Our bodies, whose property?

Claiming the body as property has been represented as the best way to ensure control over our own choices and lives; a crucial way of asserting our rights to bodily integrity; and an important means of protection against the abuse of our bodily materials by today's biotechnology companies. Refusing to see our bodies as property, it is argued, reflects either a religious view of the body as belonging to God, or a misguided sentimentalism that blocks clear thinking about matters such as prostitution, surrogate motherhood, and the sale of spare kidneys. Since we trade in our bodies whenever we work for a wage, there is no reason to view markets in sex or reproduction as a problem. Drawing on feminist arguments about the self as embodied, I argue that it is indeed a problem to think of the body as property, and a problem to view the body as a marketable substance. My minimal claim is that we do not need to assert property in the body in order to express what we mainly care about when we say ‘it’s my body’, which is bodily integrity. My maximal claim is that our ability to think of others as our equals is very much bound up with our bodies. The point at which some people’s bodies become the means to patch up the bodies of others – most dramatically, in the use of one person’s body parts to save or enhance the body of another – is therefore deeply threatening to equality. About the presenter: Currently a visitor to RSSS at ANU, Anne Phillips is Professor of Political and Gender Theory in the LSE Gender Institute and the Graham Wallas Professor of Political Science in the Department of Government and was Director of the LSE Gender Institute until September 2004. She is a leading figure in feminist political theory, and writes on issues of bodies and property, democracy and representation, equality, multiculturalism, and difference. Much of her work can be read as challenging the narrowness of contemporary liberal theory. In 1992, she was co-winner of the American Political Science Association's Victoria Schuck Award for Best Book on Women and Politics published in 1991 (awarded for Engendering Democracy). She was awarded an honorary Doctorate from the University of Aalborg in 1999; was appointed Adjunct Professor in the Political Science Programme of the Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University, 2002-6; and was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2003. In 2008, she received a Special Recognition Award from the Political Studies Association, UK, for her contribution to Political Studies. In 2012, she was awarded the title Graham Wallas Professor of Political Science.