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| Lisa Steele - Birthday Suit (with Scars and Defects) (1974) |
So, I had a
beautiful little moment of clarity today - let's see how long it lasted. I found myself thinking up some
interesting ideas for this project while I was in the middle of researching for
other things (that’s how it usually happens, for some reason!). I was doing
some reading for my thesis work and started finding some really interesting
connections (and disjunctions) to two book chapters I was reading side-by-side.
They’re both chapters I’ve read before, they were fundamental both to how I
began this research blog and to the direction my other research has taken as
well. But I never really took the time to consider them together. I’m talking
about Elizabeth Grosz’s chapter “Sexed Bodies” from the amazing 1994 book Volatile Bodies: Toward A Corporeal Feminism
and Vivian Sobchack’s “The Passion of the Material: Toward a Phenomenology of Interobjectivity” from the equally
awesome Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and
Moving Image Culture. I’d like to think through them a little bit here, and
additionally talk through a video by the Canadian video artist Lisa Steele
entitled Birthday Suit (With Scars and
Defects) from 1974.
Now, in brief
summary: I introduced Grosz’s ideas in my introductory post to this blog, but
the chapter “Sexed Bodies” ultimately attempts to think about how we can
re-insert discussions of biology into feminism and the politics of gender
inequality. She attempts to rewrite biologism not as something overly
deterministic or ‘innate’ about gender, but still existing as an “irreducible
remainder” to the way we understand or conceptualize gender difference. The
particularities of men’s and women’s bodies provide corporeal specificities to
the ontological statuses of each gender, which in turn becomes re-inscribed
into the social values and inequalities that exist between men and women.
Essentially, Grosz is considering how the materiality of the gendered body –
its irreducible status as meat, as organic
matter – contributes to intersubjective relations between men and women:
Instead of seeking sexual identities, the
notion of two absolutely separate types of entity, men and women, I have
attempted to seek out traces and residues of sexual difference, a difference
impossible to unify, impossible to searate from its various others and
impossible to identify or seal off in clear-cut terms. (Grosz, 208)
This
of course leads to Grosz’s consideration of the female body as an ontologically
liquidy, formless, leaking flow – an articulation of female corporeality as
‘abject’ that I’ve been working with throughout this whole project.
In “The Passion of the Material,”
Sobchack is also focused on the brute materiality of the body, yet while she
and Grosz seem to be starting with the same basic interest, they each take it
in separate directions. While Grosz is working from a stance of difference (and
building awareness of said difference without establishing men as the norm and
women as the ‘other’) Sobchack is interested in our fundamental sameness as matter, as body-objects that
exist in the world with other things that exert an influence over us that we
cannot fully grasp. Through her ‘interobjective’ model, Sobchack is interested
in mapping out how the human body creates resonances and influences in spaces
beyond our subjectivity and control, but also how these external forces and
objects can mutually influence us, undermining our subjectivities and treating
our body as another object in space:
This is to say, as
intersubjectivity is a structure of engagement with the intentional behavior of other body-objects from which we recognize what it objectively looks like to be
subjective, so interobjectivity is a structure of engagement with the materiality of other body-objects on
which we project our sense of what it
subjectively feels like to be objective. [to be an object, to be matter]
(316)
Sobchack
doesn’t really consider gendered relations in this chapter, but I think there
could be an interesting discussion there. She does articulate that this vision
would involve a set of ethics that understand the fundamental relatedness of
all things, and the corresponding imperative to treat the world with ‘care’
based in an awareness that the features that differentiate matter (through
gender, etc) are superficial and illusory. (In a discussion about Sartre’s
character Roquentin in Nausea, she
says: “He is merely differentiated
rather than radically differentiated from
the objective others and things that surround him.” 309).
From sameness to difference, both
Grosz and Sobchack are interested in rearticulating relationality, thinking
about a new way of imagining how we relate to each other and the surrounding
world by foregrounding the materiality of the human body, without resorting to binaristic
or hierarchical distinctions between men and women, subjects and objects.
That’s why, despite the different directions of their projects (and the
somewhat anachronistic time jump from Grosz’s 1994 book to Sobchack’s 2004
publication, forgive me for that) I feel as if these two authors are really
working from the same place. Both wish to articulate a model of understanding
how the material reality of the body
impresses itself upon our relations with the world. Near the end of her chapter
Grosz suggests the model of a Mobius strip – “a model which shows that while
there are disparate ‘things’ being related, they have the capacity to twist one
into the other” (209-210) – which I find particularly interesting in relation
to Sobchack’s ideas – while articulating difference and distinction, the Mobius
strip still retains connectiveness and pliability, indicating how things can
shift and alter throughout time.
So, that was a bit of a rant – what
about Lisa Steele? This video – an extremely influential piece of Canadian
feminist art from the 1970s – shows the artist on the occasion of her 27th
birthday, slowly and deliberately cataloguing all the scars and defects across
her body for the camera. What is a scar, if not the perfect indication of
Sobchack’s idea that the world can impress itself upon our bodies, creating an
awareness of our irreducible materiality, our unavoidable state as a
body-as-object? A scar is a literal trace of a place where the world exerted an
influence over our corporealities, leaving its mark, turning the body into a
slowly built-up archive of interobjective relations with the world. Steele’s
tape, which “accepts the extent of the consequences” of her clumsiness, could
be read as autobiographical, yet not an autobiography of a coherent subject’s actions
and choices in the world. Rather, her autobiography of the body-as-object indicates
that regardless of our subjective desires and trajectories in the world, our existence
as matter – as liquidy, bleeding, flowing, oozing, scratched matter – cannot be
erased.
And incidentally, I just love how
she spends so much time running her fingers along each scar, it’s as if she’s
allowing her own materiality to come in contact with itself, in some strange
way. I bet there’s a discussion to be had here with Merleau-Ponty’s ideas in “The
Intertwining – the Chiasm” chapter of The
Visible and Invisible – where he talks about his one hand touching the
other? That chapter was also highly influential for Sobchack’s “Passion of the
Material” text – I wonder if that’s something I should explore further – maybe the
next step??
5
minute clip of Birthday Suit on Lisa
Steele and Kim Tomczak’s website:
