Reading Notes: Grosz, "Sexed Bodies"
Sep. 5th, 2010 02:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
raxIntroductory assertion: Most texts on the body attempt to free the body from the false mind/body dichotomy and offer "prosthetic synthesis" as a means of improving the body, but they are focused on men. In fact they are essentially focused on the bodies of young white middle-class straight able-bodied ... ... ... men; other bodies are read or discusses as variants on or modification to that norm. The author doesn't know how feminists should proceed, and has presented the previous chapters of the book (not assigned and not available to me at the moment) in the hope of giving us/them a place to start from. "This chapter seeks to elucidate and negotiate a certain aporia. It seeks to question the ontological status of the sexed body." I am glad this is not one of the papers I agreed to read in detail.
This comes back to some of the stuff from the last couple of papers... it's wrong to say that sex is written onto a total blank slate body, but it's also wrong to say that sexed bodies operate independently of culture or value.
She claims that persons with "multiple personality syndrome" can have perfect vision in one personality and be nearsighted in another, or switch handednesses. There is no citation. Really? I'm loath to rule it out, but to me that's the sort of thing where you, oh, really need a citation.
"Biology is somehow regarded as the subject minus culture, as if this could result in anything but an abstraction or bare universal category." OK, so what is it? "It is an open materiality, a set of (possibly infinite) tendencies" that affect each other in myriad ways. I guess that makes sense. Can you maybe help me out with a metaphor? "...a model of etching, a model which needs to take into account the specificities of the materials being thus inscribed and their concrete effects in the kind of text produced." That does help! Thanks, Grosz.
There's no way to have an outside position and look in on sexual difference; we all live in seuxally specific bodies and are constrained by them. We can only understand our own, and not even our own _category_, just the body itself, specifically. Tiresias doesn't get to speak for everyone, Tiresias just gets to speak for Tiresias.
Relation of the (as Kristeva) abject nature of human bodily fluids in some societies --- menstruation as unclean, &c. &c. --- to cultural panic surrounding AIDS. Huh. I'm sure that'd been said before but I don't know that I'd seen it. Interesting. Bodily fluids force us to confront our own materiality and tenuous separation from the environment, OK. ...the viscousness of honey is "the horror of femininity, the voraciousness and indeterminacy of the vagina dentata?" I'm gonna back away slowly, and move on.
Grosz criticizes Douglas's work building off of Kristeva, saying that it's all well and good that she's made this pretty narrative about how different bodily fluids have different associations because of texture, but it doesn't actually stand up. No one model is more "natural" than any other. She does agree with Douglas that our experiences of bodies and bodily fluids are always mediated by the culture in which we live, which makes sense. There's a claim that women are targeted as the gatekeepers for STD prevention in heterosexual AIDS outreach --- when and where was this paper written? It's also about stopping the spread of the disease rather than self-prevention, according to Grosz. This isn't the AIDS outreach I saw (or gave) but it may be a generational/locational thing?
The next section is titled "Seminal Fluids." (I have the most awesome grad program ever.) Grosz says that there's not very much research out there on male fluids, and you really have to turn to "the borderline literatures of homosexuality and voyeurism." Huh. The source Hard Core implies that the "money shot ... functions primarily as a mode of metaphorization of the invisible and graphically unrepresentable mysteries of the vagina and woman's interior." That... I just don't buy this line of argument. I've always, always, always read this as a means of degradation. I don't think shooting semen into someone's hair is a way of visually depicting their pleasure. It's the pleasure of the person getting off, at the expense of the person who needs to find a washcloth now. Maybe I'm being too literal here, but. An analysis of money shots that doesn't even consider that angle seems lacking to me.
"Could the reduction of men's bodily fluids to the by-products of pleasure and the raw materials of reproduction... have to do with men's attempt to distance themselves from the very kind of corporeality --- uncontrollable, excessive, expansive, disruptive, irrational --- they have attributed to women?" ...Maybe! That's an interesting idea! But apparently, says Grosz, if you're a woman, you find sexuality without intimacy, promiscuity, and anonymity alien! ... Well, the first time she uses the construction, she says "many women," but still. I always thought that whole "men like holes and women like cuddling" attitude was false, and the sort of thing people said to keep women's --- and men's! --- sexuality in check, not the sort of thing feminists said in analyzing men's sexuality. Maybe I'm being optimistic. Is there data out there about how men and women view sexuality differently? I bet! Does Grosz cite any of it here? No!
Gay men's willingness to both send and receive flow of sexual fluids may make them feminized in some way? "A body that is permeable, that transmits in a circuit, that opens itself up rather than seals itself off, that is prepared to respond as well as to initiate, that does not revile its masculinity (as the transsexual commonly does) or virilize it (as a number of gay men, as well as heterosexuals, tend to do) would involve a quite radical rethinking of male sexual morphology." OK. So. This is a neat statement. But the more I dig into it, the less I find. Moving along in Grosz's argument, of course men view themselves as completely sealed within their bodies and not part of fluid exchange oh wait that makes no sense. Is this just weird for me because I grew up in an era where sexuality was very different? Am I and everyone I talk to just weird? Who is Grosz reading from, or talking to, to make these assumptions? Is anyone in any of these readings going to say anything non-asinine about transsexuality? (The last author on my list for this week is Nikki Sullivan, so, probably!)
Now we're going to talk about Women's Corporeal Flows. "My hypothesis," Grosz shares, "is that women's corporeality is inscribed as a mode of seepage." Oh apparently this comes back to Irigaray. (Who I should also read.) ...Was that a page and a half long ramble about how women's breasts are fluid in nature and reclaiming them from the stifling male gaze involves accepting their indeterminacy and fluidity? I mean I don't wear a bra either but jeez. OK, here's something that resonates more for me: Boys reaching puberty is symbolic of sexual awakening and the potential for pleasure, while girls reaching puberty is symbolic of the potential for motherhood. "an out of control status that she was led to believe would end with childhood" continues due to menstruation. Again with the menstruation as fundamental to the female experience. I don't know, maybe I shouldn't get to criticize. But here's another case of trans identity rising up and problematizing basically everything she wrote, since she was ignoring it up until now. I laugh to think of how she'd handle, in her elaborate symbolic framework, the existence of men who menstruate regularly.
Oh look here she comes making the subtext into text for me: "Men, contrary to the fantasy of the transsexual, can never, even with surgical intervention, feel or experience what it is like to be, to live, as women. At best the transsexual can live out his fantasy of femininity --- a fantasy that in itself is usually disappointed with the rather crude transformations effected by surgical and chemical intervention. The transsexual may look like a woman but can never feel like or be a woman. The one sex, whether male or female or some other term, can only experience, live, according to (and hopefully in excess of) the cultural specifications of the sexually specific body." Hey, uh, Grosz? Remember that bit earlier that I really liked where you said people could only speak for their own bodies and not for anyone else's? What makes you think that twenty pages later, you get to speak for mine? How... disappointingly binary. If sexual difference is something inscribed on the body by society, don't you think that after a couple of years "living out [a] fantasy of femininity" that societal inscription would start to act to create the existence of a woman? I mean, you can argue that society can only inscribe an "appropriate" sex on an "appropriate" body, I guess. But there aren't just two types of sexed bodies and so argh.
In a footnote, she acknowledges that not all women have the same or even any experience of lactation or menstruation, but says that "all women, whatever the details of their physiology and fertility, are culturally understood in terms of these bodily flows." So close! So close! And yet.
This comes back to some of the stuff from the last couple of papers... it's wrong to say that sex is written onto a total blank slate body, but it's also wrong to say that sexed bodies operate independently of culture or value.
She claims that persons with "multiple personality syndrome" can have perfect vision in one personality and be nearsighted in another, or switch handednesses. There is no citation. Really? I'm loath to rule it out, but to me that's the sort of thing where you, oh, really need a citation.
"Biology is somehow regarded as the subject minus culture, as if this could result in anything but an abstraction or bare universal category." OK, so what is it? "It is an open materiality, a set of (possibly infinite) tendencies" that affect each other in myriad ways. I guess that makes sense. Can you maybe help me out with a metaphor? "...a model of etching, a model which needs to take into account the specificities of the materials being thus inscribed and their concrete effects in the kind of text produced." That does help! Thanks, Grosz.
There's no way to have an outside position and look in on sexual difference; we all live in seuxally specific bodies and are constrained by them. We can only understand our own, and not even our own _category_, just the body itself, specifically. Tiresias doesn't get to speak for everyone, Tiresias just gets to speak for Tiresias.
Relation of the (as Kristeva) abject nature of human bodily fluids in some societies --- menstruation as unclean, &c. &c. --- to cultural panic surrounding AIDS. Huh. I'm sure that'd been said before but I don't know that I'd seen it. Interesting. Bodily fluids force us to confront our own materiality and tenuous separation from the environment, OK. ...the viscousness of honey is "the horror of femininity, the voraciousness and indeterminacy of the vagina dentata?" I'm gonna back away slowly, and move on.
Grosz criticizes Douglas's work building off of Kristeva, saying that it's all well and good that she's made this pretty narrative about how different bodily fluids have different associations because of texture, but it doesn't actually stand up. No one model is more "natural" than any other. She does agree with Douglas that our experiences of bodies and bodily fluids are always mediated by the culture in which we live, which makes sense. There's a claim that women are targeted as the gatekeepers for STD prevention in heterosexual AIDS outreach --- when and where was this paper written? It's also about stopping the spread of the disease rather than self-prevention, according to Grosz. This isn't the AIDS outreach I saw (or gave) but it may be a generational/locational thing?
The next section is titled "Seminal Fluids." (I have the most awesome grad program ever.) Grosz says that there's not very much research out there on male fluids, and you really have to turn to "the borderline literatures of homosexuality and voyeurism." Huh. The source Hard Core implies that the "money shot ... functions primarily as a mode of metaphorization of the invisible and graphically unrepresentable mysteries of the vagina and woman's interior." That... I just don't buy this line of argument. I've always, always, always read this as a means of degradation. I don't think shooting semen into someone's hair is a way of visually depicting their pleasure. It's the pleasure of the person getting off, at the expense of the person who needs to find a washcloth now. Maybe I'm being too literal here, but. An analysis of money shots that doesn't even consider that angle seems lacking to me.
"Could the reduction of men's bodily fluids to the by-products of pleasure and the raw materials of reproduction... have to do with men's attempt to distance themselves from the very kind of corporeality --- uncontrollable, excessive, expansive, disruptive, irrational --- they have attributed to women?" ...Maybe! That's an interesting idea! But apparently, says Grosz, if you're a woman, you find sexuality without intimacy, promiscuity, and anonymity alien! ... Well, the first time she uses the construction, she says "many women," but still. I always thought that whole "men like holes and women like cuddling" attitude was false, and the sort of thing people said to keep women's --- and men's! --- sexuality in check, not the sort of thing feminists said in analyzing men's sexuality. Maybe I'm being optimistic. Is there data out there about how men and women view sexuality differently? I bet! Does Grosz cite any of it here? No!
Gay men's willingness to both send and receive flow of sexual fluids may make them feminized in some way? "A body that is permeable, that transmits in a circuit, that opens itself up rather than seals itself off, that is prepared to respond as well as to initiate, that does not revile its masculinity (as the transsexual commonly does) or virilize it (as a number of gay men, as well as heterosexuals, tend to do) would involve a quite radical rethinking of male sexual morphology." OK. So. This is a neat statement. But the more I dig into it, the less I find. Moving along in Grosz's argument, of course men view themselves as completely sealed within their bodies and not part of fluid exchange oh wait that makes no sense. Is this just weird for me because I grew up in an era where sexuality was very different? Am I and everyone I talk to just weird? Who is Grosz reading from, or talking to, to make these assumptions? Is anyone in any of these readings going to say anything non-asinine about transsexuality? (The last author on my list for this week is Nikki Sullivan, so, probably!)
Now we're going to talk about Women's Corporeal Flows. "My hypothesis," Grosz shares, "is that women's corporeality is inscribed as a mode of seepage." Oh apparently this comes back to Irigaray. (Who I should also read.) ...Was that a page and a half long ramble about how women's breasts are fluid in nature and reclaiming them from the stifling male gaze involves accepting their indeterminacy and fluidity? I mean I don't wear a bra either but jeez. OK, here's something that resonates more for me: Boys reaching puberty is symbolic of sexual awakening and the potential for pleasure, while girls reaching puberty is symbolic of the potential for motherhood. "an out of control status that she was led to believe would end with childhood" continues due to menstruation. Again with the menstruation as fundamental to the female experience. I don't know, maybe I shouldn't get to criticize. But here's another case of trans identity rising up and problematizing basically everything she wrote, since she was ignoring it up until now. I laugh to think of how she'd handle, in her elaborate symbolic framework, the existence of men who menstruate regularly.
Oh look here she comes making the subtext into text for me: "Men, contrary to the fantasy of the transsexual, can never, even with surgical intervention, feel or experience what it is like to be, to live, as women. At best the transsexual can live out his fantasy of femininity --- a fantasy that in itself is usually disappointed with the rather crude transformations effected by surgical and chemical intervention. The transsexual may look like a woman but can never feel like or be a woman. The one sex, whether male or female or some other term, can only experience, live, according to (and hopefully in excess of) the cultural specifications of the sexually specific body." Hey, uh, Grosz? Remember that bit earlier that I really liked where you said people could only speak for their own bodies and not for anyone else's? What makes you think that twenty pages later, you get to speak for mine? How... disappointingly binary. If sexual difference is something inscribed on the body by society, don't you think that after a couple of years "living out [a] fantasy of femininity" that societal inscription would start to act to create the existence of a woman? I mean, you can argue that society can only inscribe an "appropriate" sex on an "appropriate" body, I guess. But there aren't just two types of sexed bodies and so argh.
In a footnote, she acknowledges that not all women have the same or even any experience of lactation or menstruation, but says that "all women, whatever the details of their physiology and fertility, are culturally understood in terms of these bodily flows." So close! So close! And yet.
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So, um, I took your advice... Heh.
Date: 2010-09-06 03:31 am (UTC)Ahahaha vagina dentata. Wonderful, wonderful. And, oh lulz, maybe I will just read this bit about money shots. That sounds kind of hilarious. Maybe the entire Seminal Fluids section? Hmmmmm.
I am excited to re-read the Sullivan piece again, if only to have something ENJOYABLE on my plate for this week. And I'm glad that's the one I chose to go in-depth on, heh. Oh I should probably go post on oncourse now and try to track that other person down.
My summary of this week's readings so far: "ALL WOMEN ARE UNIVERSALLY DEFINED BY MENSTRUATION AND PREGNANCY, GEEZ COME ON GET WITH THE PROGRAM ALREADY EVERYBODY. ALSO TRANSPPL ARE ICKY." T__T
(no subject)
Date: 2010-09-05 10:24 pm (UTC)You might start here (http://www.karitas.net/blackbirds/layman/whatis.html).
No, it's not a "syndrome", they are separate people. There's only a disorder if they cannot figure out a way to function as a system.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-09-05 10:42 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-09-05 10:50 pm (UTC)Multiplicity does not exist only in North America. I can understand that it may be medicalized only on North America, but I have heard nothing about the existence of multiplicity as an experience existing only in certain cultures.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-09-05 11:08 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-09-05 11:49 pm (UTC)No... it is about separate people sharing one body, not someone with any internal characteristics.
And the site does talk quite a bit about medicalization of multiplicity.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-09-06 02:35 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-09-06 12:24 am (UTC)The Blackbirds' site is one of my favorites, though.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-09-06 05:30 am (UTC)I can't tell over the internet: are you being serious or sarcastic? (I'm guessing from your icon you are not being sarcastic, but I was not sure when I got your comment in my inbox.)
Every change in thinking has to start somewhere, with articulate people willing to write about their experiences and make it public, and others willing to read it and consider the ideas put forth in there. For me personally, reading this FAQ really helped me move out of a more pathologizing (and very ignorant) mind set to a less pathologizing, less ignorant one.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-09-06 03:39 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-09-06 07:10 pm (UTC):-( re: burnout. That's sad. My way of managing "activisms" is to pick one to actively seek out working on, and then to do my best to be aware of the others that cross my path in whatever way they do, to stay as informed as I can, and to stand up/be an ally when I'm able. And to write about intersectionality issues.
But yes, it can be very draining.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-09-06 12:24 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-09-06 05:44 am (UTC)I'd hardly put myself out as anything of an expert on multiplicity, but the truth is that once any "invisible" minority is marginalized enough, commonalities crop up re: interaction with the dominant scientific/materialist/Western/reductionist master-narratives, and in dealing with the institutionalized power of medical psychiatry and the law.
I am much more likely to believe any marginalized voice which can speak articulately about those challenges and barriers than the voice of any outside "expert", who in his/her position of institutional privilege and power is "Gatekeeping" reality and shutting out the voices of those who are being so labeled and/or "diagnosed".
(no subject)
Date: 2010-09-06 03:40 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-09-05 10:26 pm (UTC)I have not considered this before, but cannot dismiss it until I date an apiary.
That bit about the "money shot" though actually rings sort of true to me. I've always seen it as a way of visualizing mutual orgasm, even though obviously only one partner needs to be orgasming. I've always disliked Japanese pornography, for instance, because of the emphasis they put on making sure the woman is not having fun. Even in their amine the passive partner is usually blushing demurely and not actively enjoying sex. The porn convention of the cum facial, I like, but often its not possible for a model to not make a face like "eww, I'm getting splattered in the face with goo" and that ruins it for me. But seeing external ejaculation with both (or all) participants gleefully exulting in it, that is sexy. To me. Anyway.
Also, gosh I had an impression that a lot of marginal feminist theorists trashed transexuals (and express contradictory assessments of homosexuals) mostly due to the fact that such people mess up the adversarial mystical dualism of gender that they try to explain the difference between men and women through, and these notes are not helping with my admittedly ill-informed opinion.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-09-06 01:41 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-09-06 08:02 pm (UTC)I think what bugs me about it is that they leave their mouths hanging stupidly open and then like 10% of it actually ends up in their mouth. Either shut the gaping maw or if you actually want to drink it hold your lips over the tip (you can them drool to show me how much cum there was if you like). I prefer cum shots on asses and tits for this reason.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-09-06 11:00 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-09-05 10:27 pm (UTC)O.o
lolwut?
(no subject)
Date: 2010-09-06 01:41 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-09-06 07:03 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-09-07 07:31 pm (UTC)“When correctly viewed / Everything is lewd...”
(no subject)
Date: 2010-09-05 11:41 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-09-06 04:14 am (UTC)I've recently become very annoyed with people who talk about "many women" or "most women", especially when what they really seem to mean is "normal women". The phrase is a way to avoid being completely and instantly provably wrong; isn't a get-out-of-offensiveness-free card.
(This did lead to an ... educational ... google experience regarding ejaculating dildos. Gender Studies is awesome.)
(no subject)
Date: 2010-09-06 06:25 pm (UTC)I need to save this statement - it seems like it will have high utility in future conversation on many topics.