What does ‘normal’ mean anyway? - March 26 - 2.25pm - 2022

Clare Chambers argues in defence of the Unmodified Body

Improve on perfection? Nah. Which is why, quite shamelessly (but with huge) reverence, I am borrowing/stealing from the Festival’s website to introduce the following review… “Philosopher Clare Chambers argues that it is time for men, women and children to reclaim their bodies and that an unmodified body is a key principle of social and political equality. “Chambers ranges across a variety of areas from bodybuilding to makeup, male circumcision, breast implants, motherhood and childbirth. She argues that social pressure to modify your body sends a message that you are not good enough, and it reinforces inequalities of sex, gender, race, disability, age, and class.” There. I couldn’t have summed it up any better because these paragraphs perfectly encapsulate the spinal column of what is obviously a complex and potentially divisive subject (and never more so than today when social media has raised the benchmark for narcissism to a giddying level). Consequently I did at times find myself a tad ‘abandoned’ from the main narrative of the discussion by the sheer convolution and intricacy of the arguments presented. Because every, on the surface, pertinent question only raised a thousand more queries and avenues to debate. Yet hanging in there proved ultimately rewarding. After all, sometimes it’s simply enough to sit back, open one’s ears and wallow in the effortless aplomb of fierce intelligence (after all, you might not ‘understand’ Black Holes or Quantum physics but still love watching Brian Cox).