rantyness
So, I was reading Germaine Greer's article in the Age and it got me thinking. Not just about how much I DO enjoy my leisure time as leisure (and hell, a little too much of my 'work' time as well...), but about some of the difficulties I've had with certain modes of feminist theory.
For example, while I was reading Greer's article how men spend their leisure time fishing, women spend their leisure time 'fighting grime' I started to feel a little guilty about my own grime-fighting shortfalls. Should I be spending more time doing housework and less time fishing (?!!??!)? Ads for cleaning products do not induce this sneaking sort of guilt in me - the blatant sexism is more likely to induce paroxysms of rage, and much pointing and shouting at the tv. (I'm pretty sure watching tv counts a leisure, no? Otherwise I'll have to find a whole new form of procrastination...) So why does an article which should affirm my liberation-through-leisure instead produce the opposite affect? Did somebody say 'interpellation'? I'm a woman and a feminist and a scholar, so when I'm reading this article by a very well-known feminist scholar about how men and women spend their time, it's reasonable to expect I'd identify with the 'woman' part of the equation. But I don't. It seems I'm really a bloke, because gee, I do like a good relax.
It's not like no one has pointed out the pitfalls of essentialism, of totalising 'women's experience' as a singular thing common to all women (and thus producing 'men's experience' as a singular thing common to all men and not available to women at all). I understand the need to articulate the subtle and not-so-subtle forms of oppression that operate in everyday life, but I can't help feeling that the essentialist binarising of men's and women's experience usually only ends up enforcing what it tries to describe by ignoring other possibilities and other lived realities.
The other thing that got me thinking was where she talks about "the onerous task of body maintenance, keeping the otherwise disgusting female body clean, tidy, deodorised, made up, not to mention toned and becomingly clad, plus the exhausting, sometimes painful and expensive business of hair and hairiness management. Work, all of it." Now I don't disagree that this is work, all of it, and a duty that primarily falls to women. I also agree with the gist of Greer's article that, in this sense (the sense of bodily maintenance), the (stereo)typically feminine leisure activity of shopping is in fact work. Although I would add that there are definite pleasures to be had, and that, for me at least, a shopping trip is usually interspersed with equally pleasurable lunch and coffee breaks.
The bit that got me thinking was "the otherwise disgusting female body". What it got me thinking about was the difficulty I had when I first studied feminist theory with the woman = body, man = mind binary. While I totally get the historical validity for that equation, it still bothers me that it seems so at odds with contemporary cultural perceptions. Seriously, before uni, if you had have asked me which sex was most closely associated with the body, I would have said male. Same for which sex was most likely to be described as having an "otherwise disgusting body". In contemporary representation, it's men's bodies that smell, sweat, bleed, emit fluids and odours, while women's bodies are safely deodorised and sanitised. I get the concept of the "disgusting female body" as a "structuring absence," something which is absent from representation (in, say, tampon ads) but which lurks "outside the frame," the ever-present threat of abjection. The threat of the "disgusting female body" is what requires "the onerous task of body maintenance" to be carried out, but it is never fully present.
While women may be associated with the body in terms of beauty, that beauty is constructed as a transcendence of the body - of its smells, fluids, its very corporeality. The body with which woman is associated is not only sanitised and deodorised, it is non-existent. It is not the body but the image of the body, which is the negation of the body. And while the female body may exist as the object of male desire, woman is not an embodied subject.
And that got me thinking (this is the bit where it all comes together, where I haven't just been whiling away the time in pleasent procrastination but DOING ACTUAL WORK toward my thesis) - I've been thinking that maybe this has something to do with the fear and loathing of the fat female body, because of its insistant corporeality, its fleshy immanence, its very presence.
Yes, I know, I've done the thing I was complaining about and talking about male and female, BUT, in my defence, I'm using them as abstract terms in discussing representation, not concrete categories and experience. And I'm not really sure what I think about any of it, but it's stuff which has been chugging away in my mind for a long time now, and since I don't seem capable of discussing these ideas in actual conversation, thought I'd give the writing about it a go...
For example, while I was reading Greer's article how men spend their leisure time fishing, women spend their leisure time 'fighting grime' I started to feel a little guilty about my own grime-fighting shortfalls. Should I be spending more time doing housework and less time fishing (?!!??!)? Ads for cleaning products do not induce this sneaking sort of guilt in me - the blatant sexism is more likely to induce paroxysms of rage, and much pointing and shouting at the tv. (I'm pretty sure watching tv counts a leisure, no? Otherwise I'll have to find a whole new form of procrastination...) So why does an article which should affirm my liberation-through-leisure instead produce the opposite affect? Did somebody say 'interpellation'? I'm a woman and a feminist and a scholar, so when I'm reading this article by a very well-known feminist scholar about how men and women spend their time, it's reasonable to expect I'd identify with the 'woman' part of the equation. But I don't. It seems I'm really a bloke, because gee, I do like a good relax.
It's not like no one has pointed out the pitfalls of essentialism, of totalising 'women's experience' as a singular thing common to all women (and thus producing 'men's experience' as a singular thing common to all men and not available to women at all). I understand the need to articulate the subtle and not-so-subtle forms of oppression that operate in everyday life, but I can't help feeling that the essentialist binarising of men's and women's experience usually only ends up enforcing what it tries to describe by ignoring other possibilities and other lived realities.
The other thing that got me thinking was where she talks about "the onerous task of body maintenance, keeping the otherwise disgusting female body clean, tidy, deodorised, made up, not to mention toned and becomingly clad, plus the exhausting, sometimes painful and expensive business of hair and hairiness management. Work, all of it." Now I don't disagree that this is work, all of it, and a duty that primarily falls to women. I also agree with the gist of Greer's article that, in this sense (the sense of bodily maintenance), the (stereo)typically feminine leisure activity of shopping is in fact work. Although I would add that there are definite pleasures to be had, and that, for me at least, a shopping trip is usually interspersed with equally pleasurable lunch and coffee breaks.
The bit that got me thinking was "the otherwise disgusting female body". What it got me thinking about was the difficulty I had when I first studied feminist theory with the woman = body, man = mind binary. While I totally get the historical validity for that equation, it still bothers me that it seems so at odds with contemporary cultural perceptions. Seriously, before uni, if you had have asked me which sex was most closely associated with the body, I would have said male. Same for which sex was most likely to be described as having an "otherwise disgusting body". In contemporary representation, it's men's bodies that smell, sweat, bleed, emit fluids and odours, while women's bodies are safely deodorised and sanitised. I get the concept of the "disgusting female body" as a "structuring absence," something which is absent from representation (in, say, tampon ads) but which lurks "outside the frame," the ever-present threat of abjection. The threat of the "disgusting female body" is what requires "the onerous task of body maintenance" to be carried out, but it is never fully present.
While women may be associated with the body in terms of beauty, that beauty is constructed as a transcendence of the body - of its smells, fluids, its very corporeality. The body with which woman is associated is not only sanitised and deodorised, it is non-existent. It is not the body but the image of the body, which is the negation of the body. And while the female body may exist as the object of male desire, woman is not an embodied subject.
And that got me thinking (this is the bit where it all comes together, where I haven't just been whiling away the time in pleasent procrastination but DOING ACTUAL WORK toward my thesis) - I've been thinking that maybe this has something to do with the fear and loathing of the fat female body, because of its insistant corporeality, its fleshy immanence, its very presence.
Yes, I know, I've done the thing I was complaining about and talking about male and female, BUT, in my defence, I'm using them as abstract terms in discussing representation, not concrete categories and experience. And I'm not really sure what I think about any of it, but it's stuff which has been chugging away in my mind for a long time now, and since I don't seem capable of discussing these ideas in actual conversation, thought I'd give the writing about it a go...