Difference
A politics of difference implies the right to define oneself, others, and the world according to one’s own interests (Grosz 1995, 54).
Patriarchal notions of difference equate it with “inequality, distinction, or opposition, a sexual difference modeled on negative, binary, or oppositional structures” (Grosz 1995, 53). Through this, difference, including bodily difference, has been an ongoing barrier for ‘equality feminists’ who seek to dismantle patriarchy, and achieve women’s equal participation in society. This idea of difference also sees that “only one of the two terms has any autonomy” (ibid. ), so for women to gain an autonomy, they must achieve equality, level out the playing field. “Difference has been colonized by power relations that reduce it to inferiority” (Braidotti 1994, 147).
‘Sexual difference’ feminism sees difference not as a barrier to feminism, but as something positive and potentially subversive. Here, difference is removed from the same/other binary and is not viewed as one thing or its other but as one of many possibilities. Difference need not be oppositional, not one half of something (be it sex or gender), but just ‘something’ that differs from many other things, or everything. Grosz refers to this as ‘pure difference’ (1995, 53). Such a difference allows us to abandon binary structures, and deny the privileging of one position over another.
Differences are found not only between men and women but within such groups. Among women, for example, there are class and racial differences, then there are differences within such class or racial groupings, and differences within those smaller groups, and so on. Difference does not stop at the individual, but each person enacts difference – a female does not express the same femaleness throughout her life (Braidotti 1994), and the same can be said for males, for all people. In this ongoing de-categorisation, the paths of difference cut across each of us from many angles. There is no central position, no subjective core, nothing that resembles a natural self.
To see difference as multifarious, whereby individuals exist within many subjectivities at many times and for many reasons, might be a key to destabilising a fixed idea of ‘normal’ that is attached to certain men who need not think of themselves through difference. A difference that is not static, can never be solidified and is endlessly renegotiated through cultural shifts. While such difference may include race, class, sex, gender, sexuality, ability, and religion, it also holds much more. In fact, such categories are revealed to be flawed when used in any stand-alone capacity. No person can only be black, or only be white, all people being a multiple of things, and never in any static way. Tomorrow, we are different.
Moira Gatens insists that ‘difference feminism’ cannot be considered as the opposition to ‘equality feminism’. To position these perspectives as oppositional “assumes a body/mind, nature/culture dualism” (Gatens 1996, 68) – where body and nature versus mind and culture. For Gatens, the two positions are not mutually exclusive, and each has similar goals. Difference feminism involves multiple differences, is not biological, and is not solely about women’s difference to men. It is more about discursive and cultural differences, understanding biology and anatomy to be shaped by discourse. Difference and equality feminisms both aim for a society that does not uphold subordination of women. Yet, their strategies differ greatly. Viewing the two positions as binary opposites ignores any overlap, and might be considered a masculine approach – where something is shaped and defined via its opposite, erasing complexities in the process, seeing all as black/white, yes/no.
But in Gaten’s world, and in the world of difference feminism, all is maybe. This can be seen through écriture féminine – a movement in which (initially French) feminists explore the possibilities of feminine difference through writing the body. It is not a theory of women, as such a thing would be considered unfeasible by those who practice it. For, to speak for everybody would be a masculine approach (Gatens 1996 73), a universal tactic, a violent assertion that erases, conceals and denies so much. Rather, écriture féminine is exploratory, creative, embodied.
Within this project I aim to position men’s bodies as other, as not one, as variable. The male body as a locus of differences, made complex, significant, and in some ways, indecipherable. Taking the focus off the mind, the interior self, the masculinity of men, and looking at differences that encircle, caress, and transcend the boundaries of male flesh.
Writing Bodies
Every time I try to write about the body, the writing ends up being about language (Butler 2004, 198).
Women’s participation in Western culture relies on an appropriation of ‘phallocentric codes’ (Dallery 1989), and it is through such codes, such language, that feminism has had to assert itself, betraying itself through its use of phallocentric discourse. A project that seeks an alternative discourse for women is écriture féminine. It is not a unified project, but more so, an approach adopted by many post-structural feminists in an attempt to challenge the linguistic realm monopolised by men, one that inscribes phallocentric meanings of femaleness and femininity onto the bodies of women (Gatens 1996).
The relationship between language and the body is a relation of production, of causing to appear and being made to appear: bodies produce language, just as language helps to produce the field of cultural intelligibility in which bodies make their appearance (Thomas 1996, 29).
Écriture féminine challenges Lacan’s notion of the phallus/lack that feeds cultural assumptions of sexual difference whereby men are active and ‘whole’, and women are passive and ‘lacking’. Yet, such writing does not simply argue against the negative terms assigned to women and is more intent on dislodging the binary structure that supports positive/negative binaries. Écriture féminine is a political act, a “discursive challenge”, an enunciation of pure difference. It “involves challenging the masculine monopoly on the construction of femininity”, and rejects that there can be a theory of woman (Gatens 1996, 72).
Écriture féminine is not so much writing about bodies, as it is an act of writing the body. It is a blurring of boundaries that traditionally separate readers and writers from the text, a slur against the objective, detached voice of reason. An implantation of textual bodily selves, “an intertextuality between language and the female body” (Fox 1999 136). Influenced by modernist avant-garde literature, much of this writing is poetic, erotic, breathing. It invites the reader closer, no longer able to read from a distance. It challenges the myth of passive readership, of objective truths, of mind/body separation. It does not rage against the masculine order as much as it subverts it, undermines it, laughs at it (Cixous 1991b). It is a provocation, a hint of what may be, a challenge to readers to write their own bodies, to participate, to explore the possibilities of discursive bodily selves.
Writing is the passageway, the entrance, the exit, the dwelling place of the other in me – the other that I am and am not, that I don’t know how to be, but that I feel passing, that makes me live – that tears me apart, disturbs me, changes me, who? (Cixous & Clément 1986, 85-6).
Writers such as Irigaray and Cixous explore connections between language and bodies, whereby each shapes the other. Such writing allows women to move from a position of sexual object to sexual subject (Dallery 1989) – she speaks herself into existence. Écriture féminine carves a space that need not conform to traditional narratives of mind over body, reason over poetics. It transcends the divide between literature and theory, between eroticism and politicism. It challenges dominant literature not always by engaging with it, but through exploring other avenues of expression, and new articulations of difference (Gatens 1996, 73).
It is only possible to express the feelings of the body through the lacework of meaning that envelope it. Sexuality is as much about language as it is about the sexual organs (Weeks 1991, 3).
Irigaray’s writings offer a space for dialogue between sexes, where men and women can speak to one another through difference, rather than speaking at one another (through sameness). Irigaray seeks a linguistic space in which women can engage with men through equitable negotiation, and on women’s own terms. A place where men and women can approach each other respectfully – a dialogical relationship that accepts difference without either sex imposing their self onto the other (Irigaray 1993b).
Many have discredited Irigaray on the basis that her feminism is essentialist, and that her use of the word ‘woman’ implies a universal, heterosexual subject, framed by its difference to men. Yet, Irigaray has always refused to define ‘woman’. She discusses difference in relation to the morphology of bodies, rather than anatomy, and a failure to recognise this leads to a misreading of her work, the suspicion of essentialism (Grosz 1989, 111). When Irigaray discusses the two lips of a woman’s sex, Grosz states that “[i]ts function is not referential” of what it is to be female, “but combatative”, arguing against the idea that women’s sexual organs are lacking, or singular (ibid. 116). “Her purpose is to displace male models, rather than to accurately reflect what female sexuality really is” (ibid. 117).
Irigaray embodies female sexuality in that which, at this moment in the history of the language, is always figurative, can never be simply taken as the thing itself (Gallop 1988, 98).
In her rejection of phallogocentrism, and repudiating humanist goals as masculine, Irigaray does not oppose male-privilege by an assertion of female-privilege (as is often thought). She seeks an autonomous position for women, a dialogue among women as well as between women and others, and a female desire that is not lacking. Throughout her work, Irigaray challenges men to look at male embodiment, difference, and to carve their own paths away from a patriarchy that also dishonours them.
The ‘writing of the feminine body’, far from being an exercise in feminist separatism, involves – and necessarily involves – addressing the other, the ‘thou’ of our social relations (Gatens 1996, 38-9).
Another significant feature of écriture féminine is in the use of metaphor as a subversion of rational text that seeks to give meaning, to define. Women do not literally have sexual organs all over their bodies, as stated by Irigaray, yet this statement is powerful in its refusal of a singular, genital-driven female sexuality.
Woman spoken through metaphors abandons and defies traditional argument and its dependence upon logic, fact, science. Yet, Greek tragedies have been used in psychoanalytic theories, so this is not something unique to écriture féminine. But difference lies in how and why such metaphors are used. The laugh of the medusa is not about defining woman, but simply to denote (and encourage) women’s abandonment of rational thought that denies her a presence, a role unto herself (Cixous 1991b). Woman as the sea represents herself as a vast, uncontainable terrain that cannot be controlled, segmented, owned (Cixous & Clément 1986 88-9). In this sense, Cixous is not using metaphors to explain, describe, and assign the production of self (as Freud does), but to evade such definition, to create a space for an ambiguous and amorphous freedom. To laugh at the very rules that were created for woman, that burden her with meaning.
The body is quite literally rewritten, traced over, by desire (Grosz 1994, 56).
So, what might it mean to write bodies as male? To (re)write the male body? Thomas argues that writing the self is a feminising process, involving exposure of the abject self, and may be considered as a form of self-castration (1996). Accordingly, women have less to lose in writing the self, whereas men do. For ‘man’, his role in the phallic economy is at stake (ibid.).
Male (Sexed) Bodies
The body is in no sense naturally or innately psychical, sexual, or sexed. It is indeterminate and indeterminable outside its social constitution as a body of a particular type (Grosz 1994, 60).
The focus of this thesis is on sexed bodies and how males might live through male bodies, rather than beyond them. The body I wish to discuss is both hetero and homo sexual, a mixture of black and white and other colours besides, belonging to all classes and living in all locations. It might also be female. It is the impossible body. My investigation of this body seeks to reveal the lie of the neutral body. This body I discuss is abstract, morphological.It is invested with so much meaning that it inevitably leaks out, despite its own attempts to remain sealed. It is from this slippery puddle that I wish to begin in the reconstruction of a body sexed male.
To discuss the bodily differences of men from women (as I do) is problematic. Biologically-influenced understandings of maleness and femaleness continue to sustain the belief that there are only two types of person. It might be said that sex lies dormant as an unquestioned truth, evidenced by the continuation of a species. How else would populations continue if it were not for the male sex and the female sex, as opposites, coming together to produce further generations. Childbirth, parenting, the act of hetero sex – a narrative we know too well.
An understanding of a natural body feeds and strengthens ideas about sex as significant, fixed, and heterosexual. The discourse of ‘natural’ is multi-layered, has historical depth, and may ensure the subject’s incomprehensibility of an unnatural, discursively produced sex (Butler 1993). The body, and the sex of the body are somewhat beyond critique, beyond change, sex often presupposing a natural connection with the self, and with others. It is difficult to unhinge ‘sex’ from ‘natural’, despite the common acknowledgment that biology never remains static (Kessler & McKenna 1978).
Sex is natural, sex is good.
Not everybody does it,
but everybody should.
This is what George Michael sings in I Want Your Sex (1988). He is not so much talking about sex as a particular biology (male/female), but the act of sex, though seemingly the two are inseparable. As evidenced by the video, this sex is clearly heterosexual, monogamous, “one-on-one”. Michael takes a tube of lipstick and writes “explore monogamy” on the leg of ‘his’ female lover. A message for her or for viewers? In either case, an interesting message for a song whose story is that of a man coercing somebody to have sex. In viewing the song and video as a cultural artifact, it, like the Bible, naturalises sex. Sex as something not necessarily procreative, but certainly heterosexual. Something between only one man and one woman at any one period of time.
I don’t need no bible,
Just look in my eyes.
I want your sex.
Surely if heterosexual monogamy was ‘natural’, such texts as this (and yes, perhaps the bible) would be unnecessary. To consider today’s George Michael, as an ‘out’ gay man, gives an added absurdity to such claims. Without knowing his sexual practices, it can be assumed that like many men, Michael’s sexual pleasure is not invested in the bodies of women. Perhaps it does not rest exclusively with the male body either. What can be said though, is that Michael’s public shift from hetero to homo sexuality denies a fixed sexuality – that which plays itself out through the concept of ‘natural’. Instead, we see that each male body can (and to varied degrees, probably does) shift its sexual practices over time.
Could it not be said that the gay man, like the woman, and the ‘other’ categories of people are integral to the construction of ‘man’? Yet how can we speak of ‘man’ in isolation? ‘Man’ overlaps with all people. He is not exclusively heterosexual, white and middleclass. He is not unhinged from women. At least not in his everyday, ongoing interactions.
One thing that sorts the men from the boys (or from the women and gays – those left behind when the boys became men) is the active/passive binary. This binary carries much weight in Freudian psychoanalysis, despite Freud’s insistence that masculine/feminine were ambiguous categories and that the active/passive binary did not fold neatly into such categorisation (Freud 1949). It can be said though that largely, Freud painted a picture of female sexuality as passive, lacking, a pale reflection of the sexuality of man. In reference to the pre-genital phase of a child’s sexual development, it is said:
The contrast between masculine and feminine plays no part as yet, its place is taken by the contrast between active and passive, which we may designate as the forerunner of sexual polarity, with which it is later fused (Freud 1920, 283).
Much feminism, literature and popular culture shows that female sexuality is not passive, and nor is a woman’s engagement with sex, be it heterosexual or otherwise. The erotic fiction of Anaïs Nin is but one example of active female sexuality as enjoyed (and read) by all sexes. The Basque and the Bijou is a short story about a man who regularly visits a brothel. It is there that he makes (not just sexual) connections with an array of women, exploring his and their sexualities.
Again he waited, then advanced a little more. Viviane had time to feel how good it was to be filled, how well suited the female crevice was to hold and to keep. The pleasure of having something to hold there, exchanging warmth, mingling the two moistures. He moved again. The suspense. The awareness of the emptiness when he withdrew – her flesh withered almost immediately. She closed her eyes. His gradual entrance threw radiations all around it, invisible currents warning the deeper regions of her womb that some explosion was coming, something made to fit in the soft-walled tunnel and to be devoured by its hungry depths, where restless nerves lay waiting. Her flesh yielded more and more. He entered further (Nin 2000, 139-40).
This scenario can be read in many ways, and if a choice is necessary, it is difficult to determine whether Viviane is active or passive. Perhaps, she is neither, or both. She might be considered active in the sense that she desires, she holds, she keeps, she hungers. She might be passive if it is considered that he controls her pleasure. Yet, she “yields”, more and more. The body that yields is surely an active body. A body that gives, desires, opens itself to pleasure. Through her body Viviane gives and receives pleasure. She is not the object of this story. Perhaps that position is filled by the penis. Yet, this is not crucial to the story. “The pleasure of having something to hold there”, does not indicate that this something must be a penis. It is just something, anything. Perhaps desire is the centre of the story. Desire as hungry, yielding, radiating, and far from passive.
The active/passive divide is rendered incomprehensible by Luce Irigaray’s conceptualisation of the sexual female and her bodily sex.
As for woman, she touches herself in and of herself without any need for mediation, and before there is any way to distinguish activity from passivity. Woman “touches herself” all the time, and moreover no one can forbid her to do so, for her genitals are formed of two lips in continuous contact (Irigaray 1985b, 24).
Irigaray’s concept of the two lips relocates woman to a sex that is not one. She is not one, but many, and therefore the vagina cannot so easily be determined as complementary to the male penis. They are not oppositional, as her pleasure resides not in one organ, but many organs, and not necessarily those considered reproductive, or penetrable. Male and female sexual organs (and sexuality) can therefore not be deemed parallel, two halves, the perfect fit. Their pleasures are different.
Some men’s disavowal of passivity may be due to a male neutrality – sexless rationality, protective of its borders. Redirecting fears of powerlessness (as connoted by passivity) onto bodies of ‘others’. Bodies that belong to women, gay men, and other men who are visibly different, such as the worker, the black man, the ‘disabled’. Could it be that ‘other’ male bodies are feminised, made passive, objectified through a sense of visibility? Are these men feminised (othered) because they are of their bodies? The black man will always be a black-man in the eyes of the ‘normal’ man who evades hyphenation. He cannot hide his difference. He cannot claim neutrality, or a position of mind over matter, for he is bodied. To what extent does ‘difference’ make us bodied?
…the subject is constituted through the force of exclusion and abjection, one which produces a constitutive outside to the subject, an abjected outside, which is, after all, ‘inside’ the subject as its own founding repudiation (Butler 1993, 3).
Men have always written of the body, but as far as my research stretches, it seems rare that they write from the body. Freud does not speak of his own self, with rarely a hint that he is there, in the same room as those he writes about, the bodies on his couch. And where is the body of Paul Schilder when he states: “By actions and determinations we give the final shape to our bodily self. It is a process of continued active development” (1950, 105). It seems that he is present within the pronoun “we”, yet why then speak of “our” self? Am I to believe that his body, my body and all bodies are one and the same?
Even modern theories and discussion of bodies that recognise difference feminism, the phenomenological position of the lived body, and the impossibility of universal bodies, fail to address the differences of and within sexed bodies. The body of these authors is absent, without shape. The voices are neutered - arguments made solid through their lack of flesh. Where is the voice that is both textual and sexual (Cixous & Clément 1986)? (Have I too failed to invite my body into this text?)
It has been argued that Foucault’s study of the body concentrates on the history of male bodies, and is “not forthcoming on the question of sexual difference” (Gatens 1996, 69). This is a difficulty that many feminists have with Foucault, despite his usefulness in presenting the body as discursively produced. Yet, can it really be said that these neutral bodies are male? Without discussion of particular body surfaces, organs, and sites of sexual difference, it is difficult to say. The neutral body might be considered as much not-man as it is not-woman, being a body that denies its sex. Yet, given masculine culture’s dependence upon the symbolism of male body privilege, as found in the phallus, the castrating glance, the impenetrable mind, it is perhaps the case that the male body is not so much neutral as it is veiled, like the phallus (Thomas 1996).
…the traditional relationship between men and their bodies has never been a spoken one; rather, it has been marked by a profound if not pronounced anxiety (Thomas 1996, 11).
This anxiety, for Thomas, relates to a refusal to speak of the body, as to do so robs the subject of his masculinity. Deprives him of a neutral, speaking position. That which allows him to speak of the self, not from the self, and on behalf of all, as objective master. Man is therefore estranged from his body, and when faced with his body, with any ruptures of the mind/body split, anxiety emerges. As though haunted by his body, its functions, its animal qualities that reduce him to ‘nature’, he must resist this fracturing of his subjectivity. To do so, he must privilege the mind over the body, and deny the erotics of his flesh.
[F]ull identification with the phallic, proprietal imago of masculinity demands a kind of de-erotization of most of the body (Waldby 1995, 271).
In The Male Body, Susan Bordo pays homage to the penis and its cultural meanings (1999). The penis discussed is that of a Western (US) white middle-class man. A man whose relationship with his penis, according to Bordo, is shaped through his consumption of media, advertising, films, and the popular culture that nourishes him.
Bordo’s goal is to re-position the penis as soft yet powerful, fragile and bodily. She critiques ‘cultural’ notions of the hard menacing penis and instead favours discussion of its beauty, vulnerability, and its signals of love. Bordo does not seek to displace the primary role of the penis within male subjectivity and does not discourage male genital pride. Rather than questioning the powers already invested by the penis, or relocating them elsewhere upon bodies, Bordo exonerates the penis as something fantastical – “No other part of the body is so visibly and overtly mercurial as the penis, capable of such dramatic transformation from passivity to otherness” (ibid. 43). Whether Bordo refers only to other body parts of males, or to all bodies is unclear. If the latter is the case, then one must ask, what of the maternal body? Surely the transformative stages of pregnancy and childbirth are more impressive than a strand of flesh that can change its shape to permit sexual penetration. And is the erect penis really so ‘hard’? Does it not maintain a certain softness (and warmth) when touched, tasted, swallowed by other bodies?
Bordo is critical of Irigaray’s concept of woman as ‘the sex which is not one’, claiming that this implies a singular sexuality of men (1999). Irigaray’s aim is to destabilise a binary sexuality built upon ideas of passive/active, subject/object, masculine/feminine, through which the concept of phallus/lack is given flesh and resonance via the penis/vagina. Irigaray is critical of Freud’s construction of female sexuality not only because it is built upon a lack (castration), but because in order to mirror his version of male sexuality, Freud denies the pleasure-giving role of the clitoris (an immature pleasure that must relocate to the vagina) and other erotogenic zones. Rather than choosing women’s primary sex organ (a masculine approach), Irigaray chooses a sexuality that is not confined to one site of the body, but across the whole of the female body, hence the sex which is not one.
In her belief that this implies a singular male sexuality located in the penis, Bordo fails to acknowledge that difference need not be oppositional, that woman’s plurality does not pre-suppose man’s singularity. This sense of the other, measured through sameness, is exactly what Irigaray does not support in her ‘difference’. Irigaray does not speak of male sexuality.
Why should I appropriate for myself what that ‘other’ man would have to say? What I want and what I’m waiting to see is what men will do and say if their sexuality releases its hold on the empire of phallocratism. But this is not for a woman to anticipate, or foresee, or prescribe..." (Irigaray 1985b, 36).
While attempting to open the path for a plural male sexuality, Bordo’s focus remains fixed on the penis as primary site. She articulates a plurality of the penis itself, as a bodily organ with a dual function. It is either ‘hard’ or ‘soft’ – “two dramatically different physiological states that have been endowed with even more dramatic – and varied – significance by culture” (1999, 44). While it is a worthy gesture to subvert the concept of penis as phallus (hard, strong and powerful), it is disappointing that the penis remains at the centre of male sexuality. Shifting the focus away from the penis and onto other bodily sites might lead the way toward multiplicitous male sexualities.
In attempting to shift the focus from women’s breasts as objects viewed by the detached observer, and thus lending itself to notions of woman-as-object, Iris Marion Young writes of ‘the breasted experience’, looking at the breasts from within (1990). This approach both highlights the significance of breasts for women, and the social detachment with which breasts are viewed, discussed and shaped. The woman, within her body, does not see her self (or her breasts) in the same way as the outside observer – “to imagine the woman’s point of view, the breasted body becomes blurry…” (ibid. 192). The same might be said for the penis-bearing body. What if we imagine this from a male point of view? Firstly, the phallic wholeness of man is jeopardised by the fact that he cannot see the whole of himself. The penis, looked down upon, is small, points downward – away from look of the self, and others. Perhaps concealed by a protruding stomach, or darkened by pubic hair. Fleshy and distant, at times forgotten. Perhaps it is not the centre of man after all.
For Young, the chest signals a person’s core, as the enunciation of “I” is often paired with a finger/hand to the chest – a locating of the self (ibid. 189). One does not point to their genitals and say “I”, but to the vicinity of the heart – an organ more crucial to the existence of self.
In all his creations, all his works, man always seems to neglect thinking of himself as flesh (Irigaray 1993a 127-8).
Masculine Vision
…but sexual difference is not determined simply by the fantasized relation to anatomy, which depends to a great extent on catching sight of something (Cixous & Clément 1986, 82).
Many theorists who analyse the role and function of bodies in the social world disallow their own body to be of this world. A distance is implicit in seeing, in envisioning truth, in interpretation without touch. A distance that is instrumental in gaining a masculine rational world-view, in which the tangible is sorted, named, positioned, theorised – made into truth.
Like many contemporary social theorists, Kathy Davis looks at the body as an object observed, an object discussed in relation to medical and scientific advances, capitalism, its ties to identity (1997). The social body is discussed through a language that denies an embodied author (and reader). The text lies dormant. The ‘sociological body’ is detached from the ‘material body’, the body with which I/you turn this page. The study of social bodies has drawn important connections between individual and social bodies, the micro and macro, the discourse that binds them, the flows and resistance between them (Foucault 1979). Yet, why must a serious ‘scientific’ text deny the body’s role in creating such a text?
By imprisoning the Other in her/his, privileged groups – notably white, Western, Bourgeois, professional men – are able to take on a god’s eye view as disembodied subjects (Davis 1997, 10).
This is a valid point, yet by stating this as a factual observation, Davis pays homage to the method she is critiquing. Her authorial voice is no less seated in a god’s eye (masculine) position than those who imprison “the Other”. Surely one cannot support embodiment from a space without bodies. Such an approach does not challenge the idea of objective, “disembodied subjects”.
The distant, rational world-view of a masculine (impossible) model of philosophy relies upon the denial, isolation, and the redistribution of emotions, desire, and the abject self, into the bodies of women and others. Removal of the abject allows the masculine subject to view the world with clarity, objectivity, truth. With little ‘investment’ in such a world, why should her/his view differ to that of another person rationally dislocated from her/his body?
The body as the seat of desire, irrationality, emotionality and sexual passion thus emerged, especially in French social theory, as a central topic in oppositional writing, as a symbol of protest against capitalist rationality and bureaucratic regulation (Turner 1991, 17).
Yet, where does Turner feature in this phrase, if nothing but a commentator? Does he support French social theory? Where does he locate his own body in social theory? Turner’s work provides no evidence that he is, himself, a body – of breath and desire. His observations about bodies echo from afar, a voice projected from an unknown place, where bodies can be observed, but the observer cannot. Where universal truths can be formulated through a masculine (disembodied) discourse – “clothing the universe in one’s own identity” (Irigaray 1993a, 121).
Through a scopic privilege that allows detachment, sociology itself might be considered masculine – “sociologists should not simply study bodies, but write their own bodies and bodily experience into their understanding of the body” (Knights & Thanem 2005, 39). Academic study itself is deeply invested in the visual – a hegemonic vision, as evidenced in the primacy of empirical studies and an inability to recognise knowledges informed by other senses – by touch, hearing, taste, or smell. This bias has been uncovered by écriture féminine, where subjectivities are informed not by a primary sense, but by a collaboration of all senses. A sensitive existence. In her reinterpretation of Eve, Cixous states – “We are told that knowledge could begin with the mouth, the discovery of the taste of something. Knowledge and taste go together” (1991a, 151).
Since Plato, ‘I see’ has been equated with ‘I know’, whereby vision is the path on which we find our way to knowledge (Braidotti 1994, 49). Indeed, metaphors that stem from Greek philosophy, such as “the mind’s eye”, evidence this “to the point that knowledge has become analogous with clear vision and light is regarded as the metaphor for truth” (Pallasmaa 2005, 15).
The primacy of vision has not only been challenged by feminist philosophy (Braidotti 1994, 49), but through studies of art and architecture. In The Eyes of the Skin, Juhani Pallasmaa discusses the ‘ocularcentric paradigm’ in relation to the corporeal intelligence of architecture, and warns against constructions through vision at the expense of other senses (2005). Pallasmaa is supportive of the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty, whereby we humans have a sensory engagement with the world – with architecture, space, art, as well as each other, and ourselves.
The dominance of the eye and the suppression of the other senses tends to push us into detachment, isolation and exteriority (Pallasmaa 2005, 19).
Psychoanalysis works within an ocularcentric paradigm, its very foundations built upon the self, founded via mirrors and sightings, occasioning a tension between phallus/lack. The mirror-image is said to be “the threshold of the visible world” (Lacan 1989, 3), in which “the child sees its wholeness before it feels its wholeness” (Gatens 1996, 33). Through psychoanalysis, females represent lack on the basis of their hidden genitals. Despite a real presence, they cannot be seen by those who stand before the woman standing (as phallic?) before the mirror. Her lack depends upon his phallus – “the penis is dominant in the shaping of the body image” (Lacan, quoted in Gatens 1996, 33). Here, sexual difference is based upon visually informed notions of (w)hole selves. If we were to touch the woman standing before the mirror, we would know that she is sexed, but psychoanalysis works from a safe distance, privileging the scopic over the tactile (masculine over feminine?) (Gatens 1996). The psychoanalyst keeps a distance between her/himself and the patient – observing, but never touching. It is only through sight that Freud’s concepts of “penis envy” and “castration anxiety” can exist.
To see requires viewing from a particular position, but the mind does not inhabit such a position, unlike the body. Therefore, the mind cannot see (Crossley 1996, 29).
While the phallus is not a tangible object, it is located in the visual realm via fetishised objects and body parts. Heterosexual male sexuality is considered fetishistic, in that the ever-missing phallus is located in the female body, or as items of female clothing, positioning the female as a sexual object, despite her ‘lack’ (Gatens 1996, 33-4). “The subject, outside all objects, fixes the object in its gaze, mastering and knowing it with unambiguous certainty” (Young 1990, 191). Here, Young is referring to the objectification of breasts, as fetishised in Western cultures. Young highlights the difficulty involved in viewing breasts from the position of the breasted woman. In doing so, she reveals a relationship between objectification and propriety – “the object is property” (1990, 191).
Merleau-Ponty challenges the notion of a disembodied vision, and the distinction between subject and object on the basis that only the body “can bring us to the things themselves” – things/objects which are “inaccessible to a subject that would survey them from above” (1968, 136). According to Merleau-Ponty, it is through the ability to see others that people realise that they too are seen – the seer and the seen are interrelated and dependable upon the other – “through other eyes we are for ourselves fully visible”, and therefore, the phantom self (that which sees without being seen) is a lie (ibid. 143). “[O]ur body commands the visible for us, but it does not explain it” (ibid. 136). In other words, by seeing, we cannot assume a clear and direct interpretation, what is at play is rather an exchange between the seer and the seen. Vision cannot envelop the world, just as it cannot be enveloped by the world (ibid. 138).
We have to reject the age-old assumptions that put the body in the world and the seer in the body, or, conversely, the world and the body in the seer as in a box (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 138).
Merleau-Ponty speaks of an abyss between the phenomenal and the objective body (the sentient and the sensible) – “a thing among things and otherwise what sees them and touches them” (ibid. 137). Here, touch and vision are not considered active or passive, but both active and passive – the seer is always seen, the toucher is always touched. In each case, the two parts, the sentient and the sensible, are inseparable, detached yet connected – “two segments of the one sole circular course” (ibid. 138).
Rethinking ‘the look’ (and the touch) through this phenomenological framework jeopardises the idea that ‘men act, women appear’. For man to possess the look, or the touch, it cannot be said that he is solely active, owner of the look/touch. Through seeing, he knows that he can be seen. Through touching, he is touched. To distinguish between active and passive, or subject and object, becomes redundant. Might it then be said that man is also formed through his appearance? That women and men both act and appear? Yet, even so, the primacy of the look, as phallocentric, possessive, and the basis of knowledge, favours those whose looking denies a looked-at-ness. Those subjects who live without prefixed identities.
Young also acknowledges that touch is simultaneously active and passive (1990, 193), and uses Merleau-Ponty’s theories to support an argument for female embodiment. This blurring of lines between passive and active, subject and object makes room for an embodied difference that is not either/or, one or its other. In her challenge of the hegemony of vision, Young suggests that “[a]n epistemology spoken from a feminine subjectivity might privilege touch rather than sight” (ibid. 193).
The Spaces In-Between
To touch, one must also be touched. The touch is owned not by one, nor the other, but both. “When one of my hands touches the other, the world of each opens upon that of the other” (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 141).
Merleau-Ponty discusses an overlapping between the touch and the touched, the seer and the seen, as well as the interrelations between vision and touch. “Since the same body sees and touches, visible and intangible belong to the same world” (ibid. 134). The two maps of vision and touch, while separate, can be interposed on each other.
If this synergy exists within one body, then why not between bodies? Merleau-Ponty gives an example of the handshake, the touching of another, a shared touch, with shared vision – an “intercorporeality”:
The body…clasps another body, applying itself to it carefully with its whole extension, forming tirelessly with its hands the strange statue which in its turn gives everything it receives (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 144).
For Irigaray, Merleau-Ponty’s own visioning of this relational (and reversible) interaction of tactility between the subject and the world is promising, yet problematic (1993a). She likens his theory to pre-natal existence, where senses do not stand alone, where the mother and the infant exist, together, in a space between subject/object, between active/passive. Each communicates through reciprocal touch. The womb, the beginning, is a tactile yet invisible space – for both mother and child. But this connection is not made by Merleau-Ponty, and perhaps cannot be, given the body and time from which he wrote (ibid.).
Not only does Merleau-Ponty deny the subject a sexual difference, but he also relies upon masculine notions of a unified and masterful subject. A subject that interacts with the world, yet, one that remains separate from the world. In his theory:
…the world is isomorphic with the subject and vice versa, and the whole is sealed up in a circle. Nothing new happens, only this permanent weaving between the world and the subject (Irigaray 1993a, 182).
Merleau-Ponty questions the primacy of vision, introducing the relation between touch and sight, tactile vision and the seeing touch. Yet Irigaray highlights that vision is still the primary within his phenomenology. Sight, as the domain of God, remains intact. But one is not touched by the all-seeing God (1993a, 163). Accordingly, the hand touched is not simply seen – “[w]hat is at play in the caress does not see itself. The in-between, the middle, the medium of the caress does not see itself” (ibid. 161). Irigaray re-positions Merleau-Ponty’s example of one hand clasping the other, to signify a different touch.
The hands joined, palms together, fingers outstretched, constitute a very particular touching (Irigaray 1993a, 161).
Here, there is no clasping, grasping, holding. This touch is more intimate than a hand that holds, possesses. Like the touch of the two lips, this is touch without possession. To Irigaray, the touch and the look need not be masterful. As the masterful look “disturbs the intelligence of my hand, of my touching… paralyzing the flow, turning it to ice, precipitating it, undoing its rhythm” (ibid. 162).
What matters to Irigaray is not who owns a gaze or a touch, or where one might locate the object and subject within touch, but rather, the space in-between, the touch. Not the caress of the body, but the caress between bodies. What of the space in-between the two surfaces that touch?
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Woman is place (Irigaray 1993a). She contains a child in her womb, a penis in her vagina. Woman contains. She is a place occupied by men and infants. Place is significant – it holds, nourishes, arouses, expels. It is active. It transforms. It is powerful. Places change and are transportable. The woman’s place accommodates, stretches, takes form around the infant and the man. “She gives form to the male sex (organ) and sculpts it from within. She becomes the container and the active place of the sexual act” (1993a, 43). Place is never closed. Woman is place, yet a woman’s place for herself is forbidden.
Can men be envelopes too? Perhaps not in the sense that Irigaray describes, as here, place belongs to the maternal woman – the woman who serves man and child, the woman denied her own place.
So why would man need to accommodate? Does man already accommodate? Is there room for man to be maternal? To be place? What of his mouth, his anus, his hands? The child in his arms, the lover’s penis inside him, his hands around another – holding, stroking, soothing, pleasuring. Giving shape.
He too has ‘places’ where his skin wraps around the body of another. Receiving, nursing, expelling.
In her Place, Interval essay, Irigaray toys with notions of passive/active and positions the female sex (organ) as active – that which holds, moves, wraps its skin around an ‘other’ (Irigaray 1993a, 34-55). It does to the male sex organ what might also be done by the mouth, the lips of men or women, where tongue meets sex organs both male and female. To caress with the tongue, lips, hands, feet, thighs, hair, or perhaps another object between bodies. To caress is not to hold, to caress is not to possess.
Irigaray is critiquing Aristotle, questioning, and re-writing the idea of woman as receptacle. For to receive, is to give place, accommodate, hold, caress. To receive is no less powerful than to give. Here, the body, as place, grows beyond itself through its interaction with and containment of others. The body/self is fluid, open, responsive to others, the self, the world as place.
The hand, it holds. It touches, it grips. Caressing and caressed. Fingernails slide across the flesh of another self. Soft, then hard. Dig beneath the surface; puncture. An opening where ‘in’ becomes ‘out’. Your blood, or mine?
The hand explores the body of another. Skin, mouth, hair, hands, contours, openings, organs. Why only speak of fucking with penises and vaginas? The body has many places in which to go. Many places that contain, give shape, give birth, bleed and ejaculate. Your tears, or mine?
The penis in my mouth or my anus is held there, put there by me. As are the folds of female sex that I take between my lips. My lips, my mouth, and my anus cannot constitute place in the way that Irigaray speaks of. Her place is tied to reproductive relations between men and infants who are shaped, incubated, and strengthened by woman. She who gives place, but never to herself. The mother is of herself, but divorced from herself. Empty, yet never closed – “The boundaries touch against one another while still remaining open” (ibid. 51).
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