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

Thinking about what sort of bodies are abject...

"Lakshmi before surgery to remove her 'parasitic twin' that stopped developing in the womb. A two-year-old Indian girl, born with four arms and four legs, is making a good recovery after a 27-hour operation last week. Doctors say her condition is stable and will decide later this week whether to move her from the intensive care unit."

It's also interesting that this girl had eight limbs, like some Hindu gods. While this may seem like a disability that would cause this girl a lot of hardship in her life, I wonder if she is treated with more dignity because her culture is more familiar with images of multiple limbs. I wonder if anyone thought she could be an incarnation of Lakshmi- while this little girl might really benefit from becoming "normal," and who am I to say she shouldn't get that chance, it's worth thinking about how she might have been thought of in a time before advanced surgery could transform her. It's kind of eugenic- and reminds me of sex-assignment surgery of intersex infants- isn't it worth asking -"what's wrong with being this way?"

Looking up the name Lakshmi on wikipedia, I found that it the name of a Hindu goddess:

Physically, goddess Lakshmi is described as a fair lady, with four arms, seated on a lotus, dressed in fine garments and precious jewels. Her expression is always calm and loving. The most striking feature of the iconography of Lakshmi is her persistent association with the lotus. The meaning of the lotus in relation to Shri-Lakshmi refers to purity and spiritual power. Rooted in the mud but blossoming above the water, completely uncontaminated by the mud, the lotus represents spiritual perfection and authority.

Lakshmi is the Hindu goddess of wealth, fortune, love and beauty, the lotus flower and fertility. Representations of Lakshmi (or Shri) are found in Jain and Buddhist monuments, in addition to Hindu temples. Analogous to the Greek Aphrodite and Roman Venus - who also originated from the oceans - she is generally thought of as the personification of material fortune, beauty and prosperity.

I've been wondering how discourse is being shaped in this country, especially with words like "freedom" and "democracy"  losing and aquiring meanings. This is a cool essay on the subject. I think it's really quite readable and explains rhetoric, interpretation, and hermeneutics.

"The Discourse of President George W. Bush and Osama bin Laden: A Rhetorical Analysis and Hermeneutic Interpretation"

Forum: Qualitative Social Research

http://www.qualitative-research.net/fqs-texte/3-02/3-02cronick-e.htm#g562

I’ve watched two Jean Luc Godard films this quarter with my housemate who is doing a video contract based around Godard. I’ve watched Masculin/Feminin and My Life to Live.

 One of my favorite parts of Masculin/Feminin is the fake survey questions that Jean-Pierre asks throughout, combined with actual real-time interviews about love, love-making, and politics. This reminded me of the survey questions we came up with in class, and the discussion of the form of the form. Apparently, these are the questions that Goddard wants to ask “the children of Marx and CocaCola.” The questions are personal, political, sexual, philosophical, literary, and sometimes nonsensical. The film’s characters are in the condition of being young, curious about sex, and caught between communism and capitalism, revolutionary ideals and teen pop. Godard’s thoughts on the over-the-top masculinity and femininity of American Hollywood gender roles is seen in a film-within-a-film parody.

In My Life to Life, the main character is down on her luck and seems to not want to run back to the shelter of a man who bores her but loves her. Even though she has a job at a record store, she cannot pay rent, and becomes a prostitute. The film is a critique of liberal humanist idea of being responsible for all your own actions and things that happen to you. Even though her philosophy is that she is responsible for her own life, even the smallest things show that she has no control over her life at all actually. Eventually she is shot when she is being traded for money against her will- she has become a sex slave and is unable to get out of the system she thought was about supply and demand, with her in some degree of control over events, who she sleeps with, and how much she makes. It’s all a fascade. I don’t think Goddard is suggesting that we have no agency over our lives, but is instead showing how we can become trapped in a mindset, a mode of discourse that then actually does entrap us materially. (Before she becomes a prostitute, a prostitute friend tells her that she should leave and go to the tropics, which she thinks is totally ridiculous. It seems less ridiculous than becoming a sex slave.) There is so much more to say about this movie, but one of the reasons I wanted to talk about it is because of the theme of prostitution in our readings this quarter.

Corpus

“Reclaiming a Toxic Legacy” Orion, October

http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/460

(Trying to stay rooted in materiality and material applications of theory, I’ve been reading magazines and articles in Orion, The Nation, Democracy Now, Ms. And Hold Everything Dear: Dispatches on Survival and Resistance, a newly released book by John Berger.)

 This article is about a bioremediation art project in a Pennsylvania town, left to rot in abject poverty and poisoned land by the coal industry that employed it for a century. Until this past year or so, there was no longer any town government, no parks, few jobs, and acid drainage poured from abandoned mine into the local water source. With the help of a few very dedicated designers, engineers, artists, and state employees, a hybrid bioremediation art project/ sculpture, of unprecedented scale, born of progressive social theory and conceptual art, was hatched and raised up over 10 years in the community. With tractors and backhoes as sculptural tools, this site was reshaped into a bicycle greenway (Ghost Town Rail Trail, which today attracts seventy-five thousand bicyclists a year), with limestone water filtration instead of toxic lime neutralization, and 1000 trees that are a sort of “’litmus garden,’ where the fall color of the trees would reflect the color of the acidic water as it turned from a reddish-orange, to yellow, to silver green.” Near the six key-stone shaped ponds, there is “a mosaic that illustrates what these thirty-five acres looked like at the height of the coal boom. The nine-by-fifteen-foot mosaic is modeled on a 1928 Sanborn Insurance map. It depicts with a line of brown and black tiles the coke ovens whose foundations are still visible in the wetland area beyond the mosaic.”

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.”

Social Media

The term “Social Media,” as explained by The Economist in an article about Facebook, encompasses web applications that allows individuals to create their own pages- filled with postings, photos, video, and portable applications. The theory is that these networks will create a virtual environment in which like-minded people can find one another.

Facebook: I’ll give some examples of where this social tool is leading, and present some ways for thinking about what kinds of environments these communities can be understood as being, and how the bodies which interact in them shape and are shaped by that environment. This will both parallel and contextualize Second Life, which Ella and Devin will talk about.

Facebook/MySpace/Second Life

“Facebook describes itself as “a social utility that connects you with the people around you.” It is a website directory, online community, social calender, and virtual bulletin board.Each individual has their own profile/id page, on which they select their chosen identity from given choices, and pontificate on their likes, dislikes, favorite books, movies, music, and update a one-line entries about their current state. The user can join groups of others interested in similar things, start a group to meet people with a specific common interest, post photos, videos, and music, play games, and share information with others. The profile/id page has your picture(s), sex, age (birthday), hometown, year of graduation from what college, political and religious views, what gender you are interested in dating, your current relationship status, what sort of interactions you’re looking for with others, education history, and personal interests like favorite activites, music, favorite tv shows, and so on… there is also and an ever-expanding array of what are called “applications” created by anyone (much like how anyone can create products for sale and use in the Second Life world.) A large number of them that I saw are about keeping up with sports teams, finding out what people think of you, flirting, sending virtual hugs, smiles and gifts, while others expand the identification constraints- such as one which addresses gender in particular- creating options both binary and non-binary, for sex, transition status, gender identity, gender presentation, orientation, interested in, title, and pronoun, Another of interest is the Facebook Addicts, which is a satirical quiz for those who feel that they no longer know a world outside Facebook, a potentially logical question when Internet Addiction Disorder, which renders a person incapable of taking care of their material body, is diagnosed in 2% of the world’s population.

I found this piece in this month's (Nov) Ms. magazine:

The Aphrodite Project, created and run by Norene Leddy, a Fulbright fellow, is about empowering women who do sex work, making it a safer profession. She has designed "high-heeled platform sandals with a small screen for digital images and speakers for sound, as well as an alarm and built-in GPS. The sex worker can set a timer when she feels unsafe, and if the alarm isn't deactivated by its set time the shoes will emit a high-pitched sound, while the silent GPS receiver alerts either law enforcement or sex-workers advocacy groups such as PONY in New York and Coyote in Los Angeles. Wearers can also access an online community with health resources, client email lists and a blog where they can list "problem clients."

In another article I found some statistics to put the need for such a prosthetic in context:

In a 2001 study of sex workers, 69% said they'd been isolated, confined, and/or restrained by pimps

50% suffered daily abuse or near-daily abuse

 http://www.theaphroditeproject.tv/

I've been reading some of the FABULOUS essays on JSTOR that I got typing in "cyborg communities." I highly recommend checking out this resource of criticism and insight if you want to take this idea further.

One specific article that I want to share a few ideas from is called "Thoughts on the Status of the Cyborg: On Technological Socialization and Its Link to the Religious Function of Popular Culture" by Brenda Brasher. This text talks about Frankenstein, Metropolis, Roland Barthes on Einstein as cyborg (though he didn't use the term), U.S. techno-celebratory popular culture's affects on the future of religious symbolism and continued existence, Star Trek, Blade Runner, Marx and more.

On the origin of the world cyborg:

"How has life managed to imitate art in this way? The cyborg's bridge across the fictional/real divide that enabled it to be replicated as both fiction and fact, and the study of its character to be approached both as mythology and anthropology have a fascinating history. Intriguingly, although the cyborg concept initially developed in the arts [the aesthetic idea], the term cyborg originated in the sciences. Its first appearance was in 1960 in a speculative article on the future of space travel authored by two research scientists (Clynes and Kline). Rather than developing human-friendly environments to travel through space, Clynes and Kline made the unorthodox proposal that scientists try to alter the human body so it could thrive in space. They reffered to these space-adapted humans as "cyborgs." In the sciences the term stuck. As advances in medical technologies enabled medical specialists to replace certain defective or deficient human organs and limbs with artificial or animal implants, the specialists involved referred to implant recipients as cyborgs."

This piece also discusses the ideas of Naomi Goldenberg, whose addition to the cyborg discourse is much less celebratory than Haraway's Manifesto:

I cannot see! I have an idea.

These parts, so smooth, so round, so fast, so gripping- they fit together.

These parts- designed by a master mind.

A new time, a body's movements and gestures measured in degrees of versimilitude- adherance to the clock.

The body still (in pieces) holds its own timepiece- the key to her mechanization.

Look sharp! Sit up straight and smile through your pain.

The pinwheeling of car logos enters the brain through a lefthand hollow of eyes-once spinning they consume me.

If you could turn me on and off you would. Oh the elegance and romance of machines!

_____________________________________________________________________________________-

I AM:

a phantom limb

a subservient dominated creature

an animal as tool

as tested upon in labratories

an intersex being

a hybrid monster

a female's genetalia as my laser eye

a faceless head in conjugal relationship with a turned on computer

an apparatus with four tiny feet for

the circular repetitive motions

of information penetration

a displaced hand

conceived by a wealthy town

birthed and handled by a poor nation.