And Monster Beauty Is....?

                In her essay “Tracking the Vampire,” Sue Ellen case asserts there is a “shared identification between monster and woman in representation: since they both share the status of object, they have a special empathy between them”(390).  In portraying women and monsters as perceived threats to the masculine, and thus property man strives for rigid control over, neither position seems advantageous to the other.  Nevertheless, Braunberger evokes the term “monster beauty” with a clear positive connotation in her essay “Revolting Bodies: The Monster Beauty of Tattooed Women. Though Braunberger never explicitly defines “monster beauty,” the context in which the term is used roots it in the physical difference generated as women tattoo themselves, breaking away from the patriarchal expectation of women to maintain pure, inkless skin. Beginning with a bit of background on different types of feminist discourse, Braunberger alleges that “women need to be able to make the double move of decolonizing the ‘fashion-beauty complex’ from our minds, while allowing for the joy and exploration in the body play of masquerade and performance” and positions women tattooing themselves as a practice that accomplishes this aim by altering body aesthetics and thus generating monster beauty (2).   In a world in which women are willing to shell out hundreds of dollars for skin treatments, hair coloring, and a whole host of cosmetic nips and tucks in order to conform to masculine standards of beauty, and, in effect, make them attractive to males, it is hard to imagine why anyone would want to be viewed as monstrous by these traditional standards.  Though the standards of beauty have altered throughout time – I’m our ancestors would be shocked that women of today’s day and age pay to have their skin artificially tanned- for hundreds of years there have been expectations for women’s physical appearances that the majority of women have striven to uphold.  Nevertheless, Braunberger reveals that throughout  history women have been attracted to tattoos, giving her concept of monster beauty a timeless quality.  At first glance, the idea of monster beauty may appear to be invested in shock value, a tactic often associated, though frequently unjustly, with the feminist movement.    However, the choice of women to make themselves “monstrous” to the male gaze is much more complicated.

                First and foremost, Braunberger illustrates that tattooing is an avenue for women to express themselves, and, in doing so, take ownership over their own bodies. The particular power of the tattoo in such efforts resides in a few key characteristics of this particular bodily alteration. The use of the skin as the canvas on which such difference is generated becomes particularly meaningful, as this barrier between the outer and inner self is loaded symbolically, allowing tattoos to become a sight of introjection, which Braunberger describes as  a opening “a mediating sight between one’s physic interior and cultural exterior”(3).  Thus, tattoos become the external manifestation of one’s internalization of the cultural meanings and definitions forced onto their bodies and selves, or a manner in which women can artistically represent how patriarchy affects them personally.  This symbolic significance makes women’s acts of defining their own bodies through the active acquisition of a tattoo, which can rightfully be interpreted as an act of taking ownership of their bodies, particularly powerful.  The fact that women, in many cases, still do not feel a sense of ownership over their bodies in today’s day and age can paradoxically be seen through the lens of tattooing.  The relative modern trend of “property of” tattoos amongst women and many women’s sole view of tattoos as an offense to a husband or boyfriend are two illustrations of this sad reality to which Braunberger gestures.

                The monster beauty that is generated from tattooing is also clearly tied to the pleasure of women. Tattoos allow women to garner pleasure not only from the self expression and exertion of ownership they can facilitate, but through the subversion of social norms and redefining of feminine beauty associated with this sort of transformation.  Foucault reveals the potential for pleasure through the transgression of norms by asserting there is pleasure to be gained through the rejection of dominant power systems.  The refusal to conform to masculine standards of feminine beauty, a powerful arm of patriarchy, certainly fits this bill. The enormity of this subversion is evidenced by Braunberger’s revelation that tattooing is a domain which has fostered discourse about the difference of the male and female gaze, which Case also briefly touches on in her article. Braunberger points out: Operating on social margins, the tattooed woman and the protestor are read as excessively sexual while the pageant contestants on center stage operate within acceptable sexual parameters. At the same time, for the protestors it is those in the beauty pageant who are excessively sexualized”(14).  Thus, tattooing becomes a manner in which women can appeal to the woman’s gaze, allowing beauty to be defined by self or from a sexual perspective outside of the heterosexual confines of patriarchy.  

                So why would woman want to be a monster? Under the framework Braunberger provides, such an inversion provides the woman with both power, pleasure (which partially derives from power), and an opportunity to be viewed as beautiful outside of the confines of the male gaze. I’m not entirely sure that I can define monster beauty in all its complexity, but I am willing to give it my best shot.

Monster beauty: the pleasure and unique physical aesthetic derived from attempts of woman to claim ownership over her body through self expression and transgression of patriarchal standards of beauty.

-        Tracy

 Works Cited

Braunberger, Christine. "Revolting Bodies: The Monster Beauty of Tattooed Women."

      Feminist Formations, Volume 12, Number 2, 1-23. Summer 2000. Print.

Case, Sure Ellen. "Tracking the Vampire." writing on the body. 1997. Print.

Sedgwick's "Queer and Now": Queer Theory at its Most Tangible

In “Queer and Now” Sedgwick manages to accomplish something none of the philosophers we have studied thus far have rigorously attempted.  In exploring the definition of the designation queer and the various interpretations of political concerns of this classification, she gives readers a glimpse into the lives of those who struggle daily with the issues we have spoken about in class.  Though I am not naïve enough to have come into this class with no understanding of the political roots of Queer Theory, when working through dense and highly theoretical language it is remarkably easy to forget these issues affect all people’s daily lives, and impact many individuals in dramatic and heartbreaking ways. By evoking the images of the countless teenagers who commit suicide each year due to the manner in which society condemns their identity, the individuals for whom Christmas -a holiday “itself constituted in the image of ‘the family’- is a time of exclusion from a grand sense of unity rather than a source of joy, and the people who struggle to hold onto life in the face of physically devastating illnesses while simultaneously having death wished upon them from members of society who regard them as filth, Sedgwick ensures her readers never lose sight of the tangible stakes of her argument (6)  As the introduction comes to a close, her meditation on the anti-intellectualism of our age made me realize just how much her ideas affect my own life in ways I never had realized.

In the last segment of her argument, Sedgwick meditates on “political correctness” and the origin of this term.   She asserts the political right of our nation has succeeded in lumping everything from Marxism to Queer Theory under “the rubric of ‘politically correct’” in “a coup of cynical slovenliness unmatched since the artistic and academic purges of Germany and Russia in the thirties”(18).  Designating theoretical perspectives which contradict their own beliefs under this terminology is brilliant to say the least.  People hate politics.  The word politics and its many variations have come to signify dishonesty and ruthless self-interest within our culture, immediately evoking a sense of distrust in many Americans.  Labeling courses of study under the heading politically correct is an easy way to generate or amplify the distrust, suspicion, or ignorance many American have for these already marginalized viewpoints.  However, the aspect of this assertion I find truly alarming is the hint Sedgwick provides that this covertly hateful discourse is ingrained within and acting upon the universities of our nation, institutions which are supposed to serve as safe havens for all ideas with academic merit regardless of their political capital.  Sedgwick ends her introduction on the note that “Newsweek pontificated that under the reign of multiculturalism in colleges, ‘it would not be enough for a student to refrain from insulting homosexuals….He or she would be expected to…study their literature and culture alongside that of Plato, Shakespeare, and Locke”(20).  The dismissal of texts falling under the discipline of Queer Theory and other stigmatized disciplines as an obligatory read in order to maintain a false sense of societal equality rather than an opportunity to explore texts in which meanings do not “line up tidily with each other” and “invest those sights with fascination and love,” is insulting to the people who creates these texts and appreciate these texts for both their artistic merit and messages of tolerance.

It is possible, and quite likely, that this portion of this article hit home for me because I am currently reading Homer’s The Iliad, a classic which could easily be take the place of the work of Locke or Shakespeare as book which is allegedly more worthy of study than more modern works within the realm of Queer Theory, in one my English courses here at Michigan State University.  I do love The Iliad, and I believe there is something about the humanity of the character Achilles that strikes me as timeless. When my professor asks us why young scholars throughout the world are still reading this text, I usually base my reply around the feeling The Iliad generates that there is something constant in human nature.  As I worked through the text, the fact that the Trojans and Achaeans featured within the epic glorified the past and their genealogical roots became abundantly clear.  Throughout Book 2 of the epic, the descriptions of the fighting men assert that though these men are glorious, they are not quite as strong or valiant as the fathers who preceded them.  This sentiment is reinforced by the usage of epithets that actually define these men in terms of their ancestors; Achilles himself is introduced as “Peleus’ son” in works first line(Homer 1).  In regarding these classics as the greatest literature to which students of our era have access and ascribing our own meanings onto characters who are removed from us historically by a temporal distance that is difficult to grasp, are we romanticizing the past in a way similar to these warriors? If so, could this action be partially motivated by an effort to hold onto what we perceive to be the norms of the past? The question is certainly as troubling one.

- Tracy

Works Cited

Homer, Robert Fagles, and Bernard Knox. The Iliad. New York, N.Y., U.S.A.:
     Viking. 1990. Print.

Sedgwick, Eve. "Queer and Now." 1993. Print.

More circles, More anxiety: An Exploration of Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality

After delving further into Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality, I was forced to continue questioning the widespread and generally accepted assertion that western society is sexually repressed, an idea I had previously considered nothing less than indisputable fact.  Throughout Part One of the work, Foucault investigates this theory of sexuality, questioning both the origin of the guilt we seem to harbor in regard to our perceived sexual repression and the legitimacy of the repressive hypothesis itself, eventually concluding as Part Two of the book draws to a close that “Modern society is perverse, not in spite of its Puritanism or as if from backlash provoked by its hypocrisy; it is, in actual fact, and directly, perverse”(47).  In effect, Foucault positions the constant meditation upon and ardent belief in the repressive hypothesis as merely an excuse for society’s sexual perversion.  He asserts society’s obsession with the repressive hypothesis has actually glorified  the discourse surrounding sex as subversive action against an exaggerated, if not nonexistent power system,  allowing discourse about sex to multiply as we “other Victorians” seek “to utter truths and promise bliss, to link together enlightenment, liberation, and manifold pleasures”(7).  In short, though we would like to think we talk about sex as an act of rebellion, in realty we do so because we have an insatiable curiosity for all things involving sex.

  Foucault discusses the pleasure which arises from the subversion of authority, using the mental patient as one example of the pleasure potentials involved in authoritative systems.  He asserts the confessional discourse of modern psychiatry generates a complex dynamic between power and pleasure by allowing the psychiatrist to derive pleasure from both exploring the sexuality of the patient and exerting authority upon the aforementioned sexual behavior, while simultaneously allowing the patient, who practices some form of alternative sexuality, to derive both pleasure and power from the subversion of authority through resistance to the psychiatrist’s questioning .  As “ these attractions, these evasions, these circular incitements have traced around bodies and sexes, not boundaries not to be crossed, but perpetual spirals of power and pleasure,” the repressed and repressor dynamic  generates perpetual pleasure, seemingly positioning itself as the optimal relationship for human enjoyment(45). Though shared power and pleasure intertwine the individuals on the opposite ends of this spectrum and Foucault asserts the an individual’s role within “this game” is fluid, society seems to put a lot of stock into strict differentiation between the individuals occupying the roles of those who strive to regulate alternative sexual practices (an example of repressors within Foucault’s proposed power system) and those who practice alternative sexual practices (an example of the repressed within this system).

Judith Butler explores such urges for differentiation within Gender Trouble, and more specifically the section “Bodily Inscriptions, Per formative Subversions.”  Butler, in exploring the ideas of Kristeva, presents the theory that “ the repudiation of the bodies for their sex, sexuality, and/or color is an ‘expulsion’ followed by a ‘repulsion’ that founds and consolidates culturally hegemonic identities along sex/race/sexuality axes of discrimination” and that through this “excreting” of self “others become shit” (182). Returning to the example of the therapist and the “sexually disturbed patient,” is the patient “the shit” by the therapist’s standards because he or she is a rejected part of the therapist’s self?  This seems plausible, as rampant curiosity about alternative sexual practices likely plays some role in the therapist’s pleasure generated in response to “the physical proximity and interplay of intense sensations” which characterizes the patient and doctor encounter in the wake of the “medicalization of the sexually peculiar” (44).   Could this curiosity stem from the desire to understand oneself and be nothing more than an act of self exploration?   Is the complex system of power regulating sexuality somehow rooted in a search for self that the expulsion of certain sexual urges and identities has caused?  Does the desire to ignore knowledge of this denial of self somehow contribute to the positioning of repression as the sole lens through which sexuality is examined within society, creating another circle of sorts?

Quite frankly, I now feel some strange sort of guilt for not questioning the somehow undeniable reality of sexual repression before, or even ever really thinking deeply about something I’ve always regarded as truth. Foucault has made me feel guilty for not thinking, for letting the conventional wisdom of others stand in as my own beliefs and not questioning that the prevailing ideology could be misguided or incomplete.  I now find myself anxious that many of my assumptions are wrong, or are merely explanations masquerading some psychological phenomenon or fundamental truth.   In turn, my level of anxiety generated by this fear also bothers me; do I really have this little faith in the mental capacity of myself and fellow members of my own species?  The whole thing is very circular, just like the systems of power Foucoult asserts have defined sexuality and its discourse. The structure of his theories have somehow begun to play on my emotions, but instead of admitting to being the most impressionable human being alive, I’ll chalk it up to the strength of his argument. Kudos Foucault. 

- Tracy

Works Cited

Butler, Judith Butler. Gender Trouble, Feminism And The Subversion Of Identity.

     Routledge Classics, 2006. Print.

Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality: Volume 1 An Introduction. Random House, Inc

      1990. Print.

What is woman? Judith Butler's Gender Trouble and the Questions it Presents

In the first 22 pages of Gender Trouble, Judith Butler questions whether or not the coalitions formed within the Feminist Movement, an infamous example of identity politics, are useful and beneficial today.  More specifically, she delves into what exactly constitutes the category of women, a designation which is often assumed or not thought of at all, and what role identity politics play in negatively shaping or limiting the conception of woman.  Questioning the expediency of identity politics is a difficult task, especially since the Feminist movement undoubtedly extended visibility of and won rights for individuals repressed by patriarchal systems of power, many of whom identified themselves as women.   Yet the question lingers, what exactly defines an individual as a woman and what are the boundaries of the category women? Butler argues that “the feminist subject turns out to be discursively constituted by the very political system that is supposed to facilitate its emancipation,” as “juridical power ultimately produces what it claims to merely represent.”(Butler 3). As one considers the assertion that woman has been defined by the Feminist movement, in effect creating inflexible or rigid boundaries of what it means to be woman, whether or not individuals within our society who identify with the designation of woman or struggle with their gender identity would have been better off if the Feminist movement had proceeded independent of a unified group identity and the power of identity politics becomes a troubling question.

What does it mean to be woman, the identity on which feminism is based?  The question is more complicated than it initially seems. The guttural response may be to turn to a biological explanation or resort to the assumption that women are united by men’s historic, and in some cases continual, subjugation.  Nevertheless, both of these avenues are quite messy and difficult to sort out upon further introspection. Is the status of woman merely attained by the gender markings of one’s person or the gender identity “constructed” in response to sex and other societal factors, or does “the distinction between sex and gender turn out to be no distinction at all”? (Butler 10, 11).  The question of whether there is truly a universal state of repression of women through patriarchal systems seems to have already been answered, as Butler remarks “the claim of universal patriarchy no longer enjoys the kind of credibility it once did”(5).  The fact that both of these explanations require man as a counterpoint in order to transmit any meaning, as binaries are created on the basis of opposite sex/gender and the status of repressor in relation to the repressed, is deeply troubling as well, forcing one to consider Butler’s question “To what extent does the category of women achieve stability and coherence only in the context of the heterosexual matrix?”(7). Women certainly must be more than man’s opposite, but it is hard to escape the binaries embedded in our collective consciousness that present the groups of man and woman in this simplistic manner.  Is the categorization of women as a group with shared characteristics apart from their collective placement intellectually as man’s opposite merely what Groz deems a knowledge which has “devoted so much conscious and unconscious effort to sweeping away all traces of the specificity, the corporeality, of their own processes of production and self-representation?(2).

                Butler offers a suggestion for the re-imagination of woman and a resulting formation of new methodology to garner representation within politics and society, suggesting the formation of coalitions of masses of fragmented and unique identities, believing “certain forms of acknowledged fragmentation might facilitate coalitional action precisely because the unity of the category of women is neither presupposed or desired(21).  Though this idea seems simple textually, its practicality remains suspect.  History certainly suggests that representation is garnered through the activism of causes whose members identify themselves as part of a group with some substantial unifying characteristic.  Would anyone have met in Seneca Falls if they did not feel connected to the individuals beside them by some common identity? How easy would it be for people to identify themselves as members of a coalition whose peers did not have some commonality, or at least claim to have some collective trait, on which to base feelings of kinsmanship? There are more questions than answers when evaluating Butler’s ideas and suggestions, but the weight and difficulty of the queries Gender Trouble inspires reveals the great importance and intellectual depth of its explorations.

- Tracy

Works Cited

Butler, Judith Butler. Gender Trouble, Feminism And The Subversion Of Identity. 
     Routledge Classics, 2006. Print    

     

Grosz, Elizabeth A. Grosz. Space, Time, And Perversion, Essays On The Politics
      Of Bodies. Burnes and Oates, 1995. Print.