It would take more than the remaining time and a great deal of religious, social and political history to unpack why exactly female embodiment has been seen as so problematic in a myriad of contexts, what is significant for us here is understanding that bodies have not always been seen of as worth, worse, bodies have been abused and oppressed and in their very breathing have been seen as wrong, weak, bad or mistaken. When looking at gender and management in Japan, Heidi Gottfried noted that ‘The discursive construction of the reproductive body assumes particular importance in disqualifying them (women) from authority positions and is continually evoked as the kernel of embodied difference.[5] There has been a devaluing and dismissing of embodiment in the Church and in some shapes of organization based upon embodied gender and difference. An equally difficult by-product of such erosion has been the commodification of the body which as Kenny and Ball write ‘the body is treated as an object with a marketable value that can be bought and sold is a common theme in feminist and organisational research.’[6] Joanna Brewis in 1999 explored whether there was even an awareness of embodiment among women managers in the public sector, questioning ‘the extent to which women managers in the UK public sector experience their work as embodied subjects: how influential… they see their bodies to be in terms of their working lives? Do they believe their bodies represent obstacles or useful resources to them at work?[7]
This is why embodiment matters, disembodiment in any organisation creates a diathesis which leaves open the way for disease and corporate ill-health. In the Church a separation of the corporeal and spirit or mind has led to a lack of wholeness about the corporate body of the Church, which is why you hear some of the Church delighting or not in bishops who are women, or clergy who can marry their same-sex partner, this is why churches get worried about making costly adaptations to building so that those who are differently abled or disabled can participate, this is why clergy suffer so much from physical and mental ill-health, this is why some people still don’t agree with maternity leave or working mothers. We are corporately unwell, we are sick in our body, our organisational body is in ill-health as long as we resist embracing the physical bodies of those who make up our organisations.