Sex/Body/Writing
“a fairy tale assumption in which an all but non-existent condition
is assumed to be rampant” —Samuel R. Delany
The accused is permitted to display the bumper sticker EAT SHIT because
it is determined that no motorist, not even a coprophiliac, is likely
to be sexually aroused by a bumper sticker reading EAT SHIT.
arousal = criminal
non-arousal = noncriminal
Offensiveness is outside the equation. When I write, “My cunt is
a camera,” is this likely to arouse photographers, the scenic vistas
of my camera’s wandering eye — or the filmstock itself?
I’m working towards a writing that subverts sexual bragging, a writing
that champions the vulnerable, the fractured, the disenfranchised, the
sexually fucked-up. A female body who has sex writing about sex—no
way can I stand in front of an audience reading this stuff and maintain
the abstraction the “author” A BODY some writers glory in
this but I feel miserable and invaded—as if the audience has x-ray
vision and can see down to the frayed elastic on my panties. But, really,
it is I who have invaded my own privacy. To regain some of that privacy
I have desexualized myself in public, have stiffened, as if to say, “This
is not a body.”
To a five o’clock cocktail party in Berkeley I wear a black Italian
pantsuit with a pink silk blouse—because that’s the way the
women dressed at the last five o’clock cocktail party I went to,
at the French Consulate. But in Berkeley everybody’s in linen, jeans,
sandals. Joshua Clover is casual chic, lanky as a cornstalk, all in white—white
linen shorts, white shirt, flame white hair, single silver hoop in his
ear. Standing beside him, I feel like a black bat. “I’m having
some problems with transgressive writing,” he says. “Why is
A.M. Homes so popular? Because she’s transgressive without being
challenging.” Transgressive but not challenging YES these words
circle through my head like a mantra for days—a formula for just
about everything that pisses me off. Any sentence containing the word
“gender” is at the top of my list.
EAT SHIT NO/BODY
F., I have heard, rejected a piece of mine because it contained too many
body fluids. Now, two years later, I run into him at the Small Press Traffic
mailbox. He shows me a favorite passage from Blanchot: the poet must expose
himself to the violence of pure being. Or some such thing. “Yes,”
I say, “but how do you then go to work?” F. explains how he
thinks one could juggle that. He’s sweet today, so shy, so halting,
so “I’ll lick your boots.” A guy confusing as Lon Chaney—the
clownface dissolves to disgruntled scientist dissolves to clown—HE
Who Gets Slapped (MGM, 1924) gets the last laugh. I don’t know what
to think of him. I smile, say, “Good luck on your thesis,”
and walk down the stairs.
A physical body writes about sex.
H. sits at the back of my prose workshop, sullen alienation brooding in
the corner. I take one look at him and think, “Oh shit.” His
attractiveness is not wrought from art school pretension—it’s
more of an afterthought—if that. H’s writing deals with schizophrenia/paranoia/madness/psychological
disintegration. “i live with monsters who are contagious,”
he writes. “the transmitter planted deep inside my ear instructs
the following: i, to justify misfortune and misery of fallen angels, is
chosen to sacrifice you to unknown forces that make cars move.”
I ask him personal questions he refuses to answer, but I keep asking anyway.
I learn he’s Korean and his family’s in Los Angeles. That’s
all.
In one piece a woman gets too close to him so he eats her. It’s
his “Archiving” assignment. “Choose an object that you
can easily bring to class. Write a real or imagined narrative explaining
this object’s significance—its importance in ‘your’
life, how it came to be a part of ‘your’ life. Type and make
copies for the class. Bring your object with you.” He brings in
a plastic fork and knife.
“The smell of her boiling flesh invaded my room. shes here no longer
but she’s here with me. the plastic fork inscribes embryo, the plastic
knife paints pictures of her memory. what can i say, i’ve fallen
in love with her.”
I don’t let on how drawn I am to this writing, but H. seems
to know anyway. Over the semester his manner softens to sweetness, eagerness,
affection even. The one day he’s not in class I miss him. Unanswered
questions, I suppose, are a form of intimacy. He writes, “you, standing
middle of my target, i can admire you more than physics allows me.”
I know this isn’t about me, but I pretend.
The last day of class. S. has changed her hair from white blonde to yellow
blonde. “I was looking too 80s.” S. projects a desperation
for attention that she doesn’t have a clue how to get. (My softspot
for her.) Finally, after hinting about it all semester, she’s writing
directly about being raped. “in the back of my head lingo had long
since departed and I wasn’t prepared to go down” This form
is really working for you, I tell her, the straightforward narrative interspersed
with poetic intensities. I think to myself, “This woman, this BODY
has been raped for Christ’s sake.” While Creative Writing
teaches us thus to hermetically seal content in aesthetics, I’m
thinking, “Dodie, you are so full of shit.”
The time is up and I say, “Well, we’re finished—in a
big way.”
H. blurts out, “Want to go out for a drink or something? I need
some closure.”
Writing that shifts the matrix, e.g. Samuel Delany’s Hogg.
“What it seriously attempts to do,” Delany explains in a 1989
letter to Randy Byers, “is challenge just about every dichotomy
on which our culture is based. And the distinction between dirty and clean—as
a grounding for both civilization and pleasure—is one of society’s
most fundamental.” And then, “Hogg constantly
compels the reader to choose one filth-laden situation over another,
when most of us would simply want to be rid of the entire set of experiences.”
Fountain pen scribbling across paper, a body writes about sex. Sitting
at the computer, a body writes about sex. The keyboard and monitor are
enormously erotic THE BEEPING MODEM, THE WORD MACHINE TALKING BACK more
than once e-mail has gotten me in trouble.
I wake up to a shock of wet at my feet—Stanley, my cat, has peed
in the bed while I was sleeping in it. “I’ll deal with this
later.” I get up, make coffee, sit down at the computer and take
some Delany notes—“hebephilia, the love of filth”—I’m
reading and typing and thinking about Delany for an hour or so when the
scent of cat urine impinges upon me—the gray jersey nightgown I’m
wearing reeks with Stanley’s urine. How marvelous, I think, Delany
has imbedded my woof and warp NO DISTANCE WOOF AND WARP I toss the nightgown
in the hamper, throw on another thriftstore favorite, this one with “Neiman
Marcus” in huge red script down the length of it, and continue typing.
————————————
Talking Dirty
Before I got involved in all this queer narrative business, when I was
a young poet in my 20s, my poems tended to be abject, sexually-explicit
tributes to the drug-addled, Vietnam vet art student I was lovers with.
I remember one poem where he gets up after sex and washes himself off
in the sink, and I bemoaned “the dark night of plumbing.”
My tone and subject matter caused much anxiety to my experimental feminist
community. Kathleen Fraser took me aside and told me she was “worried
about me.” In a peer workshop, my poetry was seen as a sign of mental
aberration and one woman suggested I enter therapy. You can imagine the
sigh of relief I gave when I joined Bob Glück’s workshop at
Small Press Traffic and I was told, more sex, more abjection. It was like
I’d found my home.
Catherine Clement’s book Syncope: The Philosophy of Rapture
was important in my understanding of sex as a state of being. Syncope
is a temporary absence of self or suspension of movement, a hesitation
or dissonance. Clement’s examples include fainting, the backward
dip in the Tango, a weak musical beat between two strong beats, the spin
of dervishes, sneezing, coughing, hiccuping, uncontrollable laughter,
screaming, facial spasms and tics, squinting, tremors, heart palpitations,
choking, uncontrolled excretion, cold sweats, tears, tingling, prickling,
tickling, wheezing, auditory hallucinations, orgasm, visions of gods speaking,
religious ecstasy, falling in love, and enjambment in poetic metrics.
“Where is the lost syllable,” she writes, “the beat
eaten away by the rhythm? Where does the subject go who, later comes to,
‘comes back?’ Where am I in syncope?” (5)
So we can look at sex as a time out, a break in linearity. Sex, then,
would seem like a natural topic for writers interested in breaking through
the linear rat’s maze of the traditional story, of academic self-absorbed
poetry. So why does there seem to be a dearth of passionate, sex-crazed
experimental writers?
According to Clement, syncope has traditionally been the enemy of Western
philosophy. “Philosophers constitutionally hate syncope and everything
it resembles—the upheaval of wit, the unruliness of passion and
anger.” They hate syncope so much they’ve written volumes
to protect themselves from it. “The history of our classical philosophy,
as it is now taught, shows this: Western thought has been busy filling
this hole in life.” Syncope is scary because it subverts “power
and force, muscle and health, vigor and lucidity. Syncope opens onto a
universe of weakness and tricks; it leads to new rebellions.” Writing
is an orderly universe, and I think much of the hostility towards the
avant-garde is its toying with this order and a fear that without standard
sentence structure the world will plunge into chaos.
70s feminism, for all its pain-in-the-assness, instilled in me the belief
that the personal is political, the importance of introducing more accurate
and varied images of female experience into the cultural pool. Before
I fell into the manicured hands of the experimental feminist poets, I
was involved with the far less intellectual and highly lesbian group,
the Feminist Writers Guild. The Feminist Writers Guild was very sex positive.
When we published an anthology of members’ work, we held our editorial
meetings naked in a hot tub in Berkeley, and we collated the printed pages,
naked on a deck in Marin. I got sunburned on parts of my body that had
never before seen the light of day. Compared to these lusty gals, I was
a bit of a shrinking violet. My first poetry reading was arranged by Gloria
Anzaldua. It was with the owner of the Marin sundeck, a woman who went
by the name of Abigail Tigresslily. Abigail began with a rather ecstatic
piece about her big dog going down on her—and then when she got
to human-to-human sex, she used the word “slurp.” I was horrified,
more by slurp than the dog.
I find it interesting, and at times dismaying, how my work changes within
the context in which it is read. In a gay culture, where there is a vocabulary
for talking about sex, my work doesn’t feel all that transgressive.
But then place the same work within a straight world, with all those things
one doesn’t talk about “in mixed company,” and I become
a pervert. To me transgression is a tedious position. But I am excited
by pushing the reader to the point where he or she cannot maintain a safe
distance from the work. I’m fascinated by writing in which the private
obsessions of the writer come through, like in JG Ballard’s latest
novel Super-Cannes. He’s still fusing cars/prosthesis/sex,
like he’s never going to stop doing that, and you can almost hear
him panting behind the words. I’m interested in a writing of embodiment,
not of abstraction. I don’t want to take messy, lived corporeal,
emotional existence—and then rationalize it with theory. I don’t
want to gild the shit. I don’t want to be like Clement’s philosophers,
trying to clean things up.
My latest book Cunt-Ups is about exploring pornographic
language. Pornographic language, I think, is pretty much a male form.
Women are stuck with the more wishy-washy “erotic.” Even as
a child I was nasty and bawdy, a sort of pre-pubescent Wife of Bath. I
am the daughter of a union carpenter, and as such I was raised in a filthy-mouthed
environment. One could easily make a case for verbal sexual abuse. I know
I didn’t feel comfortable with it. Why would a grown man engage
in locker room talk in front of a little girl, why this display of male
bonding jargon? And as we all know the abused often turns into the abuser.
Cunt-Ups takes back this pornographic language used as
a weapon on me and subverts it to my own ends. The book is also very much
about sexual obsession and desire. In American English we seem to have
a language for romance and a language for pornography, but the two rarely
meet. In Cunt-Ups, which I see as a very romantic book, I’m collapsing
romance and porn. Sex can’t be reduced to events that happen to
a person. Sex is a trap, a labyrinth, a matrix that engulfs you. There’s
no way out. If I were to write the story of my life with emotional honesty,
my relationship to my body would be the most important thing. This is
the case for many women. To theorize my relationship to my body as Abjection
doesn’t do the self-loathing, the terror, the chaos I was raised
with justice. I don’t want to present a sanitized version of female
sexuality, don’t want to use beauty to make physicality palatable.
————————————
Pop the Culture
For me, it’s all equal, culturally. This is something I learned
from Kevin Killian, whose protean slips between low culture and high culture
astonish me. Rather than using academic or scientific or philosophical
language as a marker of intelligence, like we constantly see on the Buffalo
Poetics List, I like to collage such language into my writing to bring
in a foreign tone. I often change such stolen passages to the first person,
I absorb and pervert them, make them me. Here’s an example
from my novel-in-progress, The Fourth Form:
The sticky glutinous stuff that gels my cells together and glues me
to the universe is beginning to erode. I am losing my magnetism, becoming
more liquid, denser, heavier, colder, cloying. As my electrical impulses
weaken, I drift farther away from the core of substantiality emotions
moving through time like music, emotions worked to the point where they
almost fall apart Ed appears beside me in a rental car, the congealed
face of existence, smirking at first the figures from my memory
were anatomically correct but then the cunts/cocks got bigger and bigger
and the bodies collapsed as he drives he holds my hand, the back
of his hand resting in my crotch, my crotch is immense, the oyster shell
holding up Botticelli’s Venus.
Though the appropriated passages have been substantially rewritten, many
of them are drawn from some unremembered science article I took notes
on years ago, plus an art journal piece on Tony Oursler’s projections.
I wanted to be a scientist when I was a girl and through the 80s I read
popular science magazines regularly—but when they started to be
filled with computer stuff I lost interest. Now much of my pseudo-science
comes from Lingua Franca. Its tabloid approach to academia
assures me a steady supply of bizarre and even scandalous scientific discoveries
and theories.
“At first the figures from my memory were anatomically correct but
then the cunts/cocks got bigger and bigger and the bodies collapsed”—I
remember in the original article about Oursler, it was the figures’
heads, not cunts and cocks, that got bigger. From Kathy Acker I learned
that no matter what you steal you can tweak and torture it until it’s
all sex, sex, sex—like in her reworking of Dario Argento’s
horror film Susperia in the “Clit City” section
of My Mother Demonology. In the Argento film, which takes
place in a girl’s boarding school, some meat stored in the attic
rots and maggots fall from the ceiling, on top of the girls, who go screaming
through the halls. In Acker’s version, the maggots emerge from a
much more intimate space:
When I woke up, maggots were crawling out of my cunt. At first I thought
that Mother must have over–toilet-trained me. The maggots were
coming out of my cunt because maggots come from meat.
In my first school I had been taught that through rationality humans
can know and control otherness, our histories and environments.
In one of my dreams, the maggot, huge, translucent, and slimy, was my
father.
Here is my theory of dreams: Maggots are dicks because they rise up,
then writhe and turn funny colors. Worms rise out of red meat. (Worm-
or dick-heads are the same things as nipples.)
Whereas houses are cunts. In the dream, the house is a maze.
The outside lies beyond the maze.
One result of this theory is the knowledge that all reality is alive.
It wasn’t just my cunt. When I walked out of my red room, white
dicks were falling out of the hall’s ceiling, which wasn’t
alive.
Sex consumes rationality, sex transforms the world. So do monsters. When
I was a child my fascination with monsters equaled my fear of them. I
remember lying on my bed with a copy of Monster magazine,
transfixed by the picture on the cover of Elsa Lancaster as the Bride
of Frankenstein, and inside, The Mummy, Frankenstein himself and sundry
pizza-faced teens. I found it exotic to find these images in a magazine,
so unlike the other magazines lying around our house—Life, Look,
TV Guide, Ladies Home Journal, Redbook. Standing in line outside a movie
theater, I found myself right in front of a poster for I was a Teenage
Werewolf, starring Bonanza’s Michael Landon, and was frightened
out of my wits, like I couldn’t stand to look at it. When I saw
Hunchback of Notre Dame starring Gina Lollobrigida and
Anthony Quinn, I was so hysterical with fear and shock that that evening
my mother had to sleep with me. A couple of years later, whenever the
advertisement for The Fly would come on TV I would run
into my bedroom and hide—much to the delight of my brother, who
wouldn’t stop teasing me about it. The only mainstream image to
come near the excitement I felt in looking at these monster pictures was
Life’s photo of Lee Harvey Oswald’s corpse, post-autopsy,
the huge ridge of stitches across his chest.
Attraction and terror—sounds pretty sexy to me. This is a far cry
from the mainstream avant-garde’s condescension towards pop culture—using
it as a source of parody that the author remains intellectually and morally
superior to. I think a more honest and interesting approach to pop culture
is to delight in its tackiness but at the same time admit you’re
profoundly moved by it. This is, perhaps, the essence of camp. A few years
ago when I went to the American Poetry of the 50s conference at Orono,
a number of straight academics gave papers on Frank O’Hara, and
whenever the issue of camp arose, these hetero guys up there, very stiff
and serious, defining camp like talking encyclopedia entries, presented
a camp spectacle all their own.
I thought when I finished The Letters of Mina Harker,
that would be the end of my writing about horror, but I can’t
stop. In horror, I love the confused boundaries— between living
and dead, inside/outside, one/many, human/machine, human/animal, etc.
I love to see people in intense emotional states, love the beautiful imagery
that pops up even in the worst of horror films. And, most importantly,
horror addresses female body issues as no other genre can.
In her book The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis,
Barbara Creed discusses Linda Williams’ 1984 article “When
the woman looks,” in which Williams claims that when women look
at monsters, they identify with them:
[Williams] states that classic horror films such as Nosferatu
and The Phantom of the Opera frequently represent ‘a
surprising (and at times subversive) affinity between monster and woman’
in that woman’s look acknowledges their ‘similar status
within patriarchal structures of seeing.’ Both are constructed
as ‘biological freaks’ whose bodies represent a fearful
and threatening form of sexuality. This has important implications for
the female spectator. ‘So there is a sense in which the woman’s
look at the monster . . . is also a recognition of their similar status
as potent threats to vulnerable male power.’
Creed’s book was seminal in my exploration of my fascination with
monsters within a misogynist culture that hates the female body. My copy
of The Monstrous Feminine is so marked up it’s
barely readable. To give a quick sense of the range of Creed’s ideas,
I would like to end my talk by reading my jottings in the margins of her
book, which I wrote in the mid-90s. This is not being presented as an
example of the “smart” but of the “personal.”
The rapid shifts in register of my marginalia from studenty notes to plot
ideas for Mina to personal revelation demonstrates what
I was saying earlier about an unguarded embrace of cultural artifacts—a
collapse of the me/it dichotomy. I’ve indicated which chapter each
set of notes was written in.
Introduction: Fear that women are not castrated.
The woman’s look at the monster.
Chapter 1: Kristeva, Femininity, Abjection: Pleasure
in L’s ugliness, rimming him. So few details remain—pile up
on an altar to memory. Reminds me of men who reject women after sex. Would
this mean that language writing is abject. Border. Body as colonized—how
do I know I’m not a bugged-eyed space alien who has taken over the
body of a girl from Indiana—how else could I have become me?
Chapter 3: Woman as Possessed Monster: The invaded subject.
Graphic description of bodily excrement—body as territory.
Chapter 4: Woman as Monstrous Womb: Monstrous offspring
are created by the maternal imagination. Mina dreams of monstrous babies—perhaps
Mina gets pregnant? Male versus female body. Couvade—man giving
birth. A female creature is about to give birth to an alien being or blob
. . . her womb is a grotesque thing. Uncanny = the old.
Chapter 5: Woman as Vampire: Because she is sexually
awakened she is now a threatening female figure.
Chapter 6: Woman as Witch: Over and over—this threat
to the symbolic order.
Chapter 8: Medusa’s Head: The Vagina Dentata: Whenever
he fucked her he had a fear of losing his legs. Fear of first events.
Chapter 9: The Femme Castratrice: This represents Mina’s desire
for normality. Mina & Mina—identical twins separated at birth—have
them have sex with one another.
Chapter 10: The Castrating Mother: Striges = women with
bodies of birds/clawed feet of vultures. Around us stuffed birds perch
as if ready to pounce. Voyeurism—watching someone undressing. “The
cruel eyes studying you”—trapped in madhouse. Children’s
bath/vulnerability.
Chapter 11: The Medusa’s Gaze: Death. Masochistic
viewing. Other films = sadistic gaze. Penis.
Inside Back Cover: Not writing = me as body, a body that
will not budge, will not reform, reduce—the elusive squishiness
of the flesh—you’d think it would be more plastic, easier
to push around—an excess of molecules—I want to evaporate
myself—my belly continues to hug my hip bones—L’s picture
of my leg in motion, legs crossed and blurred—people sitting around
me with notebooks, I am private I am deep—I am worthless when I
am not writing—banality consumes me—my character is a girl
who spends all her time in cafes and in bed—no banality in that
gnawing aloneness—always looking for another being to rub against.
The little bitch keeps her secrets from me . . . the little bitch won’t
fess up the facts. There’s this figment colonizing my psyche in
that unbelievable construct, the past.
___________________
Slightly different versions of these three movements were previously performed:
“Pop the Culture” and “Talking Dirty” were presented
as papers at “Prose Acts,” a conference on narrative at SUNY
Buffalo, October 18-21, 2001.
“Sex, Body, Writing” was the originary essay for a SUNY Buffalo
Poetics listserv colloquium on gender and writing, ed. Christopher W.
Alexander, September 30, 2000 (archived at http://www.epc.buffalo.edu)
The three movements were first presented together as part of a weekend
residency at Kootenay School of Writing, Vancouver, February, 2002.
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