Invisible Disabilities and How They Get That Way

I’ve been thinking a lot about disability of late, which won’t surprise those of you who have been sharing a particular corner of the blogosphere, in which awesome and fail appear to coexist in some kind of proportion in which the latter sadly sometimes seems to be winning out. In this analysis of the “Harmonisation of Disability Parking Permit Schemes in Australia”, I argue that the shift that is being proposed is from the social model of disability, to the medical model.

The medical model suggests that there is a way that the body ought to be, and any permanent ‘loss’ of such ‘normal’ capacities constitutes disability (and that this is a natural, neutral state of affairs that is no one’s fault—except the individual body, of course). This approach is the most mainstream, and it’s constitutive of much of the discrimination that disabled people (or people with disabilities, both terminologies having a different but important political point to make) experience.

The social model, which is offered as a counter to the medical model, suggests instead that the ‘loss’ of capacity occurs not because of the impairment itself, but because of the impairment in combination with a world built for the temporarily able-bodied. (And this doesn’t only refer to the built environment, of course: models of sociality, for example, are very strongly ableist).

There’s actually another step in this little spectrum, one which doesn’t get much screen time in activism (understandably, because it’s so far from the medical model, and such a challenge to it as to appear incomprehensible or nonsensical to those committed to the medical model). This suggests that even understanding particular bodies as impaired is the result of a presumption about the body. That is, it argues that disability begins at the moment when you understand some bodies as naturally unimpaired, and others as naturally impaired: the drawing of that line is not a neutral, naturally-given one, as we like to pretend. It is a political distinction that is, in itself, is invested with the ability system, which, as Lennard Davis argues, is what constitutes particular bodies as disabled, and thus as the problem. Davis recommends that whenever we see such a problem, we ought to ask how it is that this ‘problem’ is constituted as a problem, and be careful to observe the privilege that attends that which is not considered a problem. What makes disabled bodies into ‘those bodies with problems’? The presumption, essentially, that they ought to be otherwise: normal. And this in turn maintains the privilege of the able body.

The group who potentially loses out most dramatically in the proposed parking permit scheme is those with invisible disabilities, as Lauredhel demonstrates so clearly here. In response, I began thinking about what it meant to have an invisible disability. On the one hand, it might be that we could think of those with invisible disabilities as those who can ‘pass’ as able-bodied. And sometimes this is true, at least some of the time, and there’s little doubt that this ability to pass can lead to privilege as well as the problems associate with invisibility. For example, people approaching someone in a wheelchair will often talk to their assistant pushing the chair, as if the person with a disability is incapable of thought, conversation etc, and this kind of discrimination is something those who can walk are unlikely to confront. On the other hand, we can think more carefully, and see that those who have ‘invisible’ disabilities  are those whose differences simply don’t fit into someone’s expectation of what disability ought to be. And this means that legislation is likely to discriminate against those with ‘invisible’ disabilities because it is employing the medical model of disability. What does this mean? Well, hopefully this little story of mine might help.

Years ago, now, I was stepping out (sorry, I find that phrase hilarious and had to use it) with a young man who had a visual impairment. As he was doing a PhD, this meant that he couldn’t read at quite the rate he might have liked, and sometimes working on the computer was too much. I encouraged him to make use of whatever assistance the disability office at uni could offer him, even though I understood his fairly intense ambivalence about it. They were singularly unhelpful. He felt that they treated him as if he was ‘faking it’, on the one hand, and expecting too much of them on the other. The extension of his scholarship that he was hoping to get was, they told him, simply not going to be possible. I suggested that perhaps he should look to Centrelink’s Disability Allowance to help him fund the completion of his PhD. He picked up the forms, still unhappy about this prospect, even as he knew it was probably necessary, and brought them home.

I looked over his shoulder at the forms he was trying to fill out. He had ticked the box marked ‘visual impairment’, and been sent to another section. In this section, the form asked him for some proof from an opthalmologist. He hesitated. “What’s wrong?” I asked.

“Well, I’ve seen opthalmologists,” he explained. “But the issue isn’t in my eyes. It’s in my brain.”

His visual impairment, you see, wasn’t a loss of vision due to some problem in the eye, as the form assumed. He had been prone to migraines as a kid, and at some point (I think the age of 11, but this was a while ago), he had had an incredibly severe migraine. He recounted looking downwards, and having his entire left leg disappear in his blindspot. The auras had hung around—a permanent fixture, as it turned out. He saw multiple copies of everything, more or less depending on how good a day it was. Sometimes things looked like a badly tuned TV set, sometimes there were lines, sometimes… you get the idea. But although this interfered with his vision, it didn’t fit the form’s idea of what a visual impairment was. It didn’t seem to fit into any of the other categories either, as far as either of us could tell, although he might have argued a case under ‘having suffered a stroke’ except that that category seemed to think that difficulty speaking and walking would be the primary problems he’d have then. Frustrated and embarrassed, he stepped away from the idea, away from the forms. His impairment wasn’t real, couldn’t be argued for, proven, justified. Everyone would think he was faking it. I couldn’t think of what to say.

This is part of the problem with the medical model. It has a particular image of disability, generally involving the assumption of some level of dependence on others (because of course the temporarily able-bodied are so independent – [snort!]), and it institutes this, medically, legislatively. And in so doing, it requires that people with disabilities be people with particular, recognisable kinds of disabilities. Instead of testing for how one is disabled by a particular thing—by inaccessible parking, by stairs, by having to stand to be served, by the university’s expectations of a student’s reading speed—that is, instead of testing for a real problem with the way the world works, it instead requires that you fit an existing imagining of disability. And this existing imagining of disability is very limited, and thoroughly bound up with able-bodied fantasies (nightmares) about disabled bodies: as people in wheelchairs, people who are blind, people who are deaf. And indeed, it assumes that it already knows the effects of each of these impairments, a point which the Deaf community knows and battles, arguing against the idea that Deafness is a lack, or a loss, or an impairment at all. The medical model homogenises disability unnecessarily, and more than this, it renders numerous disabilities invisible because they do not match up to this fantasy of what constitutes disability.

When we legislate according to the medical model, we legislate what disability ought to be, what disability ought to look like. We legislate the visibility of disability, and we do it by rendering a whole mass of heterogeneous bodies imperceptible, invisible, ignore their capacity to be disabled by an able-bodied world. We imagine visual impairments after a singular model where vision is only located in the eye. We imagine mobility restrictions only through difficulty with walking. We imagine that the solution to PWD (and it is a solution to, not a solution for) is compensating for their recalcitrant  body, a body we assume to know all about. We reject the idea that the world might need to be reworked, rethought, rebuilt, and instead maintain disability by maintaining the world as a place which expects certain ‘normal’ things of bodies, and which privileges those bodies which can live up to this ideal as a result. When we legislate according to the medial model of disability, we maintain the disabilities of those who don’t adhere to our nightmare visions of disability, because we’re busy pretending they don’t exist, erasing them from our construction of the world. We ensure that some people remain disabled because we don’t have the imagination to allow the category of ‘disability’ to be shaped by the heterogeneity of real bodies, the heterogeneity of real needs, the heterogeneity of the real ways that people live their lives. We refuse to produce legislation which tests not for ‘the impairment itself’, but for disability, because that might implicate the able-bodied, our standards of normalcy, might trouble the extraordinary privilege maintained only at the disadvantage of those who don’t live up to our standards. We render bodies which might trouble our limited imagining of difference invisible, and then shrug, and raise our hands in the air, and ask how we could possibly have known that such people even existed, and how we could possibly be expected to ‘cater to’ such exorbitant, excessive difference. The perceptibility of bodies is a key stake in the politics of disability, because disabilities aren’t invisible. They’re invisibilised.

P.S We’ve done a whole lot of the work of being active for you! Beppie, Lauredhel and I have given you some quick and easy ways to respond to the supposed “Harmonisation Scheme”: a form letter, and a letter encouraging organisations to submit a response.

 

Disciplining Sex: Economies Etched in Intersexed Flesh

To begin, I want to tell you a story of a medical emergency.

Zippora, a 41-year-old Israeli, has given birth to an intersexed child. Sociologist Meira Weiss happens to be in the delivery room; she is researching parental reactions to diseased and deformed babies. When the nurse shows Zippora her baby, Weiss reports that the new mother turns pale, trembles, and bursts into tears: “What will I do? What will I tell people on the street when they ask me what I had, a girl or a boy? What will I tell them? [crying]… Can you operate? Maybe you can do an operation or … several operations, and then everything will be O.K. … and then people will know whether it is a boy or a girl… Oh, how disgusting” (Morland 2001, 527).

I’ve told this story several times to open a discussion of intersex, and the reactions are always quite diverse. Some people ‘tsk’ audibly during conference presentations. Some people’s eyes widen, whether because they have never imagined this scene occurring, or because they are astonished at the vehemence of Zippora’s reaction, I’m not sure. But most people look vaguely uncomfortable, caught imagining themselves in Zippora’s situation, perhaps, feeling that even as the words she uttered at a moment of great distress sound harsh, unfair, too stark and cruel, that they could not guarantee that they themselves would not react in the same way, confronted with the body of a longed-for child, which has abruptly become something other than they had imagined. There is, perhaps, a kind of comfort in knowing that medicine will not downplay the distress and anxiety expressed at such a moment. Such a situation is treated as a medical emergency. Most NICUs (Neonatal Intensive Care Unit) at most hospitals have a team ready to jump into action, to offer, supposedly, answers and solutions to the medical emergency of an infant with genitalia which doesn’t meet expectations.

Before I go on, I want to offer just a brief rundown of what intersex is, for those who have not encountered this phenomenon before. Intersex is the term that replaced ‘hermaphrodism’ in designating those bodies which did not fall neatly within those categories of ‘male’ bodies and ‘female’ bodies. The occurrence of intersex has been variously reported, but about 1.7 % of all live births seems to be the most accurate number so far. There are so many forms of intersex that sometimes talking about them collectively can be a bit misleading. There are some forms of genetic or chromosomal anomalies that will never manifest in variant genitalia or hormones at all, so that such people may never know that they are intersex in some sense. There are some which are the result of an insensitivity to a particular hormone, which can result in bodies which have testes and a vagina, because the ‘virilizing’ effect of that hormone never alters the body as it does in ‘males’. Or there can be micropenis, where the penis winds up shorter than expected in men. Or hypospadias, in which final part of the development of a ‘male’ feotus, the movement of the peehole from the base of the penis to the tip never quite completes. These are just a few examples of intersex, not an exhaustive list, but the majority result in what intersex advocates call ‘variant’ genitalia. As you can hear, every description I offer can only be fully understood in relation to those bodies taken as the measure of normalcy: male and female bodies. This is the standard from which intersex bodies are thought to vary. I’ll come back to this point. Some intersex advocates have recently adopted the term ‘DSD’ or ‘Disorders of Sexual Development’ as a better term than intersex (see www.isna.org). I resist this for a number of reasons, which I hope will become clear as the discussion progresses; but briefly: the adoption of medical language in this case works to reinforce that there is a proper order of sexual development, an order which intersex bodies fail to follow properly. This minimises the challenge that intersex poses to our assumptions about sexual dimorphism, as we shall see.

So, having discussed one form of authority over intersex bodies—that of medicine—I want to briefly mention another: the law. In NSW, there are criminal laws (Section 45 of the Crimes Act) which are designed to prevent “female genital mutilation”. They set down that any person who “excises, infibulates or otherwise mutilates the whole or any part of the labia majora or labia minora or clitoris of another person” should be imprisoned for 7 years. There are numerous recountings from intersexed people which use terms such as ‘excision’ and ‘mutilation’ to refer to the procedures performed upon their genitalia, and indeed, it is hard to see how the shortening of the clitoris, a fairly regular ‘treatment’ for intersexed infants, falls outside this part of the section. And indeed, some have suggested that cases should be brought against those who have performed ‘intersex corrective surgery’ under these laws. But the Act also contains an exception for those modifications deemed “necessary for the health of the person on whom it is performed.” And health is neatly described: “In determining whether an operation is necessary for the health of a person only matters relevant to the medical welfare of the person are to be taken into account.“ It’s pretty clear what’s at stake here: the Act is trying to outlaw one form of genital modification–that form known in the West as ‘female genital mutilation’, whilst ensuring that there are ways to argue in favour of others—and not only intersex, but ‘cosmetic’ genital procedures, which do not always differ significantly from those which are deemed ‘mutilation’. In order to ensure that this distinction is made and maintained, the law relies upon medical expertise as to what “medical welfare” actually means. A side note here is that this assumes that a special form of objectivity adheres to Western medical science’s understanding of healthy, normal genitalia, and so law relies upon Western medicine’s supposedly self-evident legitimacy to specifically preclude any non-Western ideas about what ‘normal’ genitalia look like. In other words, legitimising Western medical authority in this way ensures that genitalia which might be ‘normal’ in Kenya or Sudan can never be considered ‘healthy’.

So what does constitute ‘medical welfare’ in the context of intersex? Well, clearly the medical community agrees that there is something of a medical problem with intersexed bodies, or it would not have developed so many techniques for dealing with them. But while some of these techniques are designed to avoid serious medical problems, such as genital formations which divert urine back into the uterus, the majority of surgeries performed on infants with variant genitalia are designed to alter the appearance of that genitalia. Indeed, it has been argued that such surgeries aren’t for the health or medical welfare of the individual child, but is designed primarily to treat parental distress, as we saw in the case of Zippora. She cries out for someone to normalise her child’s genitalia, and in most if not all cases, this cry is answered, the suffering resolved. Through the surgical ‘normalisation’ of the child’s genitalia.

The ‘normalisation’ of the child’s genitalia is, in contemporary times, taken to be a resolution of the child’s ‘sex’. I want to draw attention now to the specificities of the assumption that genitalia which adheres to some sense of normal ‘male’ or ‘female’ genitalia is ‘healthy’ genitalia. We think we know what sex is—know it so well and easily that it doesn’t need specific description, or discussion is superfluous. But people have always felt this way, even in the eighteenth century, and our contemporary understanding of what constitutes a healthy sexed body is quite different from historical knowledges. Intersex advocate Alice Dreger draws attention to the specificity of our own take on sex by examining eighteenth century understandings, in which sex was considered to be given by the gonads. There’s a case of a woman who is having difficulty having sex due to a short vagina. She goes to the doctor who examines her, and upon discovery of an undescended testicle, exclaims ‘But, my good woman! You are a man!’. This woman was then expected to dissolve her marriage and begin living and working as a man. The economy of sex at this time was entirely given by the gonadal tissue they found: if you had testes, you were a man; if you had ovaries, you were a woman. Nothing else decided your sex (Dreger 2003, esp. the prologue).

Obviously, we have accounts of sex which, by comparison, are very sophisticated. If the eighteenth century was the age of the gonads, the twentieth and twenty-first might be considered the Age of the Genes, Chromosomes, Hormones, Gonadal Tissues, Primary and Secondary sex characteristics. Amongst other things. It might be tempting to say that we simply know more about what makes sex sex, now. But it’s not quite that simple. Knowing ‘more’ about what makes sex sex has changed what sex is: it has changed what counts as deeming someone of a particular sex. Sex was once defined by the presence of testicular tissue. No longer is this the case. Sex is now defined by an array of different aspects, any one of which could diverge from ‘normal’ sex. In other words, our knowledge of sex has changed, and as a result disciplines sex differently. A different economy of sexual difference—one premised on more than just testicular tissue—is now at work.

Yet for all that contemporary understandings of sex, even in popular discourse, are more complex than they once were, there’s another shift that has occurred in our economies of sex. What produces Zippora’s anxiety, her pallor, her trembling is, as Iain Morland observes, the visible unknowability of her child’s sex:

What kind of disgust does Zippora feel? She articulates an anxiety about language and knowledge: what will she tell people? How will they know her child’s sex? For Zippora, the relationship between telling and knowing has been fractured because she knows something about her child that she cannot tell: her new baby is intersexed. Its genitals are a mixture of male and female characteristics. The baby’s body has not differentiated as clearly male or female – for instance, it may appear to have both a clitoris and testes (Morland 2001, 527).

The ‘anatomical referents’ at work here, then, are more complicated than they were in the eighteenth century, and more clearly about appearance. In contemporary understandings of sex, there tends to be some familiarity with the complex scientific knowledge of sex, but the really defining part of sex is genitalia: a penis and testes makes a man, whilst a vagina and clitoris (the ovaries not being visible) make a woman. And this is evident in some of the ways that people articulate anxieties about variant genitalia: one of the most familiar is a fear of teasing or even bullying at school based on the appearance of a child’s genitals. The ‘locker room’ is regularly raised as a site in which visibility might produce problems, especially in American high schools (where cultures of nakedness would seem to differ substantially from my own experience in Australian schools). Yet as Alice Dreger points out, ‘Yes, what about the locker room? If so many people feel trepidation around it, why don’t we fix the locker room? There are ways to signal to children that they are not the problem, and normalization technologies are not the way.’ (Preeves 2003, 44)

And it is in reaction to these strict requirements of appearance that surgical intervention is made into the bodies of those who are intersexed. Lest we think that the insistence on a clear visual distinction between masculine and feminine genitalia is not properly legitimated, not properly “scientific,” I want to read a few different ways that doctors frame the decision to intervene in intersexed bodies, as collected by Susan Kessler:

Feelings about larger-than-typical clitorises are illustrated by these representative quotations:
The excision of a hypertrophied clitoris is to be preferred over allowing a disfiguring and embarrassing phallic structure to remain.
The anatomic derangements [were] surgically corrected… Surgical techniques… remedy the deformed external genitals… [E]ven patients who suffered from major clitoral overgrowth have responded well… [P]atients born with obtrusive clitoromegaly have been encountered. [N]ine females had persistent phallic enlargement that was embarrassing or offensive and incompatible with satisfactory presentation or adjustement. [After] surgery no prepubertal girl… described troublesome or painful erections.
Female babies born with an ungainly masculine enlargement of the clitoris evoke grave concern in the parents… [The new clitoroplasty technique] allow[s] erection without cosmetic offense.
Failure to [reduce the glans and shaft] will leave a button of unsightly tissue
[Another surgeon] has suggested… total elimination of the offending shaft of the clitoris.
[A particular surgical technique] can be included as part of the procedure when the size of the glans is challenging to a feminine cosmetic result. (Kessler 1998, 36)

Susan Kessler’s research demonstrates that most clitorises longer than .9 centimetres are considered ‘offensive’ in this way, and prompt surgical intervention of some kind, disciplining the body that might challenge the easy visual distinction between male and female bodies. And on the other side of the coin, infants whose ‘phallus’ contains a urethral opening (the urethral opening within the penis being apparently the defining difference between a penis and a clitoris) but which fall below about 2.5 centimetres are thought to have penises which are ‘too small’. Such children have often been ‘reassigned’ to being female, and given surgery to reflect this decision. The economies of visual difference between men and women, then, are quite specific, and the bodies of those who are intersexed are altered to adhere to such these economies. I’ll return to this point shortly.

But there’s a little more to the question of the economies of sexual difference in contemporary culture. We’ve seen already that they require the visual distinctiveness of male and female bodies to be maintained, even when that involves the reduction, excision and sometimes irreparable damage done to the bodies concerned. But this leads into another aspect of the requirements of sexual dimorphism: all bodies, it would seem, need to be made as capable as possible of heterosexual reproduction. Thus, fertility is often a consideration in whether to deem a body male or female, and the form of surgery performed. Further, hypospadic penises, that is, those penises in which the urethral opening occurs somewhere on the underside of the penis, and is sometimes not simply a ‘hole’, must be remedied, in order not only that boys be able to compete in pissing contests (yes, according to some doctors, this rite of passage is key to male identity development), but also to ensure that heterosexual reproductive sex is perfectly facilitated. In some cases, ‘repairing’ a hypospadic penis can take multiple surgeries, requiring long hospital visits throughout childhood. According to Robert Crouch, surgeries are shaped by the requirement that one have ‘a sufficiently large penis so that one can look like and “perform” as a male in childhood, and so that one can satisfy one’s partner later on even if that means having a scarred and desensitised penis’ (Crouch 1999, 34). The heterosexual functionality of the penis—its capacity to get hard and ejaculate ‘properly’ is more important, it would seem, than pleasure or any other considerations. Similarly, short vaginas are lengthened to ensure that the vagina offers a proper ‘sheath’ to the penis during heterosexual intercourse. In fact, according to some surgeons,

The clitoris is not essential for adequate sexual function and sexual gratification… but its preservation would seem to be desirable if achieved while maintaining satisfactory appearance and function… [So long as clitoral] presence does not interfere with cosmetic, psychological, social and sexual adjustment (Kessler 1998, 37).

Yet what, precisely is adequate sexual function? Intersex advocate Cheryl Chase (also known as ‘Bo Laurent’) describes a telling experience: when a doctor found that clitoral tissue had withered as a result of invasive surgeries, he said ‘you’ll find someone to hold you nice and you’ll be okay’ (Kessler 1998, 57). As Crouch observes, ‘looming in the background of all of this is a moralistic and gendered cultural script that views women as passive recipients during sex, simply there to please their partners, and not themselves agents of sexual desire or feeling’ (Crouch 1999, 33). Both these cases demonstrate how key heteronormativity—the presumed normalcy and naturalness of a particular kind of reproductive heterosexuality—is to contemporary economies of sex.

So now we have begun to unpick what, precisely, it is that constitutes the ‘medical welfare’ of the intersexed infant. Medicine participates in deeming particular kinds of bodies good and healthy, and others as problematic and unhealthy. It would be easy to say, and medical professionals sometimes offer this as a defence, that altering the body of an intersexed infant offers that child the chance to ‘grow up normal’. On the one hand, yes, maybe they do. Yet on the other, it cannot be denied that the stories of intersexed people are shaped by shame, stigma, the secrecy and the mysterious sense of something being wrong. Max Beck, once Judy before transitioning, describes having been told she was an ‘unfinished girl’, yet feeling like a ‘sexual Frankenstein’s monster,’ a sense that led her to have to deny her desire for other women and marry a man who was ‘non-plussed about [her] man-made parts’ (“My Life as an Intersexual”). But as well as the often devastating effects of surgery on intersexed infants, the normalisation of these bodies has another, significant effect on our economies of sex. Intersexed bodies are covered over, the challenge that they pose to traditional economies of sex are forcibly effaced. In disciplining these unruly bodies, we replicate and reiterate a narrow normative understanding of what sex can be. As Canguilhem observes, ‘[t]he normal is then at once the extension and the exhibition of the norm. It increases the rule at the same time that it points it out’ (Canguilhem 1991, 239). When our heteronormative visual economies of sex are such that bodies which challenge the limitations of those economies are altered to reiterate those limited economies, we effectively silence the corporeal challenge to our contemporary economies of sex, refusing to hear or negotiate with bodies, people and experiences which are different, unexpected, and which challenge our assumptions about the world.

In this respect, I want to suggest that it is not simply the lives of intersex people which are at stake, although it is certainly at the expense of intersex people’s happiness that these sexual economies are maintained. I mentioned, briefly, earlier, Max Beck. Max was raised as Judy, and his current partner, Tamara Alexander wrote about Max/Jude’s experiences in a piece called “Silence = Death”. Alexander recollects Max’s story of her college affair with a woman and the six words she said in bed that altered the entire course of Max’s life:

“Boy, Jude, you sure are weird.” Max told me she knew then that she was a lesbian but she could not be with women because they would know how her body was different. She married Harold because men were just less sensitive to the subtleties of women’s anatomy (Alexander 1999, 105).

This might seem insignificant, such a comment, but as surely as Zippora’s pallor, trembling and her tumble of distressed words and pleas, what is articulated is an inability to see beyond extremely limited economies of sex, an inability to perceive an intersexed person as anything other than weird or lacking, an inability to see anything but the failure to achieve the unambiguous genitalia of ‘normalcy’. There is little doubt that intersexed people are made to pay the majority of the cost for this need to discipline sex, in shame and secrecy and self-hatred and self-doubt, in bodies which they may never feel at home in; but it also shapes the limitations of experiences for non-intersexed people. Zippora misses the opportunity to welcome her child into the world with joy. Jude’s sexual partner misses the opportunity to experience Jude as Jude. But this is not an inevitability: Tamara Alexander gives us another way of encountering the intersexed other, describing their first sexual encounter:

She [Judy, as Max was then] was terrified, and I was aware of her fear and the cost of offering herself up to me in that moment… I have never wanted to pleasure someone, never wanted to offer my hands and fingers to heal and to love and to delight… I have never been so awed by the feeling of touching as I was that night. I wanted to stroke and explore and learn and know every inch of her, her large and proud clit, the lines and crevasses from scars and healing, the tight cavern of her cunt that held my fingers so tightly. She pulled me down on top of her and wrapped her arms around me and came, calling my name, sobbing against my shoulder. And I wept with her. I wept for the loss of what she hadn’t had and the lovers who hadn’t revelled in the wonder of her body, wept for what I hadn’t had before I held her in love, and I am weeping as I write this now (Alexander 1999, 106).

The response of Alexander to Jude is to Jude, not to Jude as she is described by categories, or her position in relation to normalcy (‘her’ “weird”ness). Alexander’s sense of wonder and delight in Jude’s body is not dependent upon the achievement or non-achievement of proper, unambiguous sex. Rather, she demonstrates that the imagination and openness that doctors and parents fear is too much to ask of the world is in fact possible; she opens up the possibility that what constitutes ‘medical welfare’ or ‘health’ might be better thought of as that which allows and encourages this kind of openness to those born intersexed, rather than deeming their bodies, from the very beginning, to be “emergencies” of ‘anatomic derangements’ in need of discipline.

What we can see here is that legal, medical and social regulation are bound up with each other, reinforcing not only authority, but also ensuring the reiteration of a singular economy of sex. This economy requires the disciplining of those bodies which fall outside its circumscription of legitimate categories: male and female. It deems worthless, or worse, threatening, those bodies which cannot be recognised as valuable according to its requirements. This economy not only disadvantages those who are different and thus cannot be recognised as valuable, but disadvantages all of us in ways that many of us have the privilege to not even be aware of. We forget—we have to forget—the gifts offered by those not recognized by existing economies of sex. Indeed, our forgetting occurs at their expense: in the disciplining wielding of the scalpel, in the requirement that traditional dichotomies of sex be maintained, in the supposed necessity that they understand themselves as disordered. And this is my response to those medical professionals who say that their techniques are ‘improving’ – what you mean by this is that your techniques are approximating heteronormative imaginaries better and better, replicating the very dichotomy that these bodies demonstrate the falsity and restrictiveness of. This is not to say that there are easy solutions, for there are not. And when those, like Zippora, are distressed, the impulse to help is important and ethical. But the response needs to take account of and negotiate with the diversity of bodies, rather than concealing the challenges that these various variant bodies pose to knowledge, to regulation, to discipline, and perhaps most intimately, most tellingly, to our very everyday lived experiences of sex.
References

Alexander, Tamara (1999) “Silence=Death” in Alice Dorumat Dreger (ed) Intersex in the Age of Ethics
Beck, Max “My Life as an Intersexual” accessed 2/5/09 http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/gender/beck.html
Canguilhem, Georges (1991) The normal and the pathological. C. Fawcett & R. Cohen (Trans.) Zone Books
Crouch, Robert (1999) ”Betwixst and Between: The Past and Future of Intersexuality” in Alice Dorumat Dreger (ed) Intersex in the Age of Ethics
Dreger, Alice Dorumat (2003) Hermaphrodites and the Medical Invention of Sex Harvard University Press
Kessler, Suzanne (1998) Lessons From the Intersexed Rutgers University Press
Morland, Iain (2001) “Is Intersexuality Real?” Textual Practice 15(3) 527-547
Preeves, Sharon (2003) Intersex and Identity: The Contested Self Rutgers University Press

 

Spec(tac)ular pop culture I: The conceptual appartus of Dollhouse

I started this post an age ago, but I need to post it before I post the others I have drafted. So forgive the oscillation between only-knowing-ep-1 and knowing-entire-season-so-far, would you please? This is, of course, always in dialogue with what Fuck Politeness has written, given that we’re watching and discussing them together each week. More to come!

As you may already be aware, Joss Whedon has produced a new concept and a new series: Dollhouse. It stars Eliza Dushku as a young woman, once known as Caroline and now, within the Dollhouse, as Echo, one of a number of ‘Dolls’. The dolls have had their memories and personalities wiped away, and these can be replaced at any point with any imprint the technician wants. They are, in some sense, the ultimate in contemporary personhood; perfectly flexible to every context, able to learn anything with the flick of a switch (Matrix-like). It seems that even muscle memory is erasable and re-code-able by Topher, the ’science nerd’ character of the series. Topher is a young man with a flexible set of morals, and in the first episode, he voices a number of justifications for the questionable ethics of erasing people’s memories. We’ll come back to that. The Dollhouse is run by Adele, terse and tightly-wound, but not entirely cold. She’s mostly efficient, it would seem, but in the opening of the series as a whole, it is she who is ‘convincing’ Caroline to give herself over to the Dollhouse. Caroline, it would seem, feels she has no choice; the implication seems to be that Caroline could either give herself to the Dollhouse or go to prison (but I am way reading into this…). Echo’s handler, Boyd Langton, is less certain about the morals of the Dollhouse, and it is his discomfort that helps to draw attention to the problematic nature of the Dollhouse.

Scene set.

For me, there’s much to be excited about in even this minimal scene-setting. I want to talk about a couple of things in particular: the creation of the perfect object, the question of consent, coercion and choice, and finally the troubling of an essentialist model of subjectivity. Today I’ll talk about the first of these.

So: the first. In the conversation over at Hoyden About Town, some concern was expressed about the objectification of Echo in the first episode. She rides a motorbike and dances around looking ecstatically happy, in a teensy tiny dress that just promises to flick up a lil to reveal her knickers (but, sadly for some, never quite does. Who doesn’t love a tease?). The camera dwells on Echo. This particular section is topped off by a young man saying something about how much fun he’s had with her that weekend, giving her a lil heart pendant, and then, as she walks off into the middle of the night, tell his buddy that the clock had struck 12 and she had had to leave. The evocation of the fairytale is self-conscious, here:  it’s pretty clear he’s pretty taken with her, and not least because she’s pretty taken with him. She’s not reduced, simply and utterly, to the object of her body, as we might be accustomed to identifying objectification. She’s the princess the prince wants, and when the clock strikes twelve, that’s what she’ll cease being. Indeed, this is the complexity that the series allows us to access: the complexity of what Luce Irigaray calls ’specularity’.

Specularity, as Irigaray (one of the ‘French feminists’, who isn’t actually French) describes it, is related to objectification. Objectification is the process where women are reduced to mere objects of male use and desire; not people at all. Historically, this has been associated with forms of feminism which are invested in a mind/body split, and thus objectification is often thought to be the reduction of a thinking, emoting woman to her body; all else is made irrelevant. The conceptual violence done here is the refusal to acknowledge that women think and feel ‘just like men’. Specularity does something slightly more deconstructive: it observes that man and woman are categories defined in relation to each other. More specifically, man is taken as the yardstick by which woman is defined, and inevitably found wanting: they are less rational, less strong, less able to control themselves and so on and so on and oh god so on. Indeed, it is precisely because woman is defined as derivative, as lesser, that man is recognisable as the norm, as the yardstick itself (and yes, that would be Irigaray’s slightly naughty  but pointed sense of humour, indicating the phallomorphism of language, which sees ‘erect’ and ‘yardsticks’ as positive things). Woman is specular: she plays the mirror that reflects man’s image of himself (as strong, rational etc) back to himself, made to be a mirror that affirms his superiority.

Echo’s name is no accident. Echo is specularity made impossibly spectacular: she is a woman who can be made into whatever is desired of her. She can be moulded, refit, reshaped, to become whoever it is that the ‘client’ wants of her. Indeed, this is perhaps most evident in the interchange she has with the ‘client’ early in the episode. He wins the motorbike race, probably because she let him. And she accuses him of cheating, all sass and fire. This is intriguing, because she’s clearly not a mere object at this moment: she’s more than a passive body for his use. But she reflects back to him precisely what he wants to believe of himself: that a smart, sassy, gorgeous woman will teasingly fight with him, maintaining the illusion that he won straight up, partly to raise the heat between the two of them. She is a mirror, spectacularly.

But to just return to Irigaray for a moment: along with this particular branch of third wave feminism, Irigaray isn’t interested in simply proclaiming the inaccuracy of these truths, and pointing out that women are ‘just not like that’. For this, of course, would presume that women already are something beyond who they are in the social. Rather, she draws a constructionist bow: men and women are constructed through precisely this logic of what she calls sexual indifference (indifference because women are not permitted to be actually different, just derivative, just lesser). In other words, men and women are produced through the social figuring of them in relation to each other. Through (in)difference, woman becomes specular, only ever what man needs of her to remain man, to remain superior.

In this sense, Echo’s position within the Dollhouse becomes a literalisation of the situation of women within patriarchy: specularised even when they are not straight-forwardly objectified. But this, of course, is not the end of the story, as both Irigaray and Whedon know. What is fascinating, already, about Dollhouse is that even when Echo is made precisely what is ‘required’, she always exceeds. She exceeds her specularity, even if she remains within the ‘parameters’ of her job. This happens over and over: it happens when she refuses to simply be the fuck-prey of the hunter in episode 2. To be clear, it’s not that some of the ‘real’ Echo shows through; that, I think, is too simplistic a model of subjectivity for what’s going on. It’s that the woman that she is ‘imprinted’ to become shifts and changes with the situations she is confronted with. She might be specularised, but she is never just that.

And this, too, is Irigaray’s point. Women will always exceed the specular economy, always exceed their definition as not-man, as the inversion, the mirror of men. This isn’t because there’s an underlying ‘truth’ to women that is not done justice to in the specular economy. Rather, it’s because the specular economy itself is shaped through disavowals: disavowals of women’s strength, of women’s capacity for rationality as well as irrationality, of women as other than what the specular economy would have them be. This is the hidden underside of the specular economy. And this is why the Dollhouse-rs are so concerned about Echo’s continual exceeding of their expectations: it testifies to the uncertainty of their control, of their capacity to decide who she is. They think they make her what she is, and she remains static, a mirror. But Echo takes their mirror, shifts it, turns it a little sideways, becomes more and other than what they expect, demonstrates that their control is never complete; and it’s not incomplete because she is someone else ‘underneath’, because each of the women she is produced to be inevitably finds the holes, the gaps, the spaces in which to become more than the Dollhouse ever thought she could be. For Irigaray, this is the unique attribute of what she calls the ‘feminine’, the disavowed underside of the specular economy. Specular woman might be the mere reflection of man, but women are always more than this, because in order to produce them as specular, the economy of specularity must also produce the feminine, an uncertain, deconstructive excess to itself. And this is why women constitute such a threat to phallocentric logics: women are never merely specular, but always more, and that ‘always more’ reveals the inconsistencies, the foolish fantasies, that which must be disavowed in the constitution of such logics.

This is why I’m describing Echo as an ‘everywoman’ figure, and why I think she’s such an important figure in current TV. Every week, she is made a mirror, a reflection to get the job done. And every week (if not with every imprint), she exceeds her mandate. Every week she testifies to their lack of control over who she can be, simply by living out the imprint given her. She refuses to be the hunted; she refuses to accede to a fundamentalist logic which would see death as the only good end; she refuses to allow the patriarchy to retain its grasp on her sisters… Each of these refusals does not take place outside the imprint created for her, but within it. This demonstrates that within every woman, produced as she may be as the specular mirror to reinforce male privilege, she always exceeds this, and the simple living out of this excess—which often occurs unconsciously, and often occurs because of her bonds to others (such as the Rihanna-stand-in, or Boyd, or the other cultists)—has the capacity to upend the phallocentric system. The real threat to patriarchy, then, doesn’t come from without, it comes from within. In other words, yes, Dollhouse does depict objectification. It depicts specularity. But in so doing, it demonstrates that these never do and never can contain women; that there is always resistance possible by turning the system back in against itself. And women have unique access to the excess that can do this (well, women plus Victor, perhaps, in the Dollhouse universe!). When women are more than mirrors, they trouble not only the supposition that they are only the reflection of men, but that men’s superiority is anything more than a illusion.

 

Grief

Marking, marked, again.

 

Awww…

Hello kidz and kittenz. So it seems someone has nominated my posts on Firefly and prostitution for the 9th Downunder Feminists Carnival. Check it out, mes amis. I only just spotted it because I have been behind on my reading because… well, here’s a lil secret, y’all… I flew across the world for a job interview. I had prepped like you would not believe for this interview. I had studied staff research interests and the content of curriculum. I had not slept. I had planned outfits. I had considered how I might supplement the existing research interests and so on…

And then Ryanair went and cancelled my flight. Which mean that when I turned up, I had had about 12 hours sleep… spread over about 52 hours of travel. I was given about fifteen minutes, and then had to go and give my presentation and be interviewed. I did a spectacularly bad job (at least, that’s how it felt. People keep telling me I probably did better than I thought I had done. To which I say ‘[shrug] yeah maybe.’). I didn’t say things I should have: discourse analysis, case studies, professional development of postgraduates, informal mentoring, etc etc etc. And I said things I shouldn’t have: students’ sexism makes me grumpy etc. Anyway. Blahblah. I may find out how it went in the next few weeks. But hence the lack of presence here. But fingers crossed, I will find more time to blog in over the next wee while. I still want to come back to fictional prostitution, because I have another text to examine: the world of trashy fantasy, or, more particularly, a series which is both indulgent and intriguing: The Kushiel books.

 

Book Review: Dancing Around Obsession

I haven’t read Davis’ book, but I do work in a similar area. The question for me is, in the diagnostic category of ‘causing marked distress’, what, precisely, causes the distress? Some would say OCD, and yet even Agin observes that if your obsession earns you money, it’s unlikely to be a psychiatric symptom. Thus what makes something a symptom is not given by the symptom itself, nor by the brain, but by how particular behaviours are situated within a given culture. What defines something as a symptom is not, in the end, a psychiatric matter. Which means that psychiatrists really need to be able to engage with the context within which that symptom occurs; what makes a particular behaviour problematic? Yes, severe distress, but what produces that distress? A mismatch between the expectations of the context within which the person works, and that person’s behaviours.

You might say that none of this matters, but as has already been pointed out, the use of psychiatric drugs is already re-setting the bar for what counts as ‘normal’ within our cultural context. As a result, more people are falling outside ‘normal behaviour’ and this, then, causes the distress which is apparently key to rendering something a psychiatric symptom. Thus ipsychiatrists need to begin to engage with understandings of the world which do not treat the brain as if it occurs in a vacuum, because to do otherwise is to reproduce and expand the very problem they are supposedly seeking to address.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

 

Aqueous Chastity Belts and Goblin Halls

Potentially it was foolish to attempt to revivify this poor lost blawg when I was about to go into full time work. For those of you full-time full-timers, doubtless this seems like the whinge of a spoilt child. But nontheless, my body clock has needed a teensy bit of tweaking, leaving me with little time to spend on selfish pursuits. But I could not neglect you all for too long, lest you think I would not return. So I wanted to share with you the spectacular works of a friend of mine, Patrick Boland. For those of you who have ever been even mildly drawn to the mysterious machines of steampunk, or to the magic palimsest of industrial remnants, or to the scary-glee of ancient robots, or to the hard, soft lines of sandstone cut by prisoners…. or, for those of you who are Sydney-siders, like me, if you have been enchanted by the bizarre and extraordinarily rare density of history you can find at Cockatoo Island, check out the gorgeous photos Patrick has taken (some of these are trimmed, thank you so so much, WordPress…). Find the Rool Thing over here:

The Goblin Hall:

It’s comin’ ta git cha!

Greys go gorgeous…

Enjoy, kidlets. I shall return at some point, carryin’ on about the Whedonverse, or potentially about Sydney Festival stuff I have been indulging in!

 

Fictional Prostitution II

Okay, so that’s a couple of points there. I actually posted this post earlier, got anxious about it and took it back down, and am now putting it back up. I sound a little anti-Amy-Chin… I’m sorry about that, coz I’m not really. I disagree with her, but I feel like this post is maybe a little… uh… emphatic about that on a couple of points. So bear with me…

To continue on with that theme, Amy-Chin argues that another key attribute required of prostitution in order to make it feminist is in relation to the public/private distinction. Now, I am not an American liberal feminist (sorry mes amis) and so the whole public/private sphere thing just doesn’t have the appeal it seems to for others. Part of this is because the public/private distinction is an incredibly gendered divide, one which has been used to both keep women in the ‘private’ sphere, and to render the abuse of them not a matter of public concern. But the other thing is that, whilst I get that according to a particular model of labour, the ideal workplace might be one which you can leave behind, I’m not convinced that any of us ever do that entirely, and I’m not convinced it would be a simple good. What we do for a living is part of who we are; this is always the case, even if we hate it with a fiery passion (the fiery passion is part of who we are… or how we are). But even accepting that this distinction might be a key matter for the possibility of feminist prostitution, the issue really seems to relate to the capacity to treat it as any other job. To be honest, this seems a fairly class-based question, at least in the world of Firefly (I want to think some more about whether it is in the contemporary world). Those who are poor don’t seem to be able to live out this distinction between the public and the private. The entire crew live where they work, and occasionally this means that blood and cow manure are where they live. Mal is thoroughly defined by his job, even as there’s more to him than that (of course). Kaylee spends a huge amount of her time ‘off’ in the engine room, present to the possibility of ‘having to work’. In some respects, amongst the others depicted, Inara’s job is the most defined by the public/private distinction if only because she has to go to her clients.

Perhaps one of Amy-Chin’s points of evidence for Inara’s inability to maintain a public/private distinction is that Inara reaches a point at which she declares that she needs to leave Serenity. This comes after her friend Nandi, who ran a whorehouse, was killed. We’re set up to believe this is the grounds for Inara’s confession of love for Mal (he is certainly about to say so to her), but instead, she says “I learned something from Nandi. Not just from what happened, but from her. The family she made, the strength of her love for them. That’s what kept them together. When you live with that kind of strength, you get tied to it, you can’t break away. And you never want to… I’m leaving.” According to Amy-Chin, ” [i]t is not merely Mal’s moral objection to Inara’s profession that inhibits their relationship; it is the fact that, as a Companion, she cannot escape her identity and have a private life outside her public profession. As the series makes clear she has a choice: to renounce her professional identity and financial independence or leave. There is no third way.” (p. 183). This is, certainly, one possible reading: that she cannot escape her job without giving up her financial independence. Amy-Chin connects this to Inara’s comment on Companion policies on dating: “it’s complicated.” On the other hand, Inara’s background remains a mystery; she left an excellent position as the up-and-coming ‘House Mistress’ (it would seem the Guild or Guild schools are broken into ‘houses). Earlier in that episode, Nandi has commented that no one knows why she left. Given that it’s pretty clear she’s drawn to Mal, and enjoys her time on Serenity, and is visibly upset by the discussion, I would suggest that it can be read as an impossibility because of previous experiences. Say, (ooh, randomly, because this motif is never used ) she was hurt either by, or because of people she was close to. Or hah! I have just discovered ‘Inara’s secret’, and it makes her even more understandable and in some ways quite selfless here. But I will not spoil yez. There’s a youtube clip out there you can find if you like.

A few other things: Amy-Chin claims that Zoe, Kaylee and River “do not trade on their femininity as a source of their power” (p. 178). I really object to how this is phrased. I don’t like the idea that femininity is a) a defined thing and b) a source of improper power. (Men ‘trade on’ their masculinity all the time; I’ve never been sure why women should be ‘good girls’ and not do so…) Which power, precisely, does Inara gain as a result of her femininity? Her respectability? Surely that’s a result of her job rather than simply her appearance or manner (though these may be key to her job)? Which femininity, precisely, are these other women not trading on? The definition of femininity at work seems a fairly middleclass one, if it is defined by Inara’s appearance and grace. Kaylee’s femininity is, I would suggest, very definitely present; it is simply a less trained one, one which is probably more working class. It’s a significant part of who she is, and even a significant part of her getting the job on Serenity (is that power?). River’s femininity might lie in her balletic grace, which causes everyone to underestimate her, but is also a key part of her deadly fighting style. Would we really want to set her fighting prowess in opposition to her femininity here? And Zoe… I adore the depiction of Zoe: she is incredibly capable, but thoroughly feminine. She doesn’t ‘trade’ on her femininity, but if you ask me whatever ‘power’ she has (and that’s seriously such an undifferentiated term it’s probably half the problem here) is bound up with her femininity.

Another: Amy-Chin claims that for the Companion, “the emphasis is on education and refinement, albeit for the express purpose of pleasing men, rather than the cultivation of such traits for their own worth.” Heh. Welcome to twenty-first century education. Show me a single form of education that is not at least sold on the grounds that it will enable one to do a particular job! Further, it’s not clear to me, given that Inara does in fact service a woman client, that we should be assuming that only men engage Companions. It’s clear that Inara chooses to primarily service men… and could choose otherwise.

Which brings us to a question which is particularly interesting, I think. There are those feminists who argue that heterosex for money undermines the idea that heterosexuality is the naturally occurring sexuality, and that in this way prostitution is a transgressive act. Amy-Chin argues that because Inara’s prostitution is placed in the context of her burgeoning (but oh! never fulfilled! never fulfilled!) romance with Mal, it is in fact this relationship that legitimises Inara and thus her job. She argues that a fairly conservative notion of sexuality is actually at work in Firefly. In many ways, I agree with her. There are three (or so… ) major couples: Zoe and Wash, Kaylee and Simon, and Inara and Mal. All three are straight. Their stories all curve in an arc. And this, I think, is part of what’s interesting here. Sexuality, as it is depicted in narrative, is given a strong teleology. It is a key dynamic of progression. The achievement of heterosexual union is most often climactic (at least an element of a climax, (heh; I am a kid, I know) or perhaps more strictly, a kind of ‘reward’; note the reflexivity in relation to this in Kaylee’s hilarious-but-oh-so-fucking-awesome response to Simon’s declaration of having wanted to have had sex with her in the film: “Screw this! I’m gonna live!’. This is the difficulty that is faced by attempting to write a conventionally-shaped narrative about prostitution: here’s Inara, achieving heterosexual (well, mostly) union, on a regular basis, with the ‘wrong dude’ and without ‘reward’ games being played (I just found this discussion in amongst research; disappointing that Firefly fans don’t take up all the opportunities the Whedon man offers!) . Amy-Chin is right here, that all of Inara’s encounters with her clients are subordinated to the sweet agony of her unrequited love for Mal (well, if her feelings are anything like mine ). That is, of course, partly because the show’s… uh… about him; he centres the narrative. There’s a moment in Heart of Gold, when Inara comes across Mal leaving Nandi’s room. He falls over himself to make excuses, and she cuts through the crap and tells him she’s glad, adding “One benefit of not being puritanical about sex: you don’t have to be embarrassed afterwards.” Later, however, we see her sobbing her eyes out. Now some see this as ceding ground to conventional monogamous heterosexuality, to have her in tears over Mal sleeping with someone else. And that’s certainly in play. I don’t want to pretend it’s not. But in addition to this,  there’s also the dynamic that Nandi is the whore that Mal can ‘get past’ his issues with prostitution with. Further, Inara knows that sleeping with him would immensely complicate her world; this is reinforced by the fact that although their desire for each other has been pretty clear from the beginning, and she, not being an idiot and also being well-educated in such matters, would know this, they simply haven’t had sex. And the one I personally like best: that she’s upset that he had sex with Nandi and not her, and she wants to sleep with him; simple desire stymied. Nonetheless, the centrality of Mal-and-Inara to the narrative does seem to push forward the one-true-love-for-ever-and-ever-oh-and-of-the-opposite-sex-please image of resolution which Western narrative has engaged in for so long.  And it is part of what functions to rescue Inara from the place her prostitution would usually put her: soiled, broken and completely lacking in morals. Mal sees worth in her, and so the audience is supposed to too. This is, of course, problematic, because it is our immediate acceptance of Mal-the-hero which then feeds through into legitimising Inara as someone to be respected and valued, rather than her on her own terms.

Yet this is not quite so simple either, methinks, because the audience’s relationship with Mal is fairly ambivalent (or at least potentially is): we are clearly meant to disapprove of Mal’s repeated description of her as a ‘whore’, particularly since it is set in contrast to his obvious, if extremely poorly expressed, affection and respect for her. This affection and respect, I might add, is heterosexual (and as such fairly conventionally heteronormative in some respects) but it is also not premised on simply what-she-is-for-him; that is, while it’s problematic that Inara’s value is seen through Mal’s desire for her, at the same time, his desire, I think, moves beyond a woman-as-object-for-man’s-use kind of misogynistic heterosexuality, and into a real acknowledgement of her as a person. He emphasises this himself when he says “I might not show respect for your job, but he didn’t respect you. That’s the difference.” For example, his willingness to joke with her, his somewhat unwilling  or admiration of her capacity to move easily in a variety of settings, his belief that she will easily play out her role as a rogue in Trash; there are lots of other examples of his demonstration of respect for her abilities. Indeed, part of what he seems to dislike about her job is that he thinks that others don’t respect her for it, and that she permits this. This isn’t necessarily the case, and indeed, he does seem to know this, too…

And the fascinating thing about their relationship, which I think that Amy-Chin misses, is that by raising this issue explicitly, Joss is prompting the viewer to interrogate his or her own understandings about sex, sexuality, women and prostitution itself. Mal’s internal struggle over whether or not he respects Inara is not unusual, or unrecognisable: in fact, it’s the tug-of-war that Western culture continues to work with. There are women who have sex with others who pay them. Where in that is the badness, the lack of respect, exactly, inherent in that? There are sex workers who are great at their jobs… why is this a bad thing? These questions remain live, because so few disrespect Inara’s job. As the audience, we know that Mal, especially the Mal who is so obviously anti-Christian, ought to be getting over whatever is standing in his way to respecting Inara (and to getting with her), and this obstacle is not, I think, depicted as being ‘Inara’s job’ so much as ‘Mal’s stupidity about Inara’s job’. This emphasis is a radical shift. As Mal works through his tug-of-war, then, so can the audience, asking: What makes a whore, and why are they considered to be the least worthy of all women? Why is sex-for-money such a problem for conventional morality? Why is monogamy, for that matter, thought to be where it’s at? And for me, this is what makes text feminist: when it prompts and coaxes its audience to que(e)r(y) and work through conventional misogynistic crap in order to reach a feminist realisation, rather than merely representing the feminist ideal.

 

Fictional prostitution I

In amongst the very fun discussion about kick arse women on TV which has been happening over at Hoyden About Town, the wonderful su suggested that I might be interested in an article which takes its place in the world of Whedon-verse fan-academia. Given that I spent a sizeable proportion of thesis-writing time refusing to allow myself to engage in Whedonverse academia, I was rather cheery to be able to read it. “Tis Pity She’s a Whore”, by Dee Amy-Chin (Feminist Media Studies 6(2), 175-189) is a good article in lots of ways. It sets itself a task, and it works it through: is Inara, from Joss Whedon’s Firefly really a feminist depiction of prostitution, as some have thought? Few articles really succeed in doing this, so it’s nice in that regard. I should say from the get-go that Amy-Chin reckons Whedon fails at feminist prostitution. And, perhaps unsurprisingly, perhaps surprisingly, I disagree with a number of her claims. Part of this, again perhaps unsurprisingly, is because I stand by what I said about Buffy all that time ago: first, that it is a text like any other, with multiple meanings at work at any given time; second, that what makes a text feminist is not that it depicts a feminist utopia. So I’m just going to run through a few of Amy-Chin’s more memorable points and point out my responses. (When I say memorable, I kinda mean ‘I’m doing this off the top of my head coz I’m feeling rool lazy and elsewise this post will not get written. So correct me if I’m wrong, won’t you please?’)

She claims that the way that Inara is filmed reproduces her as an object under the male gaze. Her focus (I think she’s borrowing someone else’s work, from memory) is on one of our first encounters with Inara. After having been used by Mal to make a preacher uncomfortable, and been called a ‘whore’ yet again by him, she is knelt on the floor and bathing herself with a sponge. In some ways, and Amy-Chin notes this, the scene can be understood as voyeuristic. Inara’s attention is turned in on itself, and displays no awareness of the viewer. This is where Amy-Chin suggests the male gaze is permitted to take hold: Inara doesn’t glance back. But what’s interesting to me is that Amy-Chin simply by-passes what for me were the really interesting elements of the way that Inara is filmed in the pilot episode: the shots are paused. I’m not sure if you all remember what I’m talking about here, but as she squeezes the sponge out over the container of water, there’s a split-second pause, where the water hangs in the air, suspended. There’s a shot, too, of water dripping down her back, of her graceful movement, and this too pauses. This echoes earlier, where she is ’servicing’ a client, and the shots stutter again, pausing as she glances away when he asks about her home (indeed, it’s unclear in this earlier part whether she actually is looking away, or if it’s a physical rendering of her internal reaction to his question). Now the question is, is this stuttered temporality significant? To me, yes. The action pauses, giving space for reflection. The reflection may be Inara’s, but for me at least, it was also mine. It asks you to dwell with her at that moment; not in simple observation of her body, but in a wondering about what is especially significant here. It offers breaks in what could be otherwise a simple voyeuristic gaze. Inara might not gaze back at the gazer, but a sense of intimacy is engendered because the shot is no longer about how hot she is (although she totes is ).

But the real bulk of Amy-Chin’s argument engages with existing feminist writings about prostitution. She explores, briefly, positive theorisations of prostitution that have been offered by a range of feminists. From my recollection, the main elements of these are: that the woman (we’ll let the gender thing slip in this context, but I do know there are boyz who do this too, k?) ought to be able to choose whether or not she engages in prostitution, that prostitution ought not to be a matter of stigma, that she should be able to maintain the distinction between public and private, and that the focus of health testing should fall on clients, not on prostitutes themselves. This last one I won’t look at, really, except to note that Inara does undergo a health check, and there’s nothing that really suggests she checks out her clients for their health record.

It’s pretty clear throughout the series that Inara chooses her clients, and has a great deal of control over who she services, under what circumstances. The Guild is mostly what makes this possible: when a client turns nasty, she tells him that he won’t be able to get a Companion to contract with him ever again, as he will have a black mark against his name. So far, so feminist, it would seem, right? Well, if we’re being entirely fair, we should point out that whilst she has the capacity to respond to bad behaviour on the part of her clients, she is nonetheless subject to it. Which leads us to the next issue that needs addressing: the question of stigma.

It’s certainly true that the stigma remains attached to prostitution in the universe of Firefly. Mal continually displays his disapproval of her way of making money, to which Inara’s rejoinder is that at least her way of making money is legal, unlike his. He refuses to name her as Companion, the name in the Firefly universe for a woman who has undergone training, is a member of the Companions’ Guild, and sexually services her clients. Instead, he refers to her habitually a ‘whore’, even when she grumps at him about it.

Shepherd Book appears uncomfortable with her and her choice of profession, although it is to her that he turns at the end of the first episode when he has a crisis of faith. This produces the rather lovely image (Amy-Chin argues it’s not so great because it draws on a history of prosititutes providing spiritual support) of Inara’s hand resting on Book’s head in benediction. I personally like the inversion; it challenges the Christian disapproval of prostitutes. Indeed, we can even read this as speaking back to the stories of Mary Magdalene: maybe she wasn’t grateful to Jesus for ‘allowing’ her to escape her ’sins’, but he was grateful to her… (this is all quite aside from the question of whether Magdalene was actually a prostitute at all; probably not seems the current scholarly understanding, but she was powerful in the early Church (and had a Gospel all of her very own) and so her influence had to be diminished: whoredom, clearly the key!). This is interesting because it’s fairly clear that a recognisable form of Christianity has persisted into the future Firefly depicts; and oh, thank all that’s holy (sarcasm, mes amis), it’s evangelical.

Now, see, Amy-Chin thinks that this stigma, clearly still at play in this universe, means that Whedon isn’t depicting feminist prostitution. To me this isn’t the case at all. I am a little (just a teensy bit) bit over the idea that the only way for something to be making an activist point (feminist, anti-racist, anti-transphobic, whatevs) in a TV show is by showing the perfected version of the world. It supposes that, in order to be feminist, a show should depict how the world would be if it were… what? equal? different-but-with-respect? Whatever. The point being, Amy-Chin thinks that Whedon is failing to do something feminist with the Inara character because she is stigmatised, because the world is not ideal. Personally, I think that a world not-yet-perfected allows us to see the continuity between that future and here, but also allows us to imagine another way that prostitution could be done. One in which to some at least, the prostitute may be conceived of as a respectable woman, in which her work is not thought to be an inherent violation and derogation. Indeed, in one episode it is her status that allows her to intervene in the acts of government officials, a situation that is especially tricky for the crew of the Serenity (and which as a result keeps coming up). A world in which the prostitute is given sufficient control and support of her own work that she can choose her clients and respond when they do not give her the respect she deserves. But a world which still has a perhaps exacerbated version of the dissonant understanding of sex work we currently live with. A world, though, through which we are encouraged to work it out…

More to come…

(PS I have not edited this properly, so apologies for that…)

 

Play the Game

As long long promised:

A small tidbit you might not know about me: I am a gamer. Occasionally, yes, I want to be Angelina Jolie in Hackers, but I’m a tad more sincere in my adoration of computer games. I am regularly found critiquing the shit out of the industry, which seems to have massive problems with a) girls, b) plots and storylines, c) trusting their audience, d) grasping that realism is really not necessarily all that. And a few other bits and pieces. A friend I’ll call Boy Sovereign and I on a regular basis discuss the possibility of making computer games. He claims he’d code them; I claim I’d write them with proper storyline. He then looks at me dubiously.

As a present to myself post-PhD, I played Bioshock. It’s a Take-Two Interactive First Person Shooter (FPS), and it provoked a serious buzz amongst the gamer communities when it was released (which was a while back now; I took a long time to write the PhD, ‘kay?). At least part of this was because it was, allegedly, grounded in, like, intellectual shit. Ayn Rand’s intellectual shit, to be precise (okay, yes, that’s just my way of getting in a snide and empty dig at Rand…). In this respect, it looks like it’s treating its audience with some respect, expecting that they can handle sophisticated theory (if you can call Rand that).

The game is set up, in fact, as a critique of a utopia of Randian proportions: you enter this utopia as it has stopped being a utopia, so the story goes. Rapture, which is the name of this city, is built underwater. This works well, of course, as a technique for delimiting gameplay, as most FPS have to do. Your movement through the city is enabled by a kind of public transport system, and of course you can only make your way from one area to another through long glass tunnels (with all kinds of sealife moseying about on the other side). I have to say that whilst I understand the need to give people a track through the game, I think that the Half Life series does this a lot better, feeling only minimally containing, for the most part, even as you can trust to the game to not let you go off on annoying, unnecessary tangents. (Oblivion, I found, was a bit this way: I haven’t finished it because Oblivion gates kept opening every mile or so, and after a while it gets a bit boring trying to close them. I’m told that there’s a particular task that needs to be accomplished to stop them from popping up, but for this here girl-o’-thoroughness, that’s not a very successful technique.)

Anyway, so there’s this underwater utopia, run by this guy Andrew Ryan. The physical setting is gorgeously art deco, which I kinda loved. His philosophies are advertised around the place, and announced at regular intervals over a kind of PA system (apparently the massive freedom of libertarianism doesn’t include freedom from fucking advertising). This utopia has gone to shit, mostly because a mob leader challenged Ryan for the city. It’s also, though, because everyone was partaking in gene splicing (which you do, too, throughout the game, letting you shoot electricity, ice or fire from your fingers, amongst other things). This splicing has made the people of Rapture into the major bad guys you encounter: splicers. There’s a variety of splicers running around to make your life hell. Amusingly, many talk away to themselves as if they were still a part of Jazz Era upperclass life, with gossip, scandal and disapproval peppering these conversations, all in an aristocratic accent. There’s also doctors, who call out to nurses to ‘help me find this patient’ (that’d be you!). But whilst I appreciate this continuation of the setting, the splicers themselves are pretty boring. They just… kill. They’re just grumpy. It feels like they should bring more to the game than simply being impediments that stop you getting where you wanna go, which is how they wound up feeling. I know this sounds strange, given that the Combine soldiers in Half Life 2 aren’t exactly the most exciting of enemies—they’re just your basic military—but I found the splicers just annoying as the game got going. I actually suspect that this has more to do with the storyline of HL, but we’ll get to that.

These aren’t your only bad guys: there’s also the Big Daddies, who run around apparently looking after the Little Sisters. The Big Daddies are all armoured up to the nines, and they’re ‘looking after’ the Little Sisters because they can produce ‘Adam’ out of dead bodies, which in the convoluted reimagining of the technologised human body in Rapture, is necessary to the processes of gene splicing (while ‘Eve’ is used to ‘power up’ to use these abilities). Now here comes the apparent depth of Bioshock. Ready? Yeah? The depth is that you can choose to either ‘harvest’ the Little Sisters, nicking all their Adam and killing them in the process, or you can ’save’ them, using a special tool their creator gave you, and getting only a proportion of their possible Adam. That’s it. It has effects on how the game plays out, but it’s really a choice of two things, in the end: harvest a single lil sis, and you’re condemned to being the at least semi-baddie. Big ethical dilemmas, huh? At the same time, you’re misled by someone you apparently rely on, manipulated by them. Except that, even though I knew that this was the case, there weren’t really many options for going other ways. This just becomes frustrating, in the end.

So this is supposed to be the fabulous part of this game: it engages your ethics. But I have to say, as if I were a lil teenage gamer, HL totally pwns Bioshock in this regard. In Half Life 2 (I played HL after HL2, so I’m focussing on the latter), you’re being pursued through a city which is under invasion. Your friends, freedom fighters, really, are helping you make it through, in amongst making amusing comments about your taciturn nature (’Don’t say much, do you?’ sez Alyx, coyly tucking hair behind her ear). I think it helps the drive of the whole thing that you’re continually under pursuit, whether you’re heading through the underground railway or sneaking into a prison complex. It makes the linearity of the path you travel seem more natural (coz you’re doing it at speed, rather than curiously investigating every lil door). Not just this, but at each location you reach, there is some information given, some decision reached about your next task. These flow pretty naturally: at one point, you’re just aiming to get away, then you discover your friend is in prison, so you go to free him. And so on. (In Bioshock, on the other hand, you’re clueless at the beginning, and it’s not exactly clear why you keep moving through the game (especially once you’ve been betrayed). I mean, sure, you want to know what’s happened, but do you really want to die to know? Perhaps not…)

Okay, so, so far, so seemingly-lacking-in-ethics, right? Yeah, kinda. Except that the entire story of HL and HL2 is shaped by the G-man. The G-man is a mysterious dude who appears randomly, pauses time, speaks weird and seems to be able to control the dimensions. At the end of HL, he makes Freeman (your character) the offer of employment. It’s not much of a choice, between facing a room full of aliens with no weapons, and accepting his offer. At the beginning of HL2, he claims to be responsible for bringing Freeman back to earth to fight the Combine. Yet as the story unfolds, it becomes clear that the human who ceded earth to the Combine manipulated Freeman’s presence to unearth the core elements of the resistance. Instead of a simple one-off choice, then, the player is left in the position of not knowing whether or not s/he undermined the resistance even as Freeman appeared to be part of it. It’s not clear to what extent you are simply a tool of the G-man, and whether the G-man is on the side of the human resistance, as he seemed to be, or not. (At the very beginning of HL, it seems he’s responsible for bringing the aliens to earth in the first place). Everything you might have thought was simply survival, all those you killed in the game, all those lucky escapes, all becomes suspect. But because you only find out about this later, you wind up wondering if you had betrayed your own friends unknowingly, rather than, as in Bioshock, having to pretend to trust the person you knew was going to betray you in order to keep the game moving.

This seems a more compelling story to me; the querying of apparently innocent deeds, rather than the self-evident weightiness of the ‘kill or do not kill the little girl’ in Bioshock. This is, probably, partly my non-adherence to a teenage paradigm of good and bad. I’ve heard since that the creator of Bioshock was forced to simplify the storyline, on the claim that people wouldn’t be able to follow it. I suspect, then, that there are a few more dilemmas one would have otherwise had to face: perhaps even the alteration of the body through gene splicing would become a questionable matter for the player. It did seem to me a little odd that you killed off a bunch of nutty splicers (who had gone crazy due to too much gene splicing) but never seemed at risk of becoming one of them. Later in the game, you ‘become’ a Big Daddy (dressed up as one, anyway), so this element would have worked really well: to what extent must you participate in what you are resisting in order to resist it? At what point do you give over simply resisting and seek to dominate? These would have been interesting questions, but they never really quite make it into being seriously considered. And the big boss battle at the end is just kinda lame, in the end. Why is it that the games industry might be able to complexify its gameplay somewhat, but the final battle is always one of pure force?

In the end, Bioshock wants to be more interesting than it is. Its context is cool, but the splicers become nothing more than an irritant as the game goes on. Part of it is context, I think. Half Life 2 moves through a city, through blocks of apartments, through sewers, through canals (on a hovercrafty thing), along coastline, through prison blocks, through huge city buildings, through sand dunes (complete with ant-lions buzzing at you); you fight on farms, lighthouses, in prison blocks, in mines, in the big weird Citadel, in huge warehouses, in small cramped towns and so on. The variety of contexts requires you to be continually finding new ways of engaging your enemies; and they themseles are varied: regular combine soldiers, the shot-gun-bearing variety, big helicopter things you take down with a rocket launcher, roof-suckers, ant-lions, zombies, head crabs (of various kinds) and so on. It maintains interest, where Bioshock became just a repetitive exercise in shooting things.

So thanks, Valve, for trusting your gamers. And phooey to those stupid execs who made Bioshock just another FPS, albeit with pretty graphics.