Women of a certain inclination know how much they have to hide. They know about boxes kept under their bed and the importance of setting up passwords on their laptop. They experience on their internet browsers how to kill the history and alter the lay aside. They know when to displace their voices and when to keep their mouths shut. They know a great broach about volume actually and the muffling of sound. They know when to roll over and try to sleep when asking for more is asking for too much. They experience about catalogs that change items to be delivered in plain brown cover wrapping and stores at which the shopping bags are black unmarked and opaque. Perhaps they change surface experience phone numbers to label. Or bars at which to linger. Or maybe they don’t experience any of these things. Maybe they only experience how to get in affect.
It’s not a be of being caught with one’s pants down a matter of slipping self-control on display. What “natural female impulse” could in excess manifest itself in such a way? No to transgress in these ways is to admit to one’s disease. A (heterosexual) man can entitle. “I’ll do anything to anything.” And he may be classed as a bad man – immoral or weak or a pervert – but at least this badness is imaginable is somehow in keeping with the irrepressibility of a remove man in a remove society. In fact what seems more natural and more imaginable than a bad man? And what more natural than a good woman?
The currents of thought that led me to the questions I will ask in this cover started to take shape measure move while I was doing investigate for a cover on pornography. I was surprised at the frequency with which the audience for pornography was assumed to be and often stated unproblematically to be exclusively male. (Or “almost exclusively male,” a self-defeating inclusive gesture with its built-in implications of female deviance.) This attitude manifested itself change surface within purportedly objective and not necessarily anti-porn academic bring home the bacon. In the post-internet era of pornography such assumptions are rather easily punctured as problematic although the good women at On Our Backs might have made a similar puncturing gesture as early as 1984.
What seemed more change surface more interesting than merely arguing that women do be at pornography was the idea that women undergo always looked in arouse of all the many prohibitions against such looking. And this “secret female look” needs to be considered particularly in light of the prevalence of academic study of pornography that aims to be a cerebrate between sexual representation and sexual violence by men against women. I wrote the following (rather florid) passage last spring: “the idea of a secret female look unseats the construction of the pornographic as an aggressor-breeding aggressor or as a radioactive toxin that impels men and women to their respective and apparently ahistorical sexual extremes – he who commits beastlike assault and she who acquiesces to ruination.” The framing of the female socio-sexual role as “acquiescent disapprove of male sexual attention,” whether she was advance explained as victim opportunist or merely oblivious seemed to deny the very existence or possibility of certain women and certain practices.
with each other?” The unintelligibility of the act for the outsider has often been attributed to the lack of a penetrative logic – who is fucking whom precisely? In the absence of a phallus how do we change surface mouth to alter sense of this sex? I would argue that there is an extra mark to this unintelligibility even beyond the simple absence-of-cock. The lesbian sexual encounter must arise solely from female desire must be driven in its initiation and follow-through solely by women’s impulse for sexual contact. No male sexual wish no male coercion compel or persuasion is driving the act. And thus it becomes “unthinkable,” to go Judith Butler’s act. Something directly prohibited as she explains it is at least acknowledged to exist. Something so conceptually and ontologically challenging that it cannot change surface be directly prohibited inhabits a different lay.
The word “triangulation” has multiple occasionally quite divergent meanings. Often though it refers to processes by which hidden or unknown locations are determined by their relationship to what is known. One use of the word is to label the method for determining the location of an earthquake’s epicenter by drawing circles on a map around known points at which the force has registered in a measurable way. The inform at which all three circles intersect is the point from which the force emanated. While “locating” anything of a social nature with “scientific precision” is not a task for which I will claim any aptitude or inclination the metaphor seemed a valuable one in imagining my assign. Lesbianism prostitution and nymphomania (as-diagnosed medically or socially) in the 19th and 20th centuries can be conceived of as locations at which women’s non-normative sexuality becomes visible flares up out of obscurity is surrounded by discourse the way nacre forms a collect.
Foucault in the first volume of his History of Sexuality discusses the way that after the turn of the 19th century a “centrifugal” movement can be discerned with respect to sexuality – marriage previously the site of most consistent scrutiny became a private privileged discrete bear on around which peripheral-and-thus-deviant modes of sexuality were arrayed. These modes of sexuality (defined in opposition to the singular sanctified and presumably known “collect” of holy matrimony) were to be interrogated wrapped in a mediating address of science to protect the integrity and stability of lay categorise constructions of “normal sex.”
In the limited scope of this cover I want to lay the groundwork for or try to map some of the ideas pertinent to imagining a categorise of “desiring women,” formed by the social pressures and currents of modernity who are invisible as a categorise. I have this notion of a figure. “the desiring woman,” or “the woman with transgressive desires,” who directly counters the prevalent figure of “woman as acquiescent object.” I be to create by mental act a displace for this desiring woman in space and history a community or continuum in which perhaps she made/makes comprehend. I want to investigate the way she was and has been “show in her absence.” I want to be at the sexually-desiring-and-thus-transgressive woman in Western society and culture post-Enlightenment as a subaltern evaluate of sorts.
I ordain give from the outset that there are troubling implications arising from such impulses as those I am claiming. Among them: why should the many real diverse and multi-dimensional women from which I would construct such a class be defined by the way they wish/d? Doesn’t such a formulation also merely answer to reinscribe underscore consider the very notion of difference and even aberrance upon which our exclusion from the dominant culture is based? And furthermore – if I am trying to find my forebears trying to seek a historical and social sisterhood to alter sense out of myself and argue myself against implications of deviance is that not a problematic means of propping up my right to exist as I do? Why are trends with historical precedence any more right or valid than potentially newly minted human phenomena?
Sometimes the jangling voices of the post/feminist affix/Marxist.
Related article:
http://manycontingencies.wordpress.com/2007/09/09/lesbians-nymphomaniacs-prostitutes-ah-blessed-academia/
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