In this piece, I will address a diverse group of human beings, male and female, black and white, civilized and savage, gay and straight, as described in the articles in our reader. I propose to examine these marginalized groups to detect a pattern that unites these people. That when these extraordinary bodies pose a threat to their respective societies, they get attention -- to neutralize them, categorize them, and control their danger lest it infect the dominant society. Once the threat is over, these groups fade into time, vanish into history. These groups are all outsiders -- marginal and powerless -- and I propose that it is their position of being closer to nature than to culture that I detect their real menace, lest the flow of nature sweep away the carefully constructed male symbolic order, an order that deems primary rationality and objectivity. I then conclude some remarks about nature and culture.
In Londa Schiebinger in "Skeletons in the Closet," the first illustrations of the female skeleton in 18th Century anatomy describes the rise of modern science in the West emerging as a discipline and engage in a flurry of objectivity of truth -- with measuring, categorizing, classifying the natural world in all its variety and abundance, including human variety -- a hot topic for a European imperial activity of colonization. One area of interest in this science was the human body, especially the skeleton. Much to the early scientists' surprise, not much was known about the female skeleton. In collections, there were many male skeletons, but no female ones. Scientists began procuring female skeletons and, for a brief period of time, the female skeleton was one that mattered.
The first drawing of the female skeleton was published in 1796, which also witnessed the rise of modern medicine. In the process of characterizing the female skeleton, scientists discovered by measuring and classifying that these skeletons were different from the male. The consensus was that the female skull was smaller and less dense than the male skull, the brain being the seed of intelligence. Women did not need intellectual ability in their daily lives of nurturing and child care, as wives and mothers -- a destiny in biology. The women's rib cage was smaller, perfect for the sedentary life of the European female and in the societal division of labor -- men in the public sphere, women in the domestic. The female skeleton's larger pelvis enhanced her role as mother -- the perfect instrument for a new life. This division of labor in the very bones of human beings rendered the female status as unequal. These findings could also be found in nature and, as such, were not to be tampered with.
Eighteenth Century European thought stressed the difference of the sexes -- the natural inferiority of women to men. Women were different in every respect, physically, emotionally and morally, as the Schiebinger states: "As creatures of feeling fulfill their natural destiny as mother, conservators of custom in the combined sphere of the home." (Schiebinger, p. 51.)
In the early 19th Century, scientists, notably the famed French anatomist and natural historian, Civier, as related by an Anne Fausto-Sterling in her Gender Race and Nation, the Comparative Anatomy of the "Hottentot" Women, wanted Sarah Bartman body with its fabled genitalia, but it was only in her death that the scientists possessed her body. Sarah was a black woman from South Africa who came to Paris, and finally to England, to be exhibited in a freak show where visitors relentlessly probed her exotic black sexual organs -- the mythical Hottentot apron. Civier dissected her in order to produce an anatomical description of the sexual organs of a woman of color.
Civier lived and worked in the European period of intense colonialism, especially on the African continent. Part of that mission was with the help of missionaries to subdue the black female sexuality -- to control the savage libido that was viewed as degenerate. This was the European power's projection a dangerous ... At first, Sarah refused Civier's desire to examine her but, after her death, he could freely explore this unknown sexual territory. Civier, a scientists, wanted to know her -- in the bodily sense -- to classify and characterize her into a schemata. One can only imagine Civier's restlessness awaiting her corpse, his anticipation to dissect palpable, to know her in a necrophilic fashion almost. In his journal, Civier wrote that Sarah's skull, in the scientific view, the neurological structure of the brain and intellect, resembled that of an orangutan. He also proposed that she was the missing link between apes and men. He also proposed that she was baboon like in her sexual swellings. With the body in his possession, he is in scientific control of her genitals, of her black sexuality.
This was a time in European history when there was insecurity about race and gender. The colonized woman of culture was characterized as lustful and libidinous, without modesty and without European morality -- rather a creature of nature and not the embodiment of culture. As the article states regarding Sarah as a colonized woman of nature, "she served as primitive primitive, she was both a female and a link to nature." (Fausto-Sterling, p. 212.)
Sarah's body mattered to Civier and to science as long as it was out of his reach. Sarah resisted, in her modesty covering her labia from his greedy male gaze. But when she was in his possession and he was exploring the new territory of the black female body, as he dissected, manipulated and controlled her, penetrating her, he then lost interest, he did not care any more and relegated her body to the basement and dusty of the museum in Paris.
In "Domesticity in Federal Indian Schools, the Power of Authority Over Mind and Body," by Tsianina Lomawaina, she documents the controlling wars of genocide of the United States against Native Americans. Defeated in war, these human beings were placed on reservations and were under the control of the Bureau of Indian Affairs whose policy was to remove young Native American boys and girls and place them in boarding schools -- where they would lose their tribal identity, language, customs and values. But this policy was not assimilation -- to become United States citizens and achieve the American dream. These children were educated not to achieve a liberal education of mainstream white America. For the girls, they were to become domestic servants.
These schools were run in a military way with much regimentation -- school uniforms, Christian religious practices, proper comportment and hygiene to civilize and Christianize these native people. In every moment and in every way, these students were on a schedule, less the native go back to his tribal identity -- now a powerless defeated identity. Their bodies and minds were shaped and manipulated and gender rules were strictly enforced. Girls labored in the kitchen and in crafts; boys in the agricultural fields. The Native American body was colonialized to learn subservience in a "complete transformative experience ... as detribalized economic underclass. (Lom . p. 41.) -- not of the nation's state, except as exploited, powerless workers. These boarding schools provided an education that stressed mental and moral discipline -- a perfect ending for a vanquished race. These regimented bodies, deep seated and racially defined" Lom , p. 47) would assimilate into the main stream, there to disappear and their genius to become extinct. What could not become at Wounded Knee, total obliteration of a people -- would be accomplished in the Indian school. The tribes would be destroyed, the community also, and the erasure of identity. Divested of their language and independent life, these children would be absorbed into the social structure of America, their proper place in society. The girls would clean and wash the dirty clothes and houses of the American middle class; the boys would harvest crops meant for the dinner table of the American elite.
The bodies of Native American children did matter, as long as they were an integral part of their own civic body. As such, they were a menace and were sent to boarding schools to be self-regulated and under surveillance. What happened after this education? Did boys and girls find jobs in white America suited to their bodies? At that point, Native American bodies were no longer of interest to the federal government. They ceased to matter.
In Terry Kapsalis' "Mastering the Female Pelvis," relates the story of how black female slaves in Alabama in 1849 who underwent multiple surgeries for vesico vaginal fistulas due to difficult child birth, the father was often the white master, who underwent multiple surgeries with no anesthetics in the back yard of Marion J. Sims, renown in American medicine as the father of modern gynecology and is the architect of the vagina also displayed this pattern of intense interest and then neglect. One of the outcomes of his horrific was the speculum, used now in modern gynecology. With the aid of this instrument, it was possible for Sims and other gynecologists -- a terra incognita of the vagina to the male gaze, and undiscovered land. This is the seed to femininity, both white and black. A dark space was illuminated, a veritable dark continent. This sexual site was made civilized and enclosed in a medical discourse of white gynecology. Under the control of Dr. Sims, a theatrical figure with much charisma, a vaginal spectacle was performed on a surgical table to much acclaim. After publishing his findings, Dr. Sims went on to fame and fortune, establishing the women's hospital in New York City where he performed the surgery he invented on poor white Irish women, as well as women of the upper class. He was called a hero by the press. Triumphing over trials and tribulations. The black slave women, who were seen as creatures impervious to pain, returned to their masters to live out their lives.
The black female slave body as it was depicted in the pre-Civil War period, was the body to be feared and controlled, but now it was mastered by Sims and his medical experimentation.
Where was the white female of the pre-Civil War South, herself controlled by the cult of true womanhood and the dictates of patriarchy, which discipline and regulated her white body under constant surveillance, lest she exhibit signs of unbridled freedom? Like the black female slave, the white female lacked power. She was locked into a system of values in a process of normalization, her cult status of purity and religiosity -- pure lily white. Her body was fit only for reproduction. Her mind and emotions did not matter and she exercised authority in the plantation economic system. She, too, true to her gender, produced heirs for her husband's enterprise.
The homosexual body is a body that is dangerous to the civic order as related by Jennifer Terry in "Anxious Slippages Between Us and Them." Is this difference, in a sexual sphere of perverse erotic desire, a constitutional deformity -- in the body, in the spermatic society. There was concern in the hetero normative culture that frequent masturbation and abnormal proclivities of the body would threaten the very fabric of society and make it a genetic dead end. The high moral values and intelligent standing of America's male ordered society feared the decline of the West -- the result was a high level of anxiety in a symbolic order.
In the 20th Century, there were attempts to codify this sexual difference. The sex variant study reflected American societal distress. Male and female were classified and categorized as masculine and feminine, from genitalia to hair -- a veritable spectacle. The homosexual body was x-rayed and drawn, pathologies described, to document this menace to the body politic. This search for evidence of the suspect body included measuring body fat, firm muscles, and skulls. Voices were categorized as low pitch or high pitch. The author calls the a "stereotypical construction of sexual inversion (Terry, p. 58) -- to detect in the body the stigma of a menacing difference. The outcome of these scientific studies unleashed fears. Homosexuals were everywhere, invisible, endangering male cultural institutions, molesting school children, diluting military strength -- an issue of national security. This imperceptible erosion of the heterosexual ideal infected the State Department and the commerce of the United States. Tensions mounted and paranoia ran wild as these ubiquitous perverts drained the life blood of the American homeland.
As if that were not enough danger for America, Kinsey came along to fan the flames. His findings of much sodomy in U.S. manhood terrified the nation. In this study, there were no clear cut findings, no distinct homosexual body. Homosexuals were widely dispersed, lurking, about to prey upon the nation's manhood. Who can tell who is a fag? They are in every part of the nation, engaging in unspeakable acts, causing hysteria among governmental officials.
For a brief interlude, the bodies of Igorotes, a tribal people of the island territory of the Philippines as Christopher Vaughan described in "Ogling Igorotes, the Politics and Commerce of Exhibiting Cultural Otherness." In the Spanish American War, the United States seized the Philippines from Spain in an act of colonization for the empire of the United States. The 1904 Worlds Fair in St. Louise was planned to highlight the nation with its white city and in a remote area of the midway the village of the subject people as they lived out their everyday life -- hunting, crafts and, much to the horror of pet loving Americans, feasting on dog meat. This village was extraordinarily successful, drawing huge crowds to gawk at these wild people. The Igorotes were heathen and non-Christian -- an exotic display of primitive life -- whom the U.S. regarded as needing the benefits of Western civilization. The tribe were people of nature and savagery, an authentic other. With their cigar smoking women, culinary dog eaters, and head hunters with tattoos covering their bodies, they were an exotic site. As Terry writes, "Igorotes posited an alternative existence. The diet and lack of dress offended the fair goers. The Igorotes images served to enhance self identifications with advance society by confirming America's distance from backwardness." (Terry, p. 227.)
The Igorotes and their village at the Worlds Fair were presented as an ethnographic display, as real certified by the emergent anthropological science; but the person-to-person experience of the savage and the American citizen in the process of defending the collective self of the American colonizing mission. But any scientific objective truth was destroyed when the Igorotes were exhibited as freaks and, as such, were dehumanized in the spectacle of difference. They were seen as novelties, as objects of the gaze of the American conqueror, celebrating the nation's power, sophistication and whiteness -- not the Igorotes who were "creatures of nature, lithe and graceful panthers they once were. (Terry, p. 230)
The sad history of what happened to these freaks of nature as they were transformed into freaks of culture, exploited by the greed of their handlers, testifies to their powerlessness. Having been entertained by the savage other, their bodies were worthless and of no value. They mattered only as long as a profit could be made and then they disappeared.
In her introduction "From Wonder to Error - a Genealogy of Freak Discourse," by Rosemary Garland Thompson, states that freaks fare little better in the consciousness of modernity than Igorotes -- as successfully by Aristotle as part of the order of the world and nature's abundance to the rise of religious discourse in the West as punishment for sin. With the rise of science and the medical model of disability, freaks were seen as oddities to be categorized and classified. What was marvelous became in this era pathology. In 19th Century America, freaks became the most popular form of entertainment with the rise of P. T. Barnum and his circus, stimulating curiosity, invoking awe. There was then a major shift in the freak show with the rise of the Disabled Rights Movement, which saw freaks as pornography, pushed freak shows to the margins of entertainment claiming political correctness. In 1937, freak shows were banned by the Nazi government and European countries followed suit. Freaks became icons of deviants and what was assumed to be a freak of nature now became a freak of culture.
According to Thompson, the extraordinary body matters when society attempts to make sense of our being in the world. We see ourselves as not -- creating distance from the freak body. We have a fascination with the different body, but want to classify that body to control its power to intrude on our normal existence. Leaving the freak show, we deem the freak body as useless, sheer entertainment rather than the marvelous, as pathology to be sullenly discarded.
What is going on here? Why is it that these diverse bodies, mostly female but including some male, gain attention when they pose a threat to the nation state? These different bodies, for example, the body of dead Sarah Bartman, dissected by Civier in Paris in 1815-1817, Native American children sent to military like boarding schools in the early 20th Century are seemingly dangerous bodies that I have addressed in this final exam. And then nothing.
These marked bodies disappear and become invisible when their threat to the nation has been eliminated. There is a pattern here, occurring and reoccurring. Black female slave bodies in the anti-bellum South come to matter for a brief time because their subject bodies are useful as raw human flesh to be experimented on for the goal of relieving the pain of white women. At the end of their usefulness, they are sent back to the white master. We see this pattern in the Igorotes, the tribe from the Philippines. Useful bodies for the celebration of American colonialism in 1904. What do we know of these people when Americans lost interest in possible financial profit from them? Did they go back to the Philippines to resume their tribal life? And freaks in America in the 19th Century, did they have any life participating in the civic body. They are a vanished people wandering forever on the American landscape, only given value for the spectacle of their different bodies. The bodies of homosexuals become prominent and arouse paranoia come to matter, causing that deviant to be measured and questioned, to be examined to detect pathology. When the crisis disappears, all the homos in the State Department purged, the gay body is locked into the ghetto never to be heard again until the next crisis.
These are invisible bodies that lack power, power to determine their own lives, to set their own agendas. All are sexual groups that are oppressed and marginalized. They have a negative identity in the nation state -- stigmatized, a personhood that they have to manage to perform in the modern state -- as not dangerous, not unruly. These deviant bodies can be resisting the internalization of oppression. Gay groups become politically active, demanding same sex unions and civil rights befitting their minority group status. Gays parody heterosexual gender in performance that satirizes heteronormativity. Native American children in strict boarding schools use government-issued clothing -- bloomers -- to subvert dominating white authority. Sarah Bartman resists the advances of Civier who desires to probe her dark body with its extraordinary sexuality while still alive in a coy, almost flirtatious manner.
These anomalous bodies are closer to nature than to culture. The Igorotes with their wild ways, a savage people who live by hunting and eating dogs, are a part of nature, not culture. Black female slaves whose bodies are deemed as uncontrollably savage, descendants of Africa, renown for its untamed sexuality and from the dark continent, can be seen as children of nature. Freaks, too, lack a cultural identity and as defined in utero as in possession of defective genes occupy a marginal space in Western civilization. Gays are viewed by the dominant culture as against nature, they deny themselves to the civic order in their refusal of adult goals of raising children necessary for the continuance of the nation state. But this population can be viewed as close to nature in their emphasis on the primacy of sex, but a sexuality that is abhorred as disgusting, that renders the gay community as ghettoized and invisible. Native American children are deemed closer to nature also -- in their government structure as a tribe, lower than the hierarchy of the classic political structure. Civilization --- the state of their oppressors -- is assumed to be the highest. These wild children are to be sent to military-like boarding schools to mold their character, to discipline their savage souls.
Women, whether African Sarah Bartman or the women whose skeletons helps 18th Century science to document their lower status and little power, are associated with nature. Their menstrual blood and the gore of childbirth, a tainted state, and lactation categorizes them as unclean and polluting. They exist in a state of troubled objection, really the main male anxiety of the castrated woman. Women are seen as emotional and subjective, never capable of objectivity, rendering women as incapable of high intellectual thought, lacking rational ability. Women are prone to hysteria and lack control. As Aristotle writes, "the uterus is a thing unto itself, wandering in need of the discipline and pregnancy." In Freud's view, women are consumed with envy over their lack of a male organ, a phallus that in later life gives the male his potency. This abjection must be ejected, lest the blood issuing forth contains pollution for the ordered world. Infused with nature's women want to break orders between humans and animals, between nature and culture. They want to push rigid structures to flow over the carefully built little boxes by which men retain power, creating disorder and chaos, breaking boundaries.
Cultures intrude, nature resists. Nature grows power as culture declines. Both have power and have agency. Both are actors on the stage of our planet Earth, and both are needed, elements not to be separated. Both nature and culture must act to fill the gaps in the other's knowledge. They are closely constructed, malleable and free of determination. There is agency in nature to combat culture's excessives. Nature and culture are inseparable with no rigid boundaries, flowing together, not dammed. They are equally powerful -- not to destroy the other and permitting a resolution of inequality, coming together in a community of respect. All are needed -- Freak and norm, man and woman, nature and culture to work together. Our very existence is threatened and we need resolution of difference, of binary opposition to solve our common problems. We must abandon rigid dichotomy, our fixed and comfortable little boxes to join a wider space.
No comments:
Post a Comment