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(pdf) version
The following piece -- 'From
the "Primitive Droop" to the "Civilised Thrust":
Towards a Politics of Body Modification' -- was originally written
for the Body Modifications
Conference at Macquarie University in April 2003, and also became
part of my PhD thesis --The Body
as Fiction / Fiction as a Way of Thinking -- submitted
for the University of Ballarat in 2006 (see side panel). It is another
example of using material and characters from my novel-in-progress --
A Short (Personal) History of the Bra and its Contents
-- to create a text for presentation within an academic context
on a particular issue.
In this piece I
have montaged an essay-style narrative with distilled fragments from
the novel as well as pieces written specifically for this work to create
a new hybrid (cross-genre or fictocriticism) text.
I found that having
set up the novel as a laboratory, I was then able to use the different
characters and their interests and experiences to actively explore some
very knotty issues regarding the discourse around body modification.
And I was able to do this from an unusual perspective precisely because
the novel brought together such a diverse range of topics - from issues
to do with identity and subjectivity, gender, the corporatisation of
medicine, the implants controversy, the way breast-feeding (and pregnancy)
confounds the notion of an individual citizen-body with inalienable
rights, through to fashion history and an intense exploration of the
seemingly superficial and benign (some would even say healthy) body
modification practice of bra-wearing.
Writers on body modification often find themselves in an impasse, where
their post-structuralist critique of the notion of a 'natural' body
then seems to render them powerless to criticise any type of body modification
practice, even those types or trends which they may personally find
disturbing - for instance, some of the more serious forms of normalising
surgery available within contemporary western capitalist culture such
as breast augmentation. The general argument is along the lines of 'we
all modify our bodies, so none of us can criticise any other culture,
group or individuals' choices'.1
Through my characters,
and their different circumstances, I have tried here to carve a way
out of this ultimately universalising 'we all do it' narrative, and
start to hone in on some very specific historical circumstances. We
all might modify our bodies, but not all of us do it at the end of the
twentieth century, under capitalism, and within such a strong scientific,
philosophical and cultural legacy of the mind-body, culture-nature split...
____________________
Preamble
I want to look
at some of the difficulties in trying to develop an ethics or a politics
of body modifications at the cusp of the twentieth and the twenty-first
centuries, exploring this within the context of a novel I'm writing,
set in 1999, called A Short (Personal) History of the Bra and its Contents.
One of the reasons
I like to work with fiction is that it allows me to create a discursive
field -- an artificial space -- in which a whole range of issues and
ideas can co-exist and work off each other. Ideas, for instance, to
do with subjectivity, gender, sexuality, and the privatisation of bodies;
the implants controversy, the cancer industry, the corporatisation of
medicine and various current debates within science; fashion history;
and so on.
In this field,
ideas and facts and bits can rub shoulders -- and thus cross-fertilise
and react -- simply by virtue of an imaginative association, a linguistic
chain, an event sequence, or via the relationships that form between
a cast of characters.
During the years
I've been working on this novel -- which is still very much a work in
progress -- quite a large cast has grown up around the narrator, Angela,
and a few of these will be making a guest appearance here today.
For instance, apart
from Angela -- who works at the State library -- there is Natalie, her
bosom buddy, who, with Angela, is researching and collecting for a Dr
B, who is creating an underwear museum in a small country town. Then
there's her downstairs neighbour Gail, mother of three, with a new baby
born soon after the novel starts. Her next door neighbour Bob (short
for Roberta), a tattoo artist. Maddie, her favourite aunt, currently
using mainly alternative and non-toxic methods to deal with her breast
cancer. And Wanda, who has various connections to the others and is
also the artist in residence at the State Library, working with street
people in the basement, helping them workshop their costumes for the
party at the end of the millennium.
(Well, I never
said it was realism.)
--------------------------------------
A
few years ago journalist Virginia Postrel, writing in defence of breast
implants, declared:
'The Biological
Century is upon us...The body, not the Internet, is the next frontier.
We are extending control over life itself, over our lives ourselves.
That control will, undoubtedly, have some unintended consequences, and
bring some tragedies. That is in the nature of things, the nature of
life. But so is the attempt to better nature, to bring the born into
the realm of the made, to assert human ingenuity against chance. The
debate over breast implants is only incidentally about the venality
of lawyers or the benefits of a C cup. It is about who we are and who
we may become. It is about the future of what it means to be human.
' (2)
*
Gail wants to
know: When is it not ok to modify the body?
With every culture,
every individual engaged in body modification as a daily practice, is
it possible to draw a line?
And if so, how,
and where?
*
Natalie says:
Well it's like this: having to wear make-up is oppressive; being able
to wear make-up is creative and fun.(3)
But are choice
and compulsion so clear cut? (I'd imagine that a few of the women on
the Silicone Survivors email list, for instance, might be interested
in debating this one.)
*
Or perhaps you
could evoke the difference -- as Bob has been known to do -- between
body modifications that reinforce notions of 'normality' and pathologise
difference; compared to ones that aim to 'individualise', encouraging
variety and tolerance.
Except that 'individuality'
itself is such a loaded term. And a bit like beauty: many beholders.
As a teenager I
remember a minister raging against our incredible conformity -- pointing
out that all of us in the room were wearing blue jeans. Strutting around,
meanwhile, in his two-piece suit and tie.
Indeed, it could
be said that what is so effective about the normalising and regulatory
practices of post-modern culture is this very ability to produce individuals
in such a variety of ways. (4) With Bob's tattooing no more outside
of the contemporary power nexus than a thousand dollar suit, or a nose
job.
*
One morning, I'm
in the shower and I overhear Bob and Gail out in the courtyard. Dora,
the receptionist for the plastic surgeon who owns the building, has
just been to collect the rent.
Bob says, 'Look,
I'm not saying there aren't some risks with piercing, too. There's the
risk of infection if you don't look after it properly. There is the
possibility of a mistake and nerve damage. But I've never seen anything
serious in that way (not like with implants). And an infection from
a piercing is only temporary -- if it gets real bad you just remove
it.'
Gail says, 'So
permanent modifications, is that the problem? But tattoos are permanent.'
Bob says, 'There
are a lot of ways you can look at body modifications.(5) You could divide
them into temporary compared to permanent. But it's not really so clear
cut. I mean, you can take a pair of shoes off, but if you're wearing
them every day from childhood, your feet are going to be permanently
altered.'
Gail says, 'Yeah,
but they would be altered if you didn't wear shoes, and walked on rocks
and ground for years. I mean, they're going to be altered whatever you
do, just by growing older…'
'Ok…' Bob
says. I rub shaving foam on my legs while she chews this one over, listening
to the clip of her shears as she moves around the courtyard checking
on her plants. 'Ok, well yes,' She says finally. 'Life is a body modification
process... But if we're talking deliberate modifications, another way
it's often talked about is the difference between soft-tissue and deep-tissue
modifications, or invasive compared to non-invasive; say ones that involve
cutting into the body compared to those that don't. But by that definition,
where do you put something like Burmese neck rings? No cutting there,
just gradual manipulation… but I think they'd be considered severe
modifications by anyone's standards...'
I nick my leg slightly
with the razor, and a little trickle of blood runs down in amongst the
foam.
'So then, you have
the adornment, manipulation, mutilation argument. Adornment,' she says,
'can just be a surface thing; or it can involve manipulation of body
tissue; and over time manipulation can involve mutilation… '
Gail says, 'So
the litmus test is does it mutilate, and anything that mutilates is
bad.'
'Well I don't know
if it's always 'bad'', says Bob, 'but it is serious.. the most serious
thing you can do, and it needs to have the most careful consideration
and a lot of discussion around it. There has to be a good reason for
it -- for instance, cancer. Or to prevent conception. Or if you want
to change your gender markers because you feel suicidal as you are.
Or lip plugs, for instance: some say they began as a protection from
evil spirits and then increased in size when it was discovered that
slavers couldn't use those with lip plugs. And then it continued because
it became such a part of their community identity and history of survival.
That's why you can't say any modification is bad per se, it has to be
in the context of things… It has to be constantly questioned and
challenged.'
'So: shoes don't
mutilate, so they're ok?'
'They can mutilate
if you wear high heels a lot and throw out your back. They also deform
your ability to walk over rocks, whereas no-shoes only deforms your
ability to wear shoes.'
I use a pumice
stone on one of my corns.
'Now, I like this
argument,' says Bob, 'because by this definition tattoos and most piercings
are simply adornment: at the lower end of the scale. Whereas wearing
a bra, for instance, is a serious body modification.'
Gail says, 'Oh
come on Bob, not this again.'
'It's true,' Bob
says, 'Bras can mutilate the functioning of an important body system
-- the lymphs. And while most parents go ballistic if their kids get
a tattoo or a tongue piercing, they happily strap their teenage girls
up into a bra the minute they begin to sprout. Barbaric really.'
*
Barbaric to some,
liberating to others.
Back in 1970, my
first day of secondary school, there was a girl called Christine Hill,
who looked a little bit like Christine Keeler (long tawny hair, white
fine-featured face). She claimed her school uniform hadn't arrived,
so instead of the regulation blue check dress she wore a yellow chiffon
blouse with ruffles at the cuffs and throat.
A see-through blouse.
And under the see-through
blouse, as clear as day, the white straps and delicate heart-stopping
lines of a bra.
The teachers swooped
and she was covered up with a borrowed jumper. But it was too late.
The serpent had entered the garden. We had glimpsed the perfect apples,
and knew ourselves to be naked.
*
Down in the basement
of the library, Wanda is giving a lecture. She writes a quote from Elizabeth
Wilson on the board. 'Clothes,' she says, pointing to it, 'are the poster
for one's act.' (6)
The workshoppers
huddle over their styrofoam cups of coffee, pulling an assortment of
many-layered jumpers and coats and cardigans around them.
'When we wear a
bra, for instance,' Wanda says, 'we perform not just gender, but also
western post-colonial ideals of progress and control over nature.'
A woman in the
front row scratches her breasts and then jiggles them up and down, getting
a laugh from the others.
'Every piece of
clothing, every act we do with or upon or allow to be done to our bodies
is a part of a constant articulation and rearticulation of power relations
in all their complexity.'
She switches on
the overhead projector. 'Take for instance,' tapping the images on the
screen, 'some of the things repeatedly used to designate feminine helplessness
and frailty -- high heels, tight-lacing, wigs, false eyelashes, push-up
bras. You have to be tough (and determined) to wear them and survive.
'You become weak,
or powerful. Or both.'
*
What does the bra
enable?
What does it restrain?
*
Natalie says: 'The
bra is the ultimate symbol of modernity: progress; comfort and the avoidance
of pain; perfection.'
Gail says: 'Classification,
competition, assessment.' (7)
Natalie writes
a card for Dr B, quoting the words of Anthony Forge, Professor of Anthropology
in the 1960s at the London School of Economics, about the bras achievement
in 'converting the primitive droop into the civilised thrust.' (8)
Bob says, 'The
civilised thrust doesn't eradicate or diminish pain, Natalie.' She is
speaking from experience -- a long history of fibrocystic breasts before
she threw away her bra. 'It creates whole new types of pain, and then
spreads it around differently. Relocates it somewhere else.'
She says: 'I mean, really, it's insane that so many women these days
feel uncomfortable unless they're wearing this thing that leaves red
welts and grooves on their bodies, damages delicate tissue, atrophies
muscles and ligaments, often causes chronic back ache or debilitating
breast pain and lumps, and by cutting off the normal lymphatic flow
and allowing toxins to concentrate in breast tissue may well be a key
factor in high breast cancer rates.' (9)
*
But as Bob herself
said, there are no absolutes.
At work I write
out a card for Dr B:
The World's Smallest
Waisted Woman was Ethel Granger: who trained herself gradually over
a period of eight years to wear a corset that reduced her waist to a
tiny thirteen inches, basically just enough room for her spinal column.
By the time she died in 1974 all her internal organs had been displaced,
for even without the corset her waist by then measured only 16-17 inches.
Yet she lived a full and healthy life into her eighties, outliving her
husband, Will, and for many years riding a small motorbike to her work
each day in a London corset shop. (10)
*
Actually Bob rather
approves of Ethel Granger. Serious modifications, she says, require
a serious attitude. Yet is it amazing how even major surgery can be
undertaken lightly if it is described as being for 'cosmetic reasons'
(advertised alongside lipstick and face creams).
On life and tattoos,
Bob says: If you truly want to be altered by it, you have to accept
the pain.
She doesn't approve
of body modifications that require anaesthetic -- not because of the
cutting thing, but because, she says, your conscious and unconscious
fears and feelings, especially any feelings of shame, are simply drugged.
She says, often they will surface later and affect your experience of
the modification, and your healing.
*
Tony, the video-shop
guy, slaps a copy of The Graduate on the counter for us and says: 'I'll
give you a one word piece of advice about the future: plastics.'
Gail says, 'What?'
Tony says: 'The
Graduate. One of the men at his father's cocktail party says it to Dustin
Hoffman...Well, actually, he does, but I read it on a Pamela Anderson
website.'
*
In pure technological
terms, with the combinations and permutations of surgery techniques,
mass media effects, globalisation, and genetic engineering, for instance,
the ability to alter our bodies has increased exponentially.
Fuelled by capitalism
and the corporatisation of medicine, an array of possibilities are offered
alongside an intensely modern, privatised notion of the body.
Western bodies
-- no longer owned as slaves or serfs -- are sold as a kind of personal
capital, to be invested in, maintained, worked and improved. With the
success of equality feminism, even women's bodies have nominally been
extended the masculine unequivocal and exclusive owner-occupier rights:
rights to derive pleasure and value from one's body, rights to change
it -- with only the lingering abortion debates and the occasional storm
over breast-feeding left to challenge this. (11)
*
As Cher told People
magazine in 1992: 'You know if I want to put tits on my back, they're
mine.'
*
The risk, of course,
as many critics of genetic engineering have pointed out, is a kind of
consumer eugenics.
Even apart from
this, it is ironic how all our manipulation and modification and adornment
of bodies in the name of individualism, greater pleasure, aesthetic
delight, choice, personal freedom and power has led to such an epidemic
of body-loathing and despair .(12)
With the body seen
as an ongoing project and investment, the sense of incompleteness is
often overwhelming.
So we keep adding
to the body -- clothing, hair dye, accessories, shoes, jewellery, hairspray,
push up bras, implants, tattoos, piercings, more clothes, newer clothes,
less clothes, muscle building… And we keep taking away: dieting,
liposuction, depilation…
(Peering into the
fridge late at night: if only I can find the right thing to put into
my body. I just need..? Maybe this chocolate ice-cream, with some of
these biscuits… ?)
*
Not one of the
choices we make about our bodies, not one of the judgements we make
on our bodies, or the pleasures we derive from them occur in a vacuum.
They all occur in specific, complex and changing social contexts. Every
act we do contributes to changing these contexts. That's why every act
we do is important, and every act is social.
*
At a dinner party
a couple complain about the way they now(days) 'have to' fork out to
have their children's teeth fixed by an orthodontist. I remember the
husband's astonished reaction when I described it as a body modification,
and compared it to breast implants and nose jobs (all aiming at uniformity,
all correcting perceived deformities that are culturally determined
). (13)
After all, they
only 'have to' because 'everyone else is'. That is, everyone else in
the class they want their children to be at home in and to succeed within.
Without their teeth 'done', their children might stand out as working
class, or odd. Marked for life. (The sins of the parents...)
*
Nose jobs in Colombia,
eye surgery in Japan, footbinding in traditional China, the war of the
bustlines on The Bold and the Beautiful… A constant shifting of
the goal posts.
*
Gail says, 'It's
-- I don't know -- a spiritual ecology thing, or about cultural ecology:
about the diversity of our bodies as a resource.
'When people say,
well if I can make myself feel better by having implants or a tummy
tuck, then why shouldn't I? This to me is the same as saying well if
I feel more powerful having a big car rather than a small car, why shouldn't
I have it? Or, if I can afford a boat that uses a year's worth of petrol
for a half hour pleasure ride -- hell, why shouldn't I just go ahead
and get that boat?
'Every person on
television who has a face lift to keep their job makes it harder for
those who don't. We are all so inter-connected. Together we make up
an aesthetic environment…
And we either value
difference and variation, or we don't. And I'm not saying no one should
make changes, but that it's complicated. And that when we make changes,
just like when we decide which car to buy, or which soap powder to use,
we should at least be thoughtful about it. As individuals, and as a
community.'
*
'Well I always
like to keep a few spots of virgin forest on my body,' Natalie says,
'like my pubes.' She glares at her boyfriend, 'Even if this is a bit
too wild for some people's tastes.
*
At the end of the
20th and start of the 21st century, still operating from Newtonian physics
and the mind-body split, medical science keeps offering us the promise
of control over our bodies, just as biological science kept offering
for so much of last century its fantasy of control over nature. (14)
As if we were somehow above it, or outside of it, independent of it.
As if we (or our minds) are the knowing and intelligent ones, and nature
(or our bodies) merely a passive surface or material.
*
My aunt Maddie
says: your body is so much more than just a machine to get your mind
where it wants to go, it is an integral part of an immensely complex
mind-body-spirit system. A precious object of great power, an extraordinary
piece of technology on loan to you for both pleasure and learning.
She says, The body
works in partnership with your spirit, and its intelligence and ways
of knowing are as intricate and vital as those of the mind. It is your
responsibility to look after it, your privilege to learn from it.
She says the limits
of your body, it's illnesses and moods, are like white rocks defining
your path, so that you can see it even in the dark.
*
Of course Maddie
only says this on her good days, when she's feeling calm and balanced.
On the bad days -- the turbulent ones -- she too rails against her body,
just wants the cancer to be gone, to disappear, just wants to be 'normal.'
And then she rides
it out, and the calm returns, and she knows there is no normal.
*
Bob says she can
no longer imagine her body -- can't even mentally visualise it -- without
the tattoos and piercings.
She says the original
Christian objection to tattooing, apart from it being a symbol of base
sexuality, was that it disfigured that which was fashioned in God's
image. (15)
Which
means that by tattooing your body, you are seeing yourself not as something
formed in God's image, or by a God, but as a part of God. You are not
just inhabiting your body, but continually co-creating it.
*
'Yes,' says
Maddie. 'A co-creator; not a dictator.'
*
I have titled this
paper 'towards an ethics or politics of body modifications', because
I have no answers, just some questions I think it is worthwhile we continue
to ask.
Like: what functions
within a cultural system do particular body modification practices serve
at any particular time? What are their long term and social consequences?
And what kind of power relations do they reinforce, reproduce, foster
or create?
The technological
imperative is often conflated with a vague notion of an unstoppable
(and therefore natural and right) 'progress'. But progress is always
a relative term, meaningless and unmeasurable without some specific
defined goals.
In other words:
just what kind of a place is this that we're creating with our bodies?
*
For
the references and notes for 'Towards a Politics of Body Modifications'
see side right hand
panel ----------->
printable
(pdf) version of this essay
To
cite this essay:
Beth
Spencer. 'From
the "Primitive Droop" to the "Civilised Thrust":
Towards a Politics of Body Modification'. Paper presented at the
Body Modifications Conference, Macquarie University, NSW,
Australia, April 2003. <http://www.bethspencer.com/bodymodifications.html>
email: beth at bethspencer dot com
