Paper and dialogue with key note guest, feminist philosopher Christine Battersby, by invitation of conference organisers. Title: “Crossing Cultures in 'Fleshy Metaphysics’”

This paper was contextualised by the arguments of Christine Battersby as well as Luce Irigaray. Battersby argues that feminist metaphysics that includes an understanding of birth and the reproductive body is called for. “Fleshy metaphysics” is necessary if women are to gain the normative position denied them by previous philosophical frameworks, since these traditional paradigms operate only from the normalised male body. Similarly Irigaray’s critiques of psychoanalysis and several seminal philosophical foundations of modern Northern society, point to the need for a fundamental rethinking of the female body /mind and its potential. This paper proposes that the ancient Indian concepts of two poles of reality, envisaged as male female energies, purusha and prakriti, of matter as female, and both permeable and solid, may offer the possibility of commencing a search for alternative paradigms, and demonstrates this through the disembodied female entity Vak.

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