Michael Warner--The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life (1999)

Warner’s book is particularly notable to read from the vantage point of 2012, after DOMA has been repealed, marriage equality has been achieved in some states, and the President has expressed his own support for marriage equality.  In his larger analysis of the push for marriage equality for same-sex couples, Warner argues that “this strategy is a mistake and that it represents a widespread loss of vision in the movement” (vii).  His primary focus is on the lack of sexual autonomy allowed in America: “because sex is an occasion for losing control, for merging one’s consciousness with the lower orders of animal desire and sensation, for raw confrontations of power and demand, it fills people with aversion and shame” (2).

Warner describes those who do not fit into accepted paradigms of sexual norms as being “rendered inarticulate” (3), and that the “politics of shame” leads to the “unthinkability of…desire” (7), an observation which echoes Butler’s discussion of those with unintelligible identities.  Warner is quite critical of movements in support of gay marriage, which Warner sees as not only selling out the queer community, but undermining its own position by ignoring its history and trying to assimilate into the straight community: “Instead of broadening its campaign against sexual stigma beyond sexual orientation, as I think it should, it has increasingly narrowed its scope to those issues of sexual orientation that have least to do with sex” (25).  Throughout this work, Warner evokes that of Erving Goffman’s work on stigma (which I plan to read soon), drawing parallels between the difference between shame and stigma and that between sin and identity—stigma being a physical mark, while sin is more ephemeral (perverse acts versus perversion) (28-29).

Warner gives extended consideration to the very idea of marriage, how it elevates certain relationships above others, bestowing privileges upon some and not others.  It also provides regulation over sex, as many who have argued for gay marriage (Andrew Sullivan draws quite  a bit of Warner’s ire) have made the case that legalizing gay marriage will lead to more monogamy among gay people, taming the gay community.  Warner does not villainize those who support gay marriage, however, noting that the “tendency to reproduce the hierarchy of shame, I believe, results from the structuring conditions of gay and lesbian politics, and not from the bad intentions of the people who devote their lives to activism within the movement” (49).  For my own project, I’m really starting to think about not only the idea of intelligibility in general (which I think is an important concept), but the question (and stakes) of the marriage economy, and who is eligible for it.  Ugly women are marked—stigmatized—as uneligible for marriage (Lily Daw first comes to mind).  In the same way that Warner argues the queer community should question the very foundations of marriage itself, rather than try to assimilate into it—such as those who pursue marriage for health benefits, childcare, and other current marks of privilege—and perhaps continue to pose a threat to the system, rather than try to assimilate into it.  Warner also echoes Joyce Carol Oates’s them to me in his discussion of marriage and the benefits of privilege, especially as he quotes Claudia Card: “Yet if marrying became an option that would legitimate behavior otherwise illegitimate and make available to us social securities that will not doubt become even more important to us as we age, we and many others like us might be pushed into marriage.  Marrying under such conditions is not a totally free choice” (107)[1] .  I think I’d like think more about ugliness as being a mark of unintelligibility—perhaps appearance as articulation?  Beauty as a necessary component of interpellation?

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[1] Quoting “Claudia Card, “Against Marriage and Motherhood,” Hypatia 11.3 (Summer 1996): 1-23, p. 7.

Judith Butler--Bodies that Matter (1993)

Ultimately, in this text Butler wishes to “think further about the workings of heterosexual hegemony in the crafting of matters sexual and political” (xii).  Specifically, she asks if there is a “way to link the question of the materiality of the body to the performativity of gender” (1), a question which is connected to my different question about the materiality of the body which is judged “ugly.”  Though she admits that even the materiality of the body is difficult to differentiate from its surroundings— “Not only did bodies tend to indicate a world beyond themselves, but this movement beyond their own boundaries, a movement of boundary itself, appeared to be quite central to what bodies ‘are’” (ix)—she still insists that there is such a thing as materiality of the body.  Further, this materiality has a demonstrable effect on the performance of gender.  Addressing criticisms that her previous work has been so focused on the performative aspects of gender, to the point of some questioning if there’s anything but constructions.  However, I like her observation that even constructions have a real effect, that “certain constructions appear constitutive, that is, have this character of being that ‘without which’ we could not think at all” (xi).

While Butler goes along with the general understanding that gender is culturally constructed[1] and sex is physiologically based, she makes the important point that sexual difference itself is also culturally constructed: “Sexual difference, however, is never simply a function of material differences which are not in some way both marked and formed by discursive practices” (1).  Invoking Foucault, she observes that sex not only functions as a norm in society, but “is part of a regulatory process that produces the bodies it governs” (1).  She stresses the importance of reiteration in the process of sexual differentiation, and points out “that this reiteration is necessary is a sign that materialization is never quite complete, that bodies never quite comply with the norms by which their materialization is impelled” (2).[2] 

Butler defines materiality in terms of power,[3] as “an effect of power, as power’s most productive effect” (2).[4]  As “the materiality of the body will not be thinkable apart from the materialization of that regulatory norm,” so sex is “one of the norms by which the ‘one’ becomes viable at all, that which qualifies a body for life within the domain of cultural intelligibility” (2).  Butler is talking about abjection here, as intelligibility being necessary for acknowledgement by and interpellation in the system.  She delineates the following as being at stake in her discussion:

(1) the recasting of  the matter of bodies as the effect of a dynamic of power, such that the matter of bodies will be indissociable from the regulatory norms that govern their materialization and the signification of those material effects; (2) the understanding of performativity not as the act by which a subject brings into being what she/he names, but, rather, as that reiterative power of discourse to produce the phenomena that it regulates and constrains; (3) the construal of “sex” no longer as a bodily given on which the construct of gender is artificially imposed, but as a cultural norm which governs the materialization of bodies; (4) a rethinking of the process by which a bodily norm is assumed, appropriated, taken on as not, strictly speaking “I,” is formed by virtue of having gone through such a process of assuming a sex; and (5) a linking of this process of “assuming” a sex with the question of identification,[5] and with the discursive means by which the heterosexual imperative enables certain sexed identifications and forecloses and/or disavows other identifications. (2-3)

And in conclusion, this “exclusionary matrix…requires the simultaneous production of a domain of abject beings, those who are not yet ‘subjects,’ but who form the constitutive outside to the domain of the subject” (3).[6]

Butler explains that “the forming of a subject requires an identification with the normative phantasm of sex”; this identification “creates the valence of ‘abjection’ and its status for the subject as a threatening spectre” (3).  This seems to be a good explanation for the gothic nature of so much the ugly women in the work I’m looking at; the threat of ugliness is always there.  Butler goes on to say that “the mobilization of the categories of sex within political discourse will be haunted in some ways by the very instabilities that the categories effectively produce and foreclose” (4).  Again, there’s this idea of hauntedness and ghosts: I wonder if this might speak to Yeager’s thesis in Dirt and Desire, that the dirt and ugliness in southern literature marks a history of racial violence?  Incorporating Butler’s ideas here, perhaps ugliness in a similar way speaks to a history of gender and sexual insecurity and even violence?  Certainly, the racial aspect is coded in the very definitions of ugliness, as beauty is typically defined in terms of a white, upper-class idea.  As sex is used to regulate “which bodies matter,” as Butler articulates (4), so, too, beauty is used to regulate which personae matter.  Those who are marked as ugly, then, inhabit a different space—but it’s an important space worth investigating.

Butler refers to these spaces, these “excluded sites,” as ones which “come to bound the ‘human’ as its constitutive outside, and to haunt those boundaries as the persistent possibility of their disruption and rearticulation” (8).  So perhaps that’s why the 1930s and 1940s—with the fear of the “new woman” rampant—have so many ugly women in them, as the fear of “rearticulation” was wide-ranging.  As Butler says, “the limits of constructivism are exposed at those boundaries of bodily life where abjected or deligitimated bodies fail to count as ‘bodies’” (15), and so what is counted as “ugly” so exposes the limits of acceptable bodies in the South.  Further, the South itself as a marginalized space—one which the rest of the country uses to confirm its own boundaries and identities—is so often the “ugly” side of the United States (accused of racism, racial violence, sexual deviancy) that perhaps some of the ugly women in the literature are simply reaffirming this idea?  Or perhaps it’s what Flannery O’Connor said, that those in the South can still identify a freak.  Given the emphasis on southern beauty,[7] are ugly women perhaps are deployed to act as a foil to southern beauty?  Or simply reflect the ugly nature of the South?  Southern literature itself so often tells the stories of those considered less than human (whether through the dark humor of Tobacco Road or more tragically in Barren Ground) that it’s already comfortable with a mode that presents what’s often considered uninhabitable zones. 

She begins by addressing the antagonism she observes between “post-structuralism” and :the body.”  Questioning the “material irreducibility of sex” as well as the idea that everything can be reduced to a text (and thus is rendered ultimately meaningless), Butler wishes to consider “the scenography and topography of construction.  This scenography is orchestrated by and as a matrix of power that remains disarticulated if we presume constructedness and materiality as necessarily oppositional notions” (28).  Importantly, she goes on to consider the very category of “woman”: “the category of women does not become useless through deconstruction, but becomes one whose uses are no longer reified as ‘referents,’ and which stand a chance of being opened up, indeed, of coming to signify in ways that none of us can predict in advance” (29); in fact, she says it is possible to both use the term woman at the same time one is subjecting it to critique.

She then gives a rather extensive consideration to the “sex of materialism,” concluding with the observation that, “to invoke matter is to invoke a sedimented history of sexual hierarchy and sexual erasures which should surely be an object of feminist inquiry, but which would be quite problematic as a ground of feminist theory” (49).  From here, she moves on to examining the meaning of the phallus by both Freud and Lacan, considering the ways in which it has been both connected to and disconnected from the material site of the penis.  In her section on the “lesbian phallus,” Butler states that, “Insofar as any reference to a lesbian phallus appears to be a spectral representation of a masculine original, we might well question the spectral production of the putative ‘originality’ of the masculine” (63). 

In this section, she addresses the very question of what we should consider as constituting the very body itself.  She says, “psychic projection confers boundaries and, hence, unity on the body, so that the very contours of the body are sites that vacillate between the psychic and the material.  Bodily contours and morphology are not merely implicated in an irreducible tension between the psychic and the material but are that tension” (66).  In reaching a consideration of Lacan’s description of the recognition of bodily boundaries during the mirror stage, Butler explains how such bodily differentiation is connected to language development as well.  She then focuses more specifically on the emergence of sexed positions (or gender), particularly in Lacan’s system.  She importantly not only highlights the heterosexual bias implicit in Lacan’s description of interpellation into gender, but more importantly calls attention to the necessity of paying attention to the function of repudiation inherent in identity formation.  Admitting that repudiation is irreducibly a part of differentiation, Butler insists that “It will be a matter of tracing the ways in which identification is implicated in what it excludes, and to follow the lines of that implication for the map of future community that it might yield” (119).

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[1] Her discussion about the nature of construction is quite useful, especially in terms of quelling criticisms about the prime mover in gender construction.  More importantly, I like her characterization of gender (and gendering) as a relational action: “gendering is, among other things, the differentiating relations by which speaking subjects come into being.  Subjected to gender, but subjectivated by gender, the ‘I’ neither precedes nor follows the process of this gendering, but emerges only within and as the matrix of gender relations themselves” (7)

[2] Ugliness, perhaps, calls attention to itself in never quite meeting these ideals.  And reiteration only works to emphasize their failure to comply—like the sounds of corners of square pegs scraping against round holes.  As Butler notes, “it is the instabilities, the possibilities for rematerialization, opened up by this process that can mark one domain in which the force of the regulatory law can be turned against itself to spawn rearticulations that call into question the hegemonic force of that very regulatory law” (2).

[3] She later clarifies power, in Foucault’s original use of the term, as that which “orchestrates the formation and sustenance of subjects,” and construction as “a process of reiteration by which both ‘subjects’ and ‘acts’ come to appear at all”: “there is not power that acts, but only a reiterated acting that is power in its persistence and instability” (9).

[4] Throughout the text, Butler returns to the problem which grammar brings to discussions of power, as “power is not a subject which acts on bodies as its distinct objects.  The grammar which compels us to speak that way enforces a metaphysics of external relations, whereby power acts on bodies but is not understood to form them.  This is a view of power as an external relation that Foucault himself calls into question” (34)

[5] Perhaps this is related to the poor aunt in The Old Order, whose life was determined by her lack of a chin?

[6] Ugliness complicates this inside/outside binary.  Ugly people have a particular kind of subjecthood—in fact, that which makes us stare (as opposed to appearances which we try to ignore or don’t even see) gives the ugly person a certain kind of power, in that she can’t be ignored.  The kind of ugliness caused by indifference to appearance demonstrates another kind of freedom (as Barbara Ladd discusses).  And while perhaps the ugly are abject to a certain kind of system—Lily Daw, for example, being unsuitable for the marriage economy—this dismissal frees them for other things.  Because there are so many women in southern literature who live in this “zone of uninhabitability” (3) as Butler calls it, I think there must be some sort of interesting life going on there.  Maybe because traditional southern femininity is so often unable or unwilling to bestow subjecthood on women?

[7] See that annoying post-feminist Garden and Gun article.

David Halperin--Forgetting Foucault (1998)

Halperin takes the title of this article (which was later included as a chapter in his 2002 How to Do the History of Homosexuality) from Jean Baudrillard’s 1977 pamphlet Forget Foucault (Oublier Foucault).  Halperin is not only critical of Baudrillard’s take on Foucault—which he disparages for Baudrillard’s insistence on “leaving the sexual aspects [of Foucault’s work and life] aside” (93)—but sees his work as symptomatic of the continued misreadings of Foucault’s work, especially that of his 1976 History of Sexuality, Volume 1.  In this article, Halperin elucidates two key misunderstandings of Foucault’s text: (1) the oversimplification and misunderstanding of Foucault’s differentiation between the sodomite and the homosexual; and (2) the misunderstanding of his deployment of “bodies and pleasures” as the “irreducible elements of sexuality” (112).

To Halperin, the most significant misinterpretation of Foucault has been to “mistake his discursive analysis for a historical assertion” (111).  What Foucault originally intended as an analysis of “discursive and institutional practices” (97) in his discussion of the differences between the early modern sodomite and the nineteenth century homosexual has been instead misunderstood as an almost dogmatic distinction between sexual practices and sexual identity.  Using the work of John J. Winkler (who examines the category of kinaidos in ancient Mediterranean societies) and Johnathan Walters (who compares Apuleius’s story of the baker’s wife to that of Boccaccio), Halperin explains how these works “challenge the orthodox pseudo-Foucauldian doctrine about the supposedly strict separation between sexual acts and sexual identities in European culture before the nineteenth century” (108).

Halperin intends his argument to encourage a more nuanced and complicated investigation and understanding of the ways in which sexual identities have changed over time, as well as a more nuanced and complicated understandings of Foucault’s work.  And although anymore it seems as if the inclusion of a section such as “Forgetting Foucault” is almost mandatory in queer scholarship, such clarifications do seem to continue to be necessary, as the examples Halperin gives amply illustrate.  In fact, I would argue that Halperin’s complaint that Foucault’s work has been reduced to “a small set of received ideas, slogans, and bits of jargon” (94) is true because Foucault’s work (even—or perhaps especially?) in translation uses such pithy phrases to convey quite complicated ideas.  It’s very tempting to pull a line like, “Confession frees, but power reduces one to silence” (History of Sexuality 60) out of context, simply because it is so enticing—though to do so completely undercuts the statement’s meaning.

Halperin attributes much of this misunderstanding to readings which focus solely on the aspects of sexuality in the work and don’t take into account his larger arguments regarding discourse.  It’s true that Foucault “deploys” sex and sexuality (and his very specific uses of these words) within a larger discussion of the history, meanings, and interactions of power and discourse.  However, I’m concerned that Halperin himself might be misunderstood as advocating for a kind of “leaving the sexual aspects aside,” similar to that for which he takes Baudrillard to task (93).  I wonder if these misreadings might be accounted for (at least in part) because the concepts connected to sexuality are more exciting (or graspable) than those connected to discourse?    

Halperin also addresses the equally misunderstood and misquoted Foucauldian phrase “bodies and pleasures,” with which Foucault ends his text.  As I personally found this to one of the more confusing aspects of the Foucault reading, I appreciated Halperin’s clarification that “bodies and pleasures” should be understood as being elements of a different sexual economy than the current one, which consists instead of “such familiar and overworked entities as ‘sexuality’ and ‘desire’” (94).  Halperin grounds this distinction in the post 1960s sexual liberation era within which Foucault was writing, which encouraged people to "liberate our 'sexuality' and to unrepress or desublimate our 'desire' (94).  Can we tease out this distinction further?  How is a sexual economy grounded in “bodies and pleasure” different from one grounded in “sexuality and desire”?

Elizabeth Grosz--Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (1994)

Grosz begins by identifying the mind/body dualism which she sees at the heart of much feminist thought (as it is at the heart of much Western thought in general), and claims that her intention is to “displace the centrality of mind, the psyche, interior, or consciousness…in conceptions of the subject through a reconfiguration of the body” (vii).  By putting the body at the center of her inquiry, she intends to confront a particular set of admittedly disparate male theorists (“Freud, Lacan, Schilder, Goldstein, Luria, Merleau-Ponty, Neitzsche, Foucault, Lingis, and Deleuze and Guattari”) “with the question of sexual difference as it arises in the work of a number of feminist theorists, including Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, Mary Douglas, Iris Marion Young, and Judith Butler, who all have in their disparate ways provided accounts of female embodiment which question many presumptions in these male texts” (ix).  She points out that not only has this binary view included the alignment of the mind with maleness and the body with femaleness, but also that since Plato, the “body has been regarded as a source of interference in, and a danger to, the operations of reason” (5).

She delineates four different senses of the term “sexuality”:

(1) “sexuality can be understood as a drive, an impulse or form of propulsion, directing a subject toward an object.  Psychoanalysis is uncontestably the great science of sexuality as a drive”

(2) “sexuality can also be understood in terms of an act, a series of practices and behaviors involving bodies, organs, and pleasures, usually but not always involving orgasm.

(3) “sexuality can also be understood in terms of an identity….now commonly described by the term gender”

(4) “sexuality commonly refers to a set of orientations, positions, and desires, which implies that there are particular ways in which the desires, differences, and bodies of subjects can seek their pleasure” (iix)

Quite a bit of the first part of this text finds Grosz starting with Freud’s theories of consciousness and gender understanding, working through his ideas for places which might be reclaimed for feminist purposes.  Here is where its age is apparent.  Though Grosz claims that feminists

agree that his [Freud’s] account of sexual difference, with its references to the phallic mother, the castration complex, and the Oedipus complex, provides an accurate description of the processes which produce masculine and feminine subjects within our Western, patriarchal, capitalist culture.  Their disagreements arise regarding the universality of Freud’s account and its value in the prognosis of future social relations—that is, regarding the necessity of the phallus. (57).

Having just read Judith Butler’s 2004 Undoing Gender, in which she in fact takes issue with the centrality of the Oedipus complex to gender formation, even given the cultural parameters with which Grosz qualifies her statement.  Irigaray in particular disagreed with the centrality of the Oedipus complex; as This Sex Which is Not One was 1985 (and is mentioned just a couple of sentences before this), Grosz and I may have different understandings of Irigaray.  However, her summary that Freud’s analysis can be read as an “analysis and explanation of the social construction of women’s bodies as a lack and the correlative (and dependent) constitution of the male body as phallic” (58) is one with which I agree.

            Importantly, she does seem to agree with Butler when she claims that

the attribution of a phallic or a castrated status to sexually different bodies is an internal condition of the ways those bodies are lived and given meaning right from the start….There is no natural body to return to, no pure sexual difference one could gain access to if only the distortions and deformations of patriarchy could be removed or transformed.  The phallus binarizes the differences between the sexes, dividing up a sexual-corporeal continuum into two mutually exclusive categories which in fact belie the multiplicity of bodies and body types.” (58)

And even more importantly is her fundamental criticism of Freud and Lacan: “while it makes perfect sense for the young boy, before he understands the anatomical differences between the sexes, to see others…on a model derived from his own body morphology, it makes no sense at all to claim, as Freud and Lacan do, that the girl too sees the world on a model derived from the boy’s experience” (58).

            Ultimately, I agree with Grosz’s conclusion, that “What psychoanalytic theory makes clear is that the body is literally written on, inscribed, by desire and signification, at the anatomical, physiological, and neurological levels” (60)—and, more importantly, “the body which is presumes and helps to explain is an open-ended, pliable set of significations, capable of being rewritten, reconstituted, in quite other terms than those which mark it, and consequently capable of reinscribing the forms of sexed identity and psychical subjectivity at work today” (60-1).

            In Chapter 3, Grosz traces the history and evolution of the idea of the body image.  I’m intrigued by the schemata proposed by Paul Schilder, in which “social and interpersonal attachments and investments, as well as libidinal energy, form a major part of one’s self-image and conception of the body.”  What I am interested in here is Grosz’s claim that, “For Schilder, every touch is already oriented in a visual register, for it evokes a mental (that is to say visual) image of the spot touched” (67).  She goes on to explain that in Schilder’s model, the optical and the tactile, which are separated in earlier models, are integrated, reflecting our ability to “see an object with our ability to touch it.  The body image is synesthetic, just as every sensation, visual or tactile, is in fact synesthetically organized and represented” (67).  I’m curious if this is related to intersubjective space, in some respect—is there some sort of feedback loop that occurs, reinforcing (or even reifying?) the judgments made or stories invented to explain the gaps which occur when we encounter the unexpected?  What is the difference between unexpected and unintelligible?

            Such a synesthetic organization leads Grosz to conclude that “The body image [for Shilder]…is formed out of the various modes of contact the subject has with its environment through its actions in the world” (67).  While Grosz’s use of “body image” here is referring to a primarily physical, tactile understanding of the body, I think it’s possible to extend her meaning to the more psychological, emotional sense of the phrase as it is used when discussing things like eating disorders.  Again and again, the idea of the body as a dialectically constructed entity emerges, refuting any sort of essentialism or fixed nature.  Finally, incorporating Grosz’s theorization of the body image with ideas from Lacan, Freud, and Grosz’s own acknowledgement of these theorists’ androcentrism, Grosz defines the body image as “a map or representation of the degree of narcissistic investment of the subject in its own body and body parts.  It is a differentiated, gridded, and ever-changing registration of the degrees of intensity the subject experiences, measuring not only the psychical but also the physiological changes the body undergoes in its day-to-day actions and performances” (83).

            Grosz then discusses the phenomenology of the body.  In her summary of Merleau-Ponty’s work, she says that he begins with the “negative claim that the body is not an object.  It is the condition and context through which I am able to have a relation to objects” (86).  The body shapes experience.  Quoting Merleau-Ponty: “The perceiving mind is an incarnated body” (87).  In this way, Cartesian dualism is avoided.  In this discussion of phenomenology, she discusses the central place that vision has occupied, considered superior to the other senses since the Greeks.  Again relying on Merleau-Ponty, she makes a number of important observations about the role of sight in knowledge, such as that:

“Merleau-Ponty describes vision in terms of an activity undertaken by a subject in relation to a distinct and separate object.  To this bare presumption—shared equally by empiricists and idealists—Merleau-Ponty adds two other factors: the claim that subjects are always and necessarily embodies, incarnate, corporeal beings and the claim that vision is always composed not of a given sense datum but of a set of relations between figure and ground, horizon and object.  In short, vision is always a function of establishing a (visual) field.  The conditions of having a visual field, then, involve the constitution of an horizon and the taking up of a perspective. (96-97)

She also notes that vision “function[s] not only as a model for knowledge, but also as representative of all the other senses,” and that the role of vision “is generally regarded as that of unifying and hierarchically ordering the other senses, taming or honing them” (97).  She then lists the three characteristics of an image:

“it presents a manifold field or set of events in terms of simultaneity (it is the only nontemporal or synchronous sense); it functions at a distance, setting up a space or field between the seer and the seen, the physical and psychical; and it does not imply or presume causality (because the other senses are momentary and occasioned by events, vision is ongoing and need not be focused on or caused by any object).  (97)

All three of these characteristics are aspects I need to keep in mind when theorizing ugliness, but especially the last two.  I’ve noted elsewhere how important I think the concept of “intersubjective space” is going to be to my project, and it seems that the role that vision plays will be key.  And, the idea that vision is not caused by an object—there’s not necessarily a trigger—may also play into my ideas of what happens in this intersubjective space.

Grosz also looks at Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of the double sensation in terms of vision.  Typically, the double sensation is restricted to touch—if one hands is feeling another hand, then the hands are both subject and object.  However, Merleau-Ponty expands this idea to the idea of vision: “the seer’s visibility conditions vision itself, is the ground the seer shares with the visible, the condition of any relation between them” (101).  Or, in Grosz’s words, “To see, then, is also, by implication, to be seen” (101).  This is similar to what Rosemarie Garland-Thompson refers to as the Sartrean double bind, the way in which staring leaves one vulnerable to being caught and being seen—the Medusa threat (see Garland-Thompson 69).  Grosz takes Garland-Thompson’s work a step further, however, in pointing out that “Seeing entails having a body that is itself capable of being seen, that is visible” (101).[1] 

However, Grosz then explains Irigaray’s feminist critique of Merleau-Ponty, specifically his privileging of the visual.  For Irigaray, the primacy of the tactile maternal bond is itself hidden visually; by focusing on the visual, Merleau-Ponty allows the perpetuation of the definition of the feminine and the maternal as one of lack. Further, she questions his understanding of the relationship between the visual and the tactile, positing the tangible as “more primordial than vision” (107).  Also important for my project is her discussion of the role of sexuality in subjecthood:

It is only the sensory, perceiving subject, the corporeal subject, who is capable of initiating (sexual) desire, responding to and proliferating desire.  The libido is not an effect of instincts, biological impulses, or the bodily reaction to external stimuli.  It emanates from the structure of sensibility, a function and effect of intentionality, of the integrated union of affectivity, motility, and perception.  Sexuality is not a reflex arc but an “intentional arc” that moves and is moved by the body as an acting perceiver. (109).

As ugliness has been theorized as a marker of sexuality, I wonder how being distinguished as ugly may be a marker of agency, of disobedience in a system which requires women be passive.

In the next section, Grosz examines the ways in which “the body can be understood as the site of the intermingling of mind and culture…[and] the symptom and mode of expression and communication of a hidden interior or depth” (116).  Unlike her earlier consideration, in this mode, the body is considered two-dimensional.  Rather than having a mind-body, inside-outside potential, here the body is a surface for inscription:

as a social object, as a text to be marked, traced, written upon by various regimes of institutional, (discursive and nondiscursive) power, as a series of linkages (or possibly activities) which form superficial or provisional connections with other objects and processes, and as a receptive surface on which the body’s boundaries and various parts or zones are constituted, always sin conjunction and through linkages with other surfaces and planes. (116)

Importantly, Grosz discusses this surface in terms of its moëbial properties and potentialities: rather than designating a boundaries between inside and outside, this inscriptive surface becomes the inside; there is no difference.  This perspective, unlike the phenomenological one, rejects the concept of a complete subject: “The body is thus not an organic totality which is capable of the wholesale expression of subjectivity, a welling up of the subject’s emotions, attitudes, beliefs, or experiences, but is itself an assemblage of organs, processes, pleasures, passions, activities, behaviors linked by fine lines and unpredictable networks to other elements, segments, and assemblages” (120).

She then looks specifically at the body as an inscriptive surface.  Using the work of Alphonso Lingis, she notes that the kind of permanent tattooing and inscription practiced by those often identified as the “primitive other” is offensive to white, middle class, Western viewers, because “its superficiality offends us; its permanence alarms us” (138).  Her reading of him is intriguing: “Welts, scars, cuts, tattoos, perforations, incisions, inlays, function quite literally to increase the surface space of the body, creating out of what may have been formless flesh a series of zones, locations, ridges, hollows, contours: places of special significance and libidinal intensity” (139).  “Civilized” people are no less inscribed than “primitive,” only our inscriptions are often more subtle, and require more interpretation.  As Grosz points out,

Makeup, stilettos, bras, hair sprays, clothing, underclothing mark women’s bodies, whether black or white, in ways in which hair styles, professional training, personal grooming, gait, posture, body building, and sports may mark men’s.  There is nothing natural or ahistorical about these modes of corporeal inscription.  Through them, bodies are made amenable to the prevailing exigencies of power” (142)

Even more importantly to her discussion of the moëbial body here, she says that “it is crucial to note that these different procedures of corporeal inscription do not simply adorn or add to a body that is basically given through biology; they help constitute the very biological organization of the subject—the subject’s height, weight, coloring, even eye color, are constituted as such by a constitutive interweaving of genetic and environmental factors” (142).  Or, more succinctly, “There is no ‘natural’ norm; there are only cultural forms of body, which do or do not conform to social norms” (143).  I’m curious to compare this to how Judith Butler explains the constructed nature of gender and sexuality—once again, there’s a specific constructed, interactive, and dialectic nature to identities, even in terms of its basic corporeal nature.

Importantly, she disagrees with Sandra Lee Bartky’s contention that women’s use of markers of femininity such as makeup and clothing “signal women’s acceptance of and absorption into prevailing patriarchal paradigms.”  Rather, she points out that “The practices of femininity can readily function in certain contexts that are difficult to ascertain in advance, as modes of guerrilla subversion of patriarchal codes, although the line between compliance and subversion is always a fine one, difficult to draw with any certainty.  All of us, men as much as women, are caught up in modes of self-production and self-observation” (144).  This leads into her discussion of the move from a Nietzschean understanding of the body, which is still an agent, to that of Foucault, for whom “The body is not outside of history, for it is produced through an in history.  Relations of force, of power, produce the body through the use of distinct techniques…and harness the energies and potential for subversion that power itself has constructed” (148).  In her critique of Foucault, she points out that “‘Bodies and pleasures’ are the objects and targets of power; in a sense, Foucault seems to imply that they preexist power, that they are or may be the raw materials on which power works and the sites for possible resistance to the particular forms power takes” (155).  But I don’t read Foucault this way; as she has already noted that sexuality and the body are constructed by power, rather than preexisting, I see them as co-emergent.

Grosz says that she is confused by his distinction that “The rallying point for the counterattack against the deployment of sexuality ought not to be sex-desire, but bodies and pleasure.”  She asks, “is it that bodies and pleasures are somehow outside the deployment of sexuality?” (155).  In my reading, I think that Foucault is saying that we need to get beneath the kinds of narratives and discourses which occur at the level of desire (which to me implies narratives, sentences, judgments, “I want that” sentences with subjects and objects and power implications), but instead at the more sensual, immediate sense perception level of bodies and pleasure.  She then goes on to discuss how other theorists posit a pure body before inscription—but here, she seems to be reinscribing the very dualism she opposes.  Having already made the point that there is no such thing as a “natural body,” she then seems to be claiming that there is, at some point, a tabula rasa body on which inscriptions are made.  It seems to me that even in the context of her argument, she should be arguing that the very understanding of the body itself is an act of inscription.  Because I have trouble following her seeming dualistic split here, I have trouble following her feminist critique of the phallocentrism of these theories.  Although, I agree that Foucault’s inclusion of the female body on in his discussion of hysteria does ignore the potential for strategic deployment of hysteria as a form of resistance (157).

She then turns to the work of Deleuze and Guattari.  While acknowledging that many feminist theorists find their work at odds with much of feminist theory, Grosz wishes to examine the places where their anti-Platonism may “help to clear the ground of metaphysical oppositions and concepts so that women may be able to devise their own knowledges” (164).  She highlights their focus on “multiplicity”: “In conceptualizing a difference in and of itself, a difference which is not subordinated to identity, Deleuze and Guattari invoke notions of becoming and of multiplicity beyond the mere doubling or proliferation of singular, unified subjectivities” (164).  She then describes their own conception of the body: “Their notion of the body as a discontinuous, nontotalizable series of processes, organs, flows, energies, corporeal substances and incorporeal events, speeds and durations, may be of great value to feminists attempting to reconceive bodies outside the binary oppositions imposed on the body by the mind/body, nature/culture, subject/object and interior/exterior oppositions” (164).

The final chapter of the book, on sexual difference, is rather problematic.  Certainly, her discussion of Mary Douglas and Julia Kristeva are apt, but her reinforcement of binary, sexual gender norms (even/especially in terms of how she compares and contrasts heterosexual and homosexual men, but reifies a unitary female sexual experience) is quite problematic.  (And her discussion of seminal fluid is just plain wrong.)  However, I am interested in her proposed replacement of woman under psychoanalytic terms as no longer represented as lack, but instead as that which cannot be contained.   

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[1] In an endnote, Grosz explains that Merleau-Ponty and Lacan agree somewhat on this idea of the “reversibility of vision,” but notes that Lacan differentiates between “the gaze at work in the picture and the functioning of vision in perception” (221 n. 9).