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Reconstructing Gender to Transcend Shame: Embracing Human Functionality to Enable Agentic and Desexualised Bodies

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The Bright Side of Shame

Abstract

Now more than ever, our bodies are being used as radical tools with which we negotiate our place and status in society. No longer is it the case that the body is purely a functional, reproductive, machine—passing on genetic information from one generation to the next; but rather they have become a form of language in their own right. Our bodies are increasingly recognised as individual emblems, each with powerful and political meaning. In Western Society in particular, the quest for the “eternal feminine” endures, rendering women passive, sexualised, and objectified; without the opportunity to subvert the shame they are forced to withstand. If women were afforded the opportunity and social standing to overcome the pressures of living in patriarchal and phallogocentric societies; they could instead become members of our civilization who are the subjects, allowed to act and experience, rather than be gazed upon, and experienced as the objects of hegemonic, heteronormative, and masculinist desire. It is in this regard that we, as a society, must change the entrenched conscious practices of sexualisation, and should expose the unconscious biases towards women’s bodies such that women can embrace their bodies, their bodily agency, and the multiple functions of their body (such as athleticism, breastfeeding, childbirth, menstruation, and orgasm) rather than feeling abject shame, which for so long has been the case. It is the aim of this chapter to advocate the reconstruction of gender in society, allowing for an understanding of fluid gender identity and context-specific gender construction to permit the desexualisation of the body and the removal of body-specific shame. It shall further argue for society to instead favour the acceptance of the body as a multi-functional entity, which can be sexual without having to be sexualised.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Elizabeth Garrett Anderson Institute for Women’s Health, University College London, Medical School Building, 74 Huntley Street, London, WC1E 6AU, UK

    Sergio A. Silverio

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  1. Sergio A. Silverio
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Correspondence to Sergio A. Silverio .

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  1. Institut für Therapeutische Kommunikation und Sprachgebrauch, Europa Universität Viadrina, Frankfurt (Oder), Germany

    Claude-Hélène Mayer

  2. Katholische Erwachsenenbildung Rheinland-Pfalz, Mainz, Rheinland-Pfalz, Germany

    Elisabeth Vanderheiden

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Silverio, S.A. (2019). Reconstructing Gender to Transcend Shame: Embracing Human Functionality to Enable Agentic and Desexualised Bodies. In: Mayer, CH., Vanderheiden, E. (eds) The Bright Side of Shame. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-13409-9_11

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