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

The altered body with its constructed landscape is broken, as though it were once whole, but no, it never was. The abject female body without a face, which is so easily connected to a sense of agency: "If I can see, I can know; if I can smell, I can speak." But when you look at the head, all you see is advertisements surged or eyes implanted by optometry (ah, the commodity of eyes).

To crank the handle (the phallus hung low, unaroused), pins the female body into action. On went the lights and in danced the super-women, a machine for society (exerting beauty, justice, knowledge and now, a class dignified enough to drive a BMW) onto the stage. Ah! the procession of women. (un)Surprisingly, the thought, "Wow, am I privileged to live in today's time (dangled by networks of power)," just seems not to generate an affirmation in my head.

The body, arm, face, hand, leg, hair, feet all exhibit a material object. "Now, at last," the creator said (meaning the words with which networks of power would speak at a node), taking a step back, "now we have modern woman. A Madonna, finally tolerated, functional, finally controlled. She thinks but not in reality - on the landscape with which all bodies are segmented, categorized, known! It is finished."

And that was when the woman, who sat on the pedestal lept but did not die; she hung, suspended, falling, frozen in time. Everything, as always stayed the same, yet now, gravity rushes blood to the head, compounding the female body: "It's all in our head, not reality," they say, and here they must be speaking to the direction of absolute, for the scene shifts. It is only a matter of time that the fixed image will plummet, shaking everything loose; here again, however, it's all in the faceless head.