Interesting analysis of the body and depth.

Being entirely enthralled by Spinoza and Deleuze, Grosz has been exactly the introduction to a monist feminism that I needed. This directly answers many of the questions I had about feminist theory in the language I hold most close to my nature.

In particular, I am fascinated by the mobius strip metaphor and the textualization and marking of the body as an explanation for how I think about bodies in an information science context. This is also a way to introduce potential geographers and socio-technical scholars to feminist developments of body. This would be very interesting to compare with Actor-Network Theorists.

I look forward to reading more of Grosz.

This was difficult and Grozs acknowledges the difficulties of her task and the resultant imperfections of her theory. One problem I had was at the end there was a completely needless transphobic moment, we certainly could have done without that. For the rest of it she runs through various theorists, mostly (thankfully) to critique them and leave them behind but she gets stuck on Deleuze and Guattari, which she shows to be problematic yet useful.

I want more development on some things. Grozs is very clear about wanting neither a binary vision nor monism but I feel at the end (especially in the transphobic paragraph) she returns to a binary a woman and man as ultimately unknowable to each other. It seems that we have then travelled all that way for nothing? I felt the mobius strip had some potential but needs to be developed more. Similarly she critiques woman as liquid (menstruation, milk etc), man as solid (erection) and I agree with her, everything she critiques is limiting and partial but she does not really begin to show another perspective. It's one of those bits of writing that deconstructs but then leaves you bereft in the ruins.

I suspect the original plan was to use this as a foundation to write more but then other theorists (eg Butler) took over the field. Still I wish someone would develop theory of embodied differences, not to erase gender-fluidity but to help make sense of bodies that do menstruate and risk pregnancy and such!

One start down for the really bizarre and out-of-place transphobia at the end, which actually seemed to contradict the argument of the rest of the book and didn't match the rest of the text's thoughtfulness and nuance.