The Rhetoric of Self-Ownership

• Published date: 01 June 2019
• DOI: 10.1177/0090591718786471
• Date: 01 June 2019
• Author: Torrey Shanks
• Subject Matter: Article

https://doi.org/10.1177/0090591718786471

Political Theory

2019, Vol. 47(3) 311 –337

© The Author(s) 2018

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DOI: 10.1177/0090591718786471

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Article

The Rhetoric of Self-

Ownership

Torrey Shanks1

Abstract

This essay considers self-ownership as a rhetorical and political practice.

Scholarly attention to the rhetoric of self-ownership, notably in feminist

theory, often rejects the term for its capacity to distort and fragment notions

of the self, the body, social relations, and labor. The ambiguous character of

self-ownership, in this view, carries the risk of subversion of more inclusive

and relational uses. Adopting a broader notion of rhetoric as creative and

effective speech, I recast self-ownership from this critical depiction through

a revised understanding of C. B. Macpherson’s possessive individualism and

then to the texts of John Locke, the Levellers, and the Putney Debates. These

early-modern exemplars offer insights into the political promises and risks

of the rhetoric of self-ownership that contemporary critics obscure. The

ambiguity and plurality too often rendered as a liability for self-ownership

instead offer conditions for its agonistic invocation for novel claims and

emerging audiences.

Keywords

self-ownership, rhetoric, property, the Levellers, possessive individualism

The language of self-ownership is a powerful political idiom and a contested

term of political philosophy. There is a deceptive simplicity to John Locke’s

iconic claim that “every Man has a Property in his own Person. This nobody

1Political Science Department, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Corresponding Author:

Torrey Shanks, Political Science Department, University of Toronto, 100 St. George St.,

Sidney Smith Hall 3018, Toronto, ON M5S 3G3, Canada.

Email: torrey.shanks@utoronto.ca

786471PTXXXX10.1177/0090591718786471Political TheoryShanks

research-article2018

312 Political Theory 47(3)

has any Right to but himself. The Labour of his Body, and the Work of his

Hands, we may say, are properly his.”1 Centuries later, the language remains,

but disagreement runs so deep as to its meaning and uses that it is not uncom-

mon to encounter a call to discard the term altogether. As Alan Ryan cautions,

“Self-ownership is so intrinsically contestable a notion that appeals to it are

rhetorically ill-advised.”2 Jennifer Nedelsky concurs on the irredeemably

riven nature of the term: “property looks to some like the perfect vehicle to

power and autonomy and to others like the path to oppression.”3 Such conclu-

sive judgments notwithstanding, self-ownership is a remarkably tenacious

idea in politics and political theory. We need only to recall the classic feminist

text Our Bodies, Our Selves and the protest signs for reproductive rights of

the 2017 Women’s March—“My Body, My Choice,” “Mind Your Own

Uterus,” “Get your tiny hands off my rights!”—to recognize the persistence

of self-ownership in contemporary politics. Perhaps this persistence is not

simply intransigence of political actors in heeding the calls of political phi-

losophers to relinquish the notion of self-ownership. Self-ownership, as a

number of its critics assert, is more than a concept; it is also a rhetoric.

The irony is that those scholars who recognize the rhetorical functions of

self-ownership are, for the most part, those most intent on eliminating it from

the political and theoretical lexicon. The greatest strides in considering self-

ownership as a rhetoric have been made by feminist theorists, attending to

differentially gendered modes of labor and embodiment. They recognize the

force of self-ownership is due in part to its qualities as fiction, metaphor, and

rhetoric, as it has been variously labeled by Carole Pateman, Anne Phillips,

and Rosalind Petchesky.4 While they identify the promises and dangers of

self-ownership in different ways, their turn to rhetoric acknowledges the plu-

rality of language and its power to frame perceptions. For the most part, how-

ever, they adopt a negative view of these effects. Phillips’ Our Bodies, Whose

Property? exemplifies this tendency when she writes, “The metaphors of

property encourage fantasies of the person as separable from her capacities

and the self as separable from her body.”5 Self-ownership, here, is an error in

a way of speaking, taking what should be inalienable selfhood—bodies and

embodied labor included—for marketable goods, obscuring human vulnera-

bility and material differences. We can and should speak otherwise, in this

view, about ourselves and our social and political arrangements, eschewing

property as an idiom for the self.

Such criticism recalls C. B. Macpherson’s critique of self-ownership as

“possessive individualism,” although he never significantly addressed gender

or rhetoric. Feminist concerns with atomized and commodified views of the

self and body, available for exchange on unequal market terms, affirm

Macpherson’s diagnosis of the narrowly conceived liberal individual as