how the struggles around the female body played out in other biopolitical strategies - the setting up o f a second wom en’s hospital by women doctors in 1896 for example, or the activity o f women in political and social reform groups. These histories o f gender and power relations in late 19th century Melbourne would further disrupt the medical meaning o f the reproductive female body.
history. There would have to be an immediate qualification to such an attempt. As something of a qualification this concluding section outlines how I use and diverge from the theoretical approaches which I see as important in a feminist critique of history. Foucault’s work on the body as a focus of modem power/knowledge and his critique of the clinical domain have been crucial to my analysis of the importance of the female body in social relations. His analysis works against the idea of the body as an objectively observable and analysable fact outside of political and social relations and instead constitutes it as a political focus of the modem state and point of identity for the modem individual. The emphasis on the body as a utilisable object of power/knowledge allows us to explain why it is that medicine, as the science of the body, becomes a powerful set of practices and ideas in modem social relations. Foucault’s theory of biopolitics links clinical practices with other social concerns with the body and also shows how the individual is an important target of social discourses. In this schema the concept of sexuality refers to more than just reproductive physiology. It is the reproduction of life, of the population, so that it also becomes an important target of modem power. Foucault’s study looks at sexuality as the key to the maintenance of the individual body and social body by looking at how the deployment of sexuality invests utility in the modem body so that strategies around sexuality are major tactics of modem power. My work builds on his brief references to the female body as an important target of the medicalising of the population. In my analysis I look at the reproductive female body as a complex set of meanings which had wide social and political significance. My argument is that in introducing the notion of the gendered female body into an analysis of modem power/knowledge the importance of the reproductive function is actually greater than Foucault’s analysis of the deployment of sexuality suggests.
Taking another methodological concept of Foucault’s, surface readings, in my analysis of medical texts I look at how the explicit denial of woman’s sexuality in the description of reproduction is important in the constitution of woman’s modem individuality and in the utilising of the female body for social reproduction. The medical gaze separates out sexuality from reproduction in such a way as to constitute women’s sexuality as a potential power which cannot find sexual expression precisely because woman is ’not male’. ’True’ sexuality is denied and yet invested in this body as the source of feminine identity because of this denial. In this discourse women’s sexuality is constituted as reproduction. It defines the modem female body’s tme sexual expression as safely within the clinical domain, because as women’s reproductivity is defined as her physiology, medicine, as the science of women’s physical space, manages women’s potential sexuality and utilises it for social reproduction. In this argument the saturation of the female body with sexuality is actually the positing of woman as a reproductive being in order to utilise the female body’s potential. As woman is defined by her physiology, this strategy effectively enmeshes the female body in a network of power which renders a docile reproductive body best interpreted by the clinical domain. Notions of woman as the other, as the sex, as reproductive, are naturalised in the medical gaze which at once defines woman’s power and identity as reproductive
and simultaneously desires this power in order to maintain the reproduction of the social body. Moving on from the historical constitution of the 19th century reproductive female body, in conclusion, I would suggest that this way of viewing the medicalised female body still operates in 20th century medical discourses. This brings my work back to the questions raised in the ’woman orientated’ approach discussed in chapter one. My argument is that doctors did not deliberately set out to oppress women by ’capturing the womb’ with scientific technology or applying sexist and derogatory views of women to medical opinion and practice. Rather, the concept of the female body which is produced by gynaecological and obstetrical practice, is an important strategy of biopolitical concerns articulated in the medical practice and knowledge of the reproduction of woman. I would argue that it is counter productive to feminist aims to see the liberation of women’s reproductive potential as the means of reinstating female power. Reproduction appears to hold the key to women’s individual freedom precisely because of the medicalising process which has naturalised the social and political meanings of woman in her physiology. To argue for the liberation of women’s reproductive potential as the essential political and sexual freedom of woman is to adopt the same medical and social framework which feminism must challenge.
Taking up feminist theory on gender and representations we can more effectively challenge medical knowledge/power by disrupting the apparently natural or closed concept of the female body. By showing how the reproductive body is not a natural fact or the essential representation of femaleness, but rather a historically and culturally specific concept which enmeshes women in a series of contradictions and social relations, we can open out the concept of the female body to other interpretations. This does not mean that we replace medical interpretations of the female body by liberationist ones - positive assertions about women’s reproductivity rather than repressive ones - or perhaps create a new feminist language based on the experiences of living within a female body , the ’(m)other speaks’. As a Foucauldian analysis of power suggests, knowledge is produced in practices. Therefore, in relation to power/knowledge of the female body types of medical and social practices need to evolve in order to produce different identities for women which cannot reduce the complexities of gender relations and women’s individuality to reproduction as the essence of female expression in modem society. And, to carry this thought further on a political level, in medical and social discourses we continually objectify the female body as something to be observed, captured, rescued, analyzed, quite alien from women’s other experiences and needs. The point is that the female body should not be the object of social and medical thought, knowledge and practice, the subject of special concern, controlled and regulated as social property. Instead, woman’s physical entity, as a reproductive body, should be seen as just one expression of woman’s individuality, one which is integrated into, rather than defining, other social and political activities. What my analysis of 19th century medical discourse suggests is that the female body, like any other concept, has a history and place in social relations which can be challenged and reread by a feminist critique which refuses to accept the present given
meanings of gender power relations.
Appendix
This appendix has two sections. The first documents the Royal Commissions and other official publications I have researched in my survey of biopolitical concerns in late 19th century Melbourne. The second lists the medical journals from which I have selected the medical texts for analysis.
1. Official Publications
Commonwealth, New South Wales and Victorian Parliamentary Papers. Abbreviations
A.Pp - Australian Pariamentary Papers
NSW Pp - New South Wales Parliamentary Papers RC - Royal Commission
V Pp - Victorian Parliamentary Papers
RC to enquire into the condition and management of the charitable institutions of the Colony, and generally into all matters Report together with minutes of evidence and appendices. VPp 1870, no. 22. (v. 2); 1871, no. 30, (v. 3).
RC on Noxious Trades, etc. Report with minutes of evidence. VPp 1871, no. 1 (v.2).
RC on industrial and reformatory schools and the sanatory station. Reports with appendices and minutes of evidence. VPp 1872, no. 9, (v.3) and 1874, no. 44 (v. 3).
Board appointed to enquire into matters relating to the Kew Lunatic Asylum. Report together with minutes of evidence and appendices. VPp 1876, no. 56 (v.3).
Report on the state of public educatation in Victoria and suggestions as to the best means of improving it. VPp 1877/78, no. 105 (v. 3).
RC on employees in shops. Reports and minutes of evidence. VPp 1882/3, no. 43 (v.3); 1883 no. 16 and 16x (v. 2); 1884 nos. 18, 29 and 39 (v. 2).
RC on education. Reports together with the minutes of evidence. VPp 1882/83, no. 16 (v.2); 1883, no. 19 (v. 2); 1884, no. 47 and 47x (v.3).
RC on asylums for the Insane and inebriate. Reports with minutes of evidence and appendices. VPp 1884, no. 64 (v. 4); 1885, no. 9 (v.2.) ; 1886, no. 15 (v. 2) ; 1887, no. 56 (v. 2).
RC to enquire into ... the sanitary conditions of Melbourne. Reports with appendices minutes of evidence, etc. VPp 1889, no. 29 (v. 2); no. 103 (v. 3); 1890, no. 7, (v. 2).
Board appointed to inquire and report as to the workings of the ’Factories and Shops Act 1890’ with regard to the alleged existence of the practice known as ’sweating’ and the alleged insanitary condition of factories and work rooms. Reports with minutes and appendices. VPp 1893, no. 47 (v. 2); 1894, no. 12 (v. 1) ; 1895/6, no. 44 (v.3).
RC on Charitable Instituions. Reports with minutes of evidence. VPp 1890, no. 203 (v. 4); 1891, no. 210 (v. 6); 1892, no. 60 (v. 4), 1895/6, no. 48 (v. 3).
RC on the Operation of the factories and shops law of Victoria. Reports with minutes of evidence and appendices. VPp 1901, no. 35 (v.3); 1902/03 no. 30 ,31 (v. 2).
RC On the Decline of the Birth-Rate and on the mortality of infants in New South Wales, vol. 1. Report together with statistical evidence etc. NSW Pp 1904.
RC On the Decline of the Birth-Rate and on the mortality of infants in New South Wales, vol. II. (not published with papers). NSWPp 1904, (v. 4) .
RC on Secret Drugs, cures and food. Report. APp 1907/8 (v. 4); 1907/8 (v. 2). 2. Australian Medical Journals
Australian Medical Gazette, 1880-1900. Australian Medical Journal, 1870-95.
Intercolonial Medical Congresses of Australasia, Adelaide, Vardon and Pritchard, 1888. Adelaide 1887.
Intercolonial Medical Congresses of Australasia, Brisbane, Wilson, Ferguson and Co., 1899. Brisbane 1899.
Intercolonial Medical Congresses of Australasia, Dunedin, The Otago Daily Times and Witness Newspaper Co.Ltd., 1897. Dunedin 1896.
Intercolonial Medical Congresses of Australasia, Melbourne, Stillwell and Co., 1889. Melbourne 1889.
Intercolonial Medical Congresses of Australasia, Sydney, Charles Potter, 1893. Sydney 1892.
Intercolonial Medical Journal of Australasia, 1896 -1910.