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

Here are two videos I have found. The first is Alexander McQueen's 07 fashion show in which Kate Moss is a hololgram. It is beautiful and amazing and scary all at once. She is a body of light, literally.

 http://youtube.com/watch?v=GQT0vcw7xZM

The second is a bmw commercial featuring the art works of Theo Jensen. His sculptures are wind powered machines and they look like creatures walking on the beach.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=jUsCQoDCXoY

I love watching South Park late on weeknights, and since we have discussed Brechtian theory, I have noticed how much South Park emulates the ideals of Brecht’s epic theatre. This especially hit home for me in an episode in which God is portrayed as a monster with fur and a hippo face with a snake tongue and a lion's tale. It pretty much got across the idea that our Occidental depictions of the abstract theory of God are ridiculous. For hundred of years God has been visualized as an aging old man with a white beard. Isn’t it just as silly to depict God as a man virtually on his deathbed as it is to make him into a strange, humorous monster? Without saying a word about the choice of depiction, a social subject was addressed by the animators. It is not just this one particular epidode; the creators of South Park seem to use Brechtian theory in many, if not all episodes.

I decided to research this online and see if I am the only person who feels this way. In doing so, I found that I am not alone. If you are interested, check out this website:

< http://storymind.com/dramatica/armando/17.htm>

I think it is awesome that Brecht is alive and well within entertainment!

Manipulating “The Eye” 

This exercise has given me a fresh perspective on analyzing writing and literature. I circled every 7 words, skip one, circled the next word, and then skip 6 and circled the seventh word again. This pattern of 7 and 2 helped to exhibit the underlying text of “The Eye.” The words I circled most had violent or horrifying connotations such as remove, straining, sickliness, dying, condemn, paralysis, and abuse. If the words did not have these connotations, they were words pertaining to health, beauty, and art.  This article is about the care and hygiene of the eyes. However, by circling certain words in a pattern, it became clear that this piece has more to do with beautiful and artistic presentation of the human eye and the awful things that occur when one does not follow the article’s rules of etiquette.   

It was also fascinating to see the phrases made by the circled words. Examples include “expedients dying be the use of many,” “eye face it is to Deity visions catch light in human,” and “thus practice near should carefully there often Modern reject good short-sighted to be precisely these only trial the art.”    These phrases speak of methods that desire universal use, of the face being a reflection of god, and of how people should reject their shortsightedness, and how people should judge art in an open minded fashion. At least that is how I interpreted these pieced together phrases. If my findings are in anyway accurate, they reflect the theme of the paper.

Allison

Fashioning the Body

Winter Project Proposal

November 27, 2007

            My winter quarter project for Fashioning the Body is composed of a critical writing element and a photographic work in series entitled The Body as a Machine: a Visual Perspective. By looking at art, especially 19^th and 20^th century photographs, and putting it in a historical context I hope to discover the significance of the body being represented as a machine.  I will be evaluating topics such as  mechanical prosthesis, body imaging and conditioning, as well as the body’s relationship with technology in today’s post-industrial society. I intend on representing my work in a photographic work in series which will be a compilation of portraits of bodies juxtaposed with images of technology and mechanics. This project will be monitored by the Fashioning the Body faculty as well as my project group. I will be presenting my project to the students and faculty of Fashioning Body during week ten of winter quarter.

            My primary theme for this project is evaluating the body as a manufactured entity.  This encompasses topics of how the body is depicted as an automaton in labor practices, the medical field, technology, and politics. I am particularly interested in how the visual arts have used mechanical imagery to discuss the relationship that our bodies have to machines. In her essay Envisioning Cyborg Bodies, Jennifer Gonzalez defines the cyborg body as “the body of an imagined cyberspatial existence. It is the site of possible being. In this sense it exists in excess of the real. But it is also embedded within the real,” (267). All images that depict the body as a machine are straddling the boundaries between current society and the realm of the imagination whether utopian or apocalyptic, optimistic or pessimistic.  It is the relationship that history has with the depictions of the mechanized body that will be the focus of my work for winter quarter.

I looked at personal ads at not only a genre but also as a culture with its own language, norms and counter cultures. The personal ad, surprisingly, has a much older and interesting part in society than one might suspect.  Personal ads began appearing in newspapers became about 300 years ago, and became regular features in the mid-19th century.

It is believed that Helen Morrison of Great Britain was the first person to place a personal ad in a newspaper. In 1727 she persuaded a local newspaper - 'The Manchester Weekly Journal' - to write an advertisement - stating that she was looking for someone nice to share her life with. It was not long before the ad was reported and she was hauled up to face the mayor of the Manchester city who quickly had her committed to a mental institution. The report is documented by the People Almanac and goes as follows: In 1727, Helen Morrison, a lonely spinster, became the first woman to place a Lonely Hearts advertisement. It appeared in the Manchester Weekly Journal. The mayor promptly committed her to a lunatic asylum for four weeks."
~The People's Almanac

Symbols, codes and word choice are the key elements required to create a personal ad. Within the confines of the ad’s space a new, secret language is developed that takes on a life of it’s own as it references codes with body type, sexual orientation, and interests. It is as if the body has been translated into binary code: succinct, but complicated.

Like the picture described by Paul Gilroy in Race Ends Here (254),  personal ads also “point to the unresolved issue of how ‘race’ interrelates with sex, gender, and sexuality; something that is further than ever from being settled and which focuses a new urgent agenda for future work.”

Check out this video which uses hands and arms to simulate synchronized dance much like the choreography of Busby Berkeley.  

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=otOjDUzoCMg

My favorite 'prosthesis' was a marvelous car named Regina. She was a 1991 Buick Regal, and I loved her. She had a huge Granny style steering wheel, red interior, and she was enormous. My friends and I used to bellow “iceberg ahead” whenever we had to maneuver her around obstacles. This car took me on many wonderful vacations and she even got amazing gas mileage, about 38 miles a gallon on the highway. My favorites include our trips to Yellowstone and Polson Montana as well as the numerous drives from Casper to Denver. I used to take her for scenic drives up and around Casper Mountain as well as midnight escapes to Alcova Lake. Driving down the highway I would feel as though Regina was a physical extension of my body, a tool that helped he escape to where ever I needed to go. It was a beautiful relationship with never ending possibilities, and it seemed as though we were made for each other.     

Five years of adventures and memories passed by quickly, and the entire time my boyfriend and I had Regina we promised that we would take her to the ocean. When we moved from Casper to Olympia the first thing we did was drive Regina to Ocean Shores so that she could finally drive on the beach. After the long drive she started to act funny, and I had to replace her fuel filter and spark plugs. Last September, tragedy struck when we were driving back from a Bill Bragg concert in Seattle. Some guy crashed into the back of Regina on Interstate 5. His car was totaled, but Regina, being the big girl that she was, hardly had any damage at all. She got both me and my boyfriend home safely that night, but she was never the same. A few weeks later she wouldn’t even start. I felt as though she had betrayed me after all of the years I had spent keeping her clean and taking her on exciting expeditions. 

"With its emphasis on the sexual, "sexual difference"  is in the first and last instance a difference of women from men, female from male; and even the more abstract notion of "sexual differences" resulting not from biology or socialization but from signification and discursive effects ends up being in the last instance a difference (of woman) from man-or better, the very instance of difference in man"

-Teresa de Lavretis "Technology of Gender" (1)

The aspect I found most interesting in the "Technology of Gender," is that throughout this article, Lavretis seems to emphasize that our language has a considerable impact on our perception of gender. How can we as a society change these  language barriers? Is it even a possiblity? If so, what ways can we go about creating change?

 "But now I must discuss a further problem with Althusser, insofas as a theory of gender is concerned, and that is that in his veiw, "ideology has no outside." It is a foolproof system whose effect is to erase its own traces completely, so that anyone who is "in ideology," caught in its web, believes himself to be outside of it...However, unlike Althusser's subject, who, being completelt "in" ideology, believes himself to be outside and free of it, the subject that I see emerging from current writings and debates within feminism is one that is at the same time inside and outside the ideology of gender, and conscious of being, conscious of that twofold pull, of that division, that doubled vision." (11)

Once again, Fashing the Body students are confronted with the notion of socitey being a net or a web. It seems as though Western feminists have been trying to break certain pieces of "the net" for the past 8-9 decades. Have they suceeded in escaping from certain bonds? And with this reshaping of "the net," what new bonds and connections have been created?