read

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    INTACT in The Observer beauty column

    Should you be using eyelash serum? Or would that be an example of shametenance? Eva Wiseman reflected on this dilemma in her beauty column on 23 April 2023. You can read the full article here.

    I hadn’t realised eyelashes thinned as we aged. If I had, perhaps I’d have been focusing on them earlier as part of the relentless search for signs that time has passed or been lost, and with it, maybe power. In her book Intact: A Defence of the Unmodified Body, philosopher Clare Chambers talks about “shametenance”, all the things we do (like applying “natural makeup”) that maintain the idea that our unmodified bodies are shameful, and I wonder if this project counts. Remove the hair there, bleach the hair there, a dull domestic struggle. The seconds dragging serum across my lashes joins the minutes spent dying my roots, then the hours logged by all the women in my life, fighting quietly in the gym or bathroom or salon to get back to an I we recognise.

  • all posts on the body and beauty,  Intact,  read,  the body

    INTACT at Epoché

    Intact Bodies: The Ambivalence of The Natural and The Normal – John C. Brady in Conversation with Clare Chambers was published in the February 2022 issue of Epoché, the monthly magazine for the Philosophy diaspora. You can read the interview here.

    Clare Chambers is a professor of political philosophy at the University of Cambridge. Her work deals with contemporary liberalism, social construction, feminism, and social justice. Her latest book, Intact (Allen Lane, 2022), is an analysis of the ways in which the body is a political site where the inequalities of sex, gender, race, disability, age, and class are reinforced. The book argues for the value of the ‘unmodified body’. The unmodified body is not an empirical concept, such a thing would be impossible in actuality (our bodies are undergoing constant revision and intervention). Rather, it is a political tool for resisting forms of coercion and oppression that would have us viewing our bodies as never good enough as they are, and thus requiring their modification, concealment, and conformance in myriad ways. However, the unmodified body cannot be viewed as a simple ‘body positivity’ any more than it can be asserted as an empirical concept. Rather, it is a new notion that cuts orthogonally across various ideals that we have previously held the body to: the natural, the normal, and the sovereign. Because of this orthogonality, these various ideals show themselves, under Chambers’ analysis, to have an ambivalent character. The book functions as both a political and cultural call to arms, and an astute analysis of how our bodies becomes ensnared in oppressive structures that inhibit the road to equality.

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    The political power of your body – INTACT in iai news

    We all feel pressure for our bodies to look a certain way: 70% of women say they feel pressure to have a perfect body, and two thirds of men feel ashamed of how they look. However, those pressures don’t affect everyone equally. The standards by which our bodies are judged reflect and reinforce other unjust societal hierarchies. Furthermore, the failure to adhere to society’s beauty standards is often interpreted as a deeper failure of character, encompassing our entire identity. By being aware of the sources of these pressures we can remind ourselves that the unmodified body is valuable just as it is, writes Clare Chambers.

    Read the whole article here.

  • all posts on feminism,  all posts on the body and beauty,  policy & impact,  read,  watch

    Women & Equalities Select Committee

    On 23rd September 2020 I gave evidence to the Women & Equalities Select Committee Inquiry “Changing the Perfect Picture: an Inquiry into Body Image” on behalf of the Nuffield Council on Bioethics. You can view a recording of the evidence session here, and read a transcript here.

    My evidence to the Committee was quoted on the Talk Radio news bulletin that night and in a written article in Yahoo News.

  • all posts on marriage,  read

    Review of Against Marriage in The Philosophical Review

    Laurie Shrage reviews Against Marriage. 

    “I agree with Chambers that state-recognized marriage retains patriarchal residues and is ultimately an inegalitarian and underinclusive way to regulate intimate partnerships and family units. I also believe that it is possible, in principle, to devise default directives for regulating different kinds of intimate relationships fairly and justly. However, the devil really is in the details here. Chambers has provided the moral and political justification, as well as a plausible mechanism, for a more egalitarian approach to family law and policy, and now it is incumbent on those who agree with her to develop the fair and just default rules that will take the place of state-recognized marriage.”

    Read the whole review here.

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    Blending in and standing out: comfort and visibility in beauty practices

    “My thought is this: a significant aspect of beauty practices is comfort and visibility. Comfort relates to discipline: discipline makes some actions and inactions seem comfortable and others effortful. Visibility relates to surveillance: some beauty practices make us seem visible or hyper-visible, others make us feel invisible. Sometimes beauty practices aim at making the practitioner visible: she wants her appearance to be noticeable. But beauty practices can also aim at invisibility: at making a person blend in rather than stand out. Both make up and its absence can have this effect, depending on the person and context involved.”

    This short piece is published on the Beauty Demands blog. You can read it here.

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    OUP Women in Philosophy reading list

     

    Against Marriage features in the Oxford University Press Women in Philosophy reading list.

    “This March, in recognition of Women’s History Month, the OUP Philosophy team will be celebrating Women in Philosophy. The philosophy discipline has long been perceived as male-dominated, so we want to recognize some of the incredible female philosophers from the past including Simone de Beauvoir, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Hannah Arendt, plus female philosophers doing great things in 2018 like Martha Nussbaum, Clare Chambers, and Kate Manne.”

    You can see the whole reading list here.

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    Quoted on marriage in The Guardian

    Rose Hackman quotes me in a long-form piece on marriage in The Guardian. You can read the whole article here.

    ” “Married men gained rights over women’s bodies, property and children,” confirms Clare Chambers, a lecturer in philosophy at the University of Cambridge who wrote a book arguing for an end to state-recognized marriage. “Traditionally [marriage] has maintained legal gender inequality, and it has done so to the benefit of men.”

    “Chambers concedes that many formal inequalities tied to marriage have been denounced and revoked. Marital rape was outlawed in the UK in 1991 and in the US in 1993 – hard to believe there was ever an exemption – and same-sex marriage was legalized in 2014 and 2015 respectively.”

     

     

  • Against Marriage,  all posts on feminism,  all posts on liberalism,  all posts on marriage,  media,  read

    Fabian Society on Against Marriage

    Andrew Harrop, General Secretary of the Fabian Society, reviewed Against Marriage in Fabian Review, May 2018. You can read the full review here.

    “Marriage makes me uncomfortable, whether the reason is political, historical, cultural or aesthetic. No matter how many married couples I see living modern equal relationships, for me, the whole concept is tainted by its patriarchal past. But I say ‘for me’ with good reason, as I have dozens of friends and comrades who disagree. This is a fault-line issue that divides socialists and feminists amongst themselves. In Against Marriage, Clare Chambers makes the case for why egalitarians and liberals should reject marriage. It is political philosophy at its most practical and readable.”

  • Against Marriage,  all posts on marriage,  media,  read

    Against Marriage on BMJ blog

    Richard Smith writes in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) blog that he is persuaded by the arguments of Against Marriage. You can read the full article here.

    “Chambers is against marriage on the grounds of equality and liberty. Women are not equal with men within marriage, and the state by attaching a bundle of rights and duties to marriage creates a hierarchy of relationships with marriage at the top, making unmarried couples and single people inferior. Much of the population, including my wife and I, thinks that “common law wives” have similar rights to married women, but in fact they have none. By bundling rights and duties together, marriage (and civil partnerships) restrict autonomy; if they weren’t bundled people might choose different combinations of rights and duties.

    “There is a need, Chambers accepted, for the law to regulate relationships, particularly to protect the vulnerable, but neither marriage nor civil partnership, which all the speakers criticised as being “one size fits all,” need to be that mechanism. She pointed out that parenthood might be a better basis for regulation than marriage, not least because parent-child relationships are more durable than couple relationships. Tatchell advocates a model whereby people would select “any significant other” (perhaps a best friend, sibling, or lover) and then choose among a menu of rights and duties. Such an arrangement would lead to greater equality and autonomy. All three speakers agreed that something along those lines would be better than either marriage or civil partnerships.

    “And at dinner afterwards, my wife and I, despite being married for 40 years, agreed.”