Western feminism has long distanced itself from biology. The preference has been to move away from the biological body as much as possible. But renouncing one’s body is not a luxury that many can allow themselves. When a body is ill or when it deviates from the norm, it becomes painfully clear that it needs to be taken into consideration. Perhaps what lies beneath the surface – our fleshy, bloody physical interiors – can find a place in feminist theory as well. Maria Lönn is a PhD student at Södertörn University and says she was immune to the assumptions of biology for a long time. Until she discovered the post-materialistic feminist Elisabeth Wilson.

Maria Lönn investigates the concept of thinking organs and guts with memories.

For a long time, I boasted about my immune position with regard to the assumptions, stories and moralising claims of biology. But a few months ago, I fell outside the limits of the debate. I caved before the complex relationship between biology and the way we comprehend ourselves and each other.

My friends would nod guardedly as I spoke unrestrainedly about the varied speed at which nostrils take in smells, the twinkling of the stars on the journey through space. The brain’s self-medication and dopamine as a carousel ride. I couldn’t stop myself; despite my squeamishness about bodily fluids I was so filled with horror and fascination that I started googling the subject of “organs”.

This new attitude was inspired by a text written by the post-materialist feminist Elisabeth Wilson and her work on thinking organs. Yes, I’m a bit late to the party when it comes to the relevance of biology to feminism, but let me talk about her ideas anyway.

Steve Martin in The Man with Two Brains.

Western feminism has been characterised by an ambivalence about how to handle its culture’s devotion to the body and soul or the soma/psyche duality. As a good post-structuralist feminist, I myself have always agonised about the debate’s impact and the attributions of the imagination.

But there are feminists who are escaping the clutches of the debate and claiming to untie this Gordian knot in a more organic and physical way.

A non-biologistic approach to bodies often springs from an effect or a reaction to overly strong or excessive trust in biology or biological evidence and data. Quantitative foundations for analyses and explanations of the human being. Within some parts of feminist theory, the body’s organs have functioned as the medical other in relation to culture and the mind, where the biological body is put to one side or seen as an inappropriate object of examination. This is not the case for Wilson, who situates the body in a different way from the classic anti-biological attitude, through something she calls “gut feminism”.

This is a feminism that can think organically and through biological substances. Wilson is a self-proclaimed science feminist, whose work lies at the intersection of the natural sciences, the humanities and the social sciences. More specifically, her research passions are biology, evolutionary theory and neuroscience.

While the self-proclaimed duchesses of western feminism have often taken a critical position against neuroscience’s flirtation with biological reductionism, Wilson makes use of neuroscience to get closer to theories of the body.

From Vacuum “I Take Pride in My Religion”.

Biological data is used to develop new models for feminist theory. The criticism deals with the lack of conversation between neuroscience and psychoanalysis.

If neuroscientists have committed themselves to the investigation of a nervous system with no psyche, then psychoanalysts (whether feminist or not) have taken a non-biological psyche as their field of research. Wilson tries to bridge this gap. She also criticises the dualism between psyche and soma, or body and soul. Wilson investigates the psyche not only through psychoanalysis, in the Freudian tradition, but also by looking at neurology and biology – the material foundations and functions for the brain, organs and neural networks. By means of or via this, she explores the link between different forms of mental expression, such as Freud’s psychoanalytical models of hysteria and its material transformations and expressions (which might be lumps that form in the throat) – i.e. the biological mechanisms of hysteria. Hysteria lets us into secrets not only about the psyche, but also about biological substrates.

Focusing on the organic nature of eating disorders, bulimia and its link to the physiology of the gut, Wilson shows how contemporaneous depressive conditions are characterised by an intertwining of emotions, sociality and biochemistry. Wilson thus analyses bulimia not as a physical manifestation of a mental disorder, but rather as a “biological unconscious”.

Mika Rottenberg
 Video still from Dough, 2005–2006 Installation with single-channel video Length: 7 min Varying dimensions Courtesy of Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery, New York; Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York. 
 Copyright: Mika Rottenberg.

This term was coined by Sándor Ferenczi, then a student and pen friend of Sigmund Freud’s.According to Ferenczi, our biological matter, in this case the gut, manifests and expresses an unconscious will. Our organs have “memories”. Memories that can be evoked by psychological stimuli but are or become manifested by real psychological means in the way our organs “think”. According to this view, our organs are “sapient things” all the time. They have their own dreams and demons.

An example is the way in which bulimia patients can induce vomiting without putting their fingers in their throats. Drinking or pressing their hands against their stomachs can be enough to make them vomit. When vomiting becomes as automatic as that, bulimia is often difficult to treat. This is because the organ, as I mentioned previously, has started to think for itself. Emotional expressions or feelings such as anger, need or depression have become organic. Sometimes the gut is angry, sometimes depressed. The ability of patients to respond to cognitive treatment in such a situation is therefore often very limited, but not entirely impossible since organs are linked to other organs. Or, more specifically, the gut is linked to the brain.

Wilson believes that, by looking at medical data on how antidepressants circulate within the body, it is possible to ascertain that the effects of antidepressant drugs are not limited to the brain but also affect the networks of nerves incorporated into the gut. In this way, the condition of bulimia patients can be alleviated using medication for depression. The reason antidepressants help with bulimia can, according to Wilson, be explained by understanding the way in which eating disorders are linked to the idea of “organic thought”. Wilson thus attempts to weaken the hierarchy between the organs and our mental condition, and show that there is no primary distinction between the two. She believes that mental manifestations like bulimia should not be taken as a sign or a symptom of secondary psychological conditions that are applied to or disrupt the “correct” functioning of our organs. The moods or conditions of the organs are thus a natural part of the events surrounding our organs, just like digestion. Wilson thus aims to highlight both the mental nature of the gut and the gut-like nature of our mood. The gut therefore does not take on a sensory state, but rather is already a sensory organ: it thinks and ponders. That means that the so-called peripheral human organs are mentally alive.

There is therefore a way to use biology as a means of constructing other models of body and soul, soma/psyche, beyond the boundaries of Cartesian dualism. This loosening of boundaries does not mean that psyche and soma are the same thing, only that there is something that precedes the latter with regard to a distinction or demarcation between them. It is a way of making the dynamic within the biological body more complex, and recognising an “organic thought” as an alternative to the split mind/body dualism.

This concept opens up another way of thinking about differences. Not just those between the psyche and the body, but also between subject and object, which complicates the question of how we think about subjectivity and bodies.