13
the biological body.” 43 This understanding of the relation between body and mind, however, is not a
simple superiority of one over the other – the popular understanding of gender treats the body as a
coherent whole, a lived experience. 44 She expands upon this understanding when she argues that bodies
become material only through relations with others and the world they are situated in. 45 Through this
principle of “felt” experience, the popular understanding of gender disregards any appeal to teleology
because it rejects the presence of functional concepts inherent in the body. What matters most is the
mental image of oneself, a concept Paul Schilder calls body schema. 46
Paul Schilder – strongly influenced by the neurological research of Sir Henry Head – developed a
similar, though distinct, account of body schema. Whereas the schema developed by Head was
neuropsychological in character, Schilder develops his concept of body schema with greater emphasis
on the psychical dimension of the human person. It is Schilder’s account of body schema, inherited by
Salamon, that this thesis proposes as the predominant form of body schema held by the popular
understanding of gender. Schilder’s account of body schema grants greater significance to expectations
than Head’s account, understanding expectations to be essentially charged with emotions and relations
to others. 47 Body schema, under this account, develops from synesthetic experiences, which are merged
and mingled sensory experiences. Body schema does not develop from discrete sensory experiences
received by the brain, then ordered and catalogued into a neat library of self. 48 Schilder describes body
schema as synesthetic, because sense of self is a Gestalt – or a whole and total experience of self –
rather than a composition of layered sensations. The physical body’s sexual significance will necessarily
be caught up in this Gestalt.
Therefore, if a real sense of sexual difference exists for
the body, it exists through the body schema and not merely
through the genitals. Relying on the genitals for defining gender
fails to see the physical body as part of a larger whole and isolates
the human person. Rigid, teleological binaries, according to
Salamon in Assuming a Body, locate the sexual difference always
in reference to the other person, never reachable or knowable. 49
My body, following this argument, always reduces to what parts I
lack. Any such view attenuates the human person by belittling the
43
Gayle Salamon, Assuming a Body: Transgender and Rhetorics of Materiality (New York: Columbia University
Press, 2010), 147.
44
Ibid, 4.
45
Ibid. This is an argument she develops from reading Merleau-Ponty, a point which she acknowledges in her
introduction.
46
Ibid, 29.
47
Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1994),
67.
48
Ibid, 67-68.
49
Gayle Salamon, Assuming a Body: Transgender and Rhetorics of Materiality (New York: Columbia University
Press, 2010), 143.