Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-94fs2 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-03T00:41:59.862Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Bodies and Souls/Sex, Sin and the Senses In Patriarchy: A Study in Applied Dualism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 March 2020

Sheila Ruth
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

What elements lie at the core of patriarchal consciousness and give it its particular expressions? Beneath the hatred of women, at its source, is a profound, dissociating fear: the fear of non-being, the Absence beyond Death. In an effort to escape death and non-being, the patriarchs have constructed a conception of existence which is split in two, with eternal life, God, meaning and spirit on one side and bodily death on the other. The masculist association of women with bodies, nature and the birthing-dying cycle places us clearly on the side of death, in the realm of being which is and necessarily must be despised and controlled. Alienation from the rhythms of life, giving rise to a crisis of meaning; the denial of death, which leads paradoxically to an adoration of death; and a hysterical ambivalence to sex and sensuality all coalesce and find concrete expression in the personal and institutionalized hatred of Woman.

Type
Research Article
Information
Hypatia , Volume 2 , Issue 1: Special Issue: Philosophy and Women Symposium , Winter 1987 , pp. 149 - 163
Copyright
Copyright © 1987 by Hypatia, Inc.

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Adler, Margot. 1979. Drawing down the moon. New York: Viking Press.Google Scholar
Aquinas, Thomas. 1945. Whether woman should have been made in the first production of things?Summa Theologica, Part I, Q. 92 (The Production of Woman), Art. 1. Basic writings of St. Thomas Aquinas, ed. Pegis, A.C.New York: Random House.Google Scholar
Daly, Mary. 1973. Beyond god the father. Boston: Beacon Press.Google Scholar
Daly, Mary. 1978. Gyn/Ecology. Boston: Beacon Press.Google Scholar
Dworkin, Andrea. 1974. Woman hating. New York: E.P. Dutton.Google Scholar
Dworkin, Andrea. 1976. Our blood. New York: Harper & Row.Google Scholar
Firestone, Shulamith. 1970. The dialectic of sex. New York: Bantam Books.Google Scholar
Friday, Nancy. 1974. My secret garden: Women's sexual fantasies. New York: Pocket Books.Google Scholar
Gilligan, Carol. 1982. In a different voice. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Gray, Elizabeth Dodson. 1979. Green paradise lost. Wellesley, Mass.: Roundtable Press.Google Scholar
Hite, Shere. 1974. Sexual honesty: By women for Women. New York: Warner Books.Google Scholar
Ochs, Carol. 1977. Behind the sex of God: Toward a new consciousness transcending matriarchy and patriarchy. Boston: Beacon Press.Google Scholar
Person, Ethel Spector. 1980. Sexuality as the mainstay of identity: Psychoanalytic perspectives. Signs 5(4).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Roget's International Thesaurus. 1946. New Edition. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Co.Google Scholar
Signs. 1980. Special issues: Woman sex and sexuality 5 (4); 6 (I).Google Scholar
Starhawk. 1979. The spiral dance. New York: Harper & Row.Google Scholar
Stone, Merlin. 1978. When God was a woman. New York: Harvest/Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich.Google Scholar
Vance, Carol S. and Snitow, Ann Barr. 1984. Forum: The feminist sexuality debates. Signs 10(1).Google Scholar
Windelband, Wilhelm. 1958. A history of philosophy, Vol. I. New York: Harper Torchbooks.Google Scholar