Fashioning the Body: Versions of the Citizen, the Self, and the Subject

For the past few years, I’ve been fascinated by Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science.  I’m not a Christian Scientist (or religious at all) but both of my grandfathers were raised as Christian Scientists.  There’s a really amazing biography of Eddy by Gillian Gill (available at the Evergreen Library!).  Christian Science is in a lot of ways a rejection of the body.  It doesn’t acknowledge materiality as real.  Healing is done through prayer – the concept is that sickness is the result of wrong thought.  If you think correctly, you can transcend material illness.  Mary Douglas has given me a way of thinking about this.  Christian Science strongly strives for being “disembodied spirits.”  Illness, then, is another “irrelevant organic process” to be screened out.  However, the attitude of Christian Science to the body is very complicated.  Gill mentions something about how obstetrics was an underdeveloped field when Eddy founded Christian Science.  A Christian Science birth was in many ways actually safer than giving birth in a hospital.  Unfortunately, I couldn’t find this passage through using the book’s index, and it’s a good 700 pages long (including the essential endnotes), and I could be remembering it wrong.  However, while looking, I found a really interesting section where Gill discusses the first edition of Science and Health, Eddy’s book about Christian Science.  Gill writes about how it is nonlinear, and similar to work by Lacan and Derrida.  She draws parallels to work by Luce Iragaray, a French philosopher and feminist.  Gill happens to be one of Iragaray’s translators.  In an endnote, Gill writes, “There are interesting correlations to be made, on the level of feminist theology, between Mary Baker Eddy and Iragaray.”  This could be an exciting subject for a future project.