Fashioning the Body: Versions of the Citizen, the Self, and the Subject

Gestus/ "Manwatching"

I found this clip in 1976 edition of Playboy magazine. My housemate Jeremiah bought a whole box of old girly mags from a yardsale for $10 and they've taken up residence in our kitchen. This entire room, consequently as become plastered with collages we make together, mostly cutting out and messing with bizarre advertisements selling super-sexualized gendered identities and lots of centerfold women's statements like "I'm not a feminist. I like a big strong man to light my cigarettes." I've spent a lot of time this quarter leafing through these magazines and thinking about the discourse they circulate, and the construction of women as sex objects and men as subjects. Surprisingly the Playboys from the late 60's have a lot of great articles about police brutality, arguments against the Vietnam war, interviews with radical artists like Dylan who cry out against labeling and objectifying (as someone who resists fixed identity)- but the magazine’s treatment of the issue of women's liberation and feminism are reactionary. I could go into a lot more analysis about the difference between Playboy and Hustler's  depiction of bodies and bodily functions- a short explanation is that Hustler seems not to be preoccupied with maintaining social boundaries as regards to the body and bodily control. It goes straight for the shock value of not only talking about, but graphically depicting male and female genitalia, naked women eating shit (I'm serious), and advocating for violent action against feminists and feminist scholars. Dispensing with what Mauss calls polite "social ideosynchracies," Hustler is perhaps in some way excising social worries; concerns that the body will rebel and resist "retarding mechanisms" that inhibit disorderly movements. “…bodily control is an expression of social control - abandonment of bodily control in ritual responds to the requirements of a social experience which his being expressed.”

 Looking critically at “men’s magazines” of the late 60’s and 70’s is an interesting way of thinking about the convergences of social discourses. These magazines are printed while also in the midst of American imperialism, women’s liberation movement, race-riots, and the student anti-war movement, and as such can be a way of studying contemporary culture by stepping out it a bit, and into part of the discourse that shaped it, to see what they were saying about these issues. The fact that it is a magazine of naked women, marketed towards well-off heterosexual white men (the advertisements say so) is all the better. After all, Douglas says: “The human body is always treated as an image of society and…there can be no natural way of considering the body that does not involve at the same time a social dimension. Interest in its apertures depends on the preoccupation with social exits and entrances, escape routes and invasions.” (Douglas 79) The woman’s body is photographed and placed firmly against this grid of militaristic, capitalistic power. A society confused about what sort of economic and political strategies are right for people, where cultural and political changes are constant, finds its security in the familiar oppression of the woman’s body, using the ruse of female sexual freedom as a means to preoccupy themselves with her entrances and exits. My analysis is not intended to sound like I’m advocating censorship. I don’t think pornography is bad, and knowing that things are usually not what they seem and power censors things it doesn’t like, I don’t think censorship is usually wise. Especially because these magazines can be used as cultural artifacts that tell us much about societal anxieties and mechanisms used to control bodies then and now.

One more thought on these mags: I never really spent any time reading Playboy before. In highschool I flipped through a modern Hustler and was really upset by it. These old magazines are so different from their modern issues. They are pre-airbrushing and Photoshop. It’s the last time women’s bodies were seen as real, even if they were objectified.

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"It is thanks to society that there is the certainty of pre-prepared movements, domination of the conscious over emotion and unconsciousness."Mauss

 Natural symbols will not be found in individual lexical items. the physical body can have universal meaning only as a system which resonds to the social system, expressing it as a system....Natural symbols can express the relation of an indicidual to his society at that general systemic level." Mary Douglas

 Manwatching is a book by Desmond Morris in which he has "itemized human behavior into several thousand separate gestures and expressions." I wonder if Brecht would have loved or hated this book. Supposedly, the author makes the clear warning that the book is not meant to be used as an aid in mind-reading or to "dominate one's companions." That, Brecht would agree with. But, the seemingly reductionist methodology is potentially unpallatable.

 These images are not innocuous observations- they must be considered in the context of eugenics, race, class, and gender. I wonder what methods Morris used to get these expressions. They might be drawings, but I bet they come from photographs-, which places them squarely in the context of what Eadweard Muybridge did with breaking up motion into segments. Thinking of an expression as just one still image refers directly to this era of science and thinking. One can't forget the pseudo-scientific methods used in the past to catalogue human faces, such as Petrus Camper's facial gonimeter, which measured facial angles of heads and skills to determine the subject's supposed quality of intelligence and ability. This catalogue of facial expressions begins to seem much more like the French National Identification Bureau's chart indexing different types of facial parts with which to convict lawbreakers, and create "criminals." And why all this emphasis on the face being the primary vehicle of expression? Perhaps the book includes more than just the face, but the magazine didn't mention them. This type of cataloging cannot be seen as something cute or amusing, which the magazine's reporter apparently feels it is- "possibly the best coffee table book of the decade."

 "Manwatching" is supposed to mean "human watching." And humans do not all look or act like this Anglo dude who has created some sort of pseudo-scientific text by observing what look like his golf buddies. Some of the faces seem eerily similar to the French neurologist Guillaume Duchenne's photographic documentation of electrically induced expressions. In lecture, Julia mentioned how these images, in their captured and printed form, (in Manwatching they are drawn) become fixed artifacts, which, like words in language, designate the range of things that can be said about something.

 Are there really only a certain specified number of ways to move and express emotion and intent? Maybe in this culture- but this approach is typically Euro-centric. At some point I learned that the Japanese have hundreds of infinitesimally different movements of the hand/kimono sleeve, indicating different expressions, meanings, and intentions. I don't know if this is part of dance or geisha culture or what, but regardless, it proves that each culture has a different set of gestural meanings, just as they have words for ideas and experiences that do not exist in other languages.

What is the face of "everyman?" Well it appears to be a male. All the faces printed in the magazine (I'm not sure about the actual book) are of the same man's face, who, with his thin nose and lips is presumably white. This reminds me of Elizabeth Grosz's essay Cities-Bodies in which she talks about the metaphor/metonymy of the body of the State as being presumably male (with male genitalia.)

But there is some merit in looking at gestures and expressions, particularly in a linguistic sense. After all, Foucault wrote about Deep Grammar- the docile surface of the human body marked by power-knowledge. Like we were thinking about while watching Pumping Iron II, "What are techniques of power which produce effects on concepts and grammar of body language? " These faces are not "natural," and the scientific cataloguing of them is not done in a vacuum. Our gestures and expressions are a product of the cultures and experiences in which we develop.

On gestus-  The faces by themselves are gestures, which Brecht might want an actor to wear, like a mask, but the assumption of "Manwatching, "that these faces can be like reading straight into the mind of the actor this is really the opposite of Brecht's idea of gesture/gestus, which was designed to show something without the actor trying to realistically represent it. I am intrigued with the idea of seeing these faces as "signs," which, like Brecht, I might turn on itself. I want to make a stencil of a particular face that stands out to me- a dualistic clownish kind of face with a raised eyebrow and closed eye. That's a start.

The form: I'm thinking how the faces, being drawn and simplified, are in a way masks. I'm wondering what the role of masks play in different cultures, and what sort of expressions they recognize and why... Also, the fact that they are drawn makes them a much softer, less eugenic-looking presentation- less stark, the connotations and acceptance of "art."