#feminist spatial theory
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[“… Jensen states in the imperative that one cannot liberate masculinity from itself; one instead must destroy it. In Jensen’s words: “One response to this toxic masculinity has been to attempt to redefine what it means to be a man, to craft a kinder-and-gentler masculinity that might pose less of a threat to women and children and be more livable for men. But such a step is inadequate; our goal should not be to reshape masculinity but to eliminate it.”
The allusion to “elimination” here is extremely noteworthy. Eliminate, comes from the Latin eliminatus, meaning “to be turned out of doors” or “through a threshold”—which also connotes to put an end to something; to kill, destroy, or make somebody or something ineffective; to defeat and put a player or team out of a competition; to remove something as irrelevant or unimportant; and interestingly, last but nowhere near least, to expel waste from the body. This is curious. Part of what Jensen suggests with this rhetoric of elimination is that, in addition to surrendering the desire to reconstruct masculinity—something he claims is an inadequate response—masculinity instead needs to be categorically destroyed, removed, killed off, and, expelled as waste.
Of course, the claim here is supported by both of the teleologies and tautologies in Jensen’s logic: “I get erections from pornography. I take that to be epistemologically significant.” Jensen concludes two points about the male body and its sexual responses: first, it is involuntary in its responsiveness; and second, that such responsiveness itself is a priori evidence of abject, irresolvable culpability and guilt. Masculinity writ noncomplicitous remains unthinkable.
Such corporeal self-evidence and abjection are precisely what Judith Butler has cautioned against in her work while, at the same time, acknowledging the vitality of the unthinkable in other ways and on different terms. Although Jensen, Dworkin, and Butler each write the impossible body as the effect of heteronormative hegemonies, Butler’s construction of embodiment differs from Jensen’s. Where he details a body constructed by its overdetermined biological need to occupy and destroy femaleness as a drive toward achieving normalized manhood, for Butler, the body is the effect of normative social processes and can, in turn, “occupy the norm in myriad ways, exceed the norm, rework the norm, and expose realities to which we thought we were confined as open to transformation.”
In other words, where matter for Jensen must inscribe no possibility of excess, Butler finds rearticulation as a fundamental part of why matter must be inhabited in excess of itself and incoherently for both theory and politics.
“Bodies are not,” Butler writes, “inhabited as spatial givens. They are, in their spatiality, also underway in time: aging, altering shape, altering signification—depending upon their interactions—and the web of visual, discursive, and tactile relations that become part of their historicity, their constitutive past, present, and future.”
What emerges vis-à-vis Jensen’s rearticulation of antipornography feminism and masculinity is precisely the opposite of what Butler seeks to map. Jensen’s is a flow of affect not only grounded in mimesis, or an assumption of realism without mediation. Instead it is affect produced relationally (as a mediation between text and audience), an affect that is also heavily invested in constituting masculinity through problematic and very limited subject positions: the only feminist affect available for masculinity is self-punishment, despair, and debilitating pathos. Jensen punctuates and performs such pathos throughout his text by lamenting, “I am sad. It feels like there are few ways out” for a masculinity trapped in the guilty male body and for whom elimination is the only remedy.”]
bobby noble, from Knowing Dick: Penetration and the Pleasures of Feminist Porn’s Trans Men, from the feminist porn book: the politics of producing pleasure, edited by tristan taormino, constance henley, and celine perreñas shimizu, 2013
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From Care to Cure and Back
Under the umbrella of the LINA platform a program From Care to Cure and Back was initiated by Ana Dana Beroš in collaboration with the Association of Architects of Istria (DAI-SAI). "Treat, cure and give care again", is the idea behind this program, says Ana Dana and stress how important is to deal with experimental publishing practices in architecture.
Ana Dana Beroš at the Publishing Acts: The Publishing School Pedagogies of Care in Rijeka (2020). | Photo © Matija Kralj Štefanić
She is referring how care was and is missing in the formal education of architecture, in the form of a humanistic way of thinking and asking background questions, which primarily concern the users of buildings. With the construction of the state, public projects fell into the background. It became clear that we must learn from our own history, repair, preserve and take care together, and not build unnecessarily.
How will architecture change in the future?
ADB: It will change drastically. I ask myself all the time is it ethical to build anymore? Or should we be focusing on “the great repair” of the broken world? Or is it broken architecture, or mankind, or more than human environment? This question are arising because we were witnessing for more than half of century the capitalist modernity, with its emphasis on innovation, growth, and progress, its economic system based on consumerism and wasteful use, and profligacy, has led to a ruthless exploitation of humans and nature.
Architecture has played a huge small part in this, as the statistics on greenhouse gas emissions and construction and demolition waste prove. As a counter-strategy to capitalism’s creative destruction, we should focus on the repair, in which nurturing and maintenance that should become the key strategies for the action.
Publishing Acts I-II-III (2017-2020) | Photo © Matija Kralj Štefanić, collage Ana Dana Beroš
This is not just mine thinking, the notions of care in architecture have been part of many international exhibitions starting from the Critical Care at the Architektur Zentrum in Viena curated by Elke Krasny and Angelika Fitz, the term The Great Repair was used by Milica Topalović and her team at ETH, then are here Pedagogies of the Broken Planet. This is how I see the future.
What does your critical spatial practice include?
ADB: My critical spatial practice has components of artistic research, documentary filmmaking, curating, publishing/broadcasting, exhibition design, activism and post-disciplinary de-schooling. This is work that overlaps, diverges, converges, runs in parallel, in circles, and in many cases came before and goes beyond.
A whole multitude of practitioners and theorists have been developing work in an expanded field such as this, quite different perhaps from the one Rosalind Krauss identified in 1979. Critical spatial practice was coined by the theorist Jane Rendell in 2000s as a helpful way of describe projects located between art and architecture, that both critiqued the sites into which they intervened as well as the disciplinary procedures through which they operated.
LINA - DAI-SAI programme From Cure to Care and Back. | Photo © Ana Dana Beroš
Taking into account the wide spectrum of intellectual fields close to architecture and space - from urban anthropology to human geography - I consider connecting architecture with feminist theory crucial for the development of critical spatial practices. Gender-based analysis of architecture, its multiple forms of representation, where subjects and spaces are viewed as performatives and constructs, is aimed primarily at questioning the world around us.
Moreover, critical spatial practices are necessarily self-critical and tend to change society, in contrast to orthodox architectural practices that seek to maintain and strengthen the existing social and spatial order of inequality.
How is the LINA platform important for your development on architecture of care?
ADB: I have started Architecture of Care actually developing through the concept of Pedagogies of Care within the predecessor platform to LINA, the former Future Architecture. The Publishing School: Pedagogies of Care is an exploration on how we learn and produce knowledge collectively through emancipatory practices of care. The program builds upon the three Publishing Acts and their collective efforts in shaping unordinary publications, unlikely publics and unorthodox spatial imaginaries.
Publishing Acts, The Publishing School -Pedagogies of Care (Rijeka, 2020). | Design © Marin Nižić
Can radio become again a media for architecture (like in the time of Wright) and in which way you work with it?
ADB: Regarding the radio, as a powerful architectural tool, or to the media that architecture uses, I can agree with many who say that architecture has nowadays become transmedial. We don’t create only in the offline dimension, in concrete and brick, but in the online sphere as well. All media are allowed, or rather necessary, to attain goals of architecture. I have been involved in radio forever as been working for Croatian radio HR3, I have been developing the Radio Schools with artists during the Pedagogies of Care. As our colleagues from dpr-barcelona we claim to this cover that radio is louder than bombs that relates to their motto.
Beside radio you work is also dedicated on documentary film?
ADB: My documentary work is dedicated both to architecture and migration topics. Within the Croatian Architects’ Association I have been leading, then co-leading a documentary project Man and Space and working as a scriptwriter on long feature documentaries dedicated to the life achievement laureates.
Geotrauma - Ana Dana Beros and Matija Kralj Štefanić at the V Magazine. | Foto © Marija Gašparović
In pluriannual research on the relational reading of migrant bodies and migrant territories, conducted together with the artistic partner and cinematographer Matija Kralj Štefanić, we have been departing from nonrepresentational theories, the practices of witnessing that produce knowledge without contemplation. The experimental documentary trajectory builds on previous investigations in the Mediterranean: in reception camps (Contrada Imbriacola, Lampedusa), hotspots (Moria, Lesbos), makeshift camps (Idomeni, Greece), urbanized camps (Dheisheh, Palestine), city refugees (Mardin, Turkey), and, recently, in the Balkans, where we live.
Transmigrancy - Life of Art Magazine, 101-2017 edited by Ana Dana Beroš: Geotrauma. Photo © Matija Kralj Štefanić (design bilic mueller studio)
We refined methods of producing critical, nonrepresentational images, and of gathering and documenting evidence found in borderscapes, in order to make a transmedial and migratory archive, a border documentarism, that is in constant articulation. After the pandemic, from mute images of migrants’ residuals that speak for themselves, we have started creating a polyphony of protagonists of migrant origin and those involved in the No Border movement in a documentary series Three-Voiced: Stories on the Move, broadcast in Croatia. As a contemporary response to the rise of fascist phenomena in Europe, In the era of fetishizing borders and territorialization of bodies, it was crucial to start resonating in a new voiced register for topics that are not heard, or rather systematically not listened to in our societies.
It is just one of many attempts at confronting structures of silencing, asking: Can we, through collective vibration, transform silence into a path of newfound hope and solidarity?
How Intermundia opened an important topic of transmigration in Europe?
ADB: Back in 2014, Intermundia research project questioned alternating border-scapes of trans-European and intra-European migration. The focus was put on the Italian island of Lampedusa, metonymy for contemporary Western conditions of confinement. For me, back then it was clear that the dominant discourses on illegal migration obscure the role of international migration as a regulatory labour market tool. It was important to stress that migrants must be conceived primarily as workers, not only as immigrants. It seemed that, in the pre-pandemic times of constant mobility, involuntary territorial shifts of the precarious workers was parallel to the detention of undesired migrants.
Intermundia at the Venice Biennial in 2014. | Foto © Ana Opalić
Instead of observing Lampedusa as a consolidated institution of the waiting room, as a jailed zone in the middle of conflict, Intermundia attempted a post-human perspective in order to investigate the ambivalent state of in-betweenness. I was aware of the impossibility of cultural translation of such a condition, the understanding of the Other, so the project Intermundia, exhibited and awarded at the Architecture Biennial in Venice 2014, challenged visitors to immerse themselves into a coffin-like light and sound installation. Inducing Verfremdungseffekt, the project asked for solemnity and re-action, and not simply empathy.
I am not sure Intermundia opened the important topic of migration in Europe, but for sure it was a predecessor to the summer of migration in 2015, with the great influx of migrants, refugees and the formation of the so-called Balkan Route.
What does architecture mean to you?
ADB: I dare to say that the fundamental task architecture has is to articulate spatial thinking, thinking capable of asking questions about burning issues of our society in a different way, hence of also creating a different reality. Architecture must offer a space for understanding of the existential condition of an individual and of society, and must also construct a foundation for a life with dignity. We know who we are, and where we belong, precisely through human constructions, both material and intellectual.
Intermundia "Io sono Africanicano". | Photo © Ana Dana Beroš
Ana Dana Beroš (b. 1979) is an architect based in Zagreb, but often explores contested borderscapes of Europe and beyond. Co-founder of ARCHIsquad - Division for Architecture with Conscience and its educational program UrgentArchitecture in Croatia. Her interest is architectural theory, experimental design and publishing as spatializing practice led her to co-found Think Space (2010-2015) and Future Architecture (2016-2021) international platforms, and currently LINA (2022-2025). The LINA member DAI-SAI ongoing project From care to cure and back, under her curation, explores critical architectural heritage on the case of The Children’s Maritime Health Resort of Military Insured Persons in Krvavica, and encourages transformation of both material and immaterial environments from spaces of a common disease into places of common healing. Her project Intermundia on trans- and intra-European migration was a finalist for the Wheelwright Prize at GSD Harvard, and received a Special Mention at the XIV Venice Architecture Biennale curated by Rem Koolhaas (2014). In her pluriannual research and relational reading of migrant bodies and migrant territories, she departs from non-representational theories, the practices of “witnessing” that produce knowledge without contemplation. The fragments of the migratory archive, a border documentarism formed together with the filmmaker and cinematographer Matija Kralj Štefanić, have been made public in different forms and formats, exhibitions and publications (2016-2022) – and lately within a documentary series Three-voiced: Stories on the move (2022-).
Here You can listen to the WELTRAUM interview
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"The complexity and multi-layered nature of “topos” as a category, historically going back to antiquity, provides an opportunity to systematize the interdependencies between categorial elements in the concrete research design. The starting point was the “relationality” of topoi – i.e. the assumptions that a topos needs to be (re)constructed in relation to other topos concepts and that the category “topos” should be defined in relation to other categories. The basic principles observable in this specific context of the development and application of categories are transferable to other contexts. The paper proposes a typology differentiating vertical, horizontal, heuristic and episte"
"A decision in designing the conceptual model is that categories and categorial relations can be organized within a heuristic space. [...] The heuristic space consists of three axes: In addition to the vertical and horizontal relations, there is the diagonal relation between categories that do not belong to the same class. [...] Another important conceptual distinction of the spatial model are three different levels: The level of the textual surface refers directly to the object of investigation, e.g. a text corpus. On the opposite side lies a deep structure, which represents the level of theoretical concepts or interpretations of the realm of phenomena. In the middle or in the space in between, categories and concepts operate, building a bridge between the other two levels."
Maria Hinzmann: Categorial Relations in (Re)constructing Topoi and in (Re)modeling Topology as a Methodology: Vertical, horizontal, heuristic and epistemological interdependencies. Digital Humanities Quarterly Volume 17 Number 3 2023
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Cut zurück zur anderen Notiz über Dietmar Dath's Topologie
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Dietmar Dath - Neptunation. 2019
Über Topologien, und Netzwerke in der digitalen Kunstgeschichte:
Wenn seit Emmy Noether die Kartierungen Teil der mathematischen Forschung sind (vgl. Lee, C. (2013) Emmy Noether, Maria Goeppert Mayer, and their Cyborgian Counter-parts: Triangulating Mathematical-Theoretical Physics, Feminist Science Studies, and Feminist Science Fiction), bis hin zu Maryam Mirzakhani (in Dietmar Daths Nachruferzählung und in der Raumerzählung “Du bist mir gleich” wird das was diese Mathematik mit dem Denken macht in seiner Tragik und transformativen Kraft spürbar), dann ist das was die Netzwerk-Coder (z.B. Fan/Gao/Luo (2007) “Hierarchical classication for automatic image annotation”, Eler/Nakazaki/Paulovich/Santos/Andery/Oliveira/Neto/Minghim (2009) “Visual analysis of image collections”) und Google Arts & Culture in die digitale Kunstwissenschaft eingeführt haben, man kann es nicht anders sagen, das Gegenteil von all dem. Unhinterfragte Kategorien und unhinterfragte konzeptuelle Graphen (also sowohl Lattice Theorie, als auch Topologie ignorierend), werden ohne Binaritäten oder Äquivalente einfach als gerichtete Graphen, entweder strukturiert von den alten Ordnungen, oder, das soll dann das neue sein, als Mapping von visueller Ähnlichkeit gezeigt (vgl. die Umap Projekte von Google oder das was die Staatlichen Museen als Visualisierungs-Baustein in der neuen Version ihrer online Sammlung veröffentlicht haben). Wenn dann das Met Museum mit Microsoft und Wikimedia kooperiert, um die Kontexte durch ein Bündnis von menschlicher und künstlicher Intelligenz zu erweitern - nämlich Crowdsourcing im Tagging, und algorithmisches Automatisieren der Anwendung der Tags, dann fehlen einfach die radikalen Mathematiker*innen, die diese Technologien mit dem Implex der Museumskritik verbinden können, um ein Topos-Coding durchzuführen, das die Kraft hätte den Raum des Sammelns zu transformieren, so das nichts mehr das Gleiche bliebe. Während die heutigen Code-Künstler*innen großteils im Rausch der KI-Industrie baden, bleiben es einzelne, wie Nora Al-Badri (“any form of (techno)heritage is (data) fiction”), die zum Beispiel in Allianz mit einer marxistischen Kunsthistorikerin die Lektüre des Latent Space gegen das Sammeln wenden (Nora Al-Badri, Wendy M. K. Shaw: Babylonian Vision), und so Institutional Critique digitalisieren.
“Was Künstlerinnen und Künstler seit Erfindung der »Institutional Critique«, deren früher erster Blüte auch einige der besten Arbeiten von Broodthaers angehörten, an Interventionen in die besagten Räume getragen und dort gezündet haben, von neomarxistischer, feministischer, postkolonialer, medienkritischer, queerer Seite und aus unzähligen anderen Affekten und Gedanken, die sich eben nicht allesamt auf eine Adorno’sche »Allergie« wider das Gegebene reduzieren lassen, sondern oft auch aus einer Faszination durch dieses, einer Verstrickung in sein Wesen und Wirken geprägt war, liegt in Archiven bereit, die ausgedehnter und zugänglicher sind als je zuvor in der Bildgeschichte. Den Tauschwert dieser Spuren bestimmen allerorten die Lichtmächte. Ihr Gebrauchswert ist weithin unbestimmt. Man sollte anfangen, das zu ändern.” Dietmar Dath Sturz durch das Prisma. In: Lichtmächte. Kino – Museum – Galerie – Öffentlichkeit, 2013. S. 45 – 70
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Aledis the Blue Yorkie
Meet Aledis, a Littlest Pet Shop OC (original character) that I created on October 2019. Before I could tell information about this character, I like to say what I have done on February 2, 2024 in the morning. Initially, I was going to archive more files that I considered necessary and that were only found in a desktop computer that used to run Windows 7. Unfortunately, when I started up said desktop computer, I found out that it has been broken down sometime after the end of support of the Professional and Enterprise volume licensed versions, making most of them lost media. What a pity that I couldn't archive them before that software rot!
In compensation of what happened to the older computer, I had to write the following information of this original character from memory:
Name: Aledis
Age: More or less the same as Brown Yorkie
Species: Dog (Yorkshire Terrier)
Gender: Cisgender female
Personal gender pronoun: She/Her
Alignment: Social good
Likes: Literature (especially fiction books and poems), rationalism, science (especially physics) and art
Dislikes: Pseudoscience, fringe theories, blockchain and similar concepts, negative evaluation
Description: Aledis is a blue-furred Yorkshire Terrier that is commonly seen wearing a wreath of flower in her left ear and a green bandana in one of her forelegs. She also has a white star-shaped birthmark that is slightly hidden in her neck's fur. Namewise, Aledis' attitude is described as being intelligent, innovative, progressive, adventurous, and slightly rebellious. As a result, Aledis herself is feminist and will fight for animal rights. Despite being a ratter, Aledis can spare the lives of rodents, including mice and rats. However, she has fear of negative evaluation and a slight spatial anxiety. In some occasions, she is able to take one for the team when necessary. She is depicted as the cousin of Brown Yorkie and is rational enought to be skeptical about magic and paranormal events.
Biography: Aledis was born in Pets Plaza (a place that is found exclusively on the 2008 video game adaptation of Littlest Pet Shop) along with her two siblings. One day, Aledis was suddenly become displaced from her original dimension. To make matters worse, she discovers that the planet she is sent to, the Glade of Dreams, contains hostile beings that are more dangerous compare to that of her native parallel world. In order to deal with it, Aledis uses the survival skills her mother taught earlier. During the journey, she meets a like-minded dweller of the Glade of Dreams that she befriends. Eventually, both of them are sent to a more peaceful world and, over time, she befriends two more female nonhuman characters from different parallel universes.
If anyone asks when Aledis appeared for the first time, the earliest drawings featuring her were first posted on Rayman Pirate Community, as I have a currently inactive account and Aledis used to be the co-mascot of this account along with a Rayman OFC (original female character). As drawn in an approximately five-year-old paper, she originally looked like this in an old artstyle:
Yes, the older picture is a model sheet in the form of traditional art, and it is written in Spanish. By January 2023, I have improved this art style to the current one (such as the digital art I have made for Aledis) so that I removed these drawing quirks found on her head for consistency. Therefore, it's time to give her a chance to make a comeback.
Aledis the Blue Yorkie © Me (@piscessheepdog)
Littlest Pet Shop © Hasbro (previously owned by Kenner)
#aledis the blue yorkie#littlest pet shop#lps art#digital art#fan art#fanart#lps oc#original character#original female character#littlestpetshop#yorkshire terrier#oc original character#dog oc
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Helloww, as a fellow literature student... what's a favourite theory/critic/movement of yours?
Oh hi, what a fun question, thank you so much!!!! 🥰
I'd say I'm generally not very set on any school or theory which is most likely due to the fact that my uni isn't very keen on teaching different theories, sadly.
But I looooove anything coming out of cultural studies! So obviously feminist and gender and queer theory, but what I reeeeeaaaally love as well is spatial theory, idk if that even counts as a distinct theory tbh, but.... spaces. My beloved <3
Oh and I love theories that go a bit into sociology, like field theory, my beloved <3
As for critics, can't say I have a favorite. I mean there are the "classics" that inform lots of my views on literature, but no one I know a lot from.
As for movements!!! Honestly, anything from the 19th century on is very much my jam. I love naturalism and I love expressionism, but also lots of the smaller (sub)movements like Wiener Moderne or Dada. All in all I'm a big fan of Modernism and some of the stuff that happened like... on the brink of Modernism (depending on the definition of Modernism you wanna go by)!
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In general, men tend to have thicker tails than women in IQ distribution tables, which are the extreme values.[16] Technically speaking, men have larger standard deviations. The further away from the mean you go, the more men are at both the bottom and the top, and the more women are in the middle to upper quartile, which is closer to the mean.[17] A 2016 meta-study by Baye and Monseur, which pooled databases from the Program for International Educational Achievement and the Program for International Student Assessment, found that men fluctuate about 14% more than women.[18] However, an extended meta-study by Helen Gray and colleagues in 2019 found that regions with higher female labor force participation tended to have higher female variability, which in turn narrowed the gap between men and women.[19] Although these are all findings from meta-studies, meta-studies are not perfect, and statistical trends vary across different social contexts, and there is a risk of perpetuating gender stereotypes, so the variability hypothesis continues to stimulate debate in modern academia.
This is largely due to the fact that the extremes are found in "math"[20] and "spatial"[21] skills[22], whereas most (if not all) other intellectual abilities do not show extremes and, on average, do not show significant gender differences.[23][24][25][26] Recent research suggests that variability also exists in reading comprehension: while math and spatial are evenly represented at the top and bottom of the scale, reading comprehension is uniquely male-dominated, with a greater proportion of men at the bottom than at the top of the scale. This is called the "Greater Male Variability Hypothesis" (GMVH) in the jargon.[27][28] The difference is greatest at the bottom, where males show a greater variance, but females also show a higher proportion at the top. The standard deviation is about twice as large when standardized to a normal distribution, and various theories and hypotheses have been proposed to explain this, but none of them have been conclusively proven. In any case, it is clear that there is a statistical difference between the two. There is also a clear tendency for the variability between men and women to change depending on the social situation in each region, so there is a view that the difference between the sexes is not explained solely by biology, but is also influenced by cultural differences, differences in test subjects, or circumstances. It may be necessary to look at it from a comprehensive perspective.
In addition, modern IQ tests cannot accurately test innate intelligence, which is absolutely influenced by education. A 2017 meta-study in the Archives of Psychology confirmed that education raises IQ scores by 1-5 points per time period, or at least improves performance on IQ tests."[29]
A recent meta-study confirmed that the gender gap in variability is closing in some developed countries. While it is true that men have always been more variable in most populations, there have been a few outliers in some countries and some races where male extremes have been absent. There is also evidence to suggest that a number of social factors are driving much of the variability."[30] In conclusion, the difference in the distribution of IQs between men and women (larger standard deviations for men) is more likely to be due to cultural factors than innate differences. However, the meta-study cites research by a feminist scholar specializing in women's studies, as well as some controversial statistics, so there may be some room to jump to conclusions.
A 2002 study by Dr. Horst Hameister of the University of Ulm in Germany, published in the British scientific journal New Scientist, found that as many as 10 percent of genetic defects that can cause mental disorders are X-chromosome abnormalities, and that the X-chromosome contains a gene associated with superior intelligence. In women, the X chromosome of this gene has a 1 in 2 chance of being inactivated instead of the X chromosome with the other normal intelligence-related gene, but men, who are XY chromosomal, have only one X chromosome, so it is hypothesized that inheriting an X chromosome with a gene associated with mental disorders or high intelligence from a parent may cause the gene to be expressed, resulting in male extremes. Of course, this hypothesis is not without controversy, as the fact that the X chromosome is larger, heavier, and X-inactivated (but not completely inactivated) means that XX is potentially more likely to produce more diverse genetic combinations than XY.
There is also research that suggests that male and female sex hormones explain the intelligence gap described above. "Research has shown that testosterone promotes the development of brain regions responsible for spatial and math skills, while the female hormone estrogen develops parts of the brain associated with language skills," says Mark Brosnan, who led the study. "These same hormone secretions also appear to correlate with the length of the index and ring fingers."
In addition, psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen argues that higher prenatal testosterone levels favor the brain's ability to systemize, which is why men are more likely than women to have an aptitude and interest in math and science. However, as a side effect, they are less likely to be empathetic and verbal, and more likely to have autism. Conversely, lower prenatal testosterone levels favor the development of empathy in the brain, making women more likely to be good at communication and language than men.
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_thinkMake Week 3 Reading
This week's reading was 'Only Resist - a feminist approach to critical spatial practice' by Jane Rendell. I found this text quite hard to decipher.
This key parts I picked out from this text were:
Architecture as a profession was historically ‘masculine’ and male dominated in the early 1900s and before, due to the lack of women’s right to work.
Identity is an important aspect of the human condition and so should have the space to exist.
Representation is important when making spaces.
From the text, I picked out the 5 main qualities that characterise the feminist approach to critical space practice:
Collectivity - the importance of collaboration in the creation of something. Women's voices must be heard during the design process of anything, as women are often ignored and not considered, or designed for without being consulted.
Subjectivity - life is often thought about in binary opposites, whereas most things in life are subjective and rely on contextual clues. Historically, architecture has been a men's profession and interior design was a woman's. However, this is not the case.
Alterity - the state of being 'other' or different. Intersectionality is the combination of race, class and gender and how they overlap to create further discrimination and disadvantage. It is important to consider everyone when designing something so that no one is disadvantaged.
Performativity - the interdependent relationship between certain words and actions. Using text as a platform to create performance and action allows a deeper understanding of the text, and has been developed through feminist practices.
Materiality - an object being composed of a material and its qualities. It is important to think about where materials are sourced from, and the processes that take place for that material to be where it is today. It is also important to think about what using a particular material in a design means for the human and non-human actants of the space.
The 7 words I picked out were:
Radical
Marginalisation
Historical - to archive
Critique - to critique
Intersectionality
Theory
Contribution - to provide
The drawing that I created represents the 'normal' way of doing something, and how this conflicts with a 'new' way of doing something. This relates to the idea of being radical and having new theories.
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“Queer Phenomenology” By Sarah Ahmed
Sara Ahmed shows how phenomenology can be effectively applied to queer studies in this ground-breaking work. Ahmed explores what it means for bodies to be placed in space and time by focusing on the "orientation" component of "sexual orientation" and the "orient" in "orientalism." As people move through the world, directing their movements towards or away from people and objects, their bodies create shape. Being "orientated" refers to having a sense of security, awareness of one's location, or access to objects. What is close to the body or what can be reached depends on the orientation. According to Ahmed, a queer phenomenology demonstrates how social ties are spatially organised, how queerness disrupts and reorders these relations by deviating from the norm, and how a politics of disorientation brings additional objects into reach, even if they initially appear to be out of the ordinary.
Ahmed suggests that a queer phenomenology might investigate both the orientation of phenomenology itself as well as how the concept of orientation is informed by it. She considers the relevance of the items that show as signals of orientation—and those that do not—in early phenomenological works like Husserl's Ideas. She integrates ideas from queer studies, feminist theory, critical race theory, Marxism, and psychoanalysis with readings of phenomenological works by Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Fanon to create a queer model of orientations. Queer Phenomenology offers radical new directions for queer theory.
Phenomenology means, the study of appearance and how people interact with things in the world as they encounter us through our senses. Phenomenology is the study of these interaction, how we interact with things in their immediacy, how we think about them, reflect on them and how they become meaningful to us. Ahmend interrogates how some objects seem to draw some more, than others. Why are we oriented to some objects in some ways, as opposed to others, in other ways. Ahmed examens how phenomenology is always to some extent, queer, in that it doesn’t point in a single, neutral direction it instead picks and chooses some things to understand to grasp over others, it doesn’t assume a single linear form. Drawing upon history, being that of colonization, patriarchy, racism, all these histories influence what phenomenology is capable of recognizing, and what it is not capable of recognizing.
How can we intergrade theses different perspectives so that phenomenology is not biased because of these things. How can we expand the category of phenomenology to account for its own queerness, its own skewedness, but do it to undo the very specific skewedness that we have, to include different perspectives.
Ahmed explains how we should rethink phenomenology to such an extent, in the sense that the world is not organized to accommodate all people in a neutral way, but only reflects the interest of those who are in power. And that world then conforms to them, and they can move freely and easily for them. Because of that it is even more difficult for them to recognize that there is anything wrong at all, especially in the case of disability, with something like the height of doorknobs, which seems perfectly normal for someone able bodied of a certain height, but for people with difficulty using doorknobs, it becomes a huge barrier of someone trying to move freely though the world.
The operation of queer phenomenology is to break through the neutral mindscape to consider the possibility that some spaces, experiences and appearances aren’t so neat as to just lend themselves into our senses and can be huge hinderances, limitations for certain people and the phenomenological engagement that they will have with it is not a neutral one. Queer phenomenology is the practice then, of considering how certain spaces, certain objects, have been given the status of neutrality, of objectivity but then undoing that through the consideration of other perspectives, allows space in the world for everyone to move freely rather than conform to privilege.
Ahmed engages in a discussion with Judith Butler, whom she quotes: “Heterosexual genders form themselves through the renunciation of the possibilities of homosexuality, as a foreclosure which produces a field of heterosexual objects at the same time as it produces a domain of those whom it would be impossible to love” (Butler, 1993). Through repeated movements that bend our bodies in a specific direction, this heterosexual field is generated. This reasoning, although with a phenomenological twist, makes us think of what Butler defines as "repetitive performativity" (Butler, 1993). Ahmed illustrates how bodies take on the shape against the predetermined background over time by thinking back on events in her own family's home, such as how they sat at the dinner table and the generations' worth of family photos hanging on the wall, all of which point in the general direction of heterosexual lines.
Acting and existing in accordance with these principles shapes bodies into forms that "enable some action only insofar as they restrict the capacity for other kinds of action”. (Ahmed, 2006, p. 91). The internalised societal norms and actions orientate our bodies towards heterosexual objects, just as our act of writing causes our orientation towards the writing table and other gathered objects. This creates a field where some objects are drawn closer while other objects become non-perceptible. So how do bodies develop a queer orientation in the face of such a dominant force?
But a keen reader would see that forced heterosexuality occasionally fails to control our bodies. When bodies encounter an object that is not supposed to be there, such as another queer body or another "contingent lesbian," new lines of direction are created (p. 107). Ahmed points out that the Latin word for "contact" and contingent share a common root. A body departs the grid of heterosexual lines after being drawn by desire.
As a result, the body needs to be reoriented by assembling and drawing closer other items that are normally invisible or out of reach in the heterosexual field. In other words, for a body to change its orientation and become a lesbian, it needs to make touch with other items. Of course, there are risks associated with these options. The straightening tools and other people's perspective are always trying to bring bodies that wander offline back into the field of heterosexual objects. Ahmed's empowering voice, which addresses gay bodies at the chapter's conclusion and cautions against interpellation:
“Yes, we are hailed; we are straightened as we direct our desire as women toward women. For a lesbian queer politics, the hope is to reinhabit the moment after such hailing...we hear the hail, and even feel its force on the surface of the skin, but we do not turn around, even when those words are directed toward us. Having not turned around, who knows where we might turn. Not turning also affects what we can do. The contingency of lesbian desire makes things happen” (Ahmed, 2006, p.107).
In conclusion, Ahmed states: “The question is not so much finding a queer line but rather asking what our orientation toward queer moments of deviation will be. If the objects slip away, if its face becomes inverted, if it looks odd, strange, or out of place, what will we do?” (Ahmed, 2006, p. 179). We can perceive how our actions change our bodies and our orientation towards the things we work with thanks to queer phenomenology. We become aware of other items that may have been hidden from view during the procedure. That doesn't mean other orientations should be replaced by gay orientation.
With this awareness, we could, nevertheless, think about many paths that connect our body to various objects. We are grouped around various items, which congregate on various grounds, as stated throughout the text. Perhaps the issue is ethical: while we are disoriented, we must be aware that there is a chance to learn about ourselves, other people, and entire worlds that we were previously unable to notice. Only then can we rapidly put the unfamiliar thing out of our line of sight and regain our bearings.
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𝗙𝗟𝗘𝗔𝗕𝗔𝗚
Fleabag is a British comedy-drama series about a woman in her 30's who is navigating her life and finding love while coping with the death of her bestfriend. The protagonist's coping mechanism in the difficulty of life were expressed through thick sarcasm, sexual liberation, and humor which made the other characters think that she is obnoxious and exhausting to be with. Fleabag seems to be very distant from everyone and seems to have a thick layer of walls which makes her perceived as a difficult woman, when, in fact, she is having a hard time in directing her own life and she is genuinely longing to be loved. There are so many things to unpack in this series including its feminist narrative and its nameless main character — Fleabag. The series has very few characters and some of them are just labeled as Dad, Godmother, and The Priest or Hot Priest, which makes it very open to character interpretations while being enclosed in the mystery of not knowing who they really are. Moreover, the greatest twist of the series, which is Fleabag's routine of breaking the fourth wall, has ignited speculations all through out the series. In this blog, I will focus on the semiotics of one scene in Episode 3 from Season 2 where the Hot Priest shared his great fear on foxes.
Before we dig in this particular episode, the context is that there is already an unspoken tension between The Priest and Fleabag; Fleabag fancies the Hot Priest. In this episode, the Hot Priest and Fleabag were having drinks in the garden in a night time and they were talking about existence and religious beliefs. The Priest have said that Fleabag's meaningless existence challenges him, but he ends up getting closer to God. In the middle of their casual conversation, The Priest panicked because he kind of heard scratches behind the bush and he assumes that it is a fox. The audience did not a see a fox, but there is this sound effects that makes everyone think that there is indeed something behind the bush. The scene effectively conveyed that the Priest is frightened because of his facial expression. His wide eyes, anxious movements, and shaky hands were signifying that he is very scared of the possible presence of the fox. There is also a spatial mode that conveys his fright because he really moved away from the bush. Meanwhile, Fleabag is unbothered and amused of the situation. She was just laughing while observing the nervous movements of the Priest.
Through a verbal narrative, the Priest shared his encounters with foxes and he talked about how he think that they are always after him. One of the many encounters he had with a fox was in the middle of his sleep in a monastery. He woke up to a fox sitting underneath his window which he thinks it was trying to say to him that they are watching him and they will be having him. Fleabag said, "Lucky God got there first. You could be a fox boy by now." The Priest replied, " Well yeah. And we all know what happened to them." This entire fox scene can be perceived as a mere fear on something — a fox in literal. But if we will pay attention to the possible connotation out of these multimodal and semiotics, we can arrive in a deeper and meaningful interpretation from the Priest's character and his fear on foxes.
There are already a lot of theories in the internet as to what does the fox represents; there are theories that it signifies either God, the Priest's trauma, or sin. I do agree with the latter theory because the Priest always jumps and says, "I thought you were a fox" in occasions that he did not anticipate Fleabag's presence. In the previous paragraph, I have mentioned that the Priest admitted that Fleabag's meaningless existence challenges his faith. Fleabag unapologetically admits her behavior that are sinful for a religiously devoted person and she did not deny that she wants something to happen between them. This is a strong foundation to derive that the fox's signified meaning is a sin. The temptations of being sinful follows the Priest for a long time and he is again challenged upon meeting Fleabag.
At the end of the series, Fleabag and the Hot Priest confessed their love for each other but the Priest chose God. They literally parted ways at the end; going to opposite directions which also signifies the different paths in life that they are both taking. After the Priest went on his way, a fox appeared on the street and Fleabag directed the fox on which way the Priest went. The fox followed the way to the Priest which gives rise to another speculation that sins would still follow him.
Superficially, scenes are just scenes. It depends on the audience as to what extent would they make out of something. In this episode, the fox scene could just be another humorous scene but if we will really analyze a film, it opens to a wider scope of imagination by considering the signifiers used by the creatives and paying attention to the dialogues of the characters.
Artwork Credits: @weeean from Pinterest
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Assistant Professor Tenure-track Position in GIS, Cartography and Transformation
The University of British Columbia
Application Deadline: 2022-09-15
The Department of Geography at the University of British Columbia (Vancouver) invites applications for a tenure-track Assistant Professor position in GIS, Cartography and Transformation.
The successful candidate will use and advance theories, methods, and technologies in cartography, GIS, spatial analysis, or geographical computing to address theoretical and empirical insights from other areas of geography. We are particularly interested in applicants whose work in GIS and cartography intersect with one or more of emerging and long-term strengths in our department, including the study of climate change, climate justice, political ecology, urban geography, migration, feminist and Black geographies, political economy, Indigenous geographies, socio-spatial inequality, physical geography, health geography, and environmental sustainability.
Applicants are expected to have a record of or demonstrated potential for research excellence and an ability to initiate and maintain an outstanding e...
See the full job description on jobRxiv: https://jobrxiv.org/job/the-university-of-british-columbia-27778-assistant-professor-tenure-track-position-in-gis-cartography-and-transformation/?feed_id=18960
#ScienceJobs #hiring #research
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The Dead Ladies Club
“Ladies die in childbed. No one sings songs about them.”
The Dead Ladies Club is a term I invented** circa 2012 to describe the pantheon of undeveloped female characters in ASOIAF from the generation or so before the story began.
It is a term that carries with it inherent criticisms of ASOIAF, which this post will address, in an essay in nine parts. The first, second, and third parts of this essay define the term in detail. Subsequent sections examine how these women were written and why this aspect of ASOIAF merits criticism, exploring the pervasiveness of the dead mothers trope in fiction, the excessive use of sexual violence in writing these women, and the differences in GRRM’s portrayals of male sacrifice versus female sacrifice in the narrative.
To conclude, I assert that the manner in which these women were written undermines GRRM’s thesis, and ASOIAF -- a series I consider to be one of the greatest works of modern fantasy -- is poorer because of it.
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PART I: WHAT IS THE DEAD LADIES CLUB?
Below is a list of women I personally include in the Dead Ladies Club. This list is flexible, but this is generally who people are talking about when they’re talking about the DLC:
Lyanna Stark
Elia Martell
Ashara Dayne
Rhaella Targaryen
Joanna Lannister
Cassana Estermont
Tysha
Lyarra Stark
the Unnamed Princess of Dorne (mother to Doran, Elia, and Oberyn)
Brienne’s Unnamed Mother
Minisa Whent-Tully
Bethany Ryswell-Bolton
EDIT - The Miller’s Wife - GRRM never named her, but she was raped by Roose Bolton and she gave birth to Ramsay
I might be forgetting someone
Most of the DLC are mothers, dead before the series began. I deliberately use the word “pantheon” when describing the DLC because, like the gods of ancient mythology, these women typically loom large over the lives of our current POVs, and it is their deification that is largely the problem. The women of the Dead Ladies Club tend to be either heavily romanticized or heavily villainized by the text, either up on a pedestal or down on their knees, to paraphrase Margaret Attwood. The DLC are written by GRRM as little more than male fantasies and tired tropes, defined almost exclusively by their beauty and desirability (or lack thereof). They have no voices of their own. Too often they are nameless. They are frequently the victims of sexual violence. They are presented with few or no choices in their stories, something I consider to be a particularly egregious oversight when GRRM says it is our choices which define us.
The space in the narrative given over to their humanity and their interiority (their inner lives, their thoughts and feelings, their existence as individuals) is minimal or nonexistent, which is quite a shame in a series that is meant to celebrate our common humanity. How can I have faith in the thesis of ASOIAF, that people’s “lives have meaning, not their deaths,” when GRRM created a coterie of women whose main if not sole purpose was to die?
I restrict the Dead Ladies Club to women one or two generations back because the Lady in question must have some immediate connection to a POV character or a second-tier character. These women tend to be of immediate importance to a POV character (mothers, grandmothers, etc), or at most they’re one character removed from a POV character in the main story (AGOT - ADWD+).
Example #1: Dany (POV) --> Rhaella Targaryen
Example #2: Davos (POV) --> Stannis --> Cassana Estermont
*~*~*~*~
PART II: "NOW SAY HER NAME.”
Lyanna Stark, “beautiful, willful, and dead before her time.” We know little about Lyanna other than how much men desired her. A Helen of Troy type figure, an entire continent of men fought and died because “Rhaegar loved his Lady Lyanna”. He loved her enough to lock her in a tower, where she gave birth and died. But who was she? How did she feel about any of these events? What did she want? What were her hopes, her dreams? On these, GRRM remains silent.
Elia Martell, “kind and clever, with a gentle heart and a sweet wit.” Presented in the narrative as a dead mother, a dead sister, a deficient wife who could bare no more children, she is defined solely by her relationships with various men, with no story of her own outside of her rape and murder.
Ashara Dayne, the maiden in the tower, the mother of a stillborn daughter, the beautiful suicide, we get no details of her personality, only that she was desired by Barristan the Bold and either (or perhaps both) Brandon or Ned Stark.
Rhaella Targaryen, a Queen of the Seven Kingdoms for more than 20 years. We know that Aerys abused and raped her to conceive Daenerys. We know that she suffered many miscarriages. But what do we know about her? What did she think of Aerys’s desire to make the Dornish deserts bloom? What did she spend 20 years doing when she wasn’t being abused? How did she feel when Aerys moved the court to Casterly Rock for almost a year? We don’t have answers to any of these questions. Yandel wrote a whole history book for ASOIAF giving us lots and lots of information on the personalities and quirks and fears and desires of men like Aerys and Tywin and Rhaegar, so I know who these men are in a way that I don’t know the women in canon. I don’t think it’s reasonable that GRRM left Rhaella’s humanity virtually blank when he had all of TWOIAF to elaborate on pre-series characters, and he could have easily made a little sidebar on Queen Rhaella. We have a lot of dairies and letters and stuff about the thoughts and feelings of real medieval queens, so why didn’t Yandel (and GRRM) give us a little more about the last Targaryen queen in the Seven Kingdoms? Why didn’t we even get a picture of Rhaella in TWOIAF?
Joanna Lannister, desired by both a King and a King’s Hand and made to suffer for it, she died giving birth to Tyrion. We know there was “love between” Tywin and Joanna, but details about her are few and far between. With many of these women, the scant lines in the text about them often leave the reader asking, “well, what does that mean exactly?” What does it mean exactly that Lyanna was willful? What does it mean exactly that Rhaella was mindful of her duty? Joanna is no exception, with GRRM’s teasing yet frustratingly vague remark that Joanna “ruled” Tywin at home. Joanna is merely the roughest sketch in the text, seen through a glass darkly.
Cassana Estermont. Honestly I tried to recall a quote about Cassana and I realized that there wasn’t one. She is the drowned lover, the dead wife, the dead mother, and we know nothing else.
Tysha, a teenage girl who was saved from rapers, only to be gang-raped on Tywin Lannister’s orders. Her whereabouts become something of a talisman for Tyrion in ADWD, as if finding her will free him from his dead father’s long, black shadow, but aside from the sexual violence she suffered, we know nothing else about this lowborn girl except that she loved a boy deemed by Westerosi society to be unloveable.
For Lyarra, Minisa, Bethany, and the rest, we know little more than their names, their pregnancies, and their deaths, and for some we don’t even have names.
I often include Lynesse Hightower and Alannys Greyjoy as honorary members, even though they’re obviously not dead.
I said above that the DLC are either up on a pedestal or down on their knees. Lynesse Hightower is both, introduced to us by Jorah as a love story out of the songs, and villainized as the woman who left Jorah to be a concubine in Lys. In Jorah’s words, he hates Lynesse, almost as much as he loves her. Lynesse’s story is defined by a lot of tired tropes; she is the “Stunningly Beautiful” “Uptown Girl” / “Rich Bitch” “Distracted by the Luxury” until she realizes Jorah is “Unable to support a wife”. (All of these are explained on tv tropes if you would like to read more.) Lynesse is basically an embodiment of the gold digger trope without any depth, without any subversion, without really delving into Lynesse as a person. Even though she’s still alive, even though lots of people still alive know her and would be able to tell us about her as a person, they don’t.
Alannys Greyjoy I personally include in the Dead Ladies Club because her character boils down to a “Mother’s Madness” with little else to her, even tho, again, she’s not dead.
When I include Lynesse and Alannys, every region in GRRM’s Seven Kingdoms has at least one of the DLC. That was something that stood out to me when I was first reading - how widespread GRRM’s dead mothers and cast off women are. It’s not just one mother, it’s not just one House, it’s everywhere in GRRM’s writing.
And when I say “everywhere in GRRM’s writing,” I mean everywhere. Mothers killed off-screen (typically in childbirth) before the story begins is a trope GRRM uses throughout his career, in Fevre Dream and Dreamsongs and Armageddon Rag and in his tv scripts. It’s unimaginative and lazy, to say the least.
*~*~*~*~
PART III: WHO ARE THEY NOT?
Long dead, historical women like Visenya Targaryen are not included in the Dead Ladies Club. Why, you ask?
If you go up to the average American on the street, they’ll probably be able to tell you something about their mother, or their grandmother, or their aunt, or some other woman in their lives who is important to them, and you can get an idea about who these women were/are as people. But the average American probably won’t be able to tell you a whole lot about Martha Washington, who lived centuries ago. (If you’re not American, substitute “Martha Washington” with the name of the mother of an important political figure who lived 300 years ago. I’m American, so this is the example I’m using. Also, I can already hear the history nerds piping up - sit down, you’re distinctly above average.)
In this same fashion, the average Westerosi should (misogyny aside) usually be able to tell you something about the important women in their lives. In real life history, kings and lords and other noblemen shared or preserved information about their wives or mothers or sisters or w/e, in spite of the extremely misogynistic medieval societies they lived in.
So this isn’t “OMG a woman died, be outraged!!1!” kind of thing. This isn’t that.
I generally limit the DLC to women who have died relatively recently in Westerosi history and who are denied their humanity in a way that their male contemporaries are not.
*~*~*~*~
PART IV: WHY DOES IT MATTER?
The Dead Ladies Club are the women of the previous one or two generations that we should know more about, but we don’t. We know little more about them than that they had children and they died. I don’t know these women, except through transformative fandom. I know a lot about the pre-series male characters in the text, but canon gives me almost nothing about these women.
To copy from another post of mine on this issue, it’s like the Dead Ladies exist in GRRM’s narrative solely to be abused, raped, give birth, and die, later to have their immutable likenesses cast in stone and put up on pedestals to be idealized. The women of the Dead Ladies Club aren’t afforded the same characterization and growth as pre-series male characters.
Think about Jaime, who, while not a pre-series character, is a great example of how GRRM can use characterization to play with his readers. We start off seeing Jaime as an asshole who pushes kids out of windows, and don’t get me wrong, he’s still an asshole who pushes kids out of windows, but he’s also so much more than that. Our perception as readers shifts and we understand that Jaime is so complex and multi-layered and grey.
With dead pre-series male characters, GRRM still manages to do interesting things with their stories, and to convey their desires, and to play with reader perceptions. Rhaegar is a prime example. Readers go from Robert’s version of the story that Rhaegar was a sadistic supervillain, to the idea that whatever happened between Rhaegar and Lyanna wasn’t as simple as Robert believed, and some fans even progress further to this idea that Rhaegar was highly motivated by prophecy.
But we don’t get that kind of character development with the Dead Ladies. For example, Elia exists in the narrative to be raped and to die, and to motivate Doran’s desires for justice and revenge, a symbol of the Dornish cause, a reminder by the narrative that it is the innocents who suffer most in the game of thrones. But we don’t know who she is as a person. We don’t know what she wanted in life, how she felt, what she dreamed of.
We don’t get characterization of the DLC, we don’t get shifts in perception, we barely get anything at all when it comes to these women. GRRM does not write pre-series female characters the same way he writes pre-series male characters. These women are not given space in the narrative the same way their male contemporaries are.
Consider the Unnamed Princess of Dorne, mother to Doran, Elia, and Oberyn. She was the only female ruler of a kingdom while the Robert’s Rebellion generation was coming up, and she is also the only leader of a Great House during that time period that we don’t have a name for.
The North? Ruled by Rickard Stark. The Riverlands? Ruled by Hoster Tully. The Iron Islands? Ruled by Quellon Greyjoy. The Vale? Ruled by Jon Arryn. The Westerlands? Ruled by Tywin Lannister. The Stormlands? Steffon, and then Robert Baratheon. The Reach? Mace Tyrell. But Dorne? Just some woman with no name, oops, who the hell cares, who even cares, why bother with a name, who needs one, it’s not like names matter in ASOIAF, amirite? //sarcasm//
We didn’t even get her name in TWOIAF, even though the Unnamed Princess was mentioned there. And this lack of a name is so very limiting - it is so hard to discuss a ruler’s policy and evaluate her decisions when the ruler doesn’t even have a name.
To speak more on the namelessness of women... Tysha didn’t get a name until ACOK. Although they were named in the appendices in book 1, neither Joanna nor Rhaella were named within the story until ASOS. Ned Stark’s mother wasn’t named until the family tree in the appendix of TWOIAF. And when will the Unnamed Princess of Dorne get a name? When?
As I think about this, I cannot help but think of this quote: “She hated the namelessness of women in stories, as if they lived and died so that men could have metaphysical insights.” Too often these women exist to further the male characters, in a way that doesn’t apply to men like Rhaegar or Aerys.
I don’t think that GRRM is leaving out or delaying these names on purpose. I don’t think GRRM is doing any of this deliberately. The Dead Ladies Club, imo, is the result of indifference, not malevolence.
But these kinds of oversights like the Princess of Dorne not having a name are, in my opinion, indicative of a much larger trend -- GRRM refuses these dead women space in the narrative while affording significant space to the dead/pre-series male characters. This issue, imo, is relevant to feminist spatial theory, or the ways in which women inhabit or occupy space (or are prevented from doing so). Some feminist scholars argue that even conceptual “places” or “spaces” (like a narrative or a story) have an influence on people’s political power, culture, and social experience. Such a discussion is probably beyond the scope of this post, but basically it’s argued that women/girls are socialized to take up less space than men in their surroundings. So when GRRM refuses narrative space to pre-series women in a way that he does not do to pre-series men, I feel like he is playing into misogynistic tropes and tendencies rather than subverting them.
*~*~*~*~
PART V: THE DEATH OF THE MOTHER
Given that many of the DLC (although not all) were mothers, and that many died in childbirth, I want to examine this phenomenon in more detail, and discuss what it means for the Dead Ladies Club.
Popular culture has a tendency to prioritize fatherhood by marginalizing motherhood. (Look at Disney’s long history of dead or absent mothers, storytelling which is merely a continuation a much older fairytale tradition of the “symbolic annihilation” of the mother figure.) Audiences are socialized to view mothers as “expendable,” while fathers are “irreplaceable”:
This is achieved by not only removing the mother from the narrative and undermining her motherwork, but also by obsessively showing her death, again and again. […] The death of the mother is instead invoked repeatedly as a romantic necessity […] there appears to be a reflex in mainstream popular visual culture to kill off the mother. [x]
For me, the existence of the Dead Ladies Club is perpetuating the tendency to devalue motherhood, and unlike so much else about ASOIAF, it’s not original, it’s not subversive, and it’s not great writing.
Consider Lyarra Stark. In GRRM’s own words, when asked who Ned Stark’s mother was and how she died, he tells us laconically, “Lady Stark. She died.” We know nothing of Lyarra Stark, other than that she married her cousin Rickard, gave birth to four children, and died during or after Benjen’s birth. It’s another example of GRRM’s casual indifference toward and disregard for these women, and it’s very disappointing coming from an author who is otherwise so amazing. If GRRM can imagine a world as rich and varied as Westeros, why is it so often the case that when it comes to the female relatives of his characters, all GRRM can imagine is that they suffer and die?
Now, you might be saying, “dying in childbirth is just something that happens to women, so what’s the big deal?” Sure, women died in childbirth in the Middle Ages at an alarming rate. Let’s assume that Westerosi medicine closely approximates medieval medicine - even if we make that assumption, the rate at which these women are dying in childbirth in Westeros is inordinately high compared to the real Middle Ages, statistically speaking. But here’s the kicker: Westerosi medicine is not medieval. Westerosi medicine is better than medieval medicine. To paraphrase my friend @alamutjones, Westeros has better than medieval medicine, but worse than medieval outcomes when it comes to women. GRRM is putting his finger down on the scales here. And it’s lazy.
Childbirth, by definition, is a very gendered death. And it’s how GRRM defines these women - they gave birth, and they died, and nothing else about them matters to him. (“Lady Stark. She died.”) Sure, there’s some bits of minutia we can gather about these women if we squint. Lyanna was said to be willful, and she had some sort of relationship with Rhaegar Targaryen that the jury is still out on, but her consent was dubious at best. Joanna was happily married, and she was desired by Aerys Targaryen, and she may or may not have been raped. Rhaella was definitely raped to conceive Daenerys, who she died giving birth to.
Why are these women treated in such a gendered manner? Why did so many mothers die in childbirth in ASOIAF? Fathers don’t tend to die gendered deaths in Westeros, so why isn’t the cause of death more varied for women?
And why are so many women in ASOIAF defined by their absence, as black holes, as negative space in the narrative?
The same cannot be said of so many fathers in ASOIAF. Consider Cersei, Jaime, and Tyrion, but whose father is a godlike-figure in their lives, both before and after his death. Even dead, Tywin still rules his children’s lives.
It’s the relationship between child and father (Randyll Tarly, Selwyn Tarth, Rickard Stark, Hoster Tully, etc) that GRRM gives so much weight to relative to the mother’s relationship, with notable exceptions found in Catelyn Stark and Cersei Lannister. (Though with Cersei, I think it could be argued that GRRM isn’t subverting anything -- he’s playing into the dark side of motherhood, and the idea that mothers damage their children with their presence -- which is basically the flip side of the dead mother trope -- but this post is already a ridiculous length and I’m not gonna get into this here.)
*~*~*~*~
PART VI: THE DLC AND SEXUAL VIOLENCE
Despite his claims to historical verisimilitude, GRRM made Westeros more misogynistic than the real Middle Ages. Considering that the details of their sexual violence is the primary information we have about the DLC, why is so much sexual violence necessary?
I discuss this issue in depth in my tag for #rape culture in Westeros, but I think it deserves to be touched on here, at least briefly.
Girls like Tysha are defined by the sexual violence they experienced. We know about Tysha’s gang rape in book 1, but we don’t even learn her name until book 2. So many of the DLC are victims of sexual violence, with little or no attention given to how this violence affected them personally. More attention is given to how the sexual violence affected the men in their lives. With each new sexual harassment Joanna suffered because of Aerys, we know per TWOIAF that Tywin cracked a little more, but how did Joanna feel? We know that Rhaella had been abused to the point that it appeared that a beast had savaged her, and we know that Jaime felt extremely conflicted about this because of his Kingsguard oaths, but how did Rhaella feel, when her abuser was her brother-husband? We know more about the abuse these women suffered than we do about the women themselves. The narrative objectifies rather than humanizes the DLC.
Why did GRRM’s messianic characters have to be conceived through rape? The mother figure being raped and sacrificed for the messiah/hero is an old and tired fantasy trope, and GRRM does it not once, but two (or possibly even three) times. Really, GRRM? Really? GRRM doesn’t need to rely on raped dead mothers as part of his store-bought tragic backstory. GRRM can do better than that, and he should do better. (Further discussion in my tag for #gender in ASOIAF.)
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PART VII: MALE SACRIFICE, FEMALE SACRIFICE, AND CHOICE
Now, you might be asking, “It’s normal for male characters to sacrifice themselves, so why can’t women sacrifice themselves for the messiah? Isn’t female sacrifice subversive?”
Male sacrifice and female sacrifice are often not the same in popular culture. To boil it down - men sacrifice, while women are sacrificed.
Women dying in childbirth to give birth to the messiah isn’t the same thing as male characters making some grand last stand with guns blazing to give the Messianic Hero the chance to Do The Thing. The male characters who get to go out guns blazing choose that fate; it’s the end result of their characterization to do so. Think of Syrio Forel. He chooses to sacrifice himself to save one of our protagonists.
But women like Lyanna and Rhaella and Joanna they didn’t get a choice, were afforded no grand moment of existential victory that was the culmination of their characters; they just died. They bled out, they got sick, they were murdered -- they-just-died. There was no grand choice to sacrifice themselves in favor of saving the world, there was no option to refuse the sacrifice, there wasn’t any choice at all.
And that’s key. That’s what lies at the heart of all of GRRM’s stories: choice. As I said here,
“Choice […]. That’s the difference between good and evil, you said. Now it looks like I’m the one got to make a choice” (Fevre Dream). In GRRM’s own words, “That’s something that’s very much in my books: I believe in great characters. We’re all capable of doing great things, and of doing bad things. We have the angels and the demons inside of us, and our lives are a succession of choices.” It’s the the choices that hurt, the choices where good and evil hang in the balance – these are the choices in which “the human heart [is] in conflict with itself,” which GRRM considers to be “the only thing worth writing about”.
Men like Aerys and Rhaegar and Tywin make choices in ASOIAF; women like Rhaella don’t have any choices at all in the narrative.
Does GRRM not find the stories of the Dead Ladies Club worth writing about? Was there no moment in GRRM’s mind when Rhaella or Elia or Ashara felt conflicted in their hearts, no moment they felt their loyalties divided? How did Lynesse feel choosing concubinage? What of Tysha, who loved a Lannister boy, but was gang-raped at the hands of House Lannister? How did she feel?
It would be very different if we were told about the choices that Lyanna and Rhaella and Elia made. (Fandom often speculates about whether, for example, Lyanna chose to go with Rhaegar, but the text remains silent on this issue as of ADWD. GRRM remains silent on these women’s choices.)
It would be different if GRRM explored their hearts in conflict, but we’re not told anything about that. It would be subversive if these women actively chose to sacrifice themselves, but they didn’t.
Dany is probably being set up as a woman who actively chooses to sacrifice herself to save the world, and I think that’s subversive, a valiant and commendable effort on GRRM’s part to tackle this dichotomy between male sacrifice and female sacrifice. But I don’t think it makes up for all of these dead women sacrificed in childbirth with no choice.
*~*~*~*~
PART VIII: CONCLUSIONS
I hope this post serves as a working definition of the Dead Ladies Club, a term which, at least for me, carries a lot of criticism of the way GRRM handles these female characters. The term encompasses the voicelessness of these women, the excessive and highly gendered abuse they suffered, and their lack of characterization and agency.
GRRM calls his characters his children. I feel like these dead women -- the mothers, the wives, the sisters -- I feel like these women were GRRM’s stillborn children, with nothing left of them but a name on a birth certificate, and a lot of lost potential, and a hole where the heart once was in someone else’s story. From my earliest days on tumblr, I wanted to give voice to these voiceless women. Too often they were forgotten, and I didn’t want them to be.
Because if they were forgotten -- if all they were meant to do was die -- how could I believe in ASOIAF?
How can I believe that “men’s lives have meaning, not their deaths” if GRRM created this group of women merely to be sacrificed? Sacrificed for prophecy, or for someone else’s pain, or simply for the tragedy of it all?
How can I believe in all the things ASOIAF stands for? I know that GRRM does a great job with Sansa and Arya and Dany and all the other female POVs, and I admire him for it.
But when ASOIAF asks, “what is the life of one bastard boy against a kingdom?" What is one life worth, when measured against so much? And Davos answers, softly, “Everything” ... When ASOIAF says that ... when ASOIAF says that one life is worth everything, how can people tell me that these women don’t matter?
How can I believe in ASOIAF as a celebration of humanity, when GRRM dehumanizes and objectifies these women?
The treatment of these women undermines ASOIAF’s central thesis, and it didn’t need to be like this. GRRM is better than this. He can do better.
I want to be wrong about all this. I want GRRM to tell us in TWOW all about Lyanna’s choices, and I want to learn the name of the Unnamed Princess, and I want to know that three women weren’t raped to fulfill GRRM’s prophecy. I want GRRM to breathe life into them, because I consider him to be the best fantasy writer alive.
But I don’t know that he will do that. The best I can say is, I want to believe.
*~*~*~*~
“Ladies die in childbed. No one sings songs about them.”
But I sing of them. I do. Sing in me, Muse, and through me tell the story...
*~*~*~*~
PART IX: FOOTNOTES AND MISCELLANEOUS
**I am 90% certain that I am the person who invented the term “Dead Ladies Club”, but I am not 100% certain. It sounds like a name I would make up, but a lot of my friends who I would talk to about this on their blogs in 2011 and 2012 have long since deleted, so I can’t find the first time I used the term, and I can’t remember anymore. Some things that should not have been forgotten were lost, history became legend, legend became myth, y'all know the drill.
To give you a little more about the origins of this term, I created my sideblog @pre-gameofthrones because I wanted a place for the history of ASOIAF, but mostly I wanted a place where these women could be brought to life. During my early days in fandom, so many people around here were writing great fanfiction featuring these women, fleshing out these women’s thoughts and feelings, bringing them to life and giving them the humanity that GRRM denied them. I wasn’t very interested in transformative works before ASOIAF, but suddenly I needed a place to preserve all of these fanfics about these women. Perhaps it sounds silly, but I didn’t want these women to suffer a second “death” and to be forgotten a second time with people deleting their blogs and posts getting lost in tumblr’s terrible organization system.
Over the years, so many other people have talked about and celebrated the Dead Ladies Club: @poorshadowspaintedqueens, @cosmonauthill, @lyannas, @rhaellas, @ayllriadayne, @poorquentyn, @goodqueenaly, @arielno, @gulbaharsultan, @racefortheironthrone and so many others, but these were the people I remembered off the top of my head, and I wanted to list them here because they all have such great things to say about this, so check them out, go through their archives, ask them stuff, because they’re wonderful!
#asoiaf meta#the dead ladies club#rhaella targaryen#elia martell#lyanna stark#joanna lannister#asoiaf#feminist spatial theory#lynesse hightower#lannister thoughts#gender in asoiaf#ashara dayne#cassana estermont#tysha#the princess of dorne#the unnamed princess of dorne
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This brilliant researcher supports a theory that vindicates important Feminist Thought, but removes some hopeful biological validation of the pre-adolescent Transgender rationale! And she is totally correct, there IS No Gendered Brain! - Phroyd
You receive an invitation, emblazoned with a question: “A bouncing little ‘he’ or a pretty little ‘she’?” The question is your teaser for the “gender reveal party” to which you are being invited by an expectant mother who, at more than 20 weeks into her pregnancy, knows what you don’t: the sex of her child. After you arrive, explains cognitive neuroscientist Gina Rippon in her riveting new book, The Gendered Brain, the big reveal will be hidden within some novelty item, such as a white iced cake, and will be colour-coded. Cut the cake and you’ll see either blue or pink filling. If it is blue, it is a…
Yes, you’ve guessed it. Whatever its sex, this baby’s future is predetermined by the entrenched belief that males and females do all kinds of things differently, better or worse, because they have different brains.
A neuroscientist explains: the need for ‘empathetic citizens’ - podcast
“Hang on a minute!” chuckles Rippon, who has been interested in the human brain since childhood, “the science has moved on. We’re in the 21st century now!” Her measured delivery is at odds with the image created by her detractors, who decry her as a “neuronazi” and a “grumpy old harridan” with an “equality fetish”. For my part, I was braced for an encounter with an egghead, who would talk at me and over me. Rippon is patient, though there is an urgency in her voice as she explains how vital it is, how life-changing, that we finally unpack – and discard – the sexist stereotypes and binary coding that limit and harm us.
For Rippon, a twin, the effects of stereotyping kicked in early. Her “under-achieving” brother was sent to a boys’ academic Catholic boarding school, aged 11. “It’s difficult to say this. I was clearly academically bright. I was top in the country for the 11+.” This gave her a scholarship to a grammar school. Her parents sent her to a girls’ non-academic Catholic convent instead. The school did not teach science. Pupils were brought up to be nuns or a diplomatic wife or mother. “Psychology,” she points out, “was the nearest I could get to studying the brain. I didn’t have the A levels to do medicine. I had wanted to be a doctor.”
A PhD in physiological psychology and a focus on brain processes and schizophrenia followed. Today, the Essex-born scientist is a professor emeritus of cognitive neuroimaging at Aston University, Birmingham. Her brother is an artist. When she is not in the lab using state-of-the-art brain imaging techniques to study developmental disorders such as autism, she is out in the world, debunking the “pernicious” sex differences myth: the idea that you can “sex” a brain or that there is such a thing as a male brain and a female brain. It is a scientific argument that has gathered momentum, unchallenged, since the 18th century “when people were happy to spout off about what men and women’s brains were like – before you could even look at them. They came up with these nice ideas and metaphors that fitted the status quo and society, and gave rise to different education for men and women.”
Rippon has analysed the data on sex differences in the brain. She admits that she, like many others, initially sought out these differences. But she couldn’t find any beyond the negligible, and other research was also starting to question the very existence of such differences. For example, once any differences in brain size were accounted for, “well-known” sex differences in key structures disappeared. Which is when the penny dropped: perhaps it was time to abandon the age-old search for the differences between brains from men and brains from women. Are there any significant differences based on sex alone? The answer, she says, is no. To suggest otherwise is “neurofoolishness”.
Plasticity is now a scientific given – the brain is moulded from birth onwards until old age
“The idea of the male brain and the female brain suggests that each is a characteristically homogenous thing and that whoever has got a male brain, say, will have the same kind of aptitudes, preferences and personalities as everyone else with that ‘type’ of brain. We now know that is not the case. We are at the point where we need to say, ‘Forget the male and female brain; it’s a distraction, it’s inaccurate.’ It’s possibly harmful, too, because it’s used as a hook to say, well, there’s no point girls doing science because they haven’t got a science brain, or boys shouldn’t be emotional or should want to lead.”
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The next question was, what then is driving the differences in behaviour between girls and boys, men and women? Our “gendered world”, she says, shapes everything, from educational policy and social hierarchies to relationships, self-identity, wellbeing and mental health. If that sounds like a familiar 20th-century social conditioning argument, it is – except that it is now coupled with knowledge of the brain’s plasticity, which we have only been aware of in the past 30 years.
“It is now a scientific given,” says Rippon, “that the brain is moulded from birth onwards and continues to be moulded through to the ‘cognitive cliff’ in old age when our grey cells start disappearing. So out goes the old ‘biology is destiny’ argument: effectively, that you get the brain you are born with – yes, it gets a bit bigger and better connected but you’ve got your developmental endpoint, determined by a biological blueprint unfolding along the way. With brain plasticity, the brain is much more a function of experiences. If you learn a skill your brain will change, and it will carry on changing.” This is shown to be the case in studies of black cab drivers learning the Knowledge, for example. “The brain is waxing and waning much more than we ever realised. So if you haven’t had particular experiences – if as a girl you weren’t given Lego, you don’t have the same spatial training that other people in the world have.
If, on the other hand, you were given those spatial tasks again and again, you would get better at them. “The neural paths change; they become automatic pathways. The task really does become easier.”
Neural plasticity throws the nature/nurture polarity out of the lab window. “Nature is entangled with nature,” says Rippon. Added to this, “being part of a social cooperative group is one of the prime drives of our brain.” The brain is also predictive and forward-thinking in a way we had never previously realised. Like a satnav, it follows rules, is hungry for them. “The brain is a rule scavenger,” explains Rippon, “and it picks up its rules from the outside world. The rules will change how the brain works and how someone behaves.” The upshot of gendered rules? “The ‘gender gap’ becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.”
Rippon regularly talks in schools. She wants girls to have leading scientists as role models, and she wants all children to know that their identity, abilities, achievements and behaviour are not prescribed by their biological sex. “Gender bombardment” makes us think otherwise. Male babies dressed in blue romper suits, female ones in pink is a binary coding that belies a status quo that resists the scientific evidence. “Pinkification”, as Rippon calls it, has to go. Parents don’t always like what they hear.
The brain is a rule scavenger and it picks up its rules from the outside world
“They say, ‘I have a son and a daughter, and they are different.’ And I say, ‘I have two daughters, and they are very different.’ When you talk about male and female identity, people are very wedded to the idea that men and women are different. People like me are not sex-difference deniers,” continues Rippon. “Of course there are sex differences. Anatomically, men and women are different. The brain is a biological organ. Sex is a biological factor. But it is not the sole factor; it intersects with so many variables.”
I ask her for a comparable watershed moment in the history of scientific understanding, in order to gauge the significance of her own. “The idea of the Earth circling around the sun,” she bats back.
Letting go of age-old certainties is frightening, concedes Rippon, who is both optimistic about the future, and fearful for it. “I am concerned about what the 21st century is doing, the way it’s making gender more relevant. We need to look at what we are plunging our children’s brains into.”
Ours may be the age of the self-image, yet we aren’t ready to let the individual self emerge, unfettered by cultural expectations of one’s biological sex. That disconnect, says Rippon, is writ large, for example, in men. “It suggests there is something wrong in their self-image.” The social brain wants to fit in. The satnav recalibrates, according to expectations. “If they are being driven down a route that leads to self-harm or even suicide or violence, what is taking them there?”
On the plus side, our plastic brains are good learners. All we need to do is change the life lessons.
How gender stereotypes led brain science
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Research so far has failed to challenge deep prejudice, says Gina Rippon
Several things went wrong in the early days of sex differences and brain imaging research. With respect to sex differences, there was a frustrating backward focus on historical beliefs in stereotypes (termed “neurosexism” by psychologist Cordelia Fine). Studies were designed based on the go-to list of the “robust” differences between females and males, generated over the centuries, or the data were interpreted in terms of stereotypical female/male characteristics which may not have even been measured in the scanner. If a difference was found, it was much more likely to be published than a finding of no difference, and it would also breathlessly be hailed as an “at last the truth” moment by an enthusiastic media. Finally the evidence that women are hard-wired to be rubbish at map reading and that men can’t multi-task! So the advent of brain imaging at the end of the 20th century did not do much to advance our understanding of alleged links between sex and the brain. Here in the 21st century, are we doing any better?
One major breakthrough in recent years has been the realisation that, even in adulthood, our brains are continually being changed, not just by the education we receive, but also by the jobs we do, the hobbies we have, the sports we play. The brain of a working London taxi driver will be different from that of a trainee and from that of a retired taxi driver; we can track differences among people who play videogames or are learning origami or to play the violin. Supposing these brain-changing experiences are different for different people, or groups of people? If, for example, being male means that you have much greater experience of constructing things or manipulating complex 3D representations (such as playing with Lego), it is very likely that this will be shown in your brain. Brains reflect the lives they have lived, not just the sex of their owners.
Seeing the life-long impressions made on our plastic brains by the experiences and attitudes they encounter makes us realise that we need to take a really close look at what is going on outside our heads as well as inside. We can no longer cast the sex differences debate as nature versus nurture – we need to acknowledge that the relationship between a brain and its world is not a one-way street, but a constant two-way flow of traffic.
Once we acknowledge that our brains are plastic and mouldable, then the power of gender stereotypes becomes evident. If we could follow the brain journey of a baby girl or a baby boy, we could see that right from the moment of birth, or even before, these brains may be set on different roads. Toys, clothes, books, parents, families, teachers, schools, universities, employers, social and cultural norms – and, of course, gender stereotypes – all can signpost different directions for different brains.
Resolving arguments about differences in the brain really matters. Understanding where such differences come from is important for everyone who has a brain and everyone who has a sex or a gender of some kind. Beliefs about sex differences (even if ill-founded) inform stereotypes, which commonly provide just two labels – girl or boy, female or male – which, in turn, historically carry with them huge amounts of “contents assured” information and save us having to judge each individual on their own merits or idiosyncrasies.
With input from exciting breakthroughs in neuroscience, the neat, binary distinctiveness of these labels is being challenged – we are coming to realise that nature is inextricably entangled with nurture. What used to be thought fixed and inevitable is being shown to be plastic and flexible; the powerful biology-changing effects of our physical and our social worlds are being revealed.
The 21st century is not just challenging the old answers – it is challenging the question itself.
An extract from The Gendered Brain by Gina Rippon, published by Vintage on 28 February for £20. To buy a copy for £15 go to guardianbookshop.com
Phroyd
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Feminist Housing (Her)Stories for the Future. BERLIN, BAUHAUS and BEYOND deals with feminist approaches, discussions and practices in architecture, as well as spatial and urban planning, in which gender relations become visible as diverse asymmetrical ideas of living, relationships and professional life. Starting from the pioneers of architecture in the 1920s (focus of the first part in autumn 2019), the second part will discuss the impacts of the second women’s movement on architecture, living, housing and activism to the present in a contradictory globalized economy, presenting feminist and inclusive alternatives for the future. www.galeriefutura.de
This looks super interesting! Hopefully the events later in the year will be able to go on, including the fem*MAP BERLIN Mapping- and Research Seminar and the main symposium (alas I do not speak German)
A feminist perspective for Berlin today! Symposium
5.9.2020 // 16:00-21:00
The symposium brings together practitioners and theorists who address emancipatory projects in architecture, urban planning, and urban sociology in different ways. An interdisciplinary and cross-generational exchange should demonstrate possible answers to questions regarding a feminist and non-sexist city.
Bettina Barthel (Sozialwissenschaftlerin, TU Berlin): “There is No Outside.” – Gender Relations in Communal Living
Dr. Katarina Bonnevier (Architect SAR, founding member of the Architecture, Design and Art Collective MYCKET, Sweden): Touching Architecture or, “hand in glove”
Roberta Burghardt (Architektin, coop-disco): Architecture as Partner
Prof. Dr. Kerstin Dörhöfer (Architektin und Stadtplanerin): “Social Housing“ – Feminist Critique and Demands of the 70s and 80s
Nanni Grau (Architektin, Hütten und Paläste): Urban Biotopes – Spaces of Emancipatory Negotiation
Dr. Meike Schalk (Architektin, Professorin in Städtebau und urbaner Theorie, KTH School of Architecture Stockholm): Feminist (Working)Environments in Architecture – Historic, Contemporary, and Future Forms of Organization
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Imogen Tyler, Against Abjection: violent disgust and the maternal, 10 Feminist Theory 77 (2009)
He locked me in a dog‘s cage when I was pregnant .... He jumped me in the kitchen window and pulled a knife to my throat. ... Um you know he would do so many things – like its sort of hard. He punched me. –You know like just – just normal things that um you know like made me have an abortion.... [The violence was] more or less every day (`Toni‘ in Kaye, Stubbs and Tolmie 2003: 41)
Why not develop a certain degree of rage against the history that has written such an abject script for you? (Spivak 1990: 62).
This article is about the theoretical life of `the abject‘. It focuses on the ways in which Anglo-American and Australian1 feminist theoretical accounts of maternal bodies and identities have utilised Julia Kristeva‘s theory of abjection. Whilst the abject has proved a compelling and productive concept for feminist theory, this article cautions against the reiteration of the maternal (as) abject within theoretical writing and questions the effects of what Rosalind Krauss terms ̳the insistent spread of ―abjection‖ as an expressive mode‘ (1999:235). It contends that employing Kristeva‘s abject paradigm risks reproducing histories of violent disgust towards maternal bodies. In place of the Kristevan model of the abject, it argues for a more thoroughly social and political account of abjection. This would entail a critical shift from the current feminist preoccupation with the `transgressive potentiality` of ̳encounters with the abject‘, to a consideration of consequences of being abject within specific social locations. By asking what it might mean to be `against abjection‘, the central aim of this article is to make an intervention into feminist debates about abjection and thus clear the way for alternative understandings and applications of this important concept to emerge..
The article begins with a critical account of Kristeva‘s theory of abjection, interrogating the matricidal premise on which it is grounded. The second part of the article details the characteristic features of the genre of feminist writing that I term ̳abject criticism‘, focusing on how the abject has been taken up and developed as a way of addressing the disparagement of the maternal within particular theoretical traditions. It argues that the emphasis within this criticism on the subversive potential of `abject parody` fails to address either the troubling premises of Kristeva‘s theory or the social consequences of living as a body that is identified as maternal and abject. Drawing on reports, interview data and testimonies of battered pregnant women from an Internet chat room, the final section considers how disgust for the maternal body materialises in acts of daily violence against pregnant women. In the conclusion, this article calls on feminist theory to resist the compulsion to abject, in Kristeva‘s words ̳to vomit the mother‘ (1982: 47) and instead suggests that feminism might imagine ways of theorising maternal subjectivity that vigorously contest the dehumanising effects of abjection. Toril Moi and Iris Marion-Young have called for a re-centering of `lived bodily experience` within feminist theory (Moi 2001, Marion-Young 2005). Following Moi and Young this article deploys accounts of lived maternal abjection in order to expose the limitations of the Kristevan model.
The Kristevan Abject
In Disgust: Theory and History of a Strong Sensation, Winfred Menninghaus notes that:
In the 1980s, a new buzzword entered political and ... critical discourse... The word is `abjection,` and it represents the newest mutation in the theory of disgust. Oscillating, in its usage, between serving as a theoretical concept and precisely defying the order of concentual language altogether, the term `abjection` also commonly appears as both adjective (`abject women,` `abject art`) and adjective turned into a substantive (`the abject`) (2003: 365).
The emergence of the concept and theories of abjection within theoretical writing in the 1980s was driven by the publication of an English translation of Pouvoirs de l'horreur (1980) in 1982. Whilst Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection is a theoretically demanding book that assumes familiarity with psychoanalysis and philosophy, it has had an extraordinarily wide impact. Indeed, rarely has the publication of a single book been so influential across both an immense range of academic disciplines and within wider spheres of cultural production, such art curatorship and practice. One cannot underestimate the sheer amount of Anglophone academic scholarship which uses and cites Kristeva‘s theory of abjection. As Menninghaus notes, `an adequate account of the academic career of the abjection paradigm could easily fill a whole book in itself‘ (2003: 393). Whilst Kristeva‘s influence on Western thought is by no means limited to feminist theory and whilst the term `abject criticism` could be used to describe a diverse body of theoretical writing, my analysis focuses on a specific body of feminist theoretical writing (which I shall introduce shortly). The influence of Powers of Horror was largely a consequence of the way in which feminist theorists in the 1980s and 1990s appropriated the Kristevan abject, hailing it as an enabling concept for feminist research. Whilst many readers will be familiar with Kristeva‘s theory of abjection, its mass citation and oscillating usage requires that we return to her original account. This return to Kristeva is essential because it is Kristeva‘s premise of matricide (the structural requirement that the maternal functions as the primary abject) that is at the heart of my critique. For whilst Kristeva‘s theory of abjection is adapted and transformed within feminist applications, this fundamental premise is accepted and reproduced almost without question.
Powers of Horror is a theoretical account of the psychic origins and mechanisms of revulsion and disgust. Kristeva develops the concept of the abject to describe and account for temporal and spatial disruptions within the life of the subject and in particular those moments when the subject experiences a frightening loss of distinction between themselves and objects/others. The abject describes those forces, practices and things which are opposed to and unsettle the conscious ego, the ̳I‘. It is the zone between being and non-being, `the border of my condition as a living being` (1982: 3). Kristeva also suggests that abjection can explain the structural and political acts of inclusion/exclusion which establish the foundations of social existence. She asserts that the abject has a double presence, it is both within `us` and within ̳culture‘ and it is through both individual and group rituals of exclusion that abjection is `acted out‘. Abjection thus generates the borders of the individual and the social body. Kristeva writes of encounters with the abject: `On the edge of non-existence and hallucination of a reality that, if I acknowledge it, annihilates me. There, abject and abjection are my safe-guards. The primers of my culture`(1982: 2). As this passage suggests, for Kristeva the abject is a force which both disrupts social order and (in doing) operates as a necessary psychological ̳safe-guard, abjection...settles the subject within a socially justified illusion—[it] is a security blanket‘ (1982: 136- 7).
Through a series of evocative accounts of abject encounters, Kristeva demonstrates that abject experiences are common within our everyday lives: you might experience an abject response when the skin that forms on top of warm milk unexpectedly touches your lips, or when you see blood, vomit or a corpse. As these examples suggest, Kristeva theorises abjection in distinctly phenomenological terms, associating the abject with all that is repulsive and fascinating about bodies and, in particular, those aspects of bodily experience which unsettle singular bodily integrity: death, decay, fluids, orifices, sex, defecation, vomiting, illness, menstruation, pregnancy and childbirth. Indeed, Kristeva primarily understands experiences of abjection in terms of bodily affect, moments of physical revulsion and disgust that result in `a discharge, a convulsion, a crying out‘ (1982: 1). What fascinates Kristeva is the jouissance of abject encounters, the exhilarating fall inwards into the monstrous depths of the narcissistic self: ̳The sublime point at which the abject collapses in a burst of beauty that overwhelms us—and ―that cancels our existence‖‘ (1982: 210). For Kristeva, it is the act of writing and in particular the poetic texts of the avant-garde, which are most productive of abject encounters.2 The suggestive possibilities that arise from the ways in which Kristeva employs abjection as a methodological approach—an interpretive lens—for analysing cultural texts is central to the subsequent development of abject criticism.
In terms of the psychoanalytic cannon, Powers of Horror can be read as an attempt to challenge the increasing predominance of Jacques Lacan‘s work in the post-war period. Indeed, Kristeva‘s extensive work on the semiotic and the pre-symbolic stages of psycho-sexual development sets out to ̳correct‘ Lacanian accounts by forcing attention onto the role of the maternal in the development of subjectivity. Indeed, Kristeva‘s introduction of the abject can be read as an attempt to problematize Lacan‘s famous mirror-stage theory—a startlingly ̳mother free‘ account of the subject‘s birth into the symbolic domain. For Kristeva, the abjection of the maternal is the precondition of the narcissism of the mirror- stage. Moreover, like the mirror-stage, abjection is not a stage ̳passed through‘ but a perpetual process that plays a central role within the project of subjectivity. Just as within Lacanian ontology all subjects are fundamentally narcissistic, so in Kristeva‘s account all subjects are fundamentally `abjecting subjects`.3 Kristeva draws heavily upon her earlier account of the semiotic when she links abjection to the earliest affective relations with the maternal body (in utero and post utero). Within the model of subjectivity she proposes, the infant‘s bodily and psychic attachment to his/her maternal origins must be successfully and violently abjected in order for an independent and cogent speaking human subject to ̳be born‘. Any subsequent `abjections` must therefore be understood as repetitions that contain within an echo of this earlier cathartic event—the first and primary abject(ion)—birth and the human infant‘s separation from the maternal body/home. For Kristeva, abjection is thus always a reminder (and the irreducible remainder) of this primary repudiation of the maternal. As she notes, `abjection preserves what existed in the archaism of pre-objectal relationship, in the immemorial violence with which a body becomes separated from another body in order to be` (1982:10). This memory of maternal dependency is deeply etched within the bodily and psychic lives of each of us: This primary abjection is the ultimate secret violence at the heart of all human existence. As she writes, `[f]or man and for woman the loss of the mother is a biological and psychic necessity, the first step on the way to autonomy. Matricide is our vital necessity, the sine qua non condition of our individuation` (1989: 38). So whilst the abject becomes attached to different objects, bodies and things at different times and in different locations, Kristeva nevertheless makes clear that all abjections are re-enactments of this primary matricide, an act that haunts the subject `unflaggingly, like an inescapable boomerang‘ (1982: 1).
On a meta-theoretical level, Kristeva mobilizes the abject to enact the return of the maternal upon psychoanalysis. Indeed this focus on the role of maternal in the formation of subjectivity is one of the reasons why the abject has such a strong conceptual draw for feminist theory. However, it is crucial to note that whilst Kristeva grants the maternal a central and formative role within her theory of subjectivity—a role that not only rivals but sequentially pre-empts the Lacanian Paternal/Phallic function—she uncouples `the maternal` from any specific `maternal subjects` or from motherhood. Whilst I have employed Kristeva‘s term, `the maternal`, in my account of her theory of abjection, within her work this term has an oblique and deeply ambiguous status. Indeed, her account of the development of subjectivity is in many ways as `mother free` as Lacan‘s.
The concept of the maternal evoked in Kristeva's writing is akin to a `subtext`, the fleshy underside of the phallic symbolic, as the Australian philosopher Michelle Boulous Walker states it/she barely surfaces `to the level of critical thought‘ (1998: 113). It remains patently unclear what, if any, relationship there is between this abstract maternal and actual maternal subjects. As Boulous Walker argues `even though much of her work focuses on the maternal `it is not clear that Kristeva‘s maternal is a category that has much to do with women‘ (1998: 125). Indeed the fundamental premise of the Kristevan abject is that there is and can be no maternal subject. She argues for example, that although women undoubtedly experience pregnancy, there is no pregnant subject: ̳no one is present [...] to signify what is going on. ―It happens, but I‘m not there.‖ ―I cannot realise it, but it goes on.‖ Motherhood‘s impossible syllogism‘ (1993: 237). This claim begs the question of which (and whose) interests are served through loyal adherence to the argument that matricide and the accompanying taboo on maternal subjectivity is the ̳primary mytheme‘ of culture (Jacqueline Rose, 1993: 52). Might we question this foundational matricide, at least in this universalistic formulation?4 For, as Judith Butler states: `what Kristeva claims to discover in the prediscursive maternal body is itself a production of a given historical discourse, an effect of culture rather than its secret and primary cause‘ (1999: 103). Feminist theory needs to ascertain what the structural and conceptual limits of the Kristevan abject are and the extent to which the abject is an enabling concept for theorising maternal subjectivity.
Abject Criticism
Kristeva‘s theory of abjection has had an extraordinary influence on feminist theory. However, it is important to note that whilst Kristeva is frequently introduced in Anglo-feminist theoretical writing as a `French Feminist` she is neither French in origin nor a feminist. Not only has Kristeva never identified herself as a feminist, she has never aligned her work with any larger feminist theoretical or philosophical project, on the contrary, she has repeatedly distanced herself from feminism. As Christine Delphy argues, it is Anglo-feminist theorists who invented ―French feminism‖ (1995). The fact that Kristeva is still frequently celebrated as one of the leading feminist theorists of our time is perplexing. Whilst many philosophical and psychoanalytic concepts have been developed by feminist theorists in ways that are distinct from and even work against their original context and/or intention, rarely has a concept as influential as abjection been consistently misrecognised as feminist in origin. This raises questions about how we should interpret Kristeva‘s theory of abjection. If ―French feminism‖ is an Anglo-feminist invention then in what senses is ̳the abject‘, as it circulates within feminist theory, similarly an Anglo-feminist concept/invention? Certainly the idea that the abject is something that can be represented (or even deliberately created, as in ̳abject art‘) would be nonsensical in Kristeva‘s account, where the abject is resolutely prior to and in excess of language and meaning. However, whilst there is significant deviation from Kristeva in feminist revisions of abjection, with a few notable exceptions5, Anglo-feminists not only consistently promotes Kristeva‘s theory of abjection as `a feminist theory` but have remained peculiarly obedient to the matricidal logic of her account.
The Anglo-feminist theory that advances the abject maternal falls into two main genres: theoretical and philosophical exegesis of Kristeva‘s theory of abjection and a body of literature that applies her theory of abjection to specific areas of cultural production. I shall focus on the latter and, in particular, on the development of the abject as an interpretive approach to the analysis of popular culture, art and cinema. As abject criticism developed in the 1990s, theories of the `maternal abject` began to appear in a series of conceptual guises: `the abject mother‘ (Oliver 1993, Bousfield 2000), ̳the monstrous feminine‘ (Creed 1993, Braidotti 1994, Constable 1999, Gear 2001, Betterton 1996 and 2006, Shildrich 2002) `the monstrous womb` (Creed 1993), `the archaic mother` (Creed 1993) and ̳the female grotesque‘ (Tamblyn 1990, Yaegar 1992, Russo 1994). What characterizes these feminist mobilisations of Kristeva‘s abject maternal is a concern with theorising and identifying the maternal (and feminine) body as primary site/sight of cultural disgust. Whilst Kristeva analysed the social and cathartic function of art and literature in order to ascertain what it reveals about human psychic development per se, this criticism is motivated by more immediate socio-political questions. In particular, it seeks out instances of the abject maternal within culture in order to explore, challenge, and in some instances, ̳reclaim‘ misogynistic depictions of women as abject. What makes the `abject paradigm` particularly compelling for feminist theorists is the promise that `reading for the abject` within specific cultural domains can challenge and/or displace the disciplinary norms that frame dominant representations of gender. Indeed, what this theory shares is a political hope that ̳cultural representations of abjection‘ (Covino, 2004:4) can be read against the grain in ways that will destabilise and/or subvert misogynistic representations of women. In contradistinction to Kristeva, for whom the abject is formless, pre-symbolic and un-representable, feminist theorists thus imagine the practice of abject criticism as variously exposing, disrupting and/or transcoding the historical and cultural associations between women‘s bodies, reproduction and the abject.
One of the most influential texts of abject criticism is Creed‘s The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism and Psychoanalysis (1993). Indeed, The Monstrous-Feminine is frequently cited as evidence of the purchase of Kristeva‘s theory of abjection. This book analyses a genre which repeatedly produces maternal bodies as abject—horror film—and employs close analysis to expose the violent gendered codes of abjection. In a chapter entitled, ̳Woman as Monstrous Womb‘ Creed cites Kristeva to argue that `the womb represents the utmost in abjection‘ (1993:49). To support this claim, she offers examples from a cycle of Hollywood horror films, such as The Brood (dir., David Cronenberg 1979) in which the sight/site of horror is a massive womb on the outside of the woman‘s body, The Manitou (dir., William Girdler 1978), in which a womb `appears as a displaced tumour growing on a woman‘s neck‘ and Aliens (dir., James Cameron 1986) in which the spectator is confronted with the site of an Alien womb, externalised in the form of a deathly birth chamber of awe-inspiring proportions. Echoing Kristeva‘s claim that every encounter with the abject is a re-enactment of a primary maternal abjection, Creed‘s central thesis is that ̳every encounter with horror, in the cinema, is an encounter with the maternal body‘ (1993: 166). The narrative structure of these films, in which the maternal other is variously expelled/destroyed/punished, thus enables the audience to pleasurably and safely ̳act-out‘ abjection. Indeed, Creed suggests that horror films offer their audiences psychic relief/resolution in the form of an intense ̳abject fix‘ which temporarily sates the raging primal need to endlessly destroy the maternal other to whom we are in bondage. She writes:
The central ideological project of the popular horror film [is] purification of the abject through a ̳descent into the foundations of the symbolic construct‘. The horror film attempts to bring about a confrontation with the abject ... in order finally to eject the abject and redraw the boundaries between the human and non-human. As a modern form of defilement rite, the horror film attempts to separate out the symbolic order from all that threatens its stability, particularly the mother and all that her universe signifies. In this sense signifying horror involves a representation of, and reconciliation with, the maternal body (15).
Creed understands horror film as akin to the purification rituals described by anthropologists such Mary Douglas (1966), whose study of the social role of defilement rituals is central to Kristeva‘s account of the cathartic function of art and religion. Creed thus not only employs Kristeva‘s account but furnishes her theory of maternal abjection with new cultural evidence. Creed proposes that the primary value of this application of abject theory is that it enables ̳a more accurate picture of the fears and fantasies that dominate our cultural imaginary‘ (166). Indeed, she argues that the exposure of the monstrous-feminine at the dark heart of film, ̳art, poetry, pornography and other popular fictions‘ unveils ̳the origins of patriarchy‘ (1993: 164). Creed also suggests that the abject representations of the maternal as alien and monstrous can be redeployed to communicate ̳real‘ maternal desire.
Kristeva argues that the abject is a force which disrupts the social world in order to secure social norms, including those of gender. Any ̳transgression‘ functions to reinstate those norms: for example, by providing opportunities for punishment and the enforcement of psychic and social laws. Creed similarly acknowledges that ̳images which seek to define woman as monstrous in relation to her reproductive functions‘ ultimately work `to reinforce the phallocratic notion that female sexuality is abject‘ (151). Indeed, Creed‘s analysis reveals that the exhilarating encounters with the abject maternal proffered by horror cinema function to secure and authorise the (male) spectator through the violent punishment of the maternal other—therein lies the central pleasures of this genre. However, in a reversal of Kristeva‘s argument, Creed further suggests that mapping the pejorative associations between the maternal and the abject can offer feminism resources with which to challenge the misogyny which underlies these cultural inscriptions Menninghaus argues that this genre of abject criticism is underpinned by an affirmative logic in which what is ̳officially considered abject‘ is provocatively embraced as a ̳positive alterity‘ in order to challenge the legitimacy of discrimination (2003: 366) He quotes art theorist and curator Simon Taylor who states that: ̳I do not claim that the abject gives us access to radical exteriority, merely that its invocation, under certain historical circumstances, can be used to renegotiate social relations in a contestary fashion‘ (Taylor in Menninghaus, 200: 389). This affirmative logic, and specifically the idea that the maternal abject can be positively embraced as a means of challenging ̳the inadequacy‘ of psychoanalysis is central to Creed‘s project. However, throughout The Monstrous-Feminine it is assumed that Kristeva‘s theory of abjection poses a useful feminist challenge to psychoanalytic orthodoxy. Creed fails to critically engage with Kristeva or question her account of maternal abjection. Indeed, Creed‘s repetition and application of Kristeva‘s claims risks affirming the universalism of this deeply problematic psychoanalytic account by furnishing the theory with empirical evidence—the maternal is monstrous.
In The Female Grotesque: Risk, Excess and Modernity (1994), literary theorist Mary Russo warns that the risk of this affirmative abjection is precisely that it might reproduce rather than challenge the cultural production of women as abject. However, Russo, like Creed, Taylor and many others, is also hopeful about the political potential of abject criticism. As she notes, ` [the] extreme difficulty of producing social change does not diminish the usefulness of these symbolic models of transgression‘ (1994: 58). This argument depends upon a belief in the transformative potential of parody and Russo draws on the work of Russian philosopher and literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin to support her claim that parody can effect social change. In ̳Abject Criticism‘ (2000) Deborah Caslav Covino summarises this belief in the transgressive potential of `abject parody`. She argues that within abject criticism:
the abject woman becomes a subversive trope of female liberation: she speaks an alternative, disruptive language, immersing herself in the significances of the flesh, becoming wilfully monstrous as she defies the symbolic order (2000)
Covino defines abject criticism as `a movement that marks a departure from ̳traditional aesthetics‘ which has informed `significant feminist typologies` and has proved `a triumph for women`. This representation of the work of mapping abjection as feminist work is a recurrent theme within this genre of criticism to the extent that being for the abject is imagined as a form of political practice. As Covino writes:
A focus on shared abjection [...] allows us to continue to historicize and confront constructions of woman as objectified, mortified flesh, as well as to qualify our inspired hopes of throwing off such flesh; it allows us to read the burden of women's greater share of abjection [and] the subversive woman's desire to inhabit alternative bodies and spaces (2000).
I want to question the transformative potential of abject criticism, namely, the idea that affirming representations of abjection `can be used to renegotiate social relations in a contestary fashion‘ (Taylor in Menninghaus, 2006: 389). Not all theorists of abjection are as effusive as Covino in embracing the logic of `affirmative abjection`, nevertheless many have been persuaded by the feminist possibilities of abject criticism. The following quotation from art theorist and performance artist Joanna Frueh details the ways in which a typology of the abject maternal has taken root within feminist theory in the way Covino suggests:
Julia Kristeva‘s Powers of Horror ... has greatly influenced feminist theorizing of the body. Here the mother (-to-be) epitomizes abjectness: she enlarges, looks swollen, produces afterbirth, lactates, and shrinks; she is beyond the bounds of even normal female flesh and bleeding; she is breakdown, dissolution, ooze, and magnificent grossness. The mother is perfectly grotesque, a psychic monument to the queasy slipperiness that is the liminal reality of human embodiment (2001: 133).
Freuh‘s description highlights how abject criticism plunders and exaggerates the abject characteristics associated with maternal bodies in order to challenge the negativity of being aligned with the abject. The mother is now ̳magnificent‘ in her ̳grossness‘. However, whilst this strategic repetition and mimicry focuses on the ̳disruptive authority‘ of the `monstrous maternal‘, the feminist theorists engaged in this critical work reproduce some of the most repulsive, pornographic, obscene and violent representations of the maternal. These accounts rarely question the underlying premises of Kristeva‘s theory: Namely that this ̳mother‘ cannot exist as a subject in her own right but only as the subjects perpetual other, that ̳liminal reality of human embodiment‘. We need to consider what the risks of this strategic repetition are in terms of cementing phantasies of the maternal as necessarily abject and think about what impact this figuration of the maternal has on those subsequently interpellated as that abject. As Frueh argues, ̳the abject mother is an imaginary figure, but as such she assumes an iconic presence that women may use against themselves‘ in forms of ―intergenerational corporeal warfare‖‘ (2001: 133).
Interestingly it is not individual maternal bodies and beings per se that are most often identified as abject within feminist analysis of literature, art and film. For example, in the films cited by Creed, it is not the maternal body per se but rather the representation of dismembered reproductive body parts (and in particular the disembodied womb), which are imagined as `the scene of horror‘ (1993: 49). As queer theorist Judith Halberstam argues, it is the deconstruction of women into her messiest and most slippery parts, images of the reproductive body grotesquely unravelled, which constitute the maternal (as) monstrous (1995: 52). As Halberstam notes: ̳The female monster is a pile of remains, the leftover material ... she does not signify in her own body the power of horror‘(52). In other words, it is only `once a woman has ... been stripped of all signs of identity` that she is reduced to a shapeless, bloody abject mass (47). It is when the maternal is no longer recognisable as a body and thus as a subject that it/she becomes abject. It is a subject-less maternal that is the sight/site of collective psycho-social disgust. What is crucial about this insight is that it reveals how maternal bodies are made disgusting through violent disassembling. The maternal can only be produced as a site of horror through representational practices which figure `her` as in excess of a singular body/identity. Indeed, Creed‘s analysis of the abject maternal in horror cinema reveals that it is precisely the uncoupling of the maternal from maternal subjects that enables the production of ̳her‘ as a thing of horror— a bloody mess of signs. This analysis echoes the story of (masculine) identity acquisition narrated by Kristeva in which the maternal is the ̳constitutive outside‘ or as Butler puts it ̳the unspeakable, the unviable, the nonnarrativizable that secures ...the very borders of materiality‘ (1993: 188). What these theoretical and cultural fantasies of `fleshy maternal horror` depend on is a radical dismembering and/or disavowal of maternal subjectivity.
As Butler argues, the limits set by theory are problematic ̳not only because there is always a question of what constitutes the authority of the one who writes the limits but because the setting of those limits is linked to the contingent regulation of what will and will not qualify as a discursively intelligible way of being‘ (1993: 190). Since the premise of the Kristevan abject is that the maternal cannot qualify as ̳intelligible being‘, it is a strikingly affirmative translation of this concept that is cited, circulated and reproduced within these feminist theoretical accounts. Kristeva‘s theory of abjection is founded on the premise that the maternal cannot be, cannot speak and cannot take up a subject position which raises a series of unresolved questions for Anglo-feminist adoption of an abject paradigm to theorise maternal subjectivity. Moreover, as I shall argue, the myopic focus within feminist abject criticism on the transformative potential of excavating `the cultural abject`, particularly those accounts which celebrate the abject maternal as marking a feminist challenge, risk marginalising lived experiences of being the thing deemed abject. Furthermore, representations of maternal abjection are not simply a ritual playing out of the violent unconscious phantasies that underpin Patriarchal society, but are constitutive of the desire for maternal abjection. There is a failure to understand theory and criticism as productive fields within which the abject maternal is not simply described but more fundamentally reconstituted as a foundational norm of psychic and social life. As Butler notes, ̳the production of the unsymbolisable, the unspeakable, the illegible is ...always a strategy of social abjection‘ (1993: 190). Abject criticism risks becoming another site in which a narrative of acceptable violence is endlessly rehearsed until we find ourselves not only colluding with, but more fundamentally believing in, our own abjection.
Donna Haraway notes that, ̳Overwhelmingly theory is bodily, and theory is literal. Theory is not about matters distant from the lived body; quite the opposite. Theory is anything but disembodied‘ (1992: 299). Perhaps this is why Kristeva‘s sentence `Matricide is our vital necessity, the sine-qua-non condition of our individuation‘ takes my breath away each time I read it. Does this theory describe a murderous hatred for the mother that we are compelled to live? In repeatedly insisting that the maternal is pre-symbolic, Kristeva‘s theory of abjection not only reiterates the taboo on maternal subjectivity but also legitimates the abjection of maternal subjects. Kristeva does not enable a new ethics of the maternal to emerge as some feminist philosopher have argued (see, for example, Harrington 1998: 139). On the contrary, her speechless maternal disavows the very possibility of vocalising lived accounts of maternity. The abjection of the maternal is not just a theoretical fiction, but speaks to living histories of violence towards maternal bodies.
Abjection, as any dictionary definition states, not only describes the action of casting down, but the condition of one cast down, that is the condition of being abject. Abjection is not just a psychic process but a social experience. Disgust reactions, hate speech, acts of physical violence and the dehumanising effects of law are integral to processes of abjection. Indeed, abjection should be understood as a concept that describes the violent exclusionary forces operating within modern states: forces that strip people of their human dignity and reproduce them as dehumanised waste, the dregs and refuse of social life (Krauss 1999: 236). The problem, as Butler states, is to imagine how `such socially saturated domains of exclusion be recast from their status as ―constitutive‖ to beings who might be said to matter (1993: 189). The final section of this article thus shifts its focus from the theoretical violence of abject criticism to a consideration of lived accounts of maternal abjection.
Lived Abjection
Pregnancy has traditionally been understood as a reified and protected time in women‘s lives but new research that reveals the scale of intimate partner male violence against pregnant women has exposed this to be an idealised myth. There have been over one hundred studies focused on intimate partner violence in pregnancy in the last decade (see for Jana Jasinski Jana 2004 and`Rebecca O‘Reilly 2007 for overview of literature). These vary considerably in terms of the size of the sample and methodology employed, but there is consistency in terms of the percentage of pregnant women reporting violence in a range of different national studies. Whilst interpretations of statistical data, methodologies and the implications of this research are inevitably contested and debated, the fact that battery during pregnancy is widespread is uncontested. Researchers in the United States have estimated that 332,000 pregnant women are battered each year by their male partners (in the context of 4 million life births each year) (de Bruyn 2003). A questionnaire survey involving 500 women in the North of England found that the prevalence of violence against pregnant women was 17% (with 10% of this group experiencing forced sexual activity as part of their battery) (Johnson, Haider, Ellis, Hay, Lindow 2003). Recent statistical research has revealed that pregnant women are more likely to be murdered than to die of any other
cause (Decker, Martin and Moracco 2004: 500 and Chang, Berg, Saltzman and Herndon 2005) and analysis of mortality figures in the United States and the United Kingdom has exposed that up to 25% of deaths among pregnant women are a result of partner homicide (Campell, Garćia- Moreno, Sharps 2004: 776). Since the first research findings were published in the 1990s, attitudes have shifted to the extent that is now widely acknowledged that is more common than conditions for which women are routinely screened (such as pregnancy induced hypertension and diabetes). As violence against pregnant women has emerged as serious public health issue it has begun to impact on governmental health policies. The World Health Organization now includes guidelines on tackling intimate partner violence within its `Making Pregnancy Safer` initiative. Many European and North American medical organizations now advocate routinely asking pregnant women about abuse, although debate continues about the most useful strategies for implementing screening.
Whilst pre-existing violence within an intimate relationship is a strong predictor of battery during pregnancy, Michele Decker, Sandra Martin, and Kathryn Moracco argue that pregnancy is a trigger for new instances of violence (2004: 498). Indeed, their research suggests that 30% of women experience their first physical assault by a male partner when they become pregnant for the first time and that when intimate partner violence already exists in a relationship the ferocity of the violence intensifies. As they state, `partner violence that occurs during pregnancy may be a marker of increased risk of severe and potentially lethal danger for some women‘ (2004: 500). Physical assaults that begin or escalate during pregnancy often have a different pattern of violence, with pregnant women more likely to suffer multiple sites of bodily injury. Maria de Bruyn supports this analysis arguing that `instead of receiving strikes against the head [pregnant women] suffer beatings directed towards the abdomen and chest‘ and in one North American study she cites, `pregnant women were hit in the abdomen twice as often as non-pregnant women‘ (2003: 26). De Bruyn (2003) quotes an Australian woman, who states:
I was subjected to constant physical abuse throughout the marriage. But pregnancy was the worst time for me. I had five miscarriages. Every time I fell pregnant he would target the belly whenever he gets violent (2003: 25).
A British report quotes `Mary` a 36 year old women `whose partner would sit on her belly saying he was trying to squeeze the baby out after he had hit and punched her`( Moorhead, 2004).
This suggests that the sight and meaning of the pregnant body invokes a specific and targeted physically violent response. This claim is supported by many midwives and healthcare workers. As Sandra Horley, chief executive of Refuge, a British charitable organisation which provides support for women who have endured violence, notes:
I've seen some appalling cases, including a woman six-and-a-half- months' pregnant who had been kicked so repeatedly in the abdomen that her baby was stillborn. Another woman had a baby who was born with three fractured limbs. It's often the breasts and abdominal area that the men go for when women are pregnant - they're the focus of their anger.
Under what social and cultural conditions does the pregnant body become a trigger for disgust, aggression, hatred and violence? Can violence that is targeted against the visibly pregnant body, be understood as a materialisation of the cultural disgust for the maternal body explored within abject criticism? Reviewing current research, US based medical anthropologist de Bruyn offers a number of speculative reasons why physical and sexual abuse might intensify or be triggered during pregnancy. She suggests, for example, that the battery of pregnant women by a male partner may be a way of forcing miscarriage for economic reasons, i.e. not wanting to bear the cost and responsibility of a child. Certainly, as Gillian Mezley and Susan Bewley (1997) document, violence against pregnant women is associated with increased rates of miscarriage, premature birth, low birth weight, fetal injury (including broken bones and stab wounds) and fetal death. However, research on domestic violence has demonstrated that contrary to popular belief, intimate partner violence is not bound by economic class: educated, successful and wealthy men batter too. De Bruyn further suggests that male partners may feel jealous `when the pregnant woman is perceived to devote less attention to his needs and wishes` (2003: 22). In other words, the intensified nature of male violence against their pregnant partners may be a consequence of a desire to destroy the presence of the other, the child or imagined child who is occupying the space and body of the woman that `belongs to him‘. This hypothesis suggests that the pregnancy inspires rage because men feel left out, are jealous or suffer from ̳frustrated sexual desire‘ when their partners are pregnant. What these speculative explanations for male violence against pregnant women ignore are the violent histories of disgust which frame the meaning of the maternal body. If abject criticism fails to consider the implications of lived experiences of abjection, medical and health research doesn‘t engage with psycho-social literature on the maternal, and the ways in which the reiteration of maternal as abject structures ways of seeing, feeling and acting towards maternal bodies. As one reports notes, ̳although cultural attitudes about pregnancy would seem to be relevant to abuse during pregnancy, they have not been measured‘ (Campbell, Garćia-Moreno, Sharps, 2004: 776).The accumulation of sociological data and testimonial accounts of violence targeted towards pregnant women is of crucial significance for feminist theoretical research in the area of maternal subjectivity. Indeed, this previously hidden aspect of pregnant experience compels feminist theory to think about how histories of violent disgust for the maternal body, the disgust that abject criticism has been re- describing since the publication of Powers of Horror in the 1980s, materialises in women‘s lived experiences. Abjection has effects on real bodies; abjection hurts.
The violent male partner attempts to exert his control over the pregnant subject through acts of repeated verbal and physical abuse, which dehumanise his victim. Australian researchers, Miranda Kaye, Julie Stubbs and Julia Tolmie (2003) detail some of the ways in which the psychological violence, which always accompanies brute physical violence, manifests itself. They argue that psychological violence is always geared towards control mechanisms which aim to limit women‘s autonomy such as `isolating women within their homes and removing other forms of support‘ (2003:43). Being called derogatory names, being told over and again that you are worthless, being subjected to racist or sexist abuse along with death threats and the ever present threat of physical violence, erodes a subject‘s fundamental sense of who they are. In their Australian ethnography, Kaye, Stubbs, Tolmie explore the material forms of control which diminished women‘s agency. These included having to hand over wages: not being given any or enough money; being told what to wear; not being allowed to have an own opinion or finish a sentence; being locked in the bedroom at night; having to ask permission to watch a television show; all the windows in the house being bolted shut and sleep deprivation‘ (2003: 42-44). All of these acts constitute attempts to disable women of their ability to act as independent subjects. One interviewee noted that as time passes, identity is effaced through these control mechanisms so that: `you don‘t know who you are. You just follow ... the order so you just follow what he say because ... you don‘t think you are a person or human being‘ (2003: 44). Battered women‘s idea of themselves as individuals is gradually obliterated, they are literally pushed `toward the place where meaning collapses‘ (Kristeva 1982: 2). One battered woman in Kaye, Stubbs and Tolmie‘s ethnography notes, `you reach to the point [at] which you lose completely your identity. You don‘t know who you are.[...] you don‘t think you are a person or human being‘ (2003: 41). For these women, repeatedly dehumanised and objectified, violence is experienced as banal. Indeed, what is truly horrific about these testimonies is that violence is ̳every day‘. This is being on the edge of non-existence. This is maternal abjection lived.
Kristeva argues that the abject emerges into sight when ̳man strays on the territories of the animal‘ (1982: 12). This phrase is telling, for Kristeva thinks and writes abjection from the perspective of `the man who strays‘ rather than the perspective of the subject who finds themselves interpellated as abject animal (less than human). Nevertheless, it is clear that if a person and their bodily appearance is designated the abject thing, that `magnet of fascination and repulsion‘ they are subject to dehumanising violence (Kristeva 1995:118). The figuring of abject beings as animalistic (less than human) is part of the process of dehumanisation that routinely takes place in experiences of being abjected. The theme of being (made) animal repeatedly surfaces in women‘s accounts of intimate partner violence in pregnancy. In the quotation from Kaye, Stubbs, Tolmie‘s ethnography, with which I began this article, ̳Toni‘ recalls,:
He locked me in a dog‘s cage when I was pregnant .... He jumped me in the kitchen window and pulled a knife to my throat. ... Um you know he would do so many things—like its sort of hard. He punched me.—You know like just—just normal things that um you know like made me have an abortion.... [The violence was] more or less every day (2003: 41).
These `normal things`, the vicious punch of the real, the brutal and sadistic slap, slap, thump, shuts ̳Toni‘ up, turns her into an animal, a dog, a maternal aborting Thing.
What is at stake in acts of violence against pregnant women is control over the maternal body and control of sex and reproduction. The powerful story of abjection that Kristeva (and feminist theorists of abjection) narrates is one in which we are ̳born‘ through a violent struggle over identity, a struggle which takes place over and through the bloodied and bruised maternal body. Kristeva‘s account of abjection can be usefully drawn upon in theorising the psycho-social mechanisms at play in lived accounts of maternal abjection. Her work is potentially useful, for example, in developing better understandings of why the visibly pregnant body is a trigger for violence. However, the deeply engrained psycho-social association between the maternal and the abject is an historical condition and not an unchangeable fact. Maternal abjection, in theory and practice, is that which feminism needs to articulate itself against
Whilst feminist theorists have demonstrated that war is waged over the reproductive body, the violence committed against pregnant women has remained largely unspoken within feminist accounts of reproductive politics. The social taboos surrounding intimate partner violence make it extremely difficult for pregnant women to speak about being battered, tortured and controlled. Given that pregnant bodies are so routinely monitored by the medical gaze, it is perhaps surprising that widespread violence has remained so invisible. However, as Brewer and Mezey note:
Changes in midwifery and obstetric practice designed to `empower` women and demedicalise childbirth may have reduced the possibility of [speaking about violence]. The traditional refuge of woman-only space in antenatal wards and labour wards is disappearing. The milieu of the antenatal clinic is not particularly conducive to facilitating disclosure of domestic violence, which women find difficult, shameful, and risky. Men often accompany their partners to clinics and in labour, and hand held notes mean that confidential documentation is no longer in the safe keeping of the hospital (1997: 1295).
Ironically the opening up of ante-natal spaces, such as clinics and hospitals, to men has potentially limited women‘s ability to speak out, whilst the marks of physical and psychological violence can be hard to detect: women disguise bruised skin and men often deliberately batter women on parts of their body that others will not see. If maternal subjectivity is impossible to conceive, intimate partner violence against maternal bodies was, until recently, unheeded and unheard.
Communities of the abject
One of the few places in which women are able to share their experiences of violence without fear of retaliation is in Internet chat rooms. The Internet (and the imaginary promise of anonymity if offers) has the potential to be a safe(r) space for battered women to speak out. On the Internet site, BabyCenter.com, I found a discussion thread in which pregnant women discussed the violence they where enduring at the hands of their partners. BabyCenter.com is a website which offers ̳expert‘ information and advice to pregnant women. It is a magazine style site that hosts reviews of consumer goods and is sponsored by links to on-line shops. However, behind this bright shopping façade, BabyCenter offers another perspective that penetrates the happy familial myths about maternity. Whilst the abused women who speak out in chat rooms must learn to ̳cover their tracks‘ so their partners cannot trace their web histories, they have created on-line communities, founded in their shared abjection.6 These women in chat rooms form `communities of the abject` who, through the act of sharing and speaking their abjection, refuse their constitution as `abject object`.
In a BabyCenter chat room pregnant women post accounts of the daily violence they are enduring at the hands of their partners. One woman calling herself ̳worried mom‘ writes in a breezy chatty tone, which belies the content of her post:
Hi. I have a question. Since I found out I was pregnant, my husband and I haven't been getting along well. We used to call each other names, but I stopped. He still calls me stupid and a bad parent and he pushes me sometimes. The other day he slapped me across the face. I yelled at him before he did it. He sometimes pushes me so hard that I fall. Is that harmful to my baby? I'm a little over 7 months pregnant. What should I do? Please email me.7 (Anonymous post 2004)
Women on this discussion site respond to each others with messages of recognition, solidarity and support: ̳Amanda‘ writes, ̳I'm almost eight months pregnant, and I left my husband two months ago. He was abusive emotionally before pregnancy, and became sexually and physically abusive after I became pregnant ... life is much better without the constant fear of your husband‘. Some of the women write about approaching the police, telling friends, family or neighbours, but others warn of their experiences of failure when they sought outside intervention. As one woman notes, `[t]he police where no help, they told me that since I hit him first I would be the one to go to jail`. However, very little of the discussion on this site focuses on the practical means by which women can leave their violent partners. Perhaps because, as Angela Moe and Myrtle Bell argue, in their article `Abject Economics‘(2004) battered women are often caught in a vicious cycle of economic dependence on their abusers. Repeated physical and psychological violence undermines women‘s ability to work and maintain steady employment and this cycle of dependency is even more acute when the women is pregnant or a mother. One woman in the Babycenter chat room supports this in her description of the poverty she endured when she left her abusive husband. Moreover, research has consistently shown that women often endanger their lives when they attempt to leave the men battering them. Many simply cannot imagine leaving and express a deep ambivalence about their partners, writing about them with love and tenderness in the same sentences as they depict gut-wrenching scenes of psychological torture and physical violence. Reading through these posts, I felt that there central purpose was witness and visibility, a desire to reclaim a semblance of agency through sharing their abjection.
The Babycenter chat room operates as a means for women to acknowledge (to themselves and others) their shame at what is happening to them. More complexly, it is a means through which women attempt to re-humanise themselves, to identify with themselves as the subjects of violence, rather than the abject Thing that violence produces them as. In the following post, we can see how the writer begins, hesitantly, to acknowledge, through imagining the previous poster reading her words, `that something has to be done‘.
I just want to share my thoughts w you because reading what you said made me feel not so alone. I love my husband very much too and he started to become more physical ever since I became pregnant. ...He has pulled my hair, kicked, and pushed me. He has grabbed my arm so tightly that his thumb print was left on my arm. ...I know what others might think reading this. I am embarrassed to even talk about it. It makes me so sad and disappointed that I dont have the relationship that I thought I did. I dont think what he does is okay but I havent done anything to make my situation better. I was thinking getting a therapist but I dont even know myself (Anonymous post 2004).
The words, ̳I don‘t even know myself‘ speak so much of being abject. In order for injury to be recognised, these women need to be recognised as subjects by another- as an ̳I‘ that has experienced this violence. However, whilst these posts do enable these women‘s to narrate lived accounts of their experience, this is a tiny fragment of `anonymous visibility` hidden in the margins of an website and produced by subjects whose very sense of being is fragile in the extreme. These posts are weighted down with guilt, shame and blame, and express dazed and battered identities. ̳He is battering my soul, my self-esteem, my identity‘ writes one woman. In the most disturbing post in the chat room, one woman signs her message with the words ̳crying for help‘:
While I was pregnant he would hit me and throw me around. I don‘t know what to do, he does it even worse now. ...He kicked me with steel toe boots on and now I have a bruise the size of a softball, not to mention the rug burns on my elbows and the jaw pain and my sprained ankle. I don‘t know what to do. It just gets worse. The night before I had my daughter he threw an apple at me and it hit my belly. It left a bruise that you couldn‘t see but I could feel. The next morning I woke up with broken water. I don‘t know what to do anymore. When he gets mad he tells me he wants to kill me. He covers my mouth and nose so I can‘t breath. I am afraid I won‘t be around much longer. I am afraid one day he will go that far. And then say it was an accident. But I know it‘s not an accident. I just want someone to know before it does happen and no one knows who did it (Anonymous post 2004).
This post and its repetition of despair is heart breaking to read: `I don‘t know what to do‘, `I don‘t know what to do anymore‘, `I am afraid I won‘t be around much longer‘. What sort of recognition can a reader of these posts possibly grant to this anonymous woman and her plea, ̳I just want someone to know before it does happen and no one knows who did it‘? These women express what it feels like to be cast down, humiliated, debased, pushed to the point where you are no longer know yourself`. What these posts communicate is experiences of being made abject— experiences which, in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds, they manage to communicate.
Social Abjection
For Kristeva, abjection does not signify living an unbearable life on the margins of social visibility, but something more akin to the writer‘s quest, the holy grail of the avant-garde. In the after-word to Powers of Horror she muses:
Does one write under any other condition than being possessed by abjection, in an indefinite catharsis? Leaving aside adherents of a feminism that is jealous of conserving its power — the last of the power-seeking ideologies — none will accuse of being a usurper the artist who, even if he does not know it is an undoer of narcissism and of all imaginary identity as well, sexual included (1982: 208).
These oblique comments are revealing of Kristeva‘s politics. Only the male artist `possessed by abjection` can communicate the abject maternal at the limits of identity. The experience of abjection enjoyed in the work of these writers is unavailable to women writers and artists due to the different structure of their subjectivity, in particular their incomplete separation from their mothers, an unwillingness perhaps to participate in matricide (see Kristeva, 1989). Whilst the implications of this argument, and the contradictions it exposes, are beyond the reach of this article, it is important to note that here, in the afterword to Powers of Horror, Kristeva makes clear she has nothing but contempt for a feminism which would question maternal abjection.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak asks: `What are the cultural politics of application of the diagnostic taxonomy of the abject?`(1992: 55). Following Spivak‘s cue, this article has focused on the sexual politics of Kristeva‘s theory of abjection — it has questioned the constitutive matricide in which theories and accounts of abjection are grounded, explored what it means to diagnose something or someone as abject and considered what the effects of such a diagnosis might be. It has examined the feminist strategy of invoking a powerful tradition of disgust for the maternal body and questioned whether this `affirmative abjection` can transform abject representational codes. It has argued that whilst feminist abject criticism has proved useful in mapping the ways in which abjection is communicated and transmitted, it has largely failed to consider the effects of abjection on embodied subjects and in this respect has been complicit with psychoanalytic and philosophical accounts which repeatedly disavow lived accounts of maternal subjectivity. For whilst Kristeva‘s account of abjection is compelling (at an explanatory level) what is completely absent from her account is any discussion of what it might mean to be that maternal abject, to be the one who repeatedly finds themselves the object of the others violent objectifying disgust. As I have suggested, Kristeva‘s account is dependent upon her ambiguous use of the term maternal. This article has troubled the distinction between the maternal as abstract concept and the maternal as lived and embodied by insisting that we take theory at its word. The maternal abject (and the matricide it assumes) is not a pre-historic, unchangeable fact but is a disciplinary norm which has been established through processes of reiteration and has taken on the appearance of a universal truth. However, the repeated framing of the maternal as abject shapes the appearance and experience of maternal bodies in the social world. Feminist theory needs to shift its focus away from `observational reiteration` of maternal abjection as it manifests within cultural realms. This doesn‘t mean abandoning the concept of abjection, which is perhaps unique in its ability to articulate the psycho-social dimensions of violence. However, we need new theories of social abjection to wrench this concept from a purely Kristevan paradigm. Specifically, we need to document the role the maternal abject plays within intimate, inter-subjective, generational and social relations and challenge the forms and processes of abjection that are central to the social exclusion and marginalisation of women. As Spivak suggests: `Why not develop a certain degree of rage against the history that has written such an abject script for you?‘
Footnotes
From this point onwards I will use the term `Anglo-Feminism` for brevity.
Kristeva repeatedly returns to the work of male avant-garde writers such as Céline, Joyce, Aragon, Sartre, Baudelaire, Lautreamont, who, in her estimation, immerse themselves in abjection through their writing practice.
Whilst Kristeva‘s formulation of the abject challenges Lacan‘s distinction between the imaginary and symbolic realms it resembles his concept of `the Real` and the related concept of `jouissance`.
This is precisely Amber Jacob's project in On Matricide 2007, which is a brilliant attempt to re- theorize matricide through feminist revision of Greek Myth.
Judith Butler's account in Bodies That Matter is the most thorough feminist challenge to the universalism of Kristeva's account.
See http://thesafetyzone.org/security.html for advice given to battered women on how to reduce the chances that net travels will be traced.
I have refrained from giving specific dates or url links due to concerns about the participants safety and also a concern that the site administrators may desire to censure this use of chat spaces.
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#julia kristeva#abjection#experience#embodiedness#body horror#motherhood#violence against women#domestic violence#transgression#interpersonal relationships#critique#frameworks#human reproduction#family#feminism#marginalization
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Reflective Piece
Using Gibbs 1988 reflective model, I will express my thoughts, progress and concerns that I experienced during this project. In order to accumulate this blog, I had to think of a clear issue that I could develop throughout the blog, which I found quite stressful. Out of the many gender inequality topics, my initial thought was to pick a topic that I could relate to, hence why I chose ‘exploring cultural gender inequalities between countries’. The reason why I wanted to look at gender inequalities in different countries was because I went to a non-western country previously and saw some of the differences amongst females and males. Having seen this, I wanted to research further and explore the reasonings behind it. One aspect that I found quite challenging was thinking of topics for the three blog entries. Initially, I wanted to do my first blog on education, then on forced/child marriage and the last one on female genital mutilation. I came to the realisation that as these three topics were strong, this blogs ultimate focus would be unclear thus why I chose brand new topics. As I knew what my main focus was (lack of choices between countries), I began to research academic journal articles, newspaper articles and documentaries.
Before the creation of the blog, I was feeling quite overwhelmed and anxious due to the fact I’ve never written a blog before. I didn’t know in which way the blog was meant to be written, eg academic style or not as formal. As this became a huge worry for me, I met up with one of the tutors and expressed my concern and she explained to me what the blog must have in it. Whilst creating the blog, I had mixed feelings, from feeling satisfied as I found a topic, to very distressed during the research process and the time frame that was given. After writing the blogs, I am feeling relieved that it is done however at the same time worried to see whether I have met each criteria. One thing that I enjoyed whilst writing the blog was reading articles and seeing different viewpoints relating to my topic. As I am a female and woman of colour, it was eye opening to see the lack of choices females have in different countries.
However, the research process was frustrating as there was a lack of journal articles/sources that focussed on gender differences that females experience in non-western countries. It was difficult to find specific journal articles and took a long amount of time to find it as I had to dig deeper. Aside from this, I found writing the structure of the blog quite confusing, however doing my research by looking at various other vlogs, I hope that I tackled this difficulty. I think planning my time and effectively sectioning how I would write/prepare for each section went well. I created a plan, for example I focussed on the outline for a couple of days and then the first entry and so on. This allowed me to manage my time but was far more relaxing as I was able to use my initiative effectively. The reason why the research process didn’t go well during the start was because due to the lack of perspectives on this situation, it was hard to search. As this process was difficult, I had to read a numerous of articles and use the bits that related to my blog the most hence why quite a few references were used. Overall, I enjoyed the experience of making a blog as it was something different to what I have done before and definitely made me more confident.
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CHORA
Excerpts from Woman, Chora, Dwelling by Elizabeth Grosz (1991)
(from Space, Time and Perversion, The Politics of the Body)
I wish to make some indirect and tenuous connections between architecture, deconstruction, and feminist theory, forge some rudimentary links, and point out some of the rather awkward points of dis-ease between these various concerns. My goal here will be to present an initial exploration of the cultural origins of notions of spatiality in the writings of the Classical period, most notably in Plato’sTimaeus, which invokes a mythological bridge between the intelligible and the sensible, mind and body, which he calls chora.
Chora has been the object of considerable philosophical reflection, especially in contemporary French philosophy, having taken on the status of a master term in the writings of Julia Kristeva, in her understanding of the stabilization and destabilization of the speaking subject and, more recently in the writings of Jacques Derrida, particularly in his various theoretical exchanges with architecture, in his commentaries on and contributions to the work of the architects and architectural theorists Bernard Tschumi and Peter Eisenman. Chora, which Derrida insists must be understood without any definite article, has an acknowledged role at the very foundations of the concept of spatiality, place and placing: it signifies, at its most literal level, notions of ‘place,’ ‘location,’ ‘site,’ ‘region,’ ‘locale,’ ‘country’; but it also contains an irreducible, yet often overlooked connection with the function of femininity, being associated with a series of sexually-coded terms—‘mother,’ ‘nurse,’ ‘receptacle,’ and ‘imprint-bearer.’ Derrida is interested in chora in keeping with the larger and more general features of ‘deconstructive reading,’ that always seek out terms that disturb the logic, thelogos, of the text under examination, in order to show that it exceeds and cannot be contained by the logic, explicit framework, and overt intentions of the text. Derrida continually seeks out these terms—impossible to assimilate into the text’s logic—which are nonetheless necessary for it to function. They are thus ineliminable from the text’s operations and exert a disruptive force, an aporetic effect, on the apparent claims and concerns of the text in question. Chora thus follows a long line of deconstructively privileged terms in Derrida’s texts, from ‘writing,’ ‘trace,’ ‘pharmakon,’ ‘dissemination,’ ‘supplement,’ ‘parergon,’ in his earlier writings, to ‘cinders,’ ‘ghost,’ ‘remainder,’ ‘residue’ (among others) in his more recent texts. Each term designates and locates a point of indeterminacy or undecidability, a point at which the text’s own writing exceeds its explicit goals and logic, where the text turns in on itself and ties itself into a strategically positioned knot.
It will be my argument here, reading Plato and Derrida on chora, that the notion of chora serves to produce a founding concept of femininity whose connections with women and female corporeality have been severed, producing a disembodied femininity as the ground for the production of a (conceptual and social) universe. In outlining the unacknowledged and unremitting debt that the very notion of space, and the built environment that relies on its formulation, owes to what Plato characterizes as the ‘femininity’ of the chora (a characterization he both utilizes and refuses to commit himself to), I will develop some of the insights of Luce Irigaray in her critical analysis of the phallocentric foundations of Western philosophy. Irigaray’s reading of the history of philosophy as the erasure or covering over of women’s specificity has served to demonstrate that even where women and femininity are not explicitly mentioned or evoked in philosophical and architectural texts, nonetheless they, and concepts associated with them, serve as the unconscious, repressed or unspoken foundations of and guarantee for philosophical value. This essay may be understood as the confrontation of one strand of contemporary architectural theory, represented by Derrida’s relatively small and admittedly oblique contributions to architecture, and Irigaray’s sweeping analysis of the investment that all modes of knowledge have in perpetuating the secondary and subordinate social positions accorded to women and femininity. Irigaray contra Derrida in the domain of the dwelling: where and how to live, as whom, and with whom?
DWELLING: BETWEEN THE INTELLIGIBLE AND THE SENSIBLE
Timaeus represents Plato’s attempt to produce a basic explanation of the universe as we know it—a modest attempt on the part of a philosopher who believed that only philosophers were fit to rule the well-ordered polis—an explanation of the divine creation of the cosmos and the earth. In an age when myth is not yet definitively separated from science or philosophy, Plato presents an account of the genesis of the universe from divine and rational metaphysical principles. He sets up a series of binary oppositions that will mark the character of Western thought: the distinctions between being and becoming, the intelligible and the sensible, the ideal and the material, the divine and the mortal, which may all be regarded as versions of the distinction between the (perfect) world of reason and the (imperfect) material world.
This opposition between what is intelligible and unchanging, being (the world of Forms or Ideas), and what is sensible (which Plato describes as visible) and subject to change, becoming, seems relatively straightforward; but, it is difficult to use as an explanatory model, a ground of ontology, unless there is the possibility of some mediation, some mode of transition or passage from one to the other. Plato complicates and indeed problematizes and undoes this opposition by devising a third or intermediate category, whose function is to explain the passage from the perfect to the imperfect, from the Form to the reality: chora. This category, it is claimed, shares little in common with either term in the opposition. Plato does suggest at some points that it shares in the properties of both the Forms and material reality; yet at other points, he claims that it has nothing in common with either. Rather enigmatically and impossibly, he suggests that it has both no attributes of its own, and that it shares some of the attributes of the Forms:’...we shall not be wrong if we describe it as invisible and formless, all-embracing, possessed in a most puzzling way of intelligibility, yet very hard to grasp (Plato, 1977:70).
Somehow, in a ‘puzzling way,’ it participates in intelligibility yet is distinct from the intelligible; it is also distinct from the material world insofar as it is ‘invisible and formless,’ beyond the realm of the senses. It dazzles the logic of non-contradiction, it insinuates itself between the oppositional terms, in the impossible no-man’s land of the excluded middle. This is already enough to indicate to Derrida, no less than to Irigaray, that there is something odd at stake here, something that exceeds what Plato is able to legitimately argue using his own criteria.
Plato cannot specify any particular properties or qualities for chora: if one could attribute it any specificity it would immediately cease to have its status as intermediary or receptacle and would instead become an object (or quality or property). It is thus by definition impossible to characterize. It is the mother of all qualities without itself having any—except its capacity to take on, to nurture, to bring into existence any other kind of being. Being a kind of pure permeability, infinitely transformable, inherently open to the specificities of whatever concrete it brings into existence, chora can have no attributes, no features of its own. Steeped in paradox, its quality is to be quality-less, its defining characteristic that it lacks any defining feature. It functions primarily as the receptacle, the storage point, the locus of nurturance in the transition necessary for the emergence of matter, a kind of womb of material existence, the nurse of becoming, an incubator to ensure the transmission or rather the copying of Forms to produce matter that resembles them. Matter bears a likeness to the Forms. This relation (like the paternal bond between father and son) depends on the minimalized contributions of the receptacle/space/ mother in the genesis of becoming. Moreover, it becomes less clear as the text proceeds whether something like chora is necessary for the very genesis of the Forms themselves, i.e. whether chora can be conceived as a product or copy of the Forms, or contrarily, whether the Forms are themselves conditioned on chora:
“It can always be called the same because it never alters its characteristics. For it continues to receive all things, and never itself takes a permanent impress from any of the things that enter it, making it appear different at different times. And the things which pass in and out of it are copies of the eternal realities, whose form they take in a wonderful way that is hard to describe.” (Plato, 1977:69)
Chora can only be designated by its, by her, function: to hold, nurture, bring into the world. Not clearly an it or a she, chora has neither existence nor becoming. Notto procreate or produce—this is the function of the father, the creator, god, the Forms—but to nurse, to support, surround, protect, incubate, to sort, or engender the worldly offspring of the Forms. Its function is a neutral, traceless production that leaves no trace of its contributions, and thus allows the product to speak indirectly of its creator without need for acknowledging its incubator. Plato explicitly compares the Forms to the role of the male, and chora to the role of the female according to Greek collective fantasies: in procreation, the father contributes all the specific characteristics to the nameless, formless incubation provided by the mother:
“We may indeed use the metaphor of birth and compare the receptacle to the mother, the model to the father, and what they produce between them to their offspring; and we may notice that, if an imprint is to present a very complex appearance, the material on which it is to be stamped will not have been properly prepared unless it is devoid of all the characters which it is to receive. For if it were like any of the things that enter it, it would badly distort any impression of a contrary or entirely different nature when it receives it, as its own features would shine through.” (Plato, 1977:69)
Neither something nor yet nothing, chora is the condition for the genesis of the material world, the screen onto which is projected the image of the changeless Forms, the space onto which the Form’s duplicate or copy is cast, providing the point of entry, as it were, into material existence. The material object is not simply produced by the Form(s), but also resembles the original, a copy whose powers of verisimilitude depend upon the neutrality, the blandness, the lack of specific attributes of its ‘nursemaid.’
This peculiar receptacle that is chora functions to receive, to take in, to possess without in turn leaving any correlative impression. She takes in without holding onto: she is unable to possess for she has no self-possession, no self- identity. She supports all material existence with nothing to support her own. Though she brings being into becoming she has neither being nor the possibilities of becoming; both the mother of all things and yet without ontological status, she designates less a positivity than an abyss, a crease, perhaps a pure difference, between being and becoming, the space which produces their separation and thus enables their co-existence and interchange.
Plato slips into a designation of chora as space itself, the condition for the very existence of material objects. (It is no accident that Descartes takes the ability to occupy space as the singular defining characteristic of material objects.) Space is a third kind of ‘entity’ that is neither apprehended by the senses nor by reason alone, being understood only with difficulty, in terms of a ‘spurious reason,’ ‘in a kind of a dream,’ in a modality that today, following Kant, may be described as apperception. Plato describes a space
“which is eternal and indestructible, which provides a position for everything that comes to be, and which is apprehended without the senses by a sort of spurious reasoning and so is hard to believe in—we look at it indeed in a kind of dream and say that everything that exists must be somewhere and occupy some space, and that what is nowhere in heaven or earth is nothing at all.(Plato, 1977:71–2)
Chora, then, is the space in which place is made possible, the chasm for the passage of spaceless Forms into a spatialized reality, a dimensionless tunnel opening itself to spatialization, obliterating itself to make others possible and actual. It is the space that engenders without possessing, that nurtures without requirements of its own, that receives without giving, and that gives without receiving, a space that evades all characterizations including the disconcerting logic of identity, of hierarchy, of being, the regulation of order. It is no wonder that chora resembles the characteristics the Greeks, and all those who follow them, have long attributed to femininity, or rather, have expelled from their own masculine self-representations and accounts of being and knowing (and have thus de facto attributed to the feminine). Moreover, this femininity is not itself merely an abstract representation of generic features (softness, nurturance, etc.), but is derived from the attributes culturally bestowed on women themselves, and in this case, particularly the biological function of gestation. While chora cannot be directly identified with the womb—to do so would be to naïvely pin it down to something specific, convert it into an object rather than as the condition of existence of objects—nonetheless, it does seem to borrow many of the paradoxical attributes of pregnancy and maternity.
Bild: Die Hure Babylon in der Ottheinrich-Bibel (um 1530–1532)
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