Feminism, Disability, and the Body/Mind Duality: Rethinking the Place of the Will

This Paper takes up the feminist critique of the mind/body duality in political philosophy and considers how disability can help deepen feminist understanding. In the history of political theory we think of the will as the enactment of rationality and located exclusively in the mind, with the body being the locus of desire that is the enemy of the will: the will must control the body, thwart its destructive tendencies. Feminist theory has tried to turn that relationship around and asks us to think about the ways in which we are often subject to the demands of the unruly body, and that appreciating this fact should help us rethink the relation between mind and body. My paper considers what disability adds to deepen this feminist intervention by introducing notions of the will, to suggest that we are sometimes at the will of the body. I draw on disability theory to engage feminist theories of the body and feminist critiques of the mind-body dualism in political theory to rethink standard concepts of the will. Both borrowing from and challenging the concept of the “bodymind” that has developed in critical disability and feminist theory, I seek to develop an understanding of the will that is located in the body itself.