I apologize for being over a week late to start the discussion post of the fifth chapter, Remaking Our Bodies, Remaking the world?, of Silvia Federici’s Beyond the Periphery of the Skin. Better late than never!

I found this chapter to be better written than the previous one. It was also more engaging in my opinion. In the first paragraph, Federici explains that body modifications, which she calls “remaking the body,” have been around since the beginning of humanity. She then lists several examples and quickly explains why humans remake their bodies. Here’s what she wrote: “This for sake of group identification, to project personal or collective power, to beautify themselves. Bodies are also texts on which power regimes have written their prescriptions. As the point of encounter with the human and nonhuman world, the body has been our most powerful means of self-expression and the most vulnerable to abuse.”

In the next paragraph Federici begins with the statement: “Never before in history, however, has the possibility of changing our bodies been so close to realization and an object of such intense desire.” She goes on to list many examples. One example that stuck out to me was working out. I never thought of regular workouts as a type of body modification since working out should be about maintaining one’s bodily health, not radically changing one’s appearance.

The next section of this chapter is titled as a question that we as the readers must ponder: What Does the Present Popularity of Body Remakes Signify? She also poses two more questions for us to answer:

1. What does this tell us about the changing conception of our bodies?
2. And what are the “body politics” of this phenomenon?

“Doctors do not ask whether we live close to a chemical dump or have money problems, but how many drinks we have, how many cigarettes we smoke, how many miles we run.”

This quote stuck out to me because in my experience with doctors I find this to be true. With a person’s health everything needs to be considered. Some examples could be the environment a person lives in, stressors from systematic failures, or how a person individually cares for their body. A person’s health isn’t the sole responsibility of that person if there are outside factors influencing it not in that person’s control.

Another quote I think is important to bring up is, “…body remakes remain individual solutions and add to the process of social stratification and exclusion…” I agree with Federici here when it comes to extreme body remakes like plastic surgery or surrogacy and when access to keeping one’s body as healthy as possible is locked behind a high price tag. It further separates the poor and rich and is also a way to subjugate women’s bodies under the guise of appearing a certain way to pretend we are healthy when we are actually just appealing to the male, patriarchal gaze. We as women can’t fight and maintain our rights if all our time, energy, resources, and money go towards solely focusing on how our bodies look to break ourselves into what males think we should look like.

Federici then goes to argue that a new “body politics” is needed to help “…us devise how the management of our bodies and their remakes may fit in a broader process of social emancipation, so that our strategies for survival do not give more power to the social forces that are sending many of us to die, and they do not contribute to a well-being whose price and content distance us from other people.” She explains this has to be done in a way that doesn’t give more power to the people in charge. Does she mean men as a class, the mega corporations, and the billionaires? Federici also brings up that feminists in the 70’s redefined beauty for women during that time period. I wonder what a current definition of beauty would be under a radical feminist interpretation.

Another quote I wrote down from my notes is, “…medicine as an institution continues to be at the service of power and the market, and we would do well not to forget its history as an instrument of capital’s incessant attempt to refurbish our humanity and break down our resistance to exploitation.” Federici explains further that doctors emboldened by the medical profession have hurt and taken advantage of people with disorders/differences of sexual development (she uses the outdated word “intersex” here), lesbians, gay men, women who refuse to stay in the home to only do housework, and black people from especially vulnerable populations, like those with intellectual disabilities. One disturbing example Federici gives took place in the 50’s where “…black people of all ages and children classified as retarded were subjected to terrifying experiments, even involving the repeated injection of radioactive material in the veins of unsuspecting black adults and children.” One thing I wish Federici would have done in this paragraph was to give more examples of how corrupt the medical institution has been to the other groups she specifically mentioned earlier.

The next section of this chapter is called Capital’s Cartesian Dream, which I found unsettling. I looked up what “Cartesian” means because I hadn’t heard that term before. It relates to Descartes and his ideas, and the idea that Federici is referencing in this section is the mind and body dualism, which I had heard of before. I just didn’t know it had a formal name and that Descartes came up with the concept.

“In sum, Dr. Frankenstein's dream is back on the table, not only in the form of a human-shaped robot, but also as a technologically enhanced human being of the kind that the implantation of microchips in our bodies is already preparing.”

I found this final sentence of this section interesting and scary. I wonder how soon could something like this happen? In my lifetime? I hope not.

The final section is called Remaking Our Bodies or Remaking Medicine? One quote I found myself completely agreeing with was, “We must, then, avoid making the medical profession the godlike creators of our bodies and instead direct our activism to devising ways in which we can exercise some control over our encounters with it.” Then Federici gave some example of organizations and people who did just that: the Popular Health Movement, feminists from the 70’s who set up underground clinics to practice abortion, and the ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) from the 80’s.