Edith Wharton--The House of Mirth (1905)

Considered by most to be Wharton’s first significant work of fiction, House of Mirth was an immediate best-seller, selling out its first printing of 40,000 and its second printing of 20,000 in two weeks.  By the end of 1905, it had sold 140,000 copies.  It was the most successful book that Scribner’s had published to date.  The title comes from Ecclesiastes 7:4: “The house of the wise is in the house of mourning/ The house of the fool is in the house of mirth.”  The novel follows the tragic heroine Lily Bart, dangerously single at 29, as she struggles to survive aristocratic New York society with dwindling funds and dwindling future possibilities.  Over the course of the novel, her prospects decline from house parties at which she is still welcome as long as she helps out her hostess with various duties, to being a sort of hired guide by the nouveau riche who need help navigating the unfamiliar waters of aristocratic society, to finally near-destitution as she works unsuccessfully in a millinery shop.  After using the last of her funds to pay off her debts, she dies of a suspicious overdose of sleeping drops. 

The novel is an accusatory examination of what Wai-Chi Dimock has characterized as the marketplace logic at the heart of the novel.  As Lily explains,

You think we live on the rich, rather than with them: and so we do, in a sense—but it’s a privilege we have to pay for!   We eat their dinners, and drink their wine, and smoke their cigarettes, and use their carriages and their opera-boxes and their private cars—yes, but there’s a tax to pay on every one of those luxuries….the girl pays it by tips and cards…and by going to the best dress-makers, and having just the right dress for every occasion, and always keeping herself fresh and exquisite and amusing!” (279-80)

Lily’s problem is that she cannot ever completely give herself over to the kind of mercenary self-commodification required for financial success in this society.  Every time she is on the verge of marital success—for example, when Percy Gryce is in love with her enough to only require her to attend a church service with him and his mother, Lily instead goes for a walk with her friend Selden.

Selden is perhaps the most infuriating character in the book, in his love for Lily never completely translates in his marrying her. Rather, in the frequent visions of Lily presented from his point of view, he fails to see her as either completely human or as innocent of artifice as she at times genuinely can be.  Indeed, from the opening scene forward, Lily is presented as a commodity to be appraised and exchanged.  Selden thinks to himself that “she must have cost a great deal to make, that a great many dull and ugly people must, in some mysterious way, have been sacrificed to produce her” (5).  Lily, brought up by a mother who instills above all an absolute fear of anything resembling what she characterizes as “dinginess” and a father who dies after losing his fortune, is poorly prepared for adult responsibility.  A exemplar of Naturalism, leaving Lily vulnerable to cruel and heartless society, Wharton places her tragic heroine, Lily Bart, in a society that she describes as a "hot-house of traditions and conventions.”

Eudora Welty--Curtain of Green (1941)

Last spring, I did my class presentation in Southern Lit on Welty and Curtain of Green, her 1941 short story collection.  I also did my final paper on her.  So, rather than try to write a short summary, after the jump I'm posting my notes on Welty and Curtain of Green, as well as the text of the paper I wrote (which I'm working on revising in order to try to get it published.

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).

Sianne Ngai--Ugly Feelings (2007)

Ngai’s highly theoretical work looks at specifically “ugly feelings” in order to examine the phenomenon of what she characterizes as a “noncathartic aesthetic: art that produces and foregrounds a failure of emotional release (another form of suspended ‘action’) and does so as a kind of politics” (9).  In order to do the kind of in-depth analysis she intends, she uses literature as her focus, as she says that, “literature may in fact be the ideal space to investigate ugly feelings that obviously ramify beyond the domain of the aesthetic proper, since the situation of restricted agency from which all of them ensue is one that describes art’s own position in a highly differentiated and totally commodified society” (2).

The feelings she examines are those she identifies as “Bartlebean” emotions, inspired by the Melville short story.  The feelings are: envy, anxiety, paranoia, irritation, “a racialialized affect I call ‘animatedness,’ and a strange amalgamation of shock and boredom I call ‘stuplimity’” (2)—these feelings “can be thought of as a mediation between the aesthetic and the political in a nontrivial way” (2).  Of these feelings, the only one which is really significant to my own work is her examination of disgust, which Ngai says is

constituted by the vehement rejection or exclusion of its object.  Hence while disgust is always disgust toward, in the same that envy is envy of…its grammar brings it closer to the intransitive feelings in this study than to the other emotions with which it is traditionally associated.  For while envy and disgust are clearly object-directed, their trajectories are directed toward the negation of these objects, either by denying them or by subjecting them to epistemological skepticism. (22)

This schemata of disgust may coordinate with my own interactive ideas of beauty and ugliness, that ugliness requires a more complicated interaction than less striking appearances.  Further, she says that disgust is “the boundary confusions built into the structure of these feelings, whether in the form of inside/outside, self/world, or psyche/body, reappear in the aesthetic forms and genres they determine” (22); in this way, disgust is related to Kristeva’s theories of abjection, in the way that it blurs these boundaries.  I need to figure out the significance of this repeated theme or violated or blurred boundaries which keeps appearing.

Ngai. Claims that Kant’s theory of the sublime is “perhaps the first ‘ugly’ or explicitly nonbeautiful feeling appearing in theories of aesthetic judgment” (4), which is something that I know I’ll eventually have to follow up on.  I’m also interested in her claim that “the feelings I examine here are explicitly amoral and noncathartic, offering no satisfactions of virtue, however oblique, nor any therapeutic or purifying release” (6).  Unlike beauty, which is supposed to inspire virtue, or the grotesque, which has similar abilities to provoke dramatic changes, ugliness may be analogous to these less dramatic emotions.  Her distinctions speak to how I’m trying to distinguish “ugliness” from other more highly theorized kind of negative appearances.  Ugliness is similarly a minor affect, and as they result in less of a shock that causes defensiveness, I think the interaction evoked by ugliness is similarly more likely to produce political and aesthetic ambiguities than passions.

Laurie Penny--Meat Market: Female Flesh Under Capitalism (201)

In this book, Guardian journalist Laurie Penny attempts to “chart some of the ways in which women’s bodies are marginalised and controlled under capitalism” (2).  What is most significant is her claim to set out the “parameters for the trade in female flesh as sexual and social capital, and demonstrate…how women are alienated from their sexual bodies and required to purchase the fundamentals of their own gender” (2).  Her Marxist, materialist reading is quite enlightening.  Importantly, she points out that “it is not enough to locate women’s physical oppression in the sexual body”: “By the late 20^th century, the partial dislocation of reproduction and labour from sexual intercourse following the widespread acceptance of contraceptive methods in most parts of the West had meat that the post-Fordist capitalist control of women’s gendered labour needed to be extended beyond the sexual and into the substantive, the nutritive and the semiotic architecture of gender and physicality itself” (2-3).  Ultimately, this market alienation results in the separation between the marketable erotic and the repulsive flesh of real sex: what Penny sees undergirding much of twentieth century women’s issues is a disgust and fear of female flesh, which is “fear of female power, the sublimated power of women over birth and death and dirt and sex” (32).

Penny also points out that femininity itself has been commodified: “when femininity is intimately tied into the labour of objectification, the cues of gender itself can be bought and sold on the the labour market.  As such, any woman wishing to free herself from the mechanisms of misogyny imperils her social-constructed sex.  Why else are feminists so consistently de-sexed in the public imagination?” (36).  This is a brilliant insight, going a long way in explaining the general hostility towards feminism in the marketplace: feminism does, in fact, pose a “threat to gender as labour capital” (36).  Penny goes on to point out that what second wave feminism got wrong was, in trying to reject the “susbmissive, spayed, stilettoed stereotype of misogynist fantasy,” they instead posited an equally fantastic feminine essentialism: “A fantasy feminine essential, set against patriarchal feminine constructions and placed in binary opposition to the masculine, was never going to be an adequate foil to the machinations of capitalist patariarchy.  The feminine as fact and as ideology is too dispersed and too pervasive for any one ‘feminist’ physicality to suffice” (37).   

She then asks crucial questions which such essentialism evades: “what the female body is, who has one, and how it is made” (37).  In considering many facets of trans life and how they inform this debate, Penny notes that many trans women, even those who undergo surgery to alleviate the dissonance they feel with their bodies, often end up experiencing gender as a fluid aspect.  Importantly, she notes that while many feminists see many trans women as reinforcing gender stereotypes, both anti-trans feminists as well as trans women themselves can see that much of this stereotyping is imposed by the medical establishment, as psychiatrists are the ones who “define gender deviance” and set “gender performance criteria,” even defining what “living as a woman” means and entails before deeming a patient worth of sex reassignment surgery (43).  Further, Penny points out the ignorance behind the kind of feminist thinking which defines womanhood on a solely biological basis, as such binary definitions ignore quite a bit of biological reality.  Finally, the violence perpetrated against trans women reveals that they are “despised by gender fanatics because they do something unforgiveable: they take the rules of the game and they make them explicit.  The show that femininity is a mode of being that can and must be purchased….The bodies of transsexual women are marginalised and punished precisely because they expose the mechanisms by which the modern carapace of gender capital is maintained, threatening its hold over women’s bodies” (47).

In her conclusion about the ramifications of the “neoliberal repugnance for women’s bodies,” Penny says that “Individual women’s anxiety about keeping our own bodies under control is part of the same structure of oppression under whose auspices cultural, physical, and sexual violence is done to the bodies of low-status women, poor women, migrant workers, transsexual women, sex workers, and every other person living and working at the coalface of the so-called gender war” (64).  Penny’s answer?  The power of refusal.  She sees contemporary pseudo-feminism as a fascism of agreement: “Only by remembering how to say ‘no’ will the women of the 21^st century regain their voice and remember their power” (66).  Brilliant, insightful, concise political analysis.

Susan Bordo--Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body (1993)

This is the tenth anniversary edition of Bordo’s book, which focuses on the female (primarily anorexic) body in Western (primarily American) culture.  One of the most interesting aspects of the work is the way in which Bordo talks back to the medical establishment, as she explains the ramifications of the pathologizing of eating disorders.  By making them diseases, medical professionals effectively erase the role of cultural norms and expectations in these epidemic syndromes.  While doctors point to the fact that most women diet and exercise without become anorexic or bulimic as evidence that eating disorders are different from these behaviors, Bordo instead insists that what this actually proves is that such behavior actually lies on a continuum of body discipline behaviors.  In addition to anorexia, she also looks at the implications of anti-abortion legislation on bodily autonomy as well as the relationship between feminism, postmodernism, and post-structuralism and how she sees postmodernism and post-structuralism obscuring fundamental feminism.

As a philosopher, Bordo is quite interested in seeing anorexia and anti-abortion legislation as manifestations of the original mind/body dualistic point of view.  Anorexia is part of a much historically longer tradition of a spiritual or moral repudiation of the body: in the tradition of spiritual mystics who denigrate the flesh in order to grow the spirit, so anorexia, too, demonstrates an attempt to control, discipline, and mortify the flesh in the service of spiritual and moral superiority.  In a society in which women are continually second-class citizens, such behaviors which often begin as a response to (inaccessible) cultural norms of appearance often evolve into a display of control and power.  Importantly, Bordo takes a fully Foucauldian perspective when talking about power, realizing that while individuals may aspire to wield power, real power is actually a systemic force which reinforces such systemic norms.

While Bordo’s deployment of Foucault’s theories of power in her analysis of cultural bodily discipline is skillful, I take issue with quite a bit of her engagement with other author and ideas which she identifies as “postmodern” and “post-structuralist.”  Claiming that much of the progress of “uncovering the pretensions and illusions of the ideals of epistemological objectivity, universal foundations or reason, and neutral judgment” which has been attributed to such theories were in reality uncovered by “the liberation movements of the sixties and seventies, emerging not only to assert the legitimacy of marginalized cultures and suppressed perspectives but also to expose the biases of the official accounts” (219), Bordo is at times downright hostile to the methodologies used in these disciplines.  In addition to being worried that these new methodologies are so focused on the theoretical as to ignore the political, she is also quite critical of feminist and gender theorists who wish to see gender as something other than a binary system.

I found this criticism quite confusing, as earlier she herself was so critical of Cartesian dualistic perspectives; however, she seems to think that rejecting binary categories of “masculine” and “feminism” dangerously shifts the focus from “practical contexts to adequate theory.”  In these later sections, Bordo says that we simply cannot ignore gender binaries: “In a culture that is in fact constructed by gender duality, however, one cannot be simply “human” (241).  I’m quite curious about her use of the phrase “in fact” here (which is in fact emphasized in the original): given her earlier critique of dualism, what exactly does she mean here?  I think that she means that since a dualistic understanding of gender is the norm in modern society, to deny it as such is a non-productive stance.  However, as so much of the rest of her work is committed to pointing out the problems with many other seemingly axiomatic societal beliefs, I wonder why she is so committed to supporting this one.  To the contrary, I think that open campaigning for and exploration of alternate gender identities is important work in attacking dualistic thinking.  While I sympathize with her fear of such campaigns as unpopular and perhaps scary in the larger culture (but certainly doable—popular culture in the past ten years seems to demonstrate this, despite her fears), I think that it is important to continue to do such important work.

She saves her strongest criticism, however, for the kind of Derridean postmodern focus on difference (though she never actually addresses differance) and postmodern play, seeing such perspectives as dangerously frivolous.  She is also leery of intersectional analyses which insist on focusing on multiple axes of oppression, claiming that the attempt to take all of these axes into account at once results in a general lack of acuity in one’s overall analysis.  She rejects the idea of postmodern play as containing any potential for real subversion; in her analysis, most postmodern claims of multiplicity function to shirk responsibility of real analysis, rather than working through real complexities.  (As an aside, I was quite confused by her discussion of heteroglossia and polyvocality as an idea attributed to Donna Haraway, without any reference to Bakhtin.)  

Significantly, throughout this section she herself at times does use the very tools she is skeptical of in her critique—such as in her discussion of the exclamation during the Hill/Thomas hearings that “they just don’t get it!”.  After positing this evaluation as an example of a non-totalizing yet common understanding between women, regardless of their other positions of privilege, she then clarifies that, “‘Not getting it’ does not come written on the Y chromosome, nor does it issue from distinctively male cognitive or personality defect.  Rather, it is a blindness created by acceptance of and identification with the position and privileges (and insecurities) of being male in a patriarchal culture” (239).  She then goes on to explain that “those who aspire to, who crave, the male privileges that have been historically denied them can also be blind” (239).  Here, I see her simultaneously deploying and decrying the very suspicion of essentialism which she has been so insistent on maintaining throughout the text.

Her final chapter on what she sees as the misreadings of Madonna by postmodern feminists is so off that I’m not even going to represent all of my problems with it here.  Suffice it to say that I am much more a believer in the possibilities inherent in postmodern parody and multiplicity than Bordo is.  It seemed quite contradictory when she was so much more willing to see the inherent political possibilities inherent in anorexia as a personal inscription on the body than to see Madonna’s self-reinvention and parody as the same.  Bordo missed an opportunity to read more postmodern bodily expressions with as much complexity as she was willing to read the anorexic body with.

Rosemarie Garland-Thomson--Staring: How We Look

            In this book, Garland-Thomson focuses on the interactive aspects of staring.  She is interested in why we stare, what happens when we stare, and how staring affects both the starer as well as the staree.  First, she breaks down what happens when we stare, noting that at its core, “Staring is an ocular response to what we don’t expect to see” (3).  More importantly, she observes that “We stare when ordinary seeing fails, when we want know more.  So staring is an interrogative gesture that asks what’s going on and demands the story….This intense visual engagement creates a circuit of communication and meaning-making” (3).  It is the narrative and “meaning-making” aspects of staring which intrigue me most, as that seems to be at play in the southern texts I am looking at.  The ugly women in these texts grab our attention in ways that the more conventional-looking women do not.  They ask us to consider why they look the way they do, what has scarred them or pushed them outside of normativity.

            Garland-Thomson spend the first half of the book focusing on images of the freak, examining the kinds of stares which occur and why, as well as the social and cultural meanings of the stare.  Garland-Thomson does distinguish the stare from the gaze, which she defines as “an oppressive act of disciplinary looking that subordinates its victim” (9).  She then goes on to further distinguish different kinds of stares: “the blank stare, the baroque stare, the separated stare,  the engaged stare, the stimulus-driven stare, the goal-driven stare, and the dominating stare” (9).  Each of these, she claims, has at its heart “the matter of appearance, of the ways we see each other and the ways we are seen” (9).  Despite the issues of power at play in staring, she is most interested in what she describes as staring’s “generative potential” (9).

Garland-Thomson explains how in the midst of a riot of sensory input, the brain works through the process of visual recognition called “orientation”: “Orientation is the attempt to impose a frame of reference on the chaos of a visual field by integrating what is unknown into what is already known….[requiring] scrutiny to impose a logical narrative on what at first glance seems to be random visual stimuli  ” (20)

In the second half of the book, she focuses on specific body parts which are most likely to induce stares: faces, hands, breasts, and bodies in general.  Faces, hands, and breasts are particularly charged locations on the body—faces and hands because of their key role in expression, interpretation, and primary bodily functions, and breasts because of their dual role in maternity and eroticism.  Breasts are unique in their object position in the stare, as they are an acceptable object of staring when erotic breasts, but inappropriate objects of the stare when maternal, scarred, or absent.  Faces, hands, and bodies, when non-normative, are potentially generative sites for narrative construction and information, as Garland-Thomson highlights in her discussion of photographs of handless victims of war and limbless war veterans and how they have been used to bring attention to important political issues.

Garland-Thomson quantifies the claim that Scarry makes, that beauty gives life to the beholder and the beheld, by making the heart beat faster: “The staring encounter arouses us as well.  Our heart rate increases when we are stared at; being subjected to a stare even registers on a cortical EEG.  So viscerally potent is the staring encounter that we can even feel stares directed at us.  In fact, humans from infancy can detect unseen stares.  We not only believe that we can tell when we are being stared at, but repeated experiments dating as early as the late nineteenth century suggest that in fact we do” (17).  So, contrary to Scarry’s claim that staring and gazing do no harm to the object of beauty, according to Garland-Thomson, they do have a palpable quality to them.  Whether harmful or harmless, though, I suppose is up for debate, and whether the heart-pounding is elation or palpitations is equally up for debate.