Clare Chambers

What would it take for your body to be good enough? The pressure to change our bodies is overwhelming. We strive to defy ageing, build our biceps, cure our disabilities, conceal our quirks. Surrounded by filtered photos and surgically-enhanced features, we must contort our physical selves to prejudiced standards of beauty. Perfection is impossible, and even an acceptable body seems out of reach. In this thought-provoking, original work, acclaimed political philosopher Clare Chambers argues that the unmodified body is a key political principle. While defending individuals' right to change their bodies, she argues that the social pressures to modify undermine equality. She shows how the connected ideas of the natural body, the normal body, and the whole body have been used both to disrupt and to maintain social hierarchies - sometimes oppressing, other times liberating. The body becomes a site of political importance: a place where hierarchies of sex, gender, race, disability, age, and class are reinforced. Through a clear-sighted analysis of the power dynamics that structure our society, and with examples ranging widely from bodybuilding to breast implants, deafness to male circumcision, biology to gender identity, Intact stresses that we must break away from the oppressive forces that demand we alter our bodies. Instead, it offers a bold, transformative vision of the human body that is equal without expectation.

A Defence of the Unmodified Body

Intact

Karolina

A vagina isn't necessary for wiping bottoms; a penis shouldn't get in the way of the Hoover.

We all have limitations to our physical capabilities. Impairment is normal. What isn't normal, or what shouldn't be accepted as normality, is that impairment creates disability.

Insisting on the moral privilege of the unmodified body allows us to insist that the impaired body is not defective, to reject gendered beauty standards and cultural practices that demean and injure us, to resist tropes that liken people with facial disfigurements to villains, to fight standards of 'professionalism' and uniformity that act as vehicles for racism. And an insistence on the moral privilege of the unmodified body allows us to insist on the humanity, the dignity and respect owed to the people who inhabit all kinds of bodies - which means all people.

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