Free Sex, Culture, and Justice: The Limits of Choice by Clare Chambers

extreme
I use the example of breast implants because that is the issue that most often prompts the question. I have been asked it almost exclusively by men (which might illustrate either the improbability of its premise or the predominance of men in political theory). One could ask the same question about rsc or fgm .
Kathy Davis, Reshaping the Female Body, 127.

    oddity of a woman who did want to have breast implants in a society in which large breasts carried no meaning, one in which women’s bod- ies were not objectified and sexualized and in which large breasts were not considered more attractive by society as a whole. Why on earth would anyone want to have surgery to insert heavy and dangerous alien objects into her body if there were no social meaning to, or social payoff from, the practice? A woman who did want to have breast implants in such a society would be like someone who wanted to have cosmetic knee implants in contemporary Britain. With no (unequal) norm sug- gesting the attractiveness of large knees there would be no injustice involved. 47 Still, the desire would be extremely perplexing, and people who had that desire would be extremely rare. 48 Indeed, the example seems implausible. Without cultural meaning, a practice does not make sense: one might say it does not exist as a practice. Until breast implants seem as peculiar as knee implants, we cannot say that a woman chooses to have them for reasons divorced from patriarchy and thus that her decision is irrelevant to justice. By extension, all choices take place in a cultural context, and depend in large part on that context for their meaning. Individual choice does not override cultural injustice. The second part of genealogy is its orientation to discontinuity in discourses or power/knowledge regimes. A discourse or a power/ knowledge regime can be thought of as a set of social norms, a system of beliefs and practices that are upheld and assumed in a culture. With the example of rsc in the United States, we saw that the focus on disorders relating to ‘‘excessive’’ sexual desire was replaced by a sup- posedly more objective focus on physical disorders that threaten life rather than morality. 49 In Foucauldian terms, this is a discontinuity in discourse, or in power/knowledge regimes. The phrase ‘‘power/knowl-
In relation to the argument I make in Part Two, there would therefore be no need to prohibit the practice on grounds of justice. There might be a justification to prohibit it on simple paternalistic grounds, if the practice were sufficiently dangerous.
By ‘‘cosmetic knee implants’’ I have in mind surgery designed to make the knees larger or more knobbly. I specify this since, as Zofia Stemplowska helpfully pointed out to me, there have been unverified reports that celebrities such as Demi Moore and Nicole Kid- man have had cosmetic surgery to make their knees less fatty and/or saggy. See, for example, Simpson, ‘‘Demi Completes Cosmetic Makeover.’’
This is, of course, a difficult distinction to draw, since disorders of sexual desire were seen as clinical disorders, and were thought to give rise to physical bodily disorders such as convulsions and bed-wetting. Indeed, the idea that contemporary justifications of rsc focus on threats to health and not morality makes sense only from within the contemporary power/ knowledge regime, which helps to illustrate the point.

    edge regime’’ signifies Foucault’s contention that knowledge is not ob- jective, scientific, and absolute, but rather that it is necessarily contin- gent and value-laden. This claim can be understood in two senses. First, even supposedly scientific findings are influenced by normative considerations: the questions asked and the answers sought result from a normative viewpoint. 50 In the nineteenth century, for example, society was regulated according to a system of ‘‘scientific knowledge’’ purporting to understand and regulate physical problems of