306. The Permanently Inadequate Human Body feat. Clare Chambers

In a society where our bodies are constantly scrutinized and judged, surrounded by filtered images and surgically-enhanced features, we face overwhelming commercial and social pressure to contort ourselves to fit into predefined notions of acceptability.

But is body positivity alone sufficient to resist those societal expectations, or is there a need perhaps for a deeper cultural shift in our relationship with our bodies?

Clare Chambers is a British political philosopher at the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge, a political philosopher specializing in feminist theory, contemporary liberal theory, theories of social justice, theories of social construction, and bioethics, In her most recent publication, Intact: A Case for the Unaltered Body, Clare explores the unmodified body as a fundamental element of equality.

Clare and Greg explore the detrimental impact of cultural and commercial pressures that perpetually reinforce body dissatisfaction, resulting in notable mental health challenges, while also investigating our inclination to focus on altering the physical form rather than shifting the societal viewpoint on diverse bodies and offering strategies to liberate ourselves from oppressive forces that impose body modifications.

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

Episode Quotes:

Are we all anxious about our bodies?

17:15: The message that your body is not good enough is absolutely ubiquitous. We receive that on every level about almost every body part. So each of us has a different personal history with our bodies. Each of us has a different understanding of how our bodies fit into our culture. But in talking to people about the arguments for Intact, what I have clearly seen is that everybody has a part of their body or an aspect of their embodied experience that they feel anxious about and often ashamed of. That shame is about the body is a deep and ubiquitous phenomenon, and it's actually so deep that I think if we feel we don't have that shame, we feel shame as well. There's a sense we expect people to have shame about their bodies.

Is feeling bad about your body part of life?

56:52: Our society, our economics, and our culture are set up in such a way as to try to make us feel bad about our bodies all the time. And so if you are feeling bad about your body as a kid, that is part of life. That doesn't mean that your body is wrong; it's something to recognize and notice but try to move past.

On accepting our bodies and their limitations 

38:49: The body is its limitation for all of us. There are things that our bodies will never be like and can never do. And so the language of kind of cure suggests we need to somehow get rid of this problematic body, and then we'll have fixed the problem. Whereas actually, what we need to do is deal with the social context.

Trying to allow our bodies to be normal is not an easy thing to do

34:53: So trying to allow our bodies to be normal is not an easy thing to do. Our bodies change, and we have to come to terms with them and re-inhabit them. And each time we are faced with this disruption. But it's that allowing our bodies to be normal that I think is and can be compatible with equality, rather than thinking that they must be normal in the sense of being like other bodies.

Show Links:Recommended Resources:

•  Perfect Me: Beauty as an Ethical Ideal by Heather Widdows

Guest Profile:

• Faculty Profile at University of Cambridge
• Clare Chambers' Website
• Clare Chambers on Twitter

Her Work:

• Intact: A Defence of the Unmodified Body
• Against Marriage: An Egalitarian Defense of the Marriage-Free State (Oxford Political Theory) 
• Sex, Culture, and Justice: The Limits of Choice
• More scholarly articles