Book review: The Body and Shame: Phenomenology, Feminism, and the Socially Shaped Body

Abstract

Book reviews 111Although she rejects the neoliberal concepts of consumer choice and wasted fertility, Pande does not explore wider issues pertaining to the neoliberal bioeconomy and India's role in connection to it. She identifies the state, the family and the clinic as sources of domination, but fails to integrate the logic on which the clinics function into the wider context of the bioeconomy and its forms of outsourced embodied labour (Cooper and Waldby, 2014) which undermine the rights of the surrogates at a systemic level and negates their powers of negotiation. India's anti-natalist history is also relevant here, as is its ambition to participate in the bioeconomy as a global player. In light of these factors, what Pande sees as a paradox, namely the state's encouragement of surrogacy despite its anti-natalism, can actually be framed as coherent, as the state not only benefits from having fewer children born into poor communities, but also from sharing the gains from the bioindustry worldwide (Rajan, 2006).Despite these omissions, Wombs in Labor succeeds in the difficult task of presenting the lives of Indian surrogates in their full complexity, thus pushing the discussion about surrogacy forward. Pande opens up many paths for further theoretical exploration in terms of agency, exploitation, embodied labour and its commercialization, while also offering possible ways of practically tackling the ethical issues involved in commercial surrogacy. This is an important feminist project that draws attention to deep rooted and pervasive female body shame and brings it to life through a discussion on cosmetic surgery in neoliberal consumer societies. It constitutes a timely contribution to feminism because as Dolezal asserts, female body shame is often trivialized in mainstream culture and politics and not addressed seriously.Luna Dolezal's critical cultural-political analysis expertly weaves together what possibly could be considered opposing schools of thoughts, the work of phenomenologists Edmund Husserl, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Jean-Paul Sartre with the scholarship of social constructionists Michel Foucault and Norbert Elias, to develop an analysis of body shame. By drawing on the two schools of thought she is able to explore shame as a personal, individual, embodied experience, as well as an embodied response embedded in the socio-cultural context. Throughout the book, Dolezal brings together these two approaches to give a balanced and well-developed argument. She provides a critical feminist analysis of Husserl, Merleau-Ponty and Sartre's work by emphasizing the