Documentos de Académico
Documentos de Profesional
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by
May 2006
Abstract
This thesis challenges the dominant image of physical disability as the
Other. I will build on the work of disability theorists such as Jenny Morris,
Susan Wendell and Robert Murphy to develop a conception that acknowledges
the significance of embodied subjectivity. In order to explain how and to what
purposes subjects come to be seen as the disabled and the Other, I shall
review existing theories involving disability, impairment, and the body. The
aim of this thesis is to undermine the able-bodiedness/physical disability
dichotomy. To achieve this, inspired by poststructuralist feminists like Judith
Butler and Julia Kristeva, I shall introduce and develop the idea that physical
disability is abjection, that is, something that society constantly attempts to
throw out because it unsettles carefully bounded conceptions of self. Without
denying the materiality of the disabled body, that is to say, without reducing
physical disability to discourse, the reconceptualisation of physical disability as
abjection opens up exciting new possibilities that have previously been
foreclosed in disability theory. If physical disability is abjection, then one
could accept ones disability differently, and thus, disrupt able-bodied norms.
The disabled is seen as the abject because it undermines boundaries between
the self and the Other, and as such, is always ambivalent. This thesis aims to
undo the process of othering physical disability, and to dismantle the
hierarchical binary oppositions of able-bodied/disabled and self/Other.
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Acknowledgements
I would first of all like to acknowledge my supervisor, Dr. Kathleen
Lennon, for her dedicated supervision that encouraged me to complete this
thesis and for her personal support. She helped to pull me through many
conceptual deadlocks. Without her, my dream to accomplish this thesis would
not have come true. I also acknowledge my supervisor, Prof. Gabriele Griffin
for her time and understanding.
Thanks are due to both his family and my family in Japan for all their
support. In particular, I am grateful to my mother, Miyoko Inahara, who has
always accepted my differences and believed in my abilities, for her
understanding my situation and giving me the second chance to accomplish this
thesis in England. A special thank you goes to Michaels parents, Gavin and
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Joyce Peckitt, his brother and sister-in-law, Ken and Catherine Peckitt, my
grandmother, Shigeko Kinnaka, my sister, Hisami Nakamura, my brother-inlaw, Daisuke Nakamura, my niece, Kaho, my cousin, Miho Oka, all merely a
handful of the many relatives who supported me.
I also would like to thank my friends for their support to complete this
thesis and for giving me the experience of the world with them. They are:
Walter Bowman, Zo Coleman, Dr. Sandy Darab, Achini Dandunage,
Benjamin Green, Midori Hatanaka, Naoko Horikawa, Makiko Irokawa,
Chikako Ishikawa, Sanna Kallioinen, Dr. Alan Libert, Paula Lister, Mei-lin Liu,
Noriyuki Matsuuchi, Dr. Angela Melville, Tomoko Nakano, Prof. Takao
Nishimura, Yumiko Ono, Hikaru Otani, Dr. John Scott, Dr. Richard Smith,
Kristy Trajcevski, Megumi Uchino, Daniel Walters, Dr. Melanie Williams, and
many others for their very special friendships, and also to Prof. Shigenori
Wakabayashi who opened my eyes to see the world in different ways by
enlightening me on the martial arts.
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Contents
ABSTRACT ....................................................................................................... 2
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ............................................................................. 3
CONTENTS....................................................................................................... 6
INTRODUCTION............................................................................................. 8
AN AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL ACCOUNT OF PHYSICAL DISABILITY ......................... 8
TOWARDS ABJECT LOVE: WHERE TEARS FLOW ............................................. 12
ROBERT MURPHYS THE BODY SILENT ............................................................ 14
THE INDIVIDUAL (MEDICAL) MODEL AND THE SOCIAL MODEL ..................... 18
TOWARDS FEMINIST DISABILITY STUDIES: CRITIQUES OF THE SOCIAL MODEL
................................................................................................... 22
THESIS FRAMEWORK ...................................................................................... 30
CHAPTER 1 - QUESTIONING THE ABLE BODIED MATRIX:
CONSTRUCTION OF THE IMAGE OF PHYSICAL DISABILITY ...... 35
INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................... 35
THE PROCESS OF OTHERING PHYSICAL DIFFERENCES .................................... 38
1. The Myth of Able-bodiedness ................................................................. 38
2. The Second Body The Disabled Other .............................................. 42
FOUCAULT: DISCOURSE AND POWER .............................................................. 49
THE ELEPHANT MAN: THE ABLE-BODIED GAZE............................................. 56
CINEMA AND THE ABLE-BODIED GAZE .......................................................... 66
CONCLUSIONS: TOWARDS RESISTANCE .......................................................... 72
CHAPTER 2 - THE ABLE BODY AS THE PHALLIC BODY:
PSYCHOANALYTIC EXPLORATION OF PHYSICAL DISABILITY . 75
INTRODUCTION: .............................................................................................. 75
FREUD AND LACAN: ON THE BODY AND LANGUAGE...................................... 77
THE PHALLIC BODY AS THE ABLE BODY ........................................................ 88
IRIGARAY AND SEXUAL DIFFERENCE ............................................................. 97
THIS BODY WHICH IS NOT ONE ................................................................... 103
CHAPTER 3 - EMBODIED VOICES: AN EXPLORATION OF JANE
CAMPIONS THE PIANO (1993) .............................................................. 111
INTRODUCTION: VOICE AND SPEECH ............................................................ 111
THE PIANO: PERSONAL REFLECTIONS ........................................................... 120
UNINTELLIGIBLE VOICES: FREUD, IRIGARAY AND KRISTEVA ....................... 125
THE PIANO: TOWARDS EMBODIED VOICES ................................................... 137
1. Silence: the Subversive Myth of Echo .................................................. 137
2. The Piano as Voice............................................................................... 144
CONCLUSION ................................................................................................ 160
CHAPTER 4 - PHYSICAL DISABILITY AND PERFORMATIVITY . 165
INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................. 165
GENDER TROUBLE ........................................................................................ 168
1. The Performative Account of the Establishment and Maintenance of the
Heterosexual Matrix ................................................................................. 168
2. Account of Routes to Destabilisation of the Heterosexual Matrix ....... 173
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Introduction
Being in too much of a rush to meet the world, I was born prematurely
in Osaka, Japan. I either ignored, or was unaware of my expected date of
release and of my mothers plan to go to her hometown to release me. I do not
know why I exited my mothers womb five weeks early. I probably felt
cramped in a confined space and like most prisoners, wanted to come out to be
free. I shocked my parents. Of course, whilst present at this event, I do not
have any memory of this state of emergency of which I myself was the author.
I heard that a doctor who was present decided to put me into an incubator.
Unfortunately, the decision was wrong for me because the incubator did not
provide enough oxygen; I was anoxic. No one knew what was wrong with me
at that time. My parents came to realise that there might be something wrong
with me when I was six to eight months old, because my head was never
steady; I always held it to one side. My mother was worried about me because
I was not good at suckling and then I would vomit up all the milk I drank. My
mother took me to the hospital and finally, when I was about ten months old, I
was diagnosed as being afflicted with cerebral palsy.1 These stories were told
to me by my mother, when I was older.
Margaret Griffiths and Mary Clegg (1988), in Cerebral Palsy: Problems and Practice, cite one of the
most comprehensive definitions of cerebral palsy, which comes from the World Commission for Cerebral
Palsy:
Cerebral Palsy is a persistent but not unchanging disorder of movement and posture
due to dysfunction of brain, excepting that caused by progressive disease, present
before its growth and development are completed. Many other clinical signs may
be present. (Griffiths and Clegg, 1988: 11)
According to Blacks Medical Dictionary Fortieth Edition (2002)
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particular parts of the brain before, during, or after birth. In most cases, it is
impossible to determine what specifically causes it. What is so significant
about cerebral palsy that it needs explanation? The reason is that cerebral palsy
has influenced, and continues to influence, my ways of seeing the world; it
matters a great deal to me how I see myself and understand my place in the
world.
The way in which I see the world is based on the way in which I am
embodied.
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I like my
hairdresser in England because she does not care about my neck movement;
she never makes me talk whilst giving me a haircut. She seems to know that if
I speak, my neck will move a lot. To me, the hairdressers salon had become
the place where I experienced my own vulnerability, in much the same way as
others may experience their vulnerabilities at a hospital where they cannot take
control of their own bodies. The point I am making here is that my embodied
experience informs my awareness of the world around me. My awareness can
only be understood by taking my body into account.
I trust that the explanation above provides an insight into how the ablebodied world, which many people habitually take for granted, ignores the
complexity, fluidity, multiplicity, and vulnerability of human embodiment.
This thesis emerges from my personal experience of becoming a disabled
subject. My physical disability, due to cerebral palsy, is central to this thesis,
which, at the same time, interrogates the category of the disabled. For a long
time I have wondered if I have a fixed identity as disabled. Why is it so
difficult for me to identify myself in this manner?
look for an image of physical disability that I can identify with, an image that
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does not suggest pity or misfortune, but one that reflects the complexity,
fluidity, multiplicity, and vulnerability of all modes of embodiment.
For a woman who has a speech impairment due to cerebral palsy, and
who comes from a non-English speaking country, tears may be regarded as
my embodied voice. They are often the only way I have to express complex,
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In short, my physical
differences are interconnected, and become fluid; they are a flood of tears. I
have learnt that when I shed these tears, a person in front of me interprets the
meaning of my tears in ways that may be contrary to my intentions. This
bodily fluid is thus ever-shifting, volatile, and open to question. I shed tears
with an embodied intention, but I cannot see them/it. Another person may
interpret my tears for his/her own sense, but inevitably he/she is left wanting.
My tears do not express a sort of fixed thoughtfulness. They tempt him/her to
ask: What are you feeling? I therefore think that there is inevitably a form of
questioning, something that we attempt to interpret, but in the end it only fills
us with further questions. In these moments of fluidity, I discover myself as an
embodied subject, making possible the fluidity that Luce Irigaray (1985b)
terms a feminine alterity, and Julia Kristeva (1982) terms abjection: a space
beyond dualisms. The feminine and the abject are often linked to the body,
which is changeable and vulnerable.
Abject Love, the title of this thesis, takes its cue from the image of tears
and French feminist theories of feminine alterity and abjection. As a feminist
thinker, I suggest that the embodied subject that I draw in the image of tears
can conceive of herself beyond the mainstream representations of the disabled
body. I am concerned to find a space where a fixed image of the embodied
self can dissolve into fluidity, creating a space in which the disabled body is
excused from the regulations imposed by an able-bodied society.
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It is
imperative that I aim to fulfil in this thesis. I need to explore the space where
physical disability may be conceived beyond the able-bodied norm that
inscribes the disabled other onto bodies that signify difference. I need to
illustrate an experience beyond the able-bodied claim of fixity that produces
boundaries that restrict participation for disabled individuals. As I will argue
throughout this thesis, such a space can found in cultural texts: cinema,
performance art, poetry, narrative, and photography.
I am not simply
interested in the ways in which these cultural texts may offer us different
types of cultural descriptions of the body. More specifically, I am concerned
with the ways in which cultural texts can, like the tears that have rolled down
my cheek throughout the researching and writing of this work, undermine the
fixed notions of the body.
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physically disabled due to a spinal cord tumour. Murphy uses the analogy of
an anthropological field trip for his disabled experience. He states:
In the chapter four entitled The Damaged Self, Murphy starts with a
quotation from Franz Kafkas The Metamorphosis:
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Thus, Murphy argues that his physical disability changes his self-image, that is,
the way in which he sees himself. Also, he reads Kafkas literature from his
embodied perspective of becoming the disabled. Murphy explains:
He also states:
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Murphy does, draw on my own experience throughout, this thesis is not simply
an autobiography. I sometimes look back on my childhood, or my experiences,
but only to illuminate or explain certain concepts. My aim is to open the reader
up
to
different
perspectives
on
embodied
subjectivity
that
may
transforms his identity, social status, and relationship to others like his wife,
colleagues, friends, and students. Murphy argues that, when encountering him,
his disability is either hardly articulated or totally ignored. Murphys physical
disability is regarded as taboo and, as something that has to remain disregarded,
thus remains silent. He points out the uneasiness of this nature of silencing or
ignoring disability.
remains concealed and unseen. Thus, Murphy argues that disability and its
suffering are socio-culturally banned from articulation.
Whilst Murphys
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Over the past two decades, disability studies developed the debate about
disabled individuals and their disabilities, and established two major models:
the individual (medical) model and the social model of disability (Barnes,
1991; Finkelstein, 1980; Oliver, 1990 & 1996).
professionals have based their concepts upon the medical model. The World
Health Organizations International Classification of Impairments, Disabilities,
and Handicaps (ICIDH) defines disability as any restriction or lack (resulting
from impairment) of ability to perform an activity in the manner or within the
range considered normal for a human being (WHO, 1980: 28). Within this
context, which is generally regarded as the medical model, disability is
positioned within the individual with impairment.
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individuals rather than with society, and it suggests that the way in which we
solve the problem is to change the disabled individual to fit into society, rather
than improve social conditions to accommodate the disabled individual. Oliver
explains:
Thus, the individual (medical) model of disability describes the physical and
psychological restrictions in the lives of disabled individuals as resulting from
their impairments. This model seems to be linked to biological determinism,
which regards disability as a biological, thus unchangeable, condition, and
which reduces disabled individuals into a category of individuals whose bodies
do not move correctly, who appear to be different, or who perceive the world
differently. 2 Politically, most academics in disability studies have opposed
biological determinism and have introduced some form of social construction
into accounts of disability, thus generating a social model of disability.
Helen Crowley and Susan Himmelweit (1992: 60), in Knowing Women: Feminism and Knowledge,
explain biological determinism as: our biology determines the way in which we as individuals develop
both physically and psychologically, and this, in turn determines which roles we are able and choose to
play in society.
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The social model views the restrictions in the lives of disabled people
as resulting from environmental, behavioural and institutional structures within
society. Thus, the social model claims that disability is not an individual
problem, but a social problem. Oliver (1996) explains his position as follows:
disablement, the social model allows disabled people to question their positions
in a society privileging the able-bodied, and empowers them to stand up for
their human rights. Thus, the social model maintains that the problem is not
the disabled individual, but the deficiency of accommodations for all disabled
people.
The social model considers that the solution to the problem of disability
lies in the reorganisation of society.
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only way of demonstrating ones support for disability politics. Here, I would
argue that the social model of disability can be considered as strategic
essentialism, theorising as if the category of disabled people was a unity for
the propose of assembling disabled individuals into a disability political
movement.3 However, it is difficult for this model to either acknowledge or
take into account the diversity and specificity of embodied experiences of
disabled individuals (Morris, 1996; Wendell, 1996, and Crow, 1996). This
critique from feminist disabled studies has raised the question of differences
among disabled individuals that challenges the social models universalism.
Gayatri Chakavorty Spivak (1988) uses the term strategic essentialism by which she means that
essentialism should be considered as a kind of tool to destabilize a narrative of the dominant group to
achieve solidarity for the purpose for political movement, even if only temporarily. In In Other Worlds:
Essays in Cultural Politics, Spivak (1988) examines Subaltern studies and states: Reading the work of
Subaltern studies from within but against the grain, I would suggest that elements of their text would
warrant a reading of the project to retrieve the subaltern consciousness as the attempt to undo a massive
historiographic matalepsis and situate the effect of the subject as subaltern. I would read it, then, as a
strategic use of positivist essentialism in a scrupulously visible political interest (Spivak, 1988: 205).
3
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Disability, Hester Parr and Ruth Butler (1999) express a critical view of the
social model:
1999: 4)
Thus, the social model of disability ignores the significance and nature of
impairment and the body. Moreover, in Disability Theory: Key Ideas, Issues,
and Thinkers, Carol Thomas (2002: 50) considers that the social model of
disability has had the following effect: that the personal experience of living
with impairment is not the concern of disability studies, and that intellectual
and political energies should be concentrated on understanding and tackling the
wider social causes of disability. Thomas (2002) argues that Oliver and
Barnes regard any theoretical consideration of impairment in disability studies
as establishing a threat to the social model.
In the process of
defending
onslaughts
ourselves
from
these
which
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Crow examines why this silence about the body has taken place and why,
under the social model of disability, we are restricted from expressing our
impairments, pain, or bodies. She argues that we are not allowed to express
any negative feelings about our experience of our impaired bodies in the social
model. She suggests that we ought to consider both disability and impairment
in terms of our embodied experiences. Crow states:
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operate
on
two
levels:
more
complete
Thus, Crow argues that this lack of consideration of the body is the weak point
of the social model of disability, and suggests that we need to explore pain,
impairment, and the body. She agrees with Morris that the social model of
disability seeks to persuade impaired individuals to ignore their bodies and
their embodied experiences. Impairment cannot simply evaporate as the social
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theory of disability strongly believes that impairment is not the issue, but that
social barriers are. In the social model, people with disability become more
confident about who they are and obtain an identity as disabled.
discussed thus far, it has to be both a political and a socio-cultural theory, since,
as the social model of disability has identified, disability is socially formed, but
also, as those feminists in disability studies claim, more is needed than the
social model.
explored in either disability studies or feminist theory. Thus, I take issue with
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the social model of disability, both for ignoring embodied subjectivity, and for
creating a homogeneous category of the disabled. My aim in writing this
thesis is to convince disability and feminist theorists to further explore the
complex embodiments and subjectivities of disabled individuals.
The
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Thesis Framework
This thesis is, therefore, different from theories of disability that take
the category of the disabled for granted and describe the socially prejudiced
relationship between the able-bodied and the disabled. Following feminist
disability studies, I call into question the categories of the able-bodied and the
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accounts of discourse and power, and the use of his work within feminism,
cultural studies, and disability studies, this chapter examines the idea that one
identifies ones self as disabled through the discourses on disability that one
encounters. To illustrate these theories, I shall analyse David Lynchs 1980
film, The Elephant Man.
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invariably regards speech as the articulation of the self. This chapter deals
with the different ways in which feminist theories challenge the Western
tradition of silencing womens embodied voices.
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This
The final chapter (chapter five) looks at the way in which disability is
constructed by examining theories of abjection. In this chapter, I shall suggest
that the disabled body is an abjected body. There are two ways in which
abjection may be understood. Through a discussion of the debate between
Julia Kristeva and Judith Butler, I shall consider whether abjection should be
recognised as a psychic process involved in the formation of the self, or
whether abjection should be discursively articulated and eliminated. Butlers
claim that abjection is simply a discursive product is questioned in this chapter.
I shall question whether the formation of abject subjectivities is purely
discursive. Adopting and adapting Kristevas account rather than Butlers, I
open up the possibility of undoing the processes of abjection.
With the
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Introduction
Disability translates into Japanese as shou-gai that literally means obstacle-harm in Chinese
characters used in Japanese writing (kanji). Shou-gai-sha means disabled person or disabled
people in Japanese. Able-bodedness is ken-jyou that literally means healthy-normal in
Chinese characters used in Japanese writing. Ken-jyou-sha is able-bodied person or ablebodied people in Japanese. Not many people in Japan care about these literal meanings.
However, I was shocked at them when I learnt the meanings of these Chinese characters in
elementary school.
4
The concept of the able-bodied matrix is developed from Judith Butlers concept of the
heterosexual matrix, that is, the naturalization of patriarchy. She states: Consider not only that
the ambiguities and incoherences within and among heterosexual, homosexual and bisexual,
practice are suppressed and redescribed within the reified framework of the disjunctive and
asymmetrical binary of masculine/feminine, but that these cultural configurations of gender
confusion operate as sites for intervention, exposure, and displacement of these reifications. In
other words, the unity of gender is the effect of a regulatory practice that seeks to render
gender identity uniform through a compulsory heterosexuality. The force of this practice is,
through an exclusionary apparatus of production, to restrict the relative meanings of
heterosexuality, homosexuality, and bisexuality as well as the subversive sites of their
convergence and resignification (Butler, 1999 [1990]: 42).
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maintain the categorising system are not initially the Other themselves. In
Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and The body, Lennard J. Davis
(1995) articulates the notion that I call the able-bodied matrix:
He continues:
Following Davis, I have come to realise that we need to see both the
construction of the Other and the construction of the norm, and to understand
the relationship between these constructions: the system of able-bodiedness.
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The beauty myth is a collection of ideas including ideals of beauty being worldwide and
objective. This myth states that women have to embody these ideals, which the mass media
(society) identifies them to be. The mainstream culture suggests to women that they are not
happy unless they are beautiful, but it also suggests to all of us that we are not happy unless
we are able-bodied. Wolfs notion of the beauty myth, explores the impact of our maledominant culture upon women. She argues that women have obtained rights equal to men in
realms of education, professional careers, and voting. Consequently, Wolf (1991: 10-11)
proposes that the beauty myth is the last one remaining of the old feminine ideologies that
still has the power to control those women whom second wave feminism would have otherwise
made relatively uncontrollable. Taking into consideration that the beauty myth is womens
last struggle, Wolf (1991: 10) argues that women are going through a violent backlash against
feminism, observing the current issues in eating disorders, cosmetic surgery, and
objectification of female bodies.
7
Mythologies (1972) is a text which contains fifty-four short journalistic articles on a variety
of subjects. Although many articles are about political figures, they also focus on various
manifestations of mass media, such as films, advertisements, newspapers, magazines,
photographs, and so on. Barthes demonstrates that it is possible to read the media
representations of day-to-day life as full of meanings.
6
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attractive to men, and women feel that they should make themselves beautiful
in order to obtain and maintain their relationships with men. Women apply the
beauty myth to the particular parts of their bodies that make them female, and
that are perceptible both to women themselves and to men, such as the breasts,
the face, and the body figure.
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Stone
argues that our images of body or physical difference that arise are central to
our feelings about ourselves. For her, the myth is that any body can be perfect.
Actually, no one can have a perfect body in any of the desired ways. Stone
argues that, as our culture forms and reforms what the ideal should be, it
becomes clear that there is no universal standard. Perfection is subjective,
since its meaning depends upon our socio-cultural and personal values. The
one who is assumed to be almost perfect is merely defined by a particular
group of people. Thus, a universal standard of perfection is a myth.
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perfect because, unlike the Vitruvian Man, we are living and our bodies are
changeable. I argue that the myth of bodily perfection or able-bodiedness
reduces the multiplicity and fluidity of human bodies into a single disabled
Other. This myth is the collection of norms, routines, and standards through
which a particular formation of the body is rendered universal, and allows the
provisional or ambiguous meaning of able-bodiedness to appear to be natural
or normal.
Simone de Beauvoir (1997 [1949]) makes the first reference to women as the
Other. This Other is essentially different from men, in that men have
demarcated it as what they are not. Thus, other (with small letter o) simply
means different, expelled, and opposite, while the Other (with big letter O)
indicates the theoretical and political standpoint of being different from the
norm, and involves the central claim that Otherness is projected on to women
by, and in the interests of, men (Kitzinger and Wilkinson, 1996: 4). Thus, the
Other is an essential concept theorised by de Beauvoir to explain how women
are formed as the inferior and the strange to men in patriarchal culture.
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object.
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Women are not seen as a separate entity but as a not-man. Women are
labelled in relation to men, but the obverse is not the case. This otherness is
the negative social condition, that is, femininity, which affirms womens
inferiority to men. Formed by patriarchal society, women begin internalising
this otherness, that is, the notion of their lesser status. She states:
Women are the Other since they are differentiated by men and by women
due to the internalisation of the patriarchal order. Mens identities are fixed
through the process of othering women. De Beauvoir argues that patriarchal
practices of objectifying women force them to internalise a male perspective
on their bodies. Similarly to de Beauvoir, Berger (1990 [1972]: 46) states:
she comes to consider the surveyor and the surveyed within her as the two
constituent yet always distinct elements if her identity as a woman. Since
women are defined in relation to men and are not able to express themselves
on their own terms, women become dependent upon men for their female
identity. De Beauvoir states:
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Otherness is a fundamental
She continues:
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colonisation. Black men are regarded as the Other subjected to the Western
law. In many societies, black men have been relegated to the position of the
Other, colonised by various forms of Western domination. In Black Skin,
White Masks (1968), Franz Fanon illustrates his personal experience as a black
intellectual in France and explores the ways in which the relationship between
colonisers and colonised people is naturalised.
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connection of blackness with the Other, the black man puts on a white mask,
or considers himself as a universal subject equally participating in a society
that advocates equality, supposedly abstracted from personal appearance.
Cultural ideals are internalised into consciousness, creating a fundamental
disjuncture between the black mans consciousness and his body. Under these
conditions, the black man is inevitably alienated from himself. Fanon claims
that the category of white depends on its fixity through its opposite, that is,
black. Neither the category of white nor the category of black exists
without each other, and both came into being by colonial invasion.
The theme of how the Same serves to define the category of the
Other is further explored in Edward Saids Orientalism (2003 [1978]). Said
argues that the history of the western world is one of misrepresentation of, and
domination over, the East.
westerners as the Other within Western discourse, and points out a range of
ways in which racial otherness is constructed and maintained through
regulatory discourses about that very Other. Said starts by asking questions
about the category of the Orient: what does it have as its features, and how do
we know who it incorporates?
category? In Western discourse, the Orient is always the Other of the West,
thus, excluded from Western culture.
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From earliest
Other, yet, at the same time, as Fanon illustrates, claims for him/herself the
status of universal subject.
- 48 -
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Discourse
human bodies and populations.8 Foucault investigates the complex and shifting
system of relations between power, knowledge and the body, governing the
historically particular process of becoming a subject.
He questions the
He
These
Foucault explains that many power relations in modern states are practiced discursively upon
the human body. He states, The body is also directly involved in a political field; power
relations have an immediate hold upon it; they invest it, mark it, train it, torture it, force it to
carry out tasks, to perform ceremonies, to emit signs (Foucault, 1979:25).
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It is not, however, only the body that disciplinary systems focus on. Foucault
considers disciplinary power as productive of certain types of subject as well.
In Discipline and Punish, he describes the way in which surveillance
recognises the psyche as well to induce a mental state of conscious and
permanent visibility (Foucault 1979: 201). Thus, continuous surveillance is
internalised by subjects to construct their own selves.
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This constant gaze controls the prisoners, affecting not only what they do, but
also how they see themselves. Thus, surveillance is a process of keeping them
under close supervision.
internalised. With this internalised gaze, one disciplines oneself. Thus, the
goal of the panopticon is to produce one who is docile. This is one of the
main techniques through which a society holds power over its subjects.
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In the
procreative purpose.
Therefore, Foucault
proposed that in the modern state, the behaviour of both individuals and
populations is persistently governed through the principle of the normal, a
principle ensured by a number of practices within criminology, medicine,
psychology and psychiatry. These techniques are justified by the need to
normalise the abnormal. In the modern state, one becomes the internalised
agent of ones own normalisation and subjection to the norm that claims to
expose the truth of ones identity.
- 54 -
Biopower makes a
distinction between the normal and the abnormal so that things are considered
as one way or the other. Throughout Foucaults works, categories of madness,
homosexuality, and illness are produced from social and medical practices, and
people are understood, and understand themselves, in terms of them. Biopower
subjects the material body to particular norms. Foucault theorises the systems
of power from which these inscriptions and projections proceed and considers
the body as discursively produced in reference to such norms. The subject, for
Foucault, has no identity prior to its subjection to such processes of
representation.
- 55 -
London society. Under Treves medical and personal care, Merrick changes
from a sensational freak to a patient and a witty pet of the aristocracy.
However, his dream of becoming a normal man is never achieved. At the end
of the film, Merrick passes away. This film represents a disabled person in an
ultimately negative way. The Elephant Man, John Merrick, cannot accept
himself with a facial deformity. He struggles through his life as the Other,
and, in the end, he dies alone. In considering why disabled protagonists are
often deceased by the end of the film, providing The Elephant Man (1980) as
an example, Paul Longmore (1987: 70) states that this implies that it is better
to be dead than disabled. Longmore states:
their
handicaps,
they
- 56 -
have
chosen
isolation.
The above quote claims that The Elephant Man (1980) produces the myth of
physical deformity (disability) fixedly positioned within an individual model of
disability, which sees the disabled person as the problem and he/she is to be
adapted to fit into the social world as it is.
I think that the Elephant Man is the biggest disservice ever done to
people with NF1. Everyone comes wondering if they look like that.
(Ablon, 1995: 1485)
In The Proteus Syndrome: the Elephant Man Diagnosed J. A. Tibbles and M. M. Cohen, Jr
(1986) explain that although first thought to have neurofibromatosis, Merrick is now believed
to have had Proteus syndrome.
9
- 57 -
and they might become malignant, that I will die as a result. (Ablon,
1995:1485)
In this film, John Merrick is constantly fixed as the Other, due to his
physical (facial) difference. The visibility of his different body is serving to
define the whole person. In the film, there are three able-bodied gazes that
serve to construct his disability: (1) the gaze in the freak show; (2) the medical
gaze; and (3) the public gaze. In all three gazes John Merrick can be seen as
being the abnormal and the Other.
Merricks body in the freak show. The freak show exposes societys need to
control physical difference and to place it in a socially comprehensible position.
In his study of freak shows, Robert Bogdan (1988 & 1996) provides a detailed
understanding of historical and social practices of looking at the Other.
Bogdon (1988) explores the transformation of discourse in American cultural
history from seeing those who are physically different as delighting the
spectator and arousing their curiosity, to seeing them as pathologically
abnormal.
In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the freak show was a
place for the exhibition of extraordinary bodies (Bogdan, 1988). During this
era, disabled people were presented with the possibility of displaying
themselves to an audience fascinated by their otherness. The freak show was
a particular term referring to the formally organized exhibition of people with
alleged physical, mental or behavioural difference at circuses, fairs carnivals or
other amusement venues (Bogdan, 1996: 25). Bogdan (1996) argues that
while these freak shows were often the place for the mistreatment and
dehumanisation of disabled individuals, in some cases, these shows provided
- 58 -
Another example of the freakish body is Mary Shelleys 19th century fictional character of
Frankensteins creature that is repeatedly represented in the cinema. In Shelleys book, Dr.
Frankenstein produced a creature called the monster from the body parts of dead people. The
Elephant Man and the creature of Frankenstein have similarities. Physical differences in both
are not simply represented as a freak, but medicalised or scientifically categorised as the
Other.
10
- 59 -
At that time, P.T. Barnum brought the freak show to its peak by
Following Thomson, I move to the second model of the able-bodied gaze in the
film, that is, the medical (clinical) gaze.
By focusing on the two main characters, the surgeon Treves and John
Merrick, there are many hospital scenes in which we can clearly see the
development of the modern doctor-patient relationship. Treves uses scientific
knowledge to control Merrick through examination. In the hands of a medical
professional like Treves, Merricks physical deformity is medicalised as
physical disability.
- 60 -
relation the medical aim of categorising and assisting the disabled. Hence, the
medical gaze upon Merricks body is different from the gaze upon the Elephant
Man at the freak show. Here, what we can clearly see is that this pivotal
turning point, from the freak show to the hospital, has continuity in terms of the
spectacle of physical difference: the Elephant Man is transformed from an
object of public curiosity to an object of scientific inquiry.
normality (or being healthy and able-bodied) has political and social
implications. If one has cerebral palsy, to all intents and purposes, one is not
normal. The Birth of Clinic relates to Foucaults other studies of madness,
where, he argues, madness negates the socially acceptable notion of what is
normal, and which puts one in need of the asylum. Likewise, in the domain of
medicine, the clinic develops. Foucault states:
In Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, Hubert Dreyfus and Paul
Rabinow (1983 [1982] : 12-5) assert that Foucault explores the system in medical institutions
which maintains discourse, practices, the gaze, and understanding the subject and its object.
They also consider that Foucault demonstrates that medical discourse, practice, and experience
have been made coherent by clarifying that they are scientifically and systematically formed.
- 61 -
No one could challenge this medical discourse. Thus, Foucault develops his
specific notion of how the medical gaze positions ones body as a scientific
object within the power structure of medical discipline.
In
the film, the medical gaze perpetuates the notion that Merrick, as a disabled
person, requires medical care as a long-term condition in his life.
Reappropriating Foucaults notion of the clinical gaze, the social value of this
medical gaze is also promoted by the development of representations. The film
allows the audience to gaze upon the body of John Merrick with a medical gaze.
Here, the medical gaze becomes the public gaze.
The Revolution, for Foucault, is the French Revolution. The French is the historical event
that instigated the modernity that had been processing for half a century before 1789.
12
- 62 -
He is harassed and
- 63 -
In the scene where John Merrick is invited to tea at the Treves house,
Merrick outwardly shows his emotion in front of Mrs. Ann Treves. He cries at
this meeting with her because he has never met a beautiful woman from the
upper class before. On the one hand, this scene could be considered as evidence
of Merricks humanity. Nevertheless, in my view, by contrasting Merrick with
Mrs. Treves, Merrick is further marginalised, and his bodily abnormality is
further portrayed as a destructive or disruptive force. This is highlighted in her
reaction to him at the tea (Darke, 1994: 337). Her shock enables the viewers
of the film to feel pity, sympathy, and regret for his personal history, but also
reinforces the horror of his appearance. Although Mr. Treves might have told
Mrs. Treves about Merrick, she could not bring herself to treat him as an
ordinary human being (Darke, 1994: 338).
In a later scene where John Merrick goes to the theatre with Mrs.
Treves, others in the audience, who are from the upper classes, acknowledge
his courage for appearing in public by applauding him. However, as Darke
(1994: 338) suggests, they cannot accept his real desire to be equal to them as
human beings. In The True History of the Elephant Man, Howell and Ford
(1980: 206-8) reveal that when the real life John Merrick went to the theatre
there was no standing ovation.13 Rather, his was a secret visit to the theatre. It
- 64 -
would seem, therefore, that for John Merrick, being treated as fully human was
only ever a dream. In reality, he was always marked as the Other due to his
physical appearance.
Darke (1994: 339) suggests that in The Elephant Man the closing scene
of John Merricks life, is perhaps the most problematic scene in respect of the
suggestion of eugenic ideals of death being preferable to physical disability for
himself and society. By analysing this film from his disabled perspective,
Darke sees that it is better to be dead than to be disabled. He states:
Darke indicates the stereotype of misfortune in the film. He regards the film as
a normality drama that specifically uses abnormal (impaired) characters to
deal with perceived threat to the dominant social hegemony of normality
(Darke, 1998: 184). Thus, this normality drama genre often represents disabled
characters as the Other and locates them in a medical model paradigm
(Darke, 1998: 188).
13
Michael Howell and Peter Ford (1980) wrote a sympathetic account of Merricks life. In
their book, Merrick, like any other man, had many hopes and dreams. His congenital
deformity prohibited him to be like, live like, and sleep lying down on his back like other ablebodied men. They described that, through all of his years of sufferings, Merrick was terrified,
yet compassionate about his condition. He appreciated the hospital staff and his new friends
who helped him; they posted some photos of how Merrick looked when he was in the London
Hospital.
- 65 -
the able-bodied gaze that the audience of this film projects into the spectacle of
physical difference. As Thomson (1997: 61) mentions, in such representations
of otherness, including freak shows, questions such as what is it? intensify
the difference between the audience and the extraordinary body.
In the
- 66 -
and discovers that their images maintain the status quo, holding disabled
people as inferior in an isolated place. He offers a critical explanation of
physically disabled characters who manifest or embody the stereotypes that
have been characteristic of social relations with their physically disabled
minority. Thus, Norden (1994) investigates the able-bodied gaze towards the
disabled body on the screen and the able-bodied spectatorship; how ablebodied people read the cinematic image of disabled people. The able-bodied
gaze is not only an inappropriate way of generalising the disabled people; it is
also a biased way of viewing that maintains the social dominance of a certain
gaze that perceives the Other.
14
Exploring the power structure of the gaze in the cinema, Mulvey illustrates that Freud
suggests scopophilia, that is, the pleasure involved in looking at other bodies as extremely
fascinating objects. In the gloom of the movie theatre, it is distinguished that one may look
without being seen either by those on the screen or by other spectators in the cinema. Mulvey
argues that most viewing positions specify for the viewer both the voyeuristic process of
objectifying female bodies and the narcissistic process of identifying with an ideal ego seen
on the screen. Mulvey asserts that in a male-dominant society, pleasure in looking at the film
representation has been split between active/male and passive/female. Mulveys work is only
reflected in the dominant models of film. Traditional Hollywood films not only constantly
bring into focus male protagonists in the narrative but also presuppose male spectators.
- 68 -
the relationship between cinematic images and spectators. She argues that, in
classical Hollywood films, men have the active viewing position while women
have the passive viewing position.
I believe this
differences from the male gaze. The female body is identified as an object for
desire, while the disabled body as an object of revulsion: If the male gaze
makes the normative female a sexual spectacle, then the stare sculpts the
disabled subject into a grotesque spectacle. The stare is the gaze intensified,
framing her body as an icon of deviance (Thompson 1997: 26). Norden
argues that traditional Hollywood films often present able-bodied characters as
active, supervising subjects, and treat disabled characters as passive,
pathological, and monstrous objects of anxiety for able-bodied people in the
narrative and in the audience. They do not allow disabled protagonists to be
- 69 -
Thus, the
construction of the disabled is obsessively subject to discourses of the ablebodied norm and isolates physical disability from the practice of looking.
looked upon with the able-bodied gaze, but he also looks at himself through the
able-bodied gaze. When Merrick looks at the reflection of his face in a mirror,
he screams at himself. He is always a spectacle, and asks himself What is
wrong with me?
He is continually
He comes to consider
the spectator and the spectacle within him as the double, integral, but particular
conditions of his identity as the Other. The Elephant Man engages these
theories of the dominant gaze by providing us with cinematic images that
remark on Merricks position as an image of the Other, and as an internal
viewer of this image. In the film, the able-bodied gaze is not something we
have or practice, but is a socially and institutionally enforced relationship into
which we enter.
- 70 -
Likewise, I argue that the assertion of the particular nature of disabled, The
Elephant Man, ignores, marginalises and inevitably misrepresents those with
NF1 who do not identify themselves within the conditions of that identity. For
me, the films appeal to the disabled Other neglects the differences between
disabled subjects and it makes these differences a negatively fixed pattern
rather than a possibly fluid figure.15
15
I recognise that there could be other readings of this film. (e.g. It can be read as a transition
from freak to human or from freak to patient. It also shows a doctor liberating a freak from
servitude as a circus performer to the more comfortable environment of the hospital.) In
Doctors in the movies Glenn Flores (2004) explores how doctors are represented and names
the top 10 best portrayal of doctors in the films and the top 10 most useful films for in medical
education. In the report, Elephant Man (1980) ranks sixth in the list of the best portrayal of
doctors. Thus, this film can be read as a positive image of the doctor as a healer and as an
ethical man to look after his patient.
- 71 -
- 72 -
will
inevitably
arise
(McNay,
1994:
101).
In
- 73 -
- 74 -
Introduction:
In
to
of the identities,
- 75 -
able-
subjectivity.
The
basic
psychoanalytic
The appeal of
assumptions about sexual difference and explores the parallels between sexual
difference and physical difference, more specifically, between the feminine and
the disabled.
Pursuing a discussion of
In The Ego and The Id (1961 [1923]), Freud argues that the psyche
consists of three parts, the id, the ego and the superego. As maintained by
Anthony Easthope in The Unconscious (1999: 44), the id, the ego, and superego are translators terms; Freud, in fact, used the terms it, I, and over-I.
According to Freud, the id consists simply of mechanisms such as sexual drives
and physical instincts. The id is an unconscious system that operates on two
energy sources: one is libido, that is, the life energy, the other is thanatos,
that is, anger or death energy. A person is born with the id. In short, the id
illustrates pure and basic drives to satisfy instinctual needs. Easthope (1999:
44) also states The id is the reservoir of libido or psychic energy which is
tapped off in the form of the ego and the super-ego. In this revised conception
the super-ego now has a separate task of performing as the voice of conscience
and censorship. The super-ego is a revision of the ego that exercises control
in order to determine the completion of the ego; it is the moral sense. It
determines what is socially and culturally acceptable as the norm.
The
- 77 -
Thus, the
The ego
The superego
develops through interactions between the infant and the parent, and between
the psyche and the social world. Hence, the id, the ego, and the superego are
interrelated.
Freud (1961 [1923]: 26) states, The ego is first and foremost a bodily
ego; it is not merely a surface entity, but is itself the projection of a surface.
The ego operates as a negotiator between the body and the drives of the id. I
support Freuds view that the ego is an embodied sense of self, and that the
body of which one has a felt sense is not necessarily contiguous with the
physical body as it is perceived from the outside (Salamon, 2004: 96). Freud
accepts that the ego is related to the body. In The World, the Flesh, and the
Subject: Continental Themes in Philosophy of Mind and Body, Gilbert and
Lennon (2005) state:
- 78 -
Thus, a body image forms by affective investment in body parts. The ego is
not only a type of perceptions based on bodily sensations, but also contains
imaginary associations. This concept of a bodily ego seems to link outer and
inner perceptions.
sensations, and it derives from the body as well as being an image of the
psyche. Freud regards (1961 [1923]: 26) it as a mental projection of the
surface of the body, besides, as we have seen above, representing the
superficies of the mental apparatus. Elizabeth Grosz states:
- 79 -
of faeces; this is the anal stage. The process of toilet training and the mothers
treatment of defecation processes in this stage are considered to have an impact
on the childs subjectivity. In the third stage, the phallic stage, manoeuvring of
the genitals, the penis or the clitoris, becomes the main source of bodily
pleasure. Children, male and female, desire the body of the mother.
Following these stages of bodily pleasures that male and female infants
share, children enter into the Oedipus complex that serves to determine their
gendered identity. The boys recognition of his mothers lack of a penis is
primarily an issue of insecurity and confusion for him. He suffers a castration
anxiety where he assumes that the mother has lost her penis somehow, or that it
has been severed, and that this could also happen to him. Furthermore, he also
assumes that his father is aware of his desire for his mother, and fears that his
father will castrate him. Thus, he represses his desire for his mother and
identifies with his father. The girl recognises her lack of a penis and interprets
it as a sign of deficiency. For her, the phallic stage is described as her desire
for a penis, that is, penis envy, which later articulates itself in jealousy of her
mother and causes an aversion from her mother and a turning toward her father,
first in the expectation that he will possibly provide her with a penis, then
substituting the desire for a baby for the desire for a penis. Freud, therefore,
assumes sexual difference derives from a recognition of the female body as
lacking. The childs sexual and antagonistic desires are connected to those
who are significant in the environment, generally his/her parents. This Oedipal
moment is the moment of recognition of sexual difference, problematic as it is.
Freuds account remains bodily without being biological. It concerns the affect
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which becomes attached to different bodily forms. Crucially for him, this is the
affect which is associated with the presence or absence of the penis.
Like Freud, Lacan (1997 [1977]) considers that the subject is always
fragmented, consisting of a conscious mind and an unconscious connection of
physical (sexual) drives. Lacan offers a linguistic model for understanding the
subjects entry into the social world.
bodily basis of the ego than it is on the ideological structures that, particularly
through language, make the subject come to understand his or her relationship
to himself and to others.
16
See Malcolm Bowie (1991) Lacan, London: Fontana Press. In particular chapter 4
Symbolic, Imaginary, Real and True (p.88-121) for more developed explanation of
Lacanian threefold model of the psyche.
17
In Social Theory and Psychoanalysis in Transition: Self and Society from Freud to Kristeva,
Anthony Elliott (1992: 125) states: The imaginary for Lacan is that aspect of psychical
organization which is formed in and through pre-Oedipal experience. It is a ream of being in
which the division between subject and object does not exist. In fact Lacan claims that from
this imaginary merging of self and other it is possible to redramatize the genesis of the ego.
- 81 -
Although Lacan does not explain what exactly jouissance is in his own texts, Bruce Fink
(1995: 60) has an explanation of jouissance: Jouissance is thus, what comes to substitute for
the lost mother-child unity, a unity which was perhaps never as united as all that since it was
a unity owing only to the childs sacrifice or foregoing of subjectivity.
- 82 -
20
Prior to the mirror stage the infant experiences a whole in the sense that it and its mother are
not demarcated. Within this its own body is just a mass of different sensations which are not
integrated together. It means that the infant has its nostalgia of its own lack (biological needs),
and that the infant develops its own self. The infant gains a horrified recognition of its
vulnerability.
In this sentence, an infants original sense of the body is the Real that is primordial
experience or unification of his/her mother. It is whatever is prior to any attempt to represent it
in a system of symbols (language). The infant entry into language is related to its separation
from the mother. Before separation, there is a plenitude based on the union of mother and child.
After separation, the mother becomes the infants first object - that is, its first experience of
absence, or lack. For the mother, on the other hand, the child is a substitute for the missing
phallus: she has a sense of fulfilment in light of her close bond with the infant. Without
separation, however, the formation of language is inhibited. Here the infant passes from an
imaginary state of fusion with the mother into the realm of the others and language/culture.
Before the mirror stage, there is no separation between the self and the other.
21
- 83 -
Lacan (1997 [1977]: 1-7) differentiates the ideal I and the ego ideal,
the former is related to the imaginary, the latter is related to the symbolic. The
ideal I is the model of wholeness that the ego attempts to imitate; it influences
one in the mirror stage. Seeing an image of him/herself forms a conflict
between the ideal image in the mirror and the confused reality of his/her body,
thus establishing the logic of the imaginary formation that dominates his/her
psychic life permanently. Lacan explains that the ego-ideal occurs when one
sees him/herself as if from that ideal point; to look at his/herself from that point
of wholeness is to see his/her life as lacking and empty.
During the mirror stage, the infant sees its reflection in a mirror and
identifies that it is a person segregated from its mother. This identification is a
misidentification because what the subject sees in the mirror is only an image
that gives the fantasy of wholeness, but this misidentification is essential for
furthering the process of becoming a subject.22 In Jacques Lacan: A Feminist
The subjects association with the mirror image is a complex one for Lacan as the reflection
(or representation) is an ensnarement and lure as much as a pleasure (Grosz, 1990: 37).
Elizabeth Grosz argues that the subject is constructed by the image, and fascinated by the
specular double (Grosz, 1990: 37). There is a difference between what the subject sees and
feels. The subject sees itself as a unified totality, a gestalt in the mirror and yet experiences
itself in a schism, as a site of fragmentation (Grosz, 1990: 39). The process of (mis)
recognition is ambiguous since it is an image of both delusion and accuracy (Grosz 1990:
39). Grosz states:
22
In identifying with its mirror-image, the child introjects it into the subjects
ego; yet the subjects relation to the image is also alienated. The image both
is and is not an image of itself The child identifies with an image of itself
that is always also the image of another (Grosz, 1990: 40).
- 84 -
Once the child enters into the symbolic stage and accepts the rules and
dictates of society, it is able to deal with others. In The Function and Field of
Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis, Lacan (1997 [1977]: 30-113) argues
that the system of language acquisition is related to the Oedipus complex. As
maintained by Lacan, in the process in which the child becomes aware of the
In Groszs context, the self-reflection in the mirror both is and is not self-image. There is the
dilemma of intercommunicating between its self-image and itself. The self-image seems to be
captured in the system of confused (mis-) recognition that Lacan describes as a feature of the
mirror-stage (Grosz 1990: 39).
- 85 -
implication of the phallus as the sign of both identity and difference, the child
comes to understand the binary division of meanings in language (Alsop,
Fizsimons, and Lennon, 2002: 51). In other words, Lacan suggests that the
process of becoming a subject through the Oedipus complex is the way of
recognising social strictures and of following the system of language in which
the child understands the self in relation to others. Lacan states:
Thus, the symbolic is made possible because of the childs recognition of the
Name-of-the-Father that regulates both the childs desire and the linguistic
system.
Thus, the phallus, in Lacanian terms, is the symbolic meaning of both what a
man is and what a man is not. In Psychoanalysis and Culture: Contemporary
States of Mind, Rosalind Minsky offers a clear explanation of the phallus in
Lacans theory:
- 86 -
Thus, for Lacan, the phallus represents both a desire for power and a fear of
loosing it. Ones self (identity) can only be established in the symbolic as a
consequence of the particular reading of sexual difference (Minsky, 1998: 689).
For Minsky, Lacan proposes that one must recognise the illusory
wholeness of the phallus and the myth of all identities based on either having it
or not having it.
- 87 -
Freud uses the penis as the essential marker of male sexuality; it is used
to theorise both male and female sexualities. Woman does not have a penis
and her position is characterised by the penis holder: man.
Likewise, the
disabled does not have an able-whole body, and the disabled position is
characterised by the able-bodied. Like masculinity, able-bodiedness is linked
to activity and dominance, while, like femininity, disability is viewed as
passive and submissive.
- 88 -
Firstly, as Freud maintains, the ego is a bodily ego. The shape of that
body is originally formed by sensations. It is not that a previously formed body
that creates the sense of itself already exists. The body becomes available to us
due to its potential for pleasure and pain. Later, our bodily ego can be formed
from the attachment of other kinds of significance to bodily parts.
The
disabled ego starts to take form when the subject begins to acknowledge certain
features of the body as having special significance.
- 89 -
clitoris that is, for Freud, considered as an absence of the penis, that is, more
feminised than other parts of the female body, my neck is more disabled than
other parts of my body. I am aware that the categorisation of my body depends
on certain bodily structures. Where one does not have an able body, one
perceives ones body as lacking. In this situation, ones desires and wishes are
attached to the able body. The able-body is the focus of desire; these desires
and wishes offer a psychological foundation for ones future characteristics.
- 90 -
I now turn to the way in which the Lacanian account can be adopted to
explain the construction of able-bodied/disabled subjectivity. As I mentioned
in the previous section, Lacan developed his theory of the mirror image from
Freuds theory of a bodily ego, assuming that the subject comes to
(mis)recognise itself in the image in the mirror. In very early childhood, one
lives in the real, a stage formed by a sense of wholeness, which, for Lacan, is
its unification with the mother, and by lack of a discrete sense of ones own
body. The sense of self that emerges from the mirror stage is formed by
identification with the image, the image of a self that is complete, fixed, and a
coherent and discrete whole.
24
The
Prior to the mirror stage, the infant experiences a whole in the sense that it and its mother are
not demarcated. Within this its own body is only a mass of different sensations which are not
integrated together. The encounter with the mirror begins the sense of itself as a discrete
material entity, but via identification with something outside. This remains in tension with the
mass of unintegrated sensation which is the experience of the body from inside.
- 91 -
Davis assumes that the disabled body appears in the imaginary as a fragmented
body. For him, the imaginary body of the disabled subject is experienced as a
lack. However, I consider that Davis reading of the imaginary is, perhaps, too
simple. To me, the disabled imaginary shifts. As I mentioned in the previous
section, Lacan illustrates the mirror stage as a drama where both the self and
the other within the subject act themselves out. As a complex formation, the
imaginary is influenced by ambiguous bodily feelings of antagonism,
- 92 -
happiness, desire, hate, and love, and is thus, complex. The imaginary is not
fixed, but fluid. It questions the certainty of self-image of what I am. Thus,
there is not a single imaginary for the disabled subject. I consider that the
ambiguity regarding the disabled imaginary is like that over Irigaray and male
and female imaginaries. Most disabled people will share the way of imagining
and feeling about disabled bodies which is dominant in the culture; in the same
way that most women will share a male imaginary of their bodies. But what
we are seeking in both cases is a re-imagining, a new imaginary of the disabled
body. Thus, Disabled people share the able-bodied symbolic with able-bodied
people. Disabled people internalise the normative concept of the able body,
too.
In relation to the imaginary, the ideal body that forms the basis of
identification, is the whole, coherent, stable, intelligible and able body. This is
the basis of the ego ideal. For me, the ego ideal is an able body. This forms
the basis of an imaginary desire for wholeness. However, the imaginary which
attaches to our body is also formed by the image of that body which is reflected
back by others. Here, what gets reflected back, is a body that is not whole but
is broken or lacking. This then fails to correspond to the ego ideal.
For me, it is not simply the having or not having of the whole body that
categorises embodied subjectivity under able-bodied norms, but rather the way
in which its presence or lack of the whole body functions as a signifier. Thus,
the way in which one can make sense of bodily difference is by possession of a
sign, the whole body, of able-bodied power that allows one to position oneself
within the order of able-bodied culture. Fear of the disabled is a fear of the
- 93 -
lack of this power that the able body, as signifier, assures the able-bodied. For
Lacan, the sense of self comes from the whole network of signification, which,
like any signifying system, can never be completely fixed.
I use Lacans
I contend that the phallic body is the able body. The able body is structured in
the symbolic. It is a phallic sign of power within able-bodied societies. The
disabled body, which is parallel to the female body as lack, is constructed by
this phallus, that is, able-bodied/castration-disabled dualism.
The disabled
The
- 95 -
Thus, Wilton argues that the disabled body, like the female body, is castrated,
and the able body, like the phallus or the male body, is seen as the normal. In
this context, psychoanalysis, as well as medical discourse, is based on the
assumption that in order to be whole and to develop a normal ego, disabled
people, like women, have to surrender themselves to their lack and abnormality
(Wilton, 2003: 382).
The possession or lack of the able body fixes the social categories of the
able-bodied and the disabled.
25
I consider that there are interrelations of different identities and subjectivities. Identities are
not just added on. The point here is that the different kinds of identity do not get fixed
independently of each other. They have an impact on each other. Being identified as disabled
impacts on ones identity as male or female. For example, for men where the normative ideal
is strength to be identified as disabled means that their masculinity is somehow called into
question. For women, whose normative ideal is beauty and attractiveness, to be identified as
disabled impacts on their femininity to suggest they are not proper women.
- 96 -
possibilities are available for those who have been so positioned? A refusal of
the fixity of the symbolic is one move. For some, like sexual difference
theorists and those recreating identities as disabled, the important move is to
construct a representation of femininity/disability that is positive. Another
move is to refuse the binary of the privileged term and other. In order to
explore ways out of the apparent determinism of psychoanalytic theory, I will
employ Luce Irigarays theory of sexual difference and female subjectivity. I
will argue for the power that psychoanalytic theory possesses for those in
search of answers to questions of the formation of disabled subjectivities.
However, following Irigaray, I will also explore ways of undoing the binary
positioning that Freud and Lacan suggest.
In This Sex Which Is Not One, Irigaray (1985b) challenges Freud and
Lacans studies of psycho-sexual development and suggests an alternative
account
of
female
sexuality
which
is
separate
from
masculine
- 97 -
While Freud and Lacan considered that the male genitals are identified
as one, as the phallus, and paid no attention to other aspects of male sexual
pleasure, Irigaray argues that the female genitals are not one. For Irigaray,
there is no single term for the female genitals in terms of a binary opposition.
What is the opposite of penis? The female body, in particular, the female
genitals, unsettle the fixity of the binary oppositions that construct patriarchal
thoughts.
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as lack, or simply as the Other; she cannot see herself in this flat mirror. The
entry to the symbolic order, or phallogocentric culture, is dependent upon the
woman remaining as a blind spot so that the man constructs his subjectivity on
the basis of her absence. This shifts womans identity to no place, which is
outside of the binary oppositions. Thus, woman remains untheorised as there is
no apparatus by which to theorise woman. According to Lacan, all we can
say is that woman is subsumed to not-man. This leads us to Irigarays main
claim, as Margaret Whitford (1991: 159) points out: the feminine is always
defined as mans other, the other of the same. 26 In other words, [the] only
woman we know is the masculine feminine, the phallic feminine, woman as
man sees her (Tong, 1997 [1989]: 226).
possible nominees for digression and segregation from the normative order of
universality: sameness (Tong, 1997 [1989]:227). The process of othering
sexual differences is possible due to the socio-culturally constructed body of
those shifted by the binary system. Irigaray argues that all identities come
from patriarchal thoughts with the emphasis on visibility, rationality, fixity,
wholeness and sameness.
In Speculum of the Other Woman and This Sex Which Is Not One,
Irigaray (1985a & 1985b) has two intentions. The first is to reveal
phallogocentrism as establishing and maintaining the entire system of
articulation and meaning, that is, language. The second is to seek to create a
feminine
system
to
offer
positive
sexual
identity
for
women.
In her study of psychoanalysis and Western philosophy, Irigaray sees sameness everywhere.
Her critical study of Freudian psychoanalysis is, in particular, significant, since she criticizes
his theory of female sexuality. (Tong, 1997 [1989]: 227). Irigaray argues that woman is not a
reflection of man, she is the Other.
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categories of gender are simply the one, that is, man, as he is the essential
figure and maintains the essential position while woman is defined in terms of
man. Irigaray (1985a: 133-46) argues that philosophy is gendered. The main
subject is always male. Irigaray (1985a: 133) states: any theory of the subject
has always been appropriated by the masculine.
27
The term oneness is defined in the publishers note and note on selected terms of This Sex
Which Is Not One: The universal standard and privileged form in our systems of
representation, oneness expresses the requirements for unitary representations of signification
and identity. Within such a system, in which the masculine standard takes itself as a universal,
it would be impossible to represent the duality or plurality of the female sex and of a possible
language in analogy with it.(Irigaray, 1985b: 221)
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For one sex and its lack, its atrophy, its negative, still does
not add up to two. In other words, the feminine has never
been defined except as the inverse, indeed the underside of
the masculine. So woman it is not a matter of installing
herself within this lack, this negative, even by denouncing it,
nor of reversing the sexual economy of sameness by turning
the feminine into the standard for sexual difference; it is
rather a matter of trying to practice that difference Is it
possible that the difference might not be reduced again
might not be reduced once again to a process of
heirachization? Of subordinating the other to the same?
(Irigaray, 1985b: 159 emphasis in the original text).
- 101 -
For Irigaray, the imaginary and symbolic are intertwined. The social
imaginary associated with woman is derived from masculine ways of
imagining her. These masculine ways of imagining the female are reflecting in
- 102 -
womens ways of imagining themselves. What is needed is not only new ways
of conceptualising women, but new ways of imagining them. That is, the way
the female body is felt, emotionally related to, needs changing.
Irigaray insists that the feminine, as she theorises it, does not imply an
essential femininity. She does not suggest a fixed, essential nature for women.
She claims that she is not accepting the psychoanalytic polarisation of
male/female. Instead, she seeks to reposition difference and femininity. For
her, the feminine represents a multiple and fluid difference, that is, it is beyond
the binary oppositions.
feminine, Irigaray suggests that she will be able to explain embodied and fluid
subjectivity. In the following section, I shall utilise Irigarays theory of the
feminine to look at different insights into physical disability as complexity,
fluidity, and multiplicity.
In our culture, the imaginary body is an able body. The able-bodied has
established its representations that are the projection of able-bodied
subjectivities.
- 103 -
Within an able-
Here, the able-bodied, or the ideal body, is the site of question in the
recognition of the disabled. The fixity of the able-bodied is always uncertain.
Inspired by Irigaray, I accept the disabled body in a fluid way that aims to
undermine able-bodied parameters.
- 105 -
- 106 -
Since the one has always been defined as able-bodied and masculine,
I, as a disabled woman, reconsider my identity and explore the possibilities for
a disabled female subject.
bodied is the norm, a norm that I have to achieve. Why do I allow myself to be
assessed by any norm which excludes myself? The able-bodied symbolic sets
up the schematics of binary opposition that compel the disabled to struggle for
equality or superiority in relation to the able-bodied.
Able-bodied culture has relegated the disabled into the Other and has
excluded the disabled from the construction of the symbolic. If disabled people
are denied as subjects, how can they change socio-cultural discourse in either
its imaginary and/or symbolic elements? Irigaray argues that the imaginary is
- 107 -
a male imaginary; I consider that the imaginary reflects the able body.
Irigaray questions Lacans attention to a flat mirror that regards female sexual
organs only as lack; I ask why this flat mirror reflects disabled bodies simply as
lack. The disabled cannot see him/herself in this mirror, which operates as a
reflection only for the able-bodied. The able-bodied symbolic is maintained by
the disabled lingering in this blind spot. Thus, the able-bodied can form his/her
identity on the basis of the disabled lack, assuring the able-bodied illusions of
fixity and wholeness that deny the disabled identity as it makes such an identity
unintelligible. If the disabled could reveal his/her own identity, not determined
by a binary opposition to the able-bodied, and if the disabled could establish
physical difference and support a non binary disabled identity, the able-bodied
identity would be undermined. However, exploring this masked identity is not
easy at all, for the disabled would not be assumed to use the same system of
articulation as the able-bodied.
Rewrite the English Language, Lois Keith (1995 [1994]) expresses the
impossibility of describing her strength in terms of the able-bodied imaginary
and symbolic:
Here, Keith exposes the difficulties expressing her bodily specificity within an
able-bodied system and suggests a new way of articulating and imagining her
own body. Rather than reinforcing a distancing from the disabled body of her
own, Keith regards physical disability as a body that opens up the possibility
for blurring boundaries, thereby envisioning new creative prospects within that
relationship and also, in far broader terms, beyond.
If the disabled wishes to obtain an identity of his/her own, the ablebodied imaginary and symbolic structure to which the disabled has been
subjected must be undermined. While able-bodied people can actively invoke
the symbolic order in identifying themselves as its standard, disabled people
are positioned in the negative or passive condition, that is, a condition of not
being able to identify themselves, since the symbolic order is alien to them.
- 109 -
next chapter, I shall explore the emergence of a feminine and disabled voice by
exploring Jane Campions cinematic production of The Piano (1993) and by
utilising French feminists who are influenced by psychoanalysis, like Luce
Irigaray and Julia Kristeva.
- 110 -
This chapter seeks to resist the dominant use of the term voice that
regards speech as the articulation of the self. It reflects my own experience
of living within society and relates to how I have been emotionally engaged
with my embodied voice, which is not always intelligible to others due to a
speech impairment caused by cerebral palsy. In the Symposium, Plato, (172a 223d), through Socrates, introduces the view of a female thinker called Diotima.
Since she is not present at the debate, her speech is reported by Socrates.
Here, Plato is presenting Diotima in a certain way. He links her to pregnancy
and birth; thereby reinforcing a view of the philosophical mind as a strictly
male domain. But, these are not Diotimas own words. From Plato onwards,
womens voices have been absent or disembodied in philosophical and other
discourses. My aim in the chapter is to explore the processes of silencing and
exclusion and to illustrate the means by which silenced voices can emerge.
- 111 -
- 112 -
Like all
He provides a
- 113 -
It is voice in this sense that I wish to explore in this chapter. I shall locate a
space for the embodied voice, departing from speech.
In order to better
articulate the notion of the voice, I shall look at Sigmund Freuds concept of
hysteria, Luce Irigarays concept of mimicry, and Julia Kristevas concept of
the semiotic, highlighting voices autonomy from speech and language. In this
context, the voice can be heard not only as linguistic and socio-cultural but also
as corporeal and expressive.
semiotic, I shall express my concern with the embodied voice, and pay
attention to its non-verbal articulations, as Roland Barthes (1977: 181-3) terms
the grain of the voice.
representative of speech; it is a less authentic form, cut off from the reality of a
direct meaning.
elaboration.
Grosz (1989: 27) has a clear and simple definition of phonocentrism: [Phonocentrism] is,
governed by an opposition granting primacy to speech over writing. According to Grosz,
Lacan states that the unconscious is structured like a language presumes that language is
identical to speech, whereas if he had understood Freuds formulation of a model for the
unconscious in Note Upon of Mystic Writing Pad(1925), he, too, could have seen that the
unconscious is structured like/as writing.
The unconscious is graphic rather than
phonetic.(Grosz 1989: 27)
28
Ong (1982) looks at the 1980s effects of electronic communication (telephone, radio, and
television/ oral based). Thus, he does not examine the 2000s effects of computer-mediated
communication (the Internet, e-mail, chat, and digital media/ mixture of textual and oral
modes).
29
- 115 -
speech and writing is at the heart of Ongs study in a way that simplifies orality
and essentialises the outcome of literacy.
Ong (1982: 36-57) critically explains oral cultures in his third chapter,
which is titled Some Psychodynamics of Orality. He illustrates primary
oral culture in comparison to writing culture, as additive rather than
subordinate (37), aggregative rather than analytic (38), redundant or
copious (39), conservative or traditionalist(41), close to the human
lifeworld(42), agonistically toned (43), empathetic and participatory rather
than objectively distanced(45), homeostatic(46), and as situational rather
than abstract (49).
- 116 -
Ong (1982) strongly asserts that there is no way to express the self
naturally in writing, while speech is wholly essential to all human beings. The
weakness in Ongs argument is rendered visible in his assumption that every
person in every culture is physiologically or psychologically able to speak, and
thereby, to think. He also emphasises that writing is technology that is
consciously and reflectively constructed (Ong, 1982: 81-3), and that spoken
words are always modifications of a total, existential situation, which always
engages the body (Ong, 1982: 67). It may seem as if Ong is simply describing
the negative side of muteness and speech impairment in a society in which both
are repressed. The primacy of speech as the manifest voice of the self can be
understood in symbolic terms as a manifestation of power in a society in which
speech mostly governs social communications.
remain.
- 117 -
When I speak, the link between my words and the meaning I intend to
convey remains restricted by my corporeality. In other words, I cannot speak
out what I really want to say.
between the writer and his or her expression. Cut off from the awareness that
would secure their meaning, words progress to take on indeterminate meanings,
30
Derridas Of Grammatology (1976) is a study of the relationship between speech and writing,
and is an exploration of how both speech and writing develop as structures of language. He
argues that writing has traditionally been regarded as derivative from speech, and that this
approach has been considered in many philosophical, linguistic, and scientific studies of the
origin of language. Derrida describes that the bias towards speech has valued speech over
writing as proximate to truth. Derrida maintains that the development of language happens
through an interaction of speech and writing, and that this interaction requires that neither
speech nor writing can be supposed to be essential to language itself. Conventional
examinations of language argue that speech has existed before writing. Derrida opposes this.
- 118 -
He
- 119 -
Thus, with uneasiness, Appelbaum suggests the new possibility of freeing the
corporeality of voice from the space of hiding and positioning it soundly before
our acoustic perceptions. In other words, Appelbaum invites us to hear our
corporeality in the voice. He urges us to resist the process of silencing the
repressed voice, a process that stems from the Western philosophical tradition,
which tries to disembody all traces of the corporeality of voice.
critical responses, some of which are represented in Jane Campions The Piano
edited by Harriet Margolis (2000) and in other articles. It is one of those rare
films that has attracted the attention of scholars outside of film and cultural
studies.31 Spectators seem to view this film in various ways. Margolis states:
31
There are many articles on this film. Pihama (1994) critically looks at the film from a Maori
womans perspective. Pihama argues that this film depicts Maori women as the negative, and
influences the public gaze at Maori women. In sociology, Norgrove (1998) also criticises the
film from a post-colonial perspective. In feminism, Attwood (1998) and Gillett (1995)
examine the construction of the female body, voice, gaze, and desire in the film. In psychology,
Van Buren (2000) argues the similarities between one of her clients and the film: voluntary
muteness and schizoid withdrawal as an outcome of cultural and personal fear of female desire.
- 120 -
The sexual and racial stereotypes in this film can be addressed in different
ways.
Many feminist scholars and film critics consider that The Piano
When I first saw The Piano, I was inspired by Adas voice since I had a
similar voice, that is, the resonance through an electric musical instrument and
my body. I have been playing the electric organ and musical keyboards to
express my emotions, since I was six years old. My parents made me learn
how to play the electric organ to facilitate my finger movement. As I have
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mentioned before, I have mild athetoid cerebral palsy and I have some
difficulty controlling movement, and in particular, my speech. I often move
involuntarily when I feel emotional distress.
became more than a tool for finger exercises. It became my voice. My mother
recognised my voice when I played it. When I played a piece of music, for
example, Greensleaves on the electric organ in a minor key, she heard my
melancholy voice. Using music in this way was a very powerful tool to help
me express my feelings in ways that speech, for me, sometimes cannot. Thus,
to me, the embodied voice has the right to be heard, touched, seen, and more
importantly to be accepted as a mode of social communication.
In The Piano, Ada is burdened by the assumption of needing-to-betranslated by her daughter, Flora, through sign language, to a speaking world.
This is done mainly for her husband, Stewart. Deeming the silence that comes
with being married to a man who does not hear her hidden voice, Ada finds a
way out of this deep silence. Ada introduces her husband and his neighbour,
Baines, to her piano. While her husband ignores it, Baines recognises it as
Adas voice, even as part of her body. The piano becomes Adas connection to
Baines who hears her embodied voice. For Ada, the piano becomes her means
of communicating, of expressing herself, much like my relationship to my
organ. Adas voice does not and cannot ever appeal to her husband, whose
entire communication system and through that, his world, is based on speech.
Most substantially, Adas piano represents a different idea of a voice that is
embodied.
- 122 -
matter-of-fact information that a typist expresses, the keys of the piano can
externalise that which the pianist feels. Thus, Chumo considers Adas piano as
art, which is essential to her, but not to Stewart.
presumably prefers a typewriter to the piano. Stewart cannot read Adas voice,
because her piano music has no fixed text and she cannot express her emotion
in any language. Throughout his essay, Chumos main point is that it is Adas
piano, not Ada herself, nor her body or fingers, that make her voice her own.
Chumos artistic notion of Adas voice is fluid but not embodied. I wish to
emphasise that Adas voice is embodied.
electronic device. This extension of his inner self turns speech into perceivable
sounds through the use of computer technology. Describing her experience of
hearing Hawkings different speech, Sandy Stone explains:
- 123 -
He selects
- 124 -
ability and disability.32 She reminds us that we are all relying to some degree
on the technology that one is using. Haraways cyborg discourse is widespread
where writers reconsidering the relationship between humans and technologies.
However, this discourse has hardly addressed cyber voices.
possession of extending ones ability.
I consider it as a
body through the object; it extends the body. Thus, the desire to be heard
makes my voice political. Moreover, voice prostheses, such as the Votrax for
Hawking, and the piano for Ada, empowers their repressed voice.
Although Sigmund Freud has been criticised by many feminists for his
biological determinism, his essentialism, his masculine models as the normal,
and his theory on sexuality as the determining factor in our identity, it is not
necessarily the case that his work on female sexuality should be rejected
outright.
32
Haraway (1991) uses the metaphor of the cyborg to discuss the relationships of science,
technology, and women. She holds that cyborg (high-technological) culture challenges and
breaks down the dualism of Western philosophy (the mind/body, self/other, male/female
dichotomy). Humans are no longer able to think of themselves in these terms, or even, strictly
speaking, as biological existences. To some extent, humans have become cyborgs,
intermixtures of man and machine, where the biological part and the mechanical part become
complexly entangled to the extent that they cannot be separated.
- 125 -
65 [1895]) argues that hysteria develops from traumas in the female patients
personal history. His study on hysteria is one of the essential investigations of
psychoanalysis, transforming our understanding of female sexuality and voice.
Countless sensations
Initially, the term hysteria was used to articulate a connection between particular anxiety
disorders and diseases of the female sexual and reproductive organs. It was assumed that there
was a fixed connection between these physical pathologies limited to the female sexual organs
and particular symptoms. Due to this connection, hysteria has generally been considered as a
pathology to which women are fully subject. If it is established in an anatomical or
physiological source that is the womb (called hystera in Greek), the disease itself would only
take place in the female body.
33
- 126 -
For Freud, hysteria is the manifestation on the patients body of her desire to
flee from the patriarchal order. Hysteria, for Freud, makes the unintelligible
voice audible and embodied.
- 127 -
The hysteric is stuck between silence and mimicry, repressed desire and a
language that does not belong to her. There is a need to find a connection
between that speech of desire which at present can only be identified in the
forms of symptoms and pathology and a language, including a verbal
language (Irigaray, 1985b: 137). In a society dominated by phallogocentrism
and constructed around a strict male/non-male opposition, One must assume
the feminine role deliberately. Which means already to convert a form of
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subordination into an affirmation, and thus to thwart it. (Irigaray, 1991: 124
edited by Whitford). For Irigaray, mimicry is neither a concept nor a notion,
but a manoeuvre, a way of temporarily undermining the masculine discourse
before the feminine writing and reading of philosophy can establish itself. 34
Through the continuation of mimicry, Irigaray hopes that women will create
their own discourse by mimicking dominant modes of action excessively in the
overstated figure of what is expected to be a woman. Thus, by mimicking
them, the hysteric contests phallogocentrism, that is, the symbolic order.
female specificity, such as the labia, the uterus, the vulva, the lips, the breasts,
34
In the last part of This Sex Which Is Not One (Irigaray, 1985b: 220), there is a section of
publishers note on selected terms. Mimicry is: An interim strategy for dealing with the realm
of discourse (where the speaking subject is posited as masculine), in which the woman
deliberately assumes the feminine style and posture assigned to her within this discourse in
order to uncover the mechanisms by which it exploits her.
- 129 -
the menstrual blood, and utilises the multiplicity of female genitals to form her
reconceptualising of womans own design. She makes her own version of the
Freudian claim anatomy is destiny. Women, for her, do not have just one sex
organ, the phallus, but have multiple sex organs. Irigaray bases her concept of
sexual difference on biology, specifically as a rewriting of biology.
Thus,
- 130 -
- 131 -
The
Kristeva seeks to answer not only the question of exactly how language comes
to mean (signify), but also the equally important question of what it is that
resists intelligibility and signification (Moi, 1986: 90). More importantly, she
brings the body back to language by claiming that bodily energy makes its way
into language.
Without the symbolic we would have only chaos, whilst without the semiotic,
language would be absolutely void. Thus, this swinging between the semiotic
and the symbolic is creative and indispensable. As maintained by Kristeva, all
types of languages (speech, writing, poetry, music, dance, etc.) have both
symbolic and semiotic elements, and it is the dialectic between these elements
that makes the language meaningful:
signifying
system
he
produces
can
be
either
Here, Kristeva shows that to experience, both utilise and receive, meaning
depends on both semiotic and symbolic elements. While the semiotic points to
a direct and embodied aspect of meaning, the symbolic represents the aspect of
socio-culturally mediated meaning in experience.
Here, I shall pay more attention to the semiotic than the symbolic. One
of the simplest semiotic expressions is the scream. The scream generally
takes place in circumstances where and when emotions are intensely involved.
The scream is associated with strong feelings of distress, rage, pain, or fear, but
occasionally also with strong feelings of bliss and pleasure, the kind
phenomena that Kristeva associates with the semiotic. The scream is the
embodied voice of the subject in process. Its meaning cannot be defined
simply.
This
the symbolic but never eliminates it, can we express these aspects that are
unintelligible. Kristeva states:
The hysteric who does not submit to the symbolic order is categorised
as deviant. Kristeva argues that the hysteric is politically dynamic, because she
is often illustrated by her connection to the semiotic, and she makes men listen
to her embodied voice. In The True Real, Kristeva states:
35
This heterogeneous semiotic encounter (sound/vision, preobject/sign) is a hallucination that marks the insistence of the
true-real, an archaic and salutary attempt to elaborate the
irruption of the real that leaves a hole in the symbolical weft
of hysterical discourse. This hallucination recurs periodically,
in order to indicate, like an icon, an unutterable jouissance
that endangers the symbolic resources of the speaking being.
The hallucination icon, which becomes obsessive by virtue
of its repetition, challenges what may be structured as a
language (Kristeva, 1986: 230)
Since language, or the symbolic, presents such a difficulty for women, the
semiotic, and womens connection to it, characterise female difference and
form alternatives for women.
John
the semiotic. The chora is a bodily space where all significations are semiotic.
I find that Kristeva sees the semiotic as a creative way of expressing bodily
rhythms and pleasures that direct the formation of the symbolic and is
connected to, in particular, the maternal body.
and expression bears some examination. Constructing the symbolic and the
semiotic as two opposing elements is ambiguous. Hysterical symptoms can
have constructed or deconstructed political effects and implications. While the
hysteric could be psychoanalytically interpreted as a deviant, she is, and has
been seen, as political. I believe that we can establish a connection between
the body and expression if we conceptualise the body as expressive, and
expression as a form of the body. I suggest that the hysteric seeks to project
semiotic elements in her body to express her desire.
In the following
sections, I will read The Piano with a listening ear for the feminine and the
semiotic. Following both Irigarays and Kristevas manoeuvres of criticising
the mainstream way of articulating the self, I will first examine Ada, the
protagonist, as a silent woman as this is demonstrated in the first half of the
- 136 -
film. I will then look at Ada and her voice as the feminine and the semiotic
that are evident in the second half of the film. The second half of this analysis
will also encompass my major discussion of the embodied voice. Thus, I will
suggest a new concept of voice as the process of becoming.
The Piano (1993) begins in the dark shadow of a fence. The spectator
perceives, in this opening image, a woman signifying her condition of
incarceration. The womans incarceration is signified by the dark fence created
by her fingers held up in front of her eyes. A perspective shot, the film is
showing the viewer the shadowy gaze of Ada, that is, her life as seen through
her eyes. The narrative of the film starts with a voiceover from Ada that comes
not in her speaking voice, she has not spoken since childhood, but in the voice
of a small girl:
I have not spoken since I was six years old. No one knows
why, not even me. My father says it is a dark talent and the
day I take it into my head to stop breathing will be my last.
Today he married me to a man Ive not yet met. Soon my
daughter and I shall join him in his own country.
My
- 137 -
To establish a personal contract between the spectator and Ada, the spectator
hears the speech of a mute woman and needs to acknowledge the personal
link to her repressed voice in order to set foot in her life story. There are two
articulated voices belonging to Ada; her daughters verbal translation of her
sign language represented in the conventional voice of the narrator, that is,
speech, and Adas cinematic voice heard only at the beginning and end of the
film.
He toasts the
bridesmaids and the best man replies for them. Men speak,
women are spoken for: here we have an epitome of women
being seen and not heard. (Cameron, 1992 [1985]: 207)
- 138 -
This ritual context is applied to Ada. As in the wedding example, she is silent
in front of her husband. However, I consider that there can be other ways of
thinking about womens silence.
A beautiful nymph, Echo, has one defect: she cannot help talking and
always has the last word in every discussion or argument (Bulfinch, 1921:
Chapter 13). The goddess Juno punishes Echo by removing her power to
initiate any speech, but permitting her to have the last word in the sentence in
which others speak. As a result, she becomes speechless in that she cannot
generate her own words. When she sees Narcissus, a beautiful youth, Echo
falls in love with him. She cannot talk to him in the softest tones, and cannot
convince him to talk to her. She waits with impatience for him to speak first.
Narcissus ignores her with indifference because she cannot speak. The myth
suggests that women are speechless and helpless. Echo fades away due to her
shame in not getting, and in being misunderstood by Narcissus. If she had her
voice, she would have been able to entice him. When Narcissus rejects Echo,
she loses her body and becomes only a reflection of the others voice, in Guy
Rosolatos term (in Silverman, 1988), an acoustic mirror.
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In Nouvets reading, Echo is the way in which the female subject comes into
being as a mystery of four-dimensional alienation. By making this observation,
Nouvets work highlights the inability of Western people to listen to the
Other voice expressed in the perception of muteness. This disembodiment of
the voice is problematic. Echo is the victim of a patriarchal society where, if a
woman tries to speak over men, she loses her body, her love, and her sexuality.
has to renounce her body. In order to come into contact with Narcissus, to be
recognised, Echo must speak like a man.
excluded from the social contract. A significant factor here is the difficulty of
obtaining the embodied feminine voice.
- 140 -
For Ada, on the other hand, the silence is her choice and speech is not
needed.
Silence, for her, can be viewed as a refusal to speak about that which
Here, Molina challenges the myth of Echo. Molina (1997: 267) explores the
way in which, unlike the society described by Nouvet, Campion endows her
mute heroine with a striking eroticism. Molina (1997) argues that although
this film does not completely eliminate the stereotypical image of femininity
and disability, its dramatising of Adas muteness offers its spectator new ways
of seeing muteness outside the social model of physical disability. Her work
also begs the significant question of communication and of understanding the
Other who does not have the normal speaking voice.
The spectator
- 143 -
and the male voice generally, objectifies the female body and silences the
female voice. In other words, she explores the politics of synchronisation
between acoustic and visual images in classic Hollywood films.
Silverman
also argues that women are imperilled contradictorily by the silence because
speech constructs the sense of the self. Examining classic narrative films,
Silverman finds that women must be disembodied, like Echo, to obtain an
intelligible voice, that is to say, a speech.
For Silverman (1988: 48-9), the male voice has control of the narrative
cinema; the male voice-over establishes a fixed sign of gender, or rather,
masculinity. Silverman argues that the female voice is related to spectacle and
the body while the male voice is invisible. This dualism is represented in
classic Hollywood films as the disembodied male voice against the
synchronized female voice (Silverman, 1988: 39). Silverman states:
In other words, it is
- 144 -
- 145 -
The male,
Silverman shows the way in which the female voice and sexuality have
been socially constructed, psychically shaped by cultural influences, and
restricted through the male gaze and voice. Silvermans account of the female
voice assists in describing the ways in which Adas female sexuality is shaped
by culture and by a marriage that disadvantaged Ada by silencing her voice.
Thus, Silvermans theorisation of the female voice guides the argument of the
contradicting myths about female sexuality and the female voice, as the woman
conforms to and questions her oppression. Adas married experiences follow
the struggle with the complexity of the social construction of female-silenced
voice and the corporeality of her voice.
showing that her sexuality and desire are not intelligible within the symbolic
order.
Kristevas concept of the semiotic. Adas piano creates a fluidity that fits with
Kristevas notion of the semiotic. Adas fluid, unintelligible, and pre-symbolic
- 146 -
repressed desire through her body by playing the piano and utilises a bodily
discourse to articulate what is otherwise unintelligible. Playing the piano is,
for Ada, a means of expressing this desire, which opens up the possibility for
jouissance. By examining the relationship between the loss of the piano and
the repossession of it, I suggest that, like hysteria, this film stresses the
significance of finding, regaining, and transforming the voice, and that it points
to the embodying potential of subjectivity.
After Adas begging, Baines reluctantly takes her to the place where the
piano is the beach. She continuously plays the piano. She withdraws from
the symbolic order and becomes lively and voiced. Her voice is evoked when
she plays the piano, suggesting that Ada, by shifting into the semiotic, flees the
symbolic order, her arranged marriage, that causes her silence. Thus, the piano
is the semiotic that is associated with rhythms, tones, and movements. It is also
associated with Adas body. In playing the piano, Ada reaches her emotion,
energy, and voice. I see the piano as the semiotic in relation to speech.
Ada is incorporated with the piano, which makes her speak; it makes
the muted to be heard. This poetically disruptive use of the piano flees from
the control of the symbolic through sounds that are created from rhythms and
tunes of the semiotic chora.
- 147 -
self in which the mother of the feminine, and emotions associated with her, are
core rather than marginal.
Following Kristeva, I believe that the subject may acquire access to the
semiotic chora through creative, musical, and poetic practices.
Kristeva
considers that we have our origins in the semiotic chora, evoking a fluid
perception of meaning and self which stimulates emotions lost in the symbolic.
Ada seeks to rupture the patriarchal symbolic by recalling this lost semiotic,
the piano.
The piano, for Ada, is the maternal, the semiotic, and the chora.
Silverman
explains:
Silverman (1988: 72) considers the fantasy of the maternal voice that embraces
the infant like a blanket of sound. The maternal voice that the infant listens
to, its mothers voice, is ambiguous, not intelligible. The sound of Adas piano,
like the maternal voice, can be considered as an echo and an aural reflection of
her interiority in the external world.
- 148 -
Ada is both in the semiotic and the symbolic because she seeks to
undermine the split nature of the subject in patriarchal society. Campion
engages in Kristevas account of the semiotic and the symbolic, demonstrating
Adas desire. I see The Piano as a film about lacking or possessing a voice
which does not fit in the symbolic order. Ada shows her desire to flee from the
symbolic order.
Kristeva claims that, to be subversive, the semiotic has to cooperate with the
symbolic. Adas piano is instigated not by withdrawing into the semiotic but
through an expression of the semiotic within the symbolic. The sound of her
piano evokes the semiotic within the symbolic.
the disruption of the symbolic through the semiotic is, therefore, a way of
resisting phallogocentrism and socio-culturally prescribed femininity.
Adas merging with the piano is the embodiment of her voice in process.
Her piano is characterised by a bodily and emotional flow that expresses
beyond symbolic speech.
- 149 -
Ada needs the piano to voice her repressed self, and the piano needs
Ada to produce expressive harmonies. Ada, with the piano, is voicing, and the
piano with Ada is no longer an object. Her touch brings the piano to life. Ada
is completely mute without her piano, but the piano sets Adas repressed voice
free. Adas repressed voice is only possible through the piano that articulates
her desire to be heard. The desire to hear is expanded to include Baines in his
sexual relationship with Ada.
- 150 -
When Adas piano arrives at his cottage, Baines asks an old man to tune
it. The old man is aware of the smell of Adas perfume from the piano keys.
Baines takes care of Adas piano and even tunes her voice. In one dramatic
scene, Ada and Flora visit Baines for his piano lesson. Flora sits down at the
piano and starts playing. She says, Its in tune! Ada, who has been standing
outside, suddenly comes in, as if starved for the piano sound. She sits down at
- 151 -
the piano and plays a few chords, looking at Baines. He asserts, I just want to
listen. Baines has no interest in piano lessons. However, he is interested in
Ada, who finds him extremely offensive. Nonetheless, she enters into a sexual
exchange. That is, she will gradually get her piano back, black key by black
key, if she allows him to sexually touch her body while she plays. Ada, who is
forced to submit to this sexual contact with Baines in order to repossess the
piano that Stewart sold, is doubly abused by both men. However, Ada's need
for the piano goes beyond her passion and displeasure. She is incarcerated and
Baines uses her in an unequal relationship between rape and forced prostitution.
Despite the repulsive ignorance and the sexual abuse of it all, however, the
spectator is able to perceive Ada's sensual and psychical pleasure as Baines
raises the prize, more piano keys in exchange for more sexual desire from Ada.
Baines fetishism fits into Freuds account. The piano as a fetish object
is inanimate, sexually glorified and inappropriate for normal sexual acts. It is a
substitute for Ada. In this fetishism, Baines attention is apprehended by a
fixation on the piano as a fetish object. The piano is used during Baines
masturbation and is also integrated into sexual activity with Ada in order to
produce sexual excitation. After Ada leaves his cottage, Baines takes off his
shirt, he is naked, and delicately wipes her piano with the shirt. He moves
behind the piano and rubs it very gently as if he would touch Adas body. His
body is now attached to her piano. Baines can see the piano as an extension of
Ada and her voice.
- 153 -
Even more
- 154 -
Between
feeling
(the
dimension
of
Thus, there is a gap between touching and being touched, a gap between the
subjective and objective aspects of our existence. Touching and being touched
are not merely different elements of being in the world because, as Grosz
argues, they are reversible. As Merleau-Ponty explains:
I can identify the hand touched in the same one which will
in a moment be touching... In this bundle of bones and
muscles which my right hand presents to my left, I can
anticipate for an instant the incarnation of that other right
hand, alive and mobile, which I thrust towards things in
order to explore them. The body tries... to touch itself while
being touched and initiates a kind of reversible reflection.
(Merleau-Ponty, 1998 [1962]: 93)
- 156 -
Nevertheless, the stick is not simply an extended sense; it also establishes the
blind man as blind. His body is extended not only in the sense of the lived body
upon which Merleau-Ponty focuses.
- 157 -
between Ada and her piano, her experience is formed through a musical
instrument and her subjectivity merges with the piano, as in the example of the
blind mans stick.
Like the pianist in the example, I consider Ada has embodied her piano as a
part of her body. In both cases what is regarded as body is neither simple nor
fixed, but rather multiple and fluid. What matters is the relationship between
their bodies and between parts of bodies: the piano.
Language, for Merleau-Ponty, is not inside the subject, but envelops the
subject in things as if it pre-existed in the world. This notion is developed
through his theory of the body. For him, language is an articulation of the body,
and, like Kristeva, he brings speech into a broader realm of articulations. For
Merleau-Ponty, and similarly for Appelbaum (1990), speech is one of many
ways of articulating the body; it is an attunement to the world that includes
other human beings.
This
Merleau-Ponty would suggest that the mediated object (the piano) can
involve itself in an intersubjective relation with the spectator/Ada/Baines.
Merleau-Ponty states:
- 159 -
Thus, the senses are contextual, trapped within the specificities of the body,
time, and space; they are embodied subjectivities. In other words, the senses
are not universal or simply natural. Following Merleau-Ponty, I suggest that,
as a sensory articulation, the piano is incorporated into Adas corporeality and
Baines and Floras senses, but not Stewarts. For this reason, the piano is an
element of an embodied sense. Her voice, the sound of the piano, indicates a
need to reconsider the constitution of our verbal articulation.
Conclusion
Towards the end of The Piano, Stewart stands outside the cottage where
Ada and Baines passionately make love. Rather than being disgusted by her
passion for Baines, it appears to have aroused Stewarts sexual curiosity; he
wants to sexually invade her all the more.
of his house and imprisons Ada and Flora. Without listening to her piano or
understanding her repressed voice, Stewart just wants Adas body as a sexual
object. However, Stewart cannot accept her as she is. He says to Ada, I want
to touch you. Why cant I touch you? Stewart looks back at her and asks:
Dont you like me?
and uses a heated needle to burn a message into the wooden key: Dear George
you have my heart, Ada McCrath (Campion and Pullinger, 1994: 182). Here,
writing and voice come together like a tattoo. She asks Flora to take her
message to Baines and says: It belongs to him. The piano becomes signed,
- 160 -
named, and established as her whole voice. Thus, physically and emotionally
the piano appears to be a continuation and extension of Ada. This idea is
expressed metaphorically through this important moment of tattooing her piano
key. It is a moment that gives an inkling of the films celebration of a strong
Ada-Piano-Baines bond that exists beyond the arranged marriage. However,
dressed in her angel wings, Flora refuses, and takes Adas voice to the wrong
person, Stewart. Soon after, Stewart walks through the forest with his axe in
his hand.
When Stewart enters the house, he slams the axe into the table,
shouting, I trusted you! He then slams the axe into the piano. Powerless to
obtain her love back from Baines, Stewart exposes his jealousy in his demoniac
state by chopping off Adas finger! He severs her ability to articulate herself,
or her sexuality, with the axe.
Throughout the film, Stewart has never heard Adas piano. For that
reason, he attacks the piano not because it is Adas means of expressing herself,
but rather he attacks it as a substitute for her sexuality. By attacking first the
piano and then her finger, he wants to de-sexualise Ada. However, Ada, who
may feel she has been castrated of her voice, her finger and the piano,
experiences complete muteness through the attack. What this exposes is that
Adas sexuality, her exploration of her own and of anothers body and pleasure,
is a way of voicing herself. In this scene, both Ada and her piano are spoiled
by Stewart. Here, Ada becomes completely mute. Flora, a witness to the
price of Adas act of betrayal to the marriage, screams in terror, but even more
expressive is Ada's silence. Ada is silent. When the camera gazes at Ada, just
after her finger is chopped off, the piano music stops. Thus, the film effect
gives Ada a power of silence. Silently, she walks unsteadily a few steps into a
- 161 -
mud-covered pond and with her hoop skirts ballooning around her collapses in
the mud. Flora is made to deliver the finger, instead of the piano key, to Baines.
Thus, the piano and Ada are interconnected with each other.
In the final scenes, Ada makes a choice of what to do with her piano
that is being ferried with her on a Maori canoe. Adas piano is both point and
process: it is a reconstruction of Ada and her voice. Ada sings to her daughter
and Flora translates Adas voice for Baines: She says throw the piano
overboard.
Flora continues: She doesnt want it. She says its spoiled.
Baines is shocked, and tells Ada that he will mend the missing key. He also
says: You will regret it. Its your piano I want you to have. Flora shouts at
Baines: She does not want it! Finally he asks the men on the canoe to
remove the ropes from the spoiled piano. However, while watching her piano
slipping into the deep sea, Ada moves her foot into the centre of the ropes coil.
Soon, her foot is pulled away by the unwinding coil of rope. She gasps as her
whole body is pulled away into the sea by the ropes force and the pianos
weight.
She suddenly starts struggling in the water. Then, she frees herself
from her shoe that is attached to the piano. For me, this scene represents Adas
incarcerated experience with the imposed husband and embodies the freedom
from the arranged marriage. The spoiled piano may be seen as her body raped
by Stewart, and in the deep sea, she is baptised and cleansed; she starts her life
again. This scene can be considered to be a ritual of rebirth. Adas voice-over
speaks out:
What a death!
What a chance!
What a surprise!
- 162 -
Down there
muteness as being without voice. Instead, it reveals an embodied voice, that is,
Adas touch, her choice of love.
- 163 -
- 164 -
Introduction
Butlers
visual artist who questions female and disabled identity in her creative work,
the purpose of this chapter is two-fold: to read Duffys work through Butlers
- 165 -
Later, I shall survey Butlers 1993 book Bodies That Matter: On the
Discursive Limits of Sex where she develops her theories by making use of
the work of Jacques Derrida. Here, her concern with performativity pays
attention to the realm of ambivalent bodies, discussing which material and
discursive conditions make bodies either conceivable or inconceivable. Butler
seeks to theorise the system that establishes and maintains particular bodies
as the Other, and the possibilities for resisting and subverting this system.
- 166 -
- 167 -
Gender Trouble
1. The Performative Account of the Establishment and
Maintenance of the Heterosexual Matrix
- 168 -
37
gestures,
enactments,
generally
construed
are
organizing
gender
core,
an
illusion
discursively
The act that one does, the act that one performs, is, in a sense,
an act that has been going on before one arrived on the scene.
Hence, gender is an act which has been rehearsed, much as a
script survives the particular actors who make use of it, but
which requires individual actors in order to be actualized and
reproduced as reality once again. The complex components
that go into an act must be distinguished in order to
understand the kind of acting in correct and acting in accord
which acting ones gender invariably is. (Butler, 1990
[1988]: 277)
Thus, gender, for Butler, is not something that we have or are; it is something
which we do or act out. It is only through performance that a gendered self
exists. There may seem to be an authentic self, or a gender essence, but there
is an effect of discourse. There is a prearranged norm that we impersonate
defectively and each gender is only as authentic as any other. Authenticity
as gender is constituted by the performance and how properly we imitate.
Butler states:
- 171 -
performance.
Since the
- 172 -
- 173 -
suggests that all social norms are unstable at their boundaries and that all
boundaries are subsequently changeable.
For Butler, drag apparently performs the differences between the body
of the performer, gender identity, and the gender being performed. She states:
In imitating gender, drag implicitly reveals the imitative structure of gender
itself as well as its contingency (Butler, 1999 [1990]: 175, italicised in the
original text). In drag, the reiteration of the performance of gender institutes
the ambivalence of the very category that it forms. For, if drag is a site of
repetition of gender norms, drag is always shifted by the reiteration that
maintains it.
The
- 175 -
Butler maintains that feminists often reject the notion that biology is
destiny. They give an account of patriarchal society which presumes that
masculine and feminine genders are constructed, by culture (not biology),
upon male and female bodies given biologically. Butler however states:
- 176 -
38
Refer to the discussion of the social model of disability in the introduction of this thesis.
- 177 -
- 178 -
Kafer claims that able-bodied feminists label of women does not include
disabled women, and that able-bodied feminists ignore disabled womens
experience within feminist theory and practice.
39
Kafer argues that able-bodied feminist theorists have not examined their able-bodieddominant position and have not incorporated disability as a subject of examination in their
work. Why is this? Able-bodied feminist theorists often explore their female otherness to
men and conceive the subject of their studies from a feminine or the Other perspective.
Thus, due to what Kafer (2003: 77) terms the political institution of able-bodiedness, ablebodied feminist theorists have difficulties in writing from a position of dominance; they do
not write about disability. There are parallels here with the criticisms of Black feminists.
- 179 -
construction; she suggests that the biological and the social are interactive in
creating disability. Both are interactive regarding disability in two senses:
first, social factors, such as war, violent crime, and mass-production of
pesticide and other chemicals, effect our bodies to create illness, impairments,
and disabilities; and second, social arrangements can make a biological
condition more or less relevant to almost any social situation (Wendell, 1996:
35-6). She claims that a group identity is not formed by disabled individuals;
there is a multiplicity of perspectives formed by the disabled individuals. For
her, disability is not something in a body perceived as being separate from its
environment. Social norms that are constantly reproduced in physical and
social formations set up the boundary between ability and disability.
The
norm, for Davis (1995: 24-25), is the ideal that is connected to the figure of the
divines body that is not attainable by a human. He states, one can never
have an ideal body.
grotesque as a visual form was inversely related to the concept of the ideal and
- 180 -
its corollary that all bodies are in some sense disabled. Developing this
argument, I view the able-bodied matrix as the construction of a norm within
culture. In order to explore this, I merge Butlers performative theory of
gender with Daviss work on normalcy.
- 181 -
able-bodied or the disabled, and which does not require an inner core of
(dis)ability. Like Butler, Davis sees that able-bodiedness is a norm which
one is enforced to both desire and to idealise.
intelligibility that operates together with labelling practices. In this way, the
system leads but does not completely determine our perceptions of ourselves
and others.
- 182 -
wheelchair user:
- 183 -
In
40
The question of agency is an issue for Butler. Given that there is no self outside of discourse
how can we act to being about change? It looks as if we just wait for iterability to take its
course. Yet, she clearly thinks political agency is possible. Thus, this remains a tension in her
account.
- 184 -
In order to
Singing like a Deaf person, CODA is a person who disturbs the simple
definition by revealing dissonances and making it clear that there is no
essentially natural and universally normal connection between impairment and
disability. To me, CODA deconstructs dichotomies and hierarchies between a
Deaf and a hearing person, nature and culture, and between impairment and
- 185 -
My initial
distinction between hearing and deafness and effectively mimics both the
cultural model of Deaf and the notion of a true identity as a hearing person.
Davis explains his double inversion as a CODA:
- 186 -
Here, Davis apparently demonstrates the differences between the hearing, Deaf
identity, and the deafness itself being constructed. In identifying with the Deaf,
he reveals the structure of the hearing norm. Here, I suggest a subversion of
the assumed consistency between (dis)ability, discourse, and identity. Unlike
drag that is constantly constructed as the Other of both the norm and the
masculine, Davis, as a CODA, is constructed as the Other of both the deaf
and the hearing. . For, if CODA is a site of reiteration, that is, if he acquires
the Deaf identity through a particular reiteration of itself, then CODA is always
shifted by the reiteration that maintains it.
- 187 -
For Tremain, physical disability is impairment that is also socioculturally constructed, and there is no impairment/disability distinction. Both
impairment and physical disability might be either encoded or re-encoded
within discourses.
bodiedness in which the disabled subject is trained and alienated from ablebodied people constructs the illusion of impairment as its prior-to-culture fact
or naturalised condition in order to develop its regulatory powers. Tremain
states:
- 188 -
Disability is a
categorical system of connecting our bodies with social norms. There are
similarities between Butlers rejection of sex/gender distinction and Tremains
rejection of impairment/disability distinction.
- 189 -
and questions the fixed notion of what constitutes a whole body. 41 In this
section, I shall discuss Duffys performance art and photography through the
performative account of physical disability that I have explored earlier. Duffy
performs a non-narrative individual show and addresses the sexual fascinations
of the armless body. Rosemarie Garland Thomson has a clear description of
Duffys performance:
41
335) states: The disabled body summons the stare and the stare mandates the
story, and she continues: This stare-and-tell ritual constitutes disability
identity in the social realm. For her, staring is a sort of process of excluding
the disabled body from the able-bodied matrix. Asking the important question
of why a disabled individual purposely empowers the stare-and-tell routine
that stabilise his/her otherness, Thomson argues that Duffys performance art is
a manifesto for intensely radical affirmations and illustrations where she is in
charge of the conditions of materialisation. Duffys work presents a mode for
positive identity politics and an opportunity to protest cultural images of
disabled people (Thomson, 2000: 335).
Hers is the
classically
beautiful
body
elicits
confusing
Thomson also suggests that there are two contrasting ways of looking at
Duffys body. This is realised firstly by staring at the disabled body and by
gazing at the erotically female body, and secondly through the synthesis of the
- 191 -
stare and the gaze that destabilises the narrative of What happened to you?
Duffys work undermines socio-cultural conjectures about physical disability
and femininity by contrasting and incorporating both identity categories. By
integrating the looking and the narrative, her body and discourses of physical
disability and femininity operate together in a deed of identities, that is,
performativity. Duffys body is connected to the discourse, operating as a
material site that fabricates performativity of disability and the Venus de
Milo.42
42
- 193 -
the disabled body looses its political power because it is devalued as the
Other by the able-bodied norm. Indeed, when Duffys body is seen as the
Venus de Milo, her body is robbed of its disability in shifting socio-cultural
meanings. In addition, demonstrating such openness in her work destabilises
the fixed meaning of the disabled body, and both connects and disconnects it
from a border between disability and femininity. The policing of the disabled
body is precisely the sort of boundaries that Duffy resists.
Thus, Duffy
- 194 -
work demonstrates an amorous image and a complete object being looked at.
As a result, if we view Duffys photographic work as the classical nude figure
of the Venus de Milo, then her disabled body becomes hard to believe, and if
we see her work as the manifestation of the armless body, then this image of
the Venus de Milo fades away. It becomes an optical illusion, like the Rubin
Vase/faces figure.43 Duffy states:
43
When one looks at the figure one will recognise either a vase or two facial profiles. Usually,
there is one object that projects from the background, however, in this figure, the vase (the
object) and two facial profiles (the background) are reversible. I found the similar illusion in
Duffys photographic work.
- 195 -
you husband and wife, which brings about a new state of being. This event
produces the reality, rather than reflecting an already fixed reality. The priests
statement of representing a heterosexual couple as husband and wife is what
makes them become married. In the event, the priest shifts the status of this
couple within the public sphere. As Butler (1993: 13) describes, Within
speech act theory, a performative is that discursive practice that enacts or
produces that which it names. Thus, a speech act forms that which it names
by relation to the norm that is reiterated and then performed in the statement.
Nevertheless, as Austin himself reveals, this performative depends upon a
social system that renders it intelligible, naturalised, fixed, and normalised.
- 196 -
Thus, the norm that controls the body cannot replicate and maintain itself;
rather, the norm has to be repeated in order to be replicated and maintained.
For Butler, gender performance is not a singular act by a subject who simply
decides which gender to become, but rather it is a forced reiteration of the norm
that constructs the sexed and gendered subject. Nevertheless, this claim that it
is essential for the norm to be reiterated in order for it to sustain its efficiency
means that the norm is never fixed nor finalised. Butler explains:
- 197 -
heterosexual matrix and the homosexual subject who contests the system. This
notion allows Butler to see the connection between the sexed subject and the
social norm that governs the system. For one to be normal, there must be a
norm to which normal matches, but also it must not seem as though it is only
a citation of that norm. In summary, performativity is a discursive practice
that acts out or produces an identity that constructs through citation and
reiteration of the norm.
established, but are repeated in a way that reverses and shifts their original
connotations. For Butler, however, reiteration does not have to be docile. In
my reading of Butler, reiteration upholds the opportunity for a performative
- 198 -
- 199 -
making choice
DIGNITY. All of these poems are mercilessly honest about the subjectivity
of a physically disabled woman within an able-bodied matrix that Duffy is
nonetheless attempting to subvert. However, as well as complexity, there is
love and pleasure in her poems. Here, I have selected the second poem, my
own WOMEN for further exploration:
- 200 -
my own
WOMEN
I am growing up,
and you think that I will never go away,
that I will always live with you
be washed and dressed by you
the perfect offspring who never leaves the nest.
you teach me to be independent,
to be strong,
to have my own opinions,
to earn my own living.
neither of us knows
that one day, I will dress and wash myself
and live independently.
but I havent been programmed or conditioned
to be anyones wife,
lover,
or mother,
you didnt teach me to serve anybody,
to wash and peel potatoes.
you appreciate my intelligence,
creativity, wit, sharpness
and humour.
you call me maire cook
by refusing to inoculate me against rubella,
you ignore my sexuality.
(Duffy, 1994: 26 in Mustnt Grumble: Writing by Disabled Women)
This poem does what Janet Price and Margirit Shildrick (2002: 62) describe as
[addressing] disability from the perspective of the embodied subject. It
allows the reader to see Duffy as the Other of the able-bodied feminine even
as it challenges such standards of able-bodiedness. This work of Duffys
identity as a disabled woman leaks from her inside, while the able-bodied
matrix from outside of her identity seeps in. In other words, Duffy in this piece
of poetry has turned her gaze inward, questioning the specificity of her body.
Duffys shifting position between femininity and disability in the poem
- 201 -
- 202 -
culture in her own terms and take control of it? Or, is she seeking to be as
close to it as possible in order to be less on the outside and closer to the inside?
Here, we can see the complexity and unpredictability of the repetition of norms.
- 203 -
- 204 -
- 205 -
sclerosis, and feel unwell a lot of the time, and if they use a
wheelchair they only do so occasionally. (Morris, 2001: 9)
Consequently, the
It too is
issue for many transsexuals who submit themselves to difficult and painful
surgery in order to change their mode of embodiment. Whilst Butler suggests
the performative limit that remains indefinable through the destabilisation of
the norm, Prosser suggests that there is a material limit that remains inevitable.
Yet both thinkers demonstrate that the biological and socio-cultural categories
of our bodies are not separate entities, but are closely entangled, even when
they appear to be in conflict. Materiality is not destiny, yet it cannot be simply
accommodated by a performative account.
The
impaired person who turns to the medical establishment to obtain treatment that
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makes her or him into an able-bodied person is quite different from the
Paralympic athlete who denies, or is denied, being able-bodied and acts out
disability in a particular context. An able-bodied identity turns on a notion of
authenticity, an original body that fixes identity. The identity of Paralympic
athletes reveals another possibility. Most of them believe that they are not only
disabled, but also differently able-bodied, and they are identified as such by
others. Thus, the performativity of Paralympic athletes who perform their
ability is different from the transformation of impaired people who desire to be
the able-bodied. The point is that neither disability nor impairment is a fixed
entity. We not only categorise others but form, perform and transform our own
embodied identities within different contexts.
In one
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Her
photographic work shows her transformation into a different body and contests
the notion of the normal body. The transformation of her body must be
understood in its socio-cultural context, but its corporeality cannot be ignored.
Spence states in a dialogue with the British disabled activist and photographer,
David Hevey:
Thus, Spence seeks to reject the idea that medical discourse is productive of
her identity. When a doctor diagnoses a patient and says it is a cancer, the
doctor is informing an already distinguishable condition of the patients body.
Spence also states:
Explaining
my
experience
as
patient
and
the
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Unlike Butler, but along the lines of Prosser, Spence considers the materiality
of the body, recognises the importance of corporeality, and adapts the socially
conceptualised perspective of her bodily experience. The consideration of
corporeality requires us to rethink Butlers lack of attention to the specificities
of the physical body. I suggest that the body as lived is specifically formed as
a way of experiencing particular corporeal conditions.
- 210 -
- 211 -
Indeed, even
physical and vocal differences, but his viewing experience was not necessarily
the process of othering my cerebral palsy in a particular way. Synchronously
with the ten-year-old protagonist in the film, Elliott (Henry Thomas), who
experiences the process of transforming (and accepting) difference with a lost
visitor from another planet, I, as a spectator, also experienced that process. As
well as my own process of transforming an image of my physical difference,
my classmate may also have gone through the process of transforming it.
44
The DVD, I watched for this chapter is the special edition for its twenty-year anniversary. It
is a longer version with additional scenes deleted out of the 1982s original, sound re-mastering
and digital effects to enhance E.T.s facial expressions, the spaceship, E.T.s lost-his-way in the
forest, and so on. However, the film narrative itself is same as the original. This DVD has
some additional explanations from Spielberg, the scriptwriter, producers, actors, and other staff.
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This chapter seeks to theorise the disabled subversion of the ablebodied matrix by using Julia Kristevas theory of abjection and to find new
models to undo the boundary between the normal and the abnormal.
In
particular, it examines the subversion between the able-bodied and the disabled.
As described earlier, my classmates reaction to my physical difference, in
parallel with Elliots reaction to E.T.s physical difference, and more
significantly, my reaction to E.T.s and my own physical differences, are
ambivalent and mixed. This ambivalent and mixed feeling about differences is
integral to this chapters main thrust abjection.
Kristeva maintains,
This
- 213 -
- 214 -
- 215 -
Rather, it is
constructed through the childs first encounter of its own body, experiencing
pleasure in feeding and cleaning, and thus occurs in connection to its caregiver,
generally, its mother. This encounter establishes the first boundary between
what I is and what not-I is. Kristeva (1982: 1) states: The abject is not an
ob-ject facing me, which I can name or imagine Nor is it an ob-jest, an
otherness ceaselessly fleeing in a systematic quest of desire. The abject has
only one quality of the object that of being opposed to I. Expelling what is
not the self, abjection is a process of establishing boundaries of subjectivity.
But, abjection is never expelled completely. It always remains on the edge of
consciousness, disturbing the ever-uncertain contour of subjectivity. Thus,
Kristeva explores the site of the subject and questions the idea of a fixed
identity that is based upon the Other as a result of pushing the abject out of
the subject. She argues that abjection is often portrayed as ambivalence, an
ambivalence that presents itself as a feeling that can be transferred to an object
and acquired by the subject.
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images of the abject because of their ambivalence, whether the abject is outside
or inside, a part of ourselves. We identify ourselves in opposition to the abject
that nauseates us, and it is that disruption of the boundary between the self and
the other that threatens. The abject is, in fact, similar to ourselves.
Kristeva, in particular, claims that the mirror stage, as Lacan sees it,
may constitute the I, however, she considers that, prior to this stage, the infant
seeks to separate itself from others in order to acquire boundaries between
itself and others. As may be seen in the arguments developed in chapter two,
for Lacan, the infant primarily forms his subjectivity through identifying
something that looks like him, and then through rejecting something that is
strange to him, and this infant is male. Kristeva, on the other hand, suggests
that the Lacanian masculine subject needs to be questioned.
According to
Kristeva, abjection first takes place when the infant is in the imaginary
unification with its mother prior to the mirror stage. At this stage, the infant
does not have any sense of the self, it has not acquired subjectivity.
process of abjection assists it in acquiring a contour of the subject.
The
In Julia
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Thus, for Kristeva, this ambivalent process of becoming the subject, that is,
abjection, is essential. Separating what is regarded as the Other to the self, it
is a process for recognising the boundaries of subjectivity. Noelle McAfee
explains:
For Kristeva, subjectivity is not constituted simply in the symbolic realm. She
brings the psychic impact of bodily processes back into the Lacanian discourse
and focuses on the significance of the body in the constitution of subjectivity.
ambivalence between the self and the Other and to recognise the
changeability of oneself. The abject is unable to establish and maintain itself in
- 219 -
- 220 -
Kristeva argues that the individual struggles to see otherness within him/herself.
We are strangers to ourselves. Kristeva (1991: 7) considers that the stranger is
constantly in motion and does not belong to any place, any time, any love.
The stranger both facilitates and disallows a clear and fixed boundary between
the self and the other. Kristevas notion of strangers to ourselves echoes the
Freudian notion of the uncanny or unheimliche.
[1919]), the uncanny develops its horror not from something completely
strange but from something strangely recognisable or recognisably strange
that overwhelms ones effort to detach oneself from it: the uncanny is that
class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long
familiar (Freud, 1990 [1919]: 340).
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The uncanny is not simply about horror, but strangely about nostalgia.
Something is uncanny because we may recognise it as something very close to
us but not ourselves. The maternal body is uncanny, for Kristeva, because it
takes us back to the pre-symbolic. Yet, at the uncanny stage of identification,
that is, the process of abjection, we are confused because we seek to reject and
identify with our (m)other, and therefore we are the Other to ourselves. The
uncanny, the abject for Kristeva, is the mixed sense of self and otherness. The
(m)other is separated from her baby (the self) since she is separated from
possessing the selfness for her baby her babys life. The (m)other provides
the uncanny in terms of positioning it in our subjectivity. The uncanny is
disturbing precisely because it focuses upon a simultaneous feeling of
identification and rejection, a sense of being both embodied and disembodied,
and both being the self and the Other. The uncanny emerges when we
unexpectedly stumble upon a position of what has been suppressed by the norm
or the symbolic order, that is, the (m)other, or the otherness, within us.
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identify what the abject is, whether it is, or it is not. But, we can recognise that
it might be something strangely familiar, something uncanny.
For Kristeva, strangeness is not simply the Other, but the abject, and the abject
is not essentially antagonistic to the self. Kristeva (1982) regards the abject as
a fluid realm, surrounding boundaries where no place of demarcation can be
drawn. Kristeva (1982: 4) considers that abjection is what disturbs identity,
system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between,
the ambiguous, the composite. She explains:
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Moi considers that the abject is linked to the semiotic that incorporates the nonsignifying elements of signification, and that it is prior to any binary
differentiation establishing and maintaining the symbolic and the subject.
Therefore, the abject characterises identity. For Kristeva, the abject is the
condition of possibility of any fluid ego or any subject/object distinction. Thus,
Kristeva suggests that one is both subject and object at once. One establishes
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oneself as the Other who finds this ambivalence unpleasant, even while the
Subject is formed upon it.
terrifying about the abject is the possibility of the return of the expelled or
repressed parts of the subject. The very notion of the abject rejects the idea of
a fixed (rational and normal) subject which is the foundation of Western
philosophy since Plato. If we understand Kristevas concept of abjection, we
may never make any claims that identity is fixed or has anything to do with
rationality. I shall explore this by analysing Judith Butlers reading of Kristeva
in the following section.
- 225 -
with an account of subject formation that explains how to accept and to undo
the Other.
constituting the subject (or indeed anything); she does not believe that the
subject is capable of undermining discursive formation.
- 226 -
here
precisely
those
unliveable
and
Butler claims that there is no simple binary relationship between subject and
abject, and she regards abjection not as a permanent contestation of social
norms condemned to the pathos of perpetual failure, but rather as a critical
resource in the struggle to rearticulate the very terms of symbolic legitimacy
and intelligibility (Butler, 1993: 3). Butler maintains that the domain of the
abject consists in that which the normal subject is not, the unliveable conditions
of abjection that circumscribe a whole domain of the Other of the norm.
However, the abject maintains the truth of the heterosexual. The heterosexual
is as intelligible as its constitutive deeds. Butler argues that the abject is
formed through the constant repetition of what the subject is not. However, for
When Butler says a position is unthinkable, she does not mean that it is outside of the
symbolic; she means something which in terms of prevailing norms is constructed as it were
unthinkable. Yet she points out it must be thinkable to have been judged to be outside of the
norms. Thus, norms proceed needing to an outside to them which they officially claim is
unthinkable; but which nonetheless has been thought.
45
- 227 -
me, Butler, by reducing the abject to discourse, ignores the psychic and bodily
processes involved in the formation of subjectivity.
Thus, for Butler, the abject is the Other that society seeks to reject in order to
maintain the normal.
- 228 -
bodies.
This
claim
calls
for
radical
Thus, for Butler, abjection, like gender, is discursive and performative. A reexamination of abjection in the symbolic opens up possibilities for a subversive
re-articulation of the symbolic boundaries where the abject is positioned as
simply not a subject. Butler argues that it is essential for the abject to become
a discursively intelligible subject so that the abject can obtain its own identity.
Butler (1993: 3) argues that new discourses of the abject may be considered as
a critical resource in the struggle to rearticulate the very terms of symbolic
legitimacy and intelligibility.
produces the norm, then the abject is a performance that forms the illusion of
an essence of it. In The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection, Butler
(1997) sums up:
- 229 -
placeholder,
structure
in
formation.
For Butler, the subject is a linguistic or discursive construction, and the abject
is simply a position within discourse.
In short, Butler (1993) positions the abject outside of the domain of the
subject. For her, the abject indicates the intolerable domain that is inhabited
by those who cannot fit into the norm that is the subject.
Thus, Butler
Butler (1993)
states:
Butler argues that the abject is a discursive effect, and as such, belongs to the
symbolic as opposed to the pre-symbolic realm. The idea that the abject is
characterised by anything more than discourse is alien to Butler. That it could
- 230 -
While Butler
- 231 -
constituted in and through the Other and positioned as the Other by means
of the symbolic. However, I argue that the abject is not what Butler (1993)
terms a constitutive outside established by the discursive restriction.
- 232 -
- 233 -
Unlike Kristeva, Butler has focused upon the denial of the abject by
viewing abjection as a discursive realm of otherness, socio-culturally excluded.
The matter of norm, for Butler, indicates the social exclusion of the Other.
For her, the undoing of abjection requires modifications at a level of discourse,
that is, destabilisation of norms by different performances.
Such recognition
- 234 -
recognises our vulnerability. Learning to love our own body, which was once
separated from another body, is learning to love the Other within ourselves.
Kristeva regards the abject as that which threatens the fixed boundary
separating the self from the Other. Thus, for her, abjection appears in a
process in which a pre-subject seeks to separate itself from what is to become
the Other. Kristeva (1982: 9) states: We may call it a border; abjection is
above all ambiguity. Because, while releasing a hold, it does not radically cut
off the subject from what threatens it on the contrary, abjection acknowledges
it to be in perpetual danger.
processes of subject formation. The abject cannot be externalised from the self.
The abject always remains in the self, disturbing the fixed sense of self,
questioning its intelligibility.
Here, the
- 235 -
As s compromise between
In Formal Justice, Anita Silvers (1998: 44) points out that Jenny Morris and Iris Young
consider that the presence of disabled people threatens able-bodied people by indicating the
possibility of becoming disabled. In particular, in Justice and the Politics of Difference, Young
(1990: 144) states: The abject provokes fear and loathing because it exposes the border
between self and other as constituted and fragile, and to threatens to dissolve the subject by
dissolving the border . Young (1990: 145) considers that racism, sexism, homophobia,
ageism, and ableism are, to some extent, formed by abjection, and exist at the level of
discursive consciousness, the despised groups are objectified. Thus, Silvers, Morris, and
Young have a similar theoretical position to Butlers account of abjection. In this section, I
introduce a different way of seeing the disabled body as the abject.
46
- 236 -
particular subject who is Japanese and has a particular type of cerebral palsy. I
shall cite an instance. A man, who was walking along came up to me, thinking
I was Chinese, and tried to greet me in Chinese. He said Ni hao ma? That is
Hello and how are you? in Chinese. I was silent for a moment, but decided
to respond to him. I told him I am not Chinese but Japanese, but, because I
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have many Chinese friends, I can understand some words in Chinese. Then,
he was shocked at my bodily movement and vocal difference. He did not
recognise my physical disability, but he interpreted my bodily movement and
vocal difference as being that of an alcoholic. He said No alcohol! and ran
away. In this case, my body threatened him. Why did he run away from me?
His interpretation of my body, and voice, destabilises my subjectivity, my
national identity, and my own understandings of my disabled body.
For the man in the street, my body and my voice represented a risk to
which his boundary was permanently exposed.
demotion to the absolute Other. Kristeva (1982: 2) claims that the abject
becomes the jettisoned object [and] is radically excluded. The man ran away
from me and radically excluded my presence. His ego, according to Kristeva
(1982: 2), requires the abject in order to reinforce its own existence: To each
ego its object, to each superego its abject.
- 238 -
from
all
ambiguities,
interconnections,
and
Grosz recognises that freaks are ambiguous and crossing boundaries, the abject
that threatens the coherent identity. In her emphasis on the freak, she explores
the psychical, physical, and conceptual limits of human subjectivity, that is,
what the nature and forms of subjectivities consist of and the degree to which
social, political, and historical factors shape the forms of subjectivity with
which we are familiar; and the degree to which these factors are able to tolerate
anomalies, ambiguities, and borderline cases, marking the threshold, not of
humanity in itself, but of acceptable, tolerable, knowable humanity(Grosz,
1996: 55). I consider that Groszs notion of the freak involves the abject in the
formation of subjectivities.
In this light, I regard the disabled as the abject, that which disturbs the
subject boundaries of the able-bodied. The disabled takes countless shapes, but
is particularly associated with the lived body, its vulnerability and
changeability. The disabled is that which must be excluded so that an ablebodied self can be established. However, the disabled is not simply a contrast,
not simply what is not the able-bodied self. It is what almost becomes part of
the able-bodied self, that which has been, and could be, part of the able-bodied
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In her poetry, Bitter and Twisted, Aspen (1995 [1994]) expresses her
disabled body as the abject:
bitter?
yes, i am bitter
like acid, and
like poison fruit.
twisted?
yes, i am twisted
like an old tree trunk
racked and gnarled
like old roots
twisting deep in the soil
i am here and i
will not be moved:
i am far too strong
and deadly.
(Aspen, 1995 [1994]: 57
in Mustnt Grumble: Writing by Disabled Women)
It is Aspens use of poetic language that allows her to articulate the meaning of
the disabled body. In identifying and embodying both a poison fruit and an old
tree with her body, the poetic language of Aspen illustrates the rhythms of the
lived body itself, that is, Kristevas semiotic. Whereas the able-bodied
discourse is constructed by the symbolic, Aspens expression disrupts the
symbolic order. She seeks to dissolve the boundaries between the able-bodied
and the disabled body, as well as between the subject and the object. Rather
- 241 -
than reinforcing a distance from the disabled body of her own, Aspen
reconsiders physical disability as a body that opens up the possibility for
blurring boundaries.
E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (2002 [1982]) starts with a night sky and
develops into a deeper darkness of a forest near a suburban area in California,
in the United States. A small malformed alien collecting many kinds of plants
reaches his two fingers out toward a green plant. Suddenly, the small alien
moans in fright when a threatening motor vehicle with headlights throws its
beams through the dark sky. U.S. government radar has detected the landing of
a spacecraft. Suddenly, some government vehicles gather around the alien who
has become separated from the mother ship. The small alien becomes the
abject by questioning where is it?, and seeking to find his place. In the dark
forests, government and science officials look for the alien. When the crew of
aliens realises that there are human trespassers around them, one of the aliens
at the spacecrafts hatchway sends out a signal from its chest, alerting other
aliens to immediately return to it.
- 242 -
a game that his older brother Michael (Robert MacNaughton) and Michaels
friends are playing. Elliott is separated from the group of older boys around a
kitchen table, as he sits behind a counter separate from them. At this moment,
both Elliott and the small alien are separated from where they want to belong.
Elliott is forced to leave the house for the time being. He has to stand outside
of his suburban home and wait for a pizza that one of the boys has ordered by
phone. Elliott leaves the dining room with his baseball and glove and walks
down the driveway into the night mist.
driveway to the house with the pizza, he hears a noise from the backyard shed.
When he hears more noise, he walks to the shed to look in. Leaving the pizza
on the ground, Elliott throws his ball into the shed, and it is thrown back to him.
Elliott is scared and runs away, losing his footing on the pizza box on the grass,
and coming into the kitchen. Elliott reports to his mother Mary (Dee WallaceStone): Mom, mom, theres something out there... Its in the tool shed. He
threw out the ball at me... No one believes him. However, Elliott is curious
about the unseen creature.
After midnight, in his bedroom, Elliott lies awake. With the familys
dog, he decides to return to the backyard armed with a torch.
In the cornfield
adjacent to the house, Elliott finds mysterious footprints and walks slowly.
Suddenly, he shines his torch light onto the alien. They both scream at the first
sight of each other, and both are equally scared. The alien runs off through the
field as Elliott also runs back into the backyard. Both are shocked. Elliotts
reaction is due to the recognition of the impossible and the unintelligible. The
image of the alien challenges the fixity of a same identity and forces Elliott
and the film viewers to face up to the abject through the image of the excluded
- 243 -
and rejected.
Thus, Spielberg designs the aliens body to look very different from a human
body and frightening at first sight. I was surprised at the fact that Spielberg
used many people with physical differences to make E.T.s body move in
different ways from that of a normal human being. To me, this alien body was
a site of abjection, of physical disability. The alien is not a subject that Elliott
can recognise, but, nonetheless, an abject about which he seeks to find out
more. I view this film in a way that opens up a space in which to discuss ones
possibility of shifting position through processes of expanding the domain of
the abject.
Elliott cannot help thinking of the alien creature. Riding his bicycle
into the forest, Elliott distributes small, round, colourful chocolate balls on the
ground, probably to feed the alien creature, or to guide it to his home with the
path of chocolates as a lure. Elliott is in a double bind: a longing for more
contact with this creature, and a need to reject it. The abject body, to Elliott,
threatens engulfment.
- 245 -
Seeking to find out what exactly this creature is, he feels both fear of and
fascination with the creature. In this section, I shall open up a new concept of
abjection, that is, abjection that seeks to find a means of incorporating the
Other into the self.
closer to touch him with two long fingers. Elliotts body reacts to the touch.
Rather than touching him, the alien has simply come to return the chocolate
balls to Elliott and places them on Elliotts sleeping bag. In order to invite the
alien into the house, Elliott leaves more chocolate balls as a path to his
bedroom. In complete view for the first time, the alien has a rough, brown skin
surface, a big globular head, huge blue eyes, an elastic neck, long fingers, a
gourd-shaped body, short legs, and large webbed feet.47 As a spectator, I was
on the verge of both denying and accepting the alien with which my classmates
identified me.
Probably from fear and uneasiness, Elliott wipes his nose, and the alien
imitates him. Recognising that the alien is mimicking him, Elliott gesticulates
with other body movements in order to communicate with it.
The alien
Someone may find that the facial figure of E.T. is Kindchenschema (in German word for
Child-like figure which has a big head, big round eyes, a small mouth, and a small nose).
However, as Spielberg (2002) states, he designed E.T. as a different creature from the space
which looks very different from a human figure.
47
- 246 -
imitates Elliott: the two make images of each other. The alien impersonates
Elliotts yawn and fatigue when he tumbles down in a chair in his room. This
scene appeals to me. Lacan describes the mirror stage as a moment of human
development in which an infant sees itself in a mirror and becomes fascinated
with the image.
However, for both Elliott and the alien, this stage is the moment of
relational development in which they see each other and become fascinated
with each other.
Do you talk, you know, talk? Me human. Boy. Elliott. Ell-iott. Elliott. Coke. You see, we drink it. Its a, its a drink.
You know, food. These are toys, these are little men. This
is Greedo, and then this is Hammerhead, see this is Walrus
Man, and this is Snaggle Tooth and this is Lando Calrissian,
see, ...and look, they can even have wars. Look at this. Thth-th-th-th-th. Uuuuuuuuuuuugh. Look fish. The fish eat
the fish food, and the shark eats the fish, and nobody eats
the shark. See, this is PEZ, candy. See you eat it. You put
the candy in here and then when you lift up the head, the
candy comes out and you can eat it. You want some? This
is a peanut. You eat it, but you cant eat this one, cause this
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is fake. This is money. You see. You put the money in the
peanut. You see? Its a bank. See? And then, this is a car.
This is what we get around in. You see? Car. Hey, hey
wait a second. No. You dont eat em. Are you hungry?
Im hungry. Stay. Stay. Ill be right here. OK? Ill be right
here. (from E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, 2002 [1982])
In this dialogue from the film, Elliott expresses his emotions through a
fragmentary flow of words or phrases that are more sensitive than sensible. He
speaks as if he was speaking to an infant. Elliotts expression partakes of what
Kristeva (1984) calls the semiotic.
understand what he is talking about, but he just wants to communicate with it.
To do so, he shifts his mode of expression from the symbolic to the semiotic.
In other words, he enters the imaginary realm in order to make the alien
understand him and his world. This shift often manifests itself to me when a
person who is not familiar with my difference attempts to communicate with
me. In that situation, his or her expression tends to be in the semiotic mode. I
once thought that it was not easy for me to deal with the semiotic mode since I
felt strongly that it was used because the user saw me as if there was something
wrong with me.
complex process of expanding the domain of the abject. Like Elliott in the film,
the person in front of me might have been curious about my physical difference
and sought to understand me.
Elliott assumes that the alien is hungry. Both Elliott and the alien have
identified and empathised with each other as though they were a mother and a
child. He tries to look after it. Elliott collects food from the refrigerator, such
as peanut butter, cheese, tomatoes, and a carton of milk. He treats the alien as
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a human boy. The alien has inspected other objects in the room, such as a
tennis racket and an umbrella. When the umbrella unexpectedly opens up and
the alien shrieks and rushes to hide, Elliott drops the milk carton on the floor in
the kitchen as they simultaneously experience shock and fear. While carrying a
plate of food to the alien, Elliott finds the alien in his closet that is full of toys
and stuffed animals. There the alien looks like another toy item. I began to
identify and emphasise with Elliott who seemed to understand the alien with
which my classmates identified me.
When Elliotts brother Michael returns home after school, Elliott calls
his brother to his room. Elliott reveals his secret friend. Before the disclosure
- 249 -
is made, Elliott wants to make sure that his secret must be safeguarded. Here,
Elliott starts to identify the alien as a boy:
When Elliott brings the alien out from the closet, Michael turns around and is
astonished at the first sight. Gertie, his younger sister, also rushes into the
room and is frightened from looking at the unknown creature. She screams
aloud, and the creature reacts by making an awful groan in imitation. Elliott
talks about his new friend to his sister:
In this dialogue, Elliott asserts that the alien is a boy. This scene takes the
spectator back to the threshold of how subjectivity is produced. This scene
demonstrates how the alien (the abject) comes to see itself as an incorporated
being within the fluid realm between self (a boy) and other (an alien). Elliott
closes down the aliens identity as other by assigning boyhood or boy-ness to it.
Elliott wants to teach the alien about where they are so the alien can
understand where it is located.
Michael suggests a globe. Elliott teaches the alien where they are: OK. Were
here. We are here. Where are you from? Hes trying to tell us something.
Earth. Home. Home. Home. The alien whispers home, pointing toward
the window. To display where the home planet is located, the alien puts three
pieces of fruit and two eggs on the map of the solar system and levitates them
to float and spin in the air, as if it were a three-dimensional model of the solar
system. The children are amazed by the aliens ability. When Elliott screams
in fright, these objects instantaneously fall.
4. Multiple Identifications
The next day while at school, Elliott has to leave the alien at home. In
cross-takes of Elliotts (at school) and the aliens (at home) experiences, an
extrasensory relationship is established between them. Elliott is in a biology
classroom. As the teacher walks down the aisle, he picks up Elliotts drawing
of the aliens face with the classification extra-terrestrial, the initials E.T..
E.T. is at home exploring the places outside Elliotts bedroom. He stumbles
- 251 -
into the kitchen. In his class, Elliott is advised about the dangers of a sharp
scalpel; Elliott is experiencing the results of whatever E.T. experiences at home.
When E.T. opens the refrigerator door, opens a plastic container of Potato
Salad, Elliott tastes it, E.T. starts to drink a can of Coors beer, and Elliott
suddenly burps in the classroom. When E.T., now quickly intoxicated, bumps
into a kitchen counter, Elliott reacts to the bump, rubs his nose, and exhibits the
effects of being drunk. When E.T. hits his head again and then falls face first
onto the floor, Elliott sinks in his chair and also falls onto the floor under his
desk. Opening another can of beer, E.T. gets very drunk; Elliott is also drunk
and he turns around and smiles at a girl.
The teacher distributes etherised cotton balls to each students jar to put
frogs to sleep, and he states: They wont feel anything. They wont be hurt. It
will take a little while. If you dont want to watch them, you dont have to.
Elliott stares at his frog, which he is about to sedate with chloroform and which
tries to escape from the jar. He connects with it in a chat similar to his first
chat with E.T., connecting the two creatures together: Say hi. Can you talk?
Can you say hi?
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courage to save him to free his frog from its jar. Elliott calls out: Run for
your life. Back to the river. Back to the forest! Elliott also seeks to release all
the other frogs. This scene expands the web of complex identifications, and
makes the spectator think about his or her day-to-day life in which there are
many creatures like E.T. For Elliott, E.T. is everywhere.
approaching OHara. The movements of the two in the film that E.T. watches
at home identically match the movements of Elliott and the girl in the
classroom. When the two lovers in the film kiss, Elliott accelerates his courage
and kisses her. E.T. smiles as if he knew Elliott did so. To me, this scene is
very interesting; it connects the world of what E.T. is watching with the world
of what the viewer of E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (2002 [1982]) is watching.
Here, the viewer may identify him or herself with E.T. rather than with Elliott.
The multiple identifications between Elliott and E.T., Elliott and the spectator,
E.T. and the spectator and importantly between the spectators themselves
enables a destabilising of their positions, it makes them experience different
perspectives. It allowed me to move forward to the touches or the feelings that
can be perceived beyond the construction of otherness that is a construction
within the symbolic realm.
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When I saw the scene where Elliott identified frogs with his alien friend
and set them free from the jars, I felt a strong connection with him. Elliott is
concerned about the lives of other creatures.
Moreover, to consider my
experience in school life, I hoped to see someone like Elliott who understood
(other or my) pain of being different, isolated, and excluded. I identified
myself as one of Elliotts classmates as well. Thus, my multiple identifications
are coterminous with my body and embodied practice. By becoming embodied
or incorporated with others experiences, one creates the space where it would
be transformed.
The images of the alien friend shift throughout the film, from the abject,
to a boy, and now a girl. This shift of body images demonstrates resistance to
the social model of the normal body. When Elliott has been brought home
from the frog disaster at school, he discovers that Gertie has been in her own
room playing dress-up with E.T. E.T. is dressed up in girl clothes with an
ugly blonde wig, black hat with flowers, and a rabbit-fur around his neck: a girl.
Importantly, the alien friend can now speak his name: Elliott. Elliott.
48
By talking of pre-framed identities, this can sound as if these identities are fixed and
determinate. What I wanted to say is that we can only become formed as subjects in terms of
categories which are on offer; while recognising that the content of these categories is open and
indeterminate.
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Whereas Gertie wants to identify E.T. as a girl, Elliott does not like it. In the
imaginary, there is no certain boundary between self and other in this scene
between a boy and a girl. This is not, as Butler argues, a performance of drag
that simply blurs the boundaries, but rather, it is multiple identifications that
make connection across differences possible.
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5. Towards Incorporation
Later in the film, when Michael brings E.T. home from the forest where
Elliott and E.T. had spent the night building the space communicator, both
Elliott and E.T. experience the same physical conditions. They are dying
together as a result of their incorporated, symbiotic relationship.
Elliotts
uniforms march through the neighbourhood; some of them are rolling a large,
greenhouse-like plastic tunnel toward the house. The government-employed
scientists question the family members about E.T. Michael explicitly describes
Elliotts and E.T.s incorporation: Hes smart. He communicates through
Elliott Elliott feels his feelings.
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between the two, similar to the experience of unity between mother and child
in the early stage of a childs life. Elliott is becoming E.T.s imaginary mother.
Both Elliott and E.T. are placed on long beds alongside each other in a
quarantined room. They are connected to many complex life-support machines
that display similar graphing results for both. Elliott complains about their
treatment and calls out: You have no right to do this! Youre scaring him.
Youre scaring him! Leave him alone. Leave him alone, I can take care of him.
Elliott physically and mentally senses E.T.s pain. As E.T. begins to approach
death, his blood pressure sinks, whilst Elliotts condition stabilises. E.T.s life
fades away. Here, E.T. becomes mother. As in the psychoanalytic narrative,
the mother fades away before the infant recognises that this mother is a
separate being or an other. Elliott loses his telepathic connection to E.T. and
miraculously comes back to full life. Elliott stretches his arms out to his dead
friend, pleading for him to answer: E.T. Answer me, please. Please.
With the process of abjection in which the very first love is lost before
it can be excluded, one cannot distinguish between self and other. One cannot
identify what one has lost, thus, the feelings of melancholic wonder. However,
in the film, after all the treatments and the moment when E.T. appears to be
lifeless, he is suddenly reincarnated.
jouissance a love for the alien within himself who was not really the Other
but a part of himself.
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In the final scene, the flap of the spaceship opens, and E.T. leaves his
human friends. After Michael and Gertie say goodbye to E.T., Elliott
approaches E.T. to spend the last moment with his best friend from space:
E.T.: Come.
Elliott: Stay.
E.T.: Ouch!
Elliott: Ouch!
E.T.: Ill be right here.
(from E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, 2002 [1982])
Here, there is no sentence, but a semiotic expression that makes the spectator
feel their moment. E.T. and Elliott use hand movements as well as those
simple words. E.T. invites Elliott to come with him, and his big round eyes
stare at Elliott. Elliott calmly responds to him that he will stay here. Or, Elliott
invites E.T. to stay on earth with him. E.T. softly says Ouch! as if he
understood Elliotts mental pain of parting. Elliott also repeats Ouch! back
to him. Elliott sheds tears. E.T. tells Elliott: I will be right here. It means
that E.T. will always stay in Elliotts life. E.T. will remain in Elliotts life, and
possibly, they will be incorporated in different ways. E.T. enters his spaceship
to depart from the Earth. Despite the fact that this film undoes othering of the
abject, I found this final scene uneasy to watch, because it showed the
separation from the abject, the process of othering. However, I also consider
that this uneasiness is significant for undoing the abject.
- 258 -
Once the body of E.T. has been incorporated with Elliott, like an infant
and its mother, E.T. is no longer positioned as the maternal Other. Unlike an
infant in general, Elliott chooses to separate from E.T. without othering and
decides to be incorporated with him in the imaginary. In this case, Elliotts
incorporated image of E.T. not only oscillates between absence and presence
but, more importantly, Elliott discovers himself in a new way of becoming a
subject, that is, a process of loving the Other and of incorporating the Other
with himself. The alien body was once far from a human ideal body, that is,
the able body, and, to me, it is the refusal of able-bodiedness that allows me to
resist the normal positioning of disabled subjectivity. E.T., as the abject, is
reclaimed through an equation with the self and the Other. I add, moreover,
that the way of the incorporating of E.T. is Elliotts internalising mode of
identification. Such an idea is captured in Kaja Silvermans notion of the
active gift of love in The Threshold of the Visible World. Silverman (1996)
states:
- 259 -
- 261 -
system
modifying
itself
in
light
of
new
Reading Kristeva in a creative way in Art, Love, and Melancholy in the Work
of Julia Kristeva, Lechte (1990) explains her notion of the subject as an
open system:
It is neither easy nor simple to shift from a way of seeing physical differences
as the Other in a more positive way. Abjection, to me, is a field in which a
variety of others, differences, identities, and relations intermingle. I could have
rejected watching E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial (2002 [1982]) and pushed the
small alien out of my domain of subjectivity for good. I was pleased to watch
- 262 -
and explore this film, that was, to me, an open system of loving my own
difference.
I now understand how love operates to connect others together. Love is,
to me, crucial in the experience of othering the self and in the process of
undoing that otherness.
return the self-love; this functions to encourage us to accept the Other. I love
my body with a nostalgia for the pre-symbolic stage, when my body was not
distinguished as the disabled Other. I keep loving my body rather than
forcing myself to distinguish it as the Other the lack of able-bodiedness.
To me,
abjection is not limited to the feminine, the maternal, the disabled, or the
Other, but is applicable to all beings. Abjection is a progress of becoming,
and as such, is an active transformation. In conclusion, I trust that my reading
of Kristevas abjection has allowed my readers to reconsider an image of the
disabled that goes beyond the image of the Other. All bodies can be open to
the presence of the abject. In exploring abjection, the disabled threatens the
able-bodied image of the human body. The changeability of the body
undermines the fixed image of the able-bodied, and in so doing, destabilisation
occurs in the able-bodied imaginary. Abjection is a process of transformation
- 263 -
relationships,
relationships
that
are
we
can
both
imagine
embodied
subsequent
and
social,
(Oliver,
2000: 16)
Thus, the opposition between nature and culture, or between maternal and
paternal, may also be linked to the opposition between the disabled and the
able-bodied. Without an image of E.T., the images of otherness and physical
disability had left me with negative image of otherness and myself.
- 264 -
- 265 -
Appendix
Mary Duffy
Venus De Milo
- 266 -
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Web Resources
Image of Venus de Milo (Louvre Museum, Paris):
http://www.cis.nctu.edu.tw/~whtsai/France%20Tour/Daily_Webpages/Summar
y%20of%20Trip%20(browsing)/03-30-0707%20La%20Venus%20de%20Milo%20(from%20postcard).jpg
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