment to realizing aesthetic autonomy and enabling artistic imagination for all.
 
Because, if there were such a thing as an unmodified body, who would want one? It would be inert, untouched by the ordeal of living, almost inanimate. Worse, it would be artless, one more refusal to sanctify the world by beautifying it. The drag queens whose cosmetic skills I find so impressive present a better model. They have every motive to become drab or, worse, vulgarly virile, but instead they muster the courage and imagination to render themselves dazzling—an aesthetic merit that smacks of moral courage at a time when neo-fascists prowl in wait outside drag queen story hours. Like all the best artworks, they invent not only themselves but new sensibilities for themselves. Reactionaries are right, in a way, to fear them. They leave no one who sees them intact.
 
A Body of One’s Own : Feminist arguments against body modification are a dead end. By
Becca Rothfeld. Boston Review, March 1, 2023. 

More on Clare Chambers website