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1
MANAGING THE MONSTROUS FEMININE
Regulating the reproductive body
Woman is literally a monster: a failed and botched male who is only born female due to an excess of moisture and of coldness during the process of conception.
Aristotle [1, p. 49]
Woman, as sign of difference, is monstrous. If we define the monster as a bodily entity that is anomalous and deviant vis-a-vis the norm, then we can argue that the female body shares with the monster the privilege of bringing out a unique blend of fascination and horror.
Rosi Braidotti [2, p. 81]
Throughout history, and across cultures, the reproductive body of woman has provoked fascination and fear. It is a body deemed dangerous and defiled, the myth of the monstrous feminine made flesh, yet also a body which provokes adoration and desire, enthralment with the mysteries within. We see this ambivalent relationship played out in mythological, literary and artistic representations of the feminine, where woman is positioned as powerful, impure and corrupt, source of moral and physical contamination; or as sacred, asexual and nourishing, a phantasmic signifier of threat extinguished. Central to this positioning of the female body as monstrous or beneficent is ambivalence associated with the power and danger perceived to be inherent in woman's fecund flesh, her seeping, leaking, bleeding womb standing as site of pollution and source of dread.
We see evidence of this dread in representations of the dangers of the menstruating woman, whose âtouch could blast the fruits of the field, sour wine, cloud mirrors, rust iron, and blunt the edges of knivesâ [3, p. 643]. Or in the belief that the world's most feared poison, moon-dew, made by Thessalian witches, came from girls' first menstrual blood [4, p. 166]. The vagina, from which menstrual blood issues, is positioned as equally abhorrent. Representations of the vagina dentata, the vagina with teeth, transform dread of the vagina into myth. In medieval art, this is through allegorical images of the gaping dragon mouth speared by the knight in shining armourâthe knight's ability to slay the beast a signifier of his phallic power. Kali, the Hindu folk goddess, the âterrible motherâ who devours her offspring, is often depicted with a vagina dentate devouring the phallus of the male god Shiva. Described as a representation of the sexualised mother who both nurtures and devours, symbol of the âcarnivorous wombâ [5, p. 273], Kali is the monstrous mother with power to give lifeâbut who chooses to destroy it. Equally, Medusa, archetype of malevolent femininity at its worst, able to turn those who looked at her into stone, is depicted with open-mouthed writhing snakes as her hair, her âentire visage alive with images of toothed vaginas ready to strikeâ [6, p. 111]. Urban myths circulating in the Vietnam war warned American soldiers of the dangers inherent in sex with Vietnamese womenâfrom razor blades hidden in the vagina [5]. In all of its manifestations, the vagina dentate is an allegory crude in its symbolism, leaving little room for ambiguity about its underlying message: the fecund body as âthe mouth of hellâa terrifying symbol of woman as the âdevil's gatewayââ [6, p. 106]; the monstrous feminine most thinly disguised.
The female monster depicted in contemporary cinema is the modern manifestation of such misogynistic fantasies, described by Barbara Creed, in her book The Monstrous Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis [6], as a woman simultaneously deadly and desirable. Rosemary's Baby, Carrie, Fatal Attraction, Misery, Alien, The Exorcist, Dangerous Liaisons, Sweetie, Crush, Celia, Single White Female, To Die Forâeach depicts the coalescence of female sexuality and malevolence, all attempts at concealment put aside. The centrality of the fecund body in woman's monstrosity is exemplified by Carrie, the girl who develops telekinetic powers at menarche, turning her into âwitch and menstrual monsterâ [6, p. 78], thus continuing the mythological representation of the connection between menstrual blood and the possession of supernatural powers. When Carrie is tormented by her classmates, who throw a bucket of pigs' blood over her at a high school prom, she transforms into an avenging monster, described by Barbara Creed thus: âStanding above the crowd, her body covered in blood, her eyes bulging with fury, she wreaks destruction, transforming the nightâŠinto an orgy of deathâŠ. Like the witches of other horror films, Carrie has become a figure of monumental destruction, sparing no one in her furyâ [6, p. 81]. Carrie thus personifies the notion of the womb as source of malevolence and evil, continuing the legacy of Christian art where hell was depicted as a âlurid and rotten uterusâ [7, p. 147], a place in which âsinners were perpetually tortured for their crimesâ [6, p. 43].
However, film and art also offer the potential for inoculation against the danger and polluting power of the fecund body. Indeed, Julia Kristeva [8] has argued that as societies become more secular, art has taken over from religion as a force of purification and catharsis. The ubiquitous representations of the beneficent Madonna, or the idealised female beauty, the âeternal feminineâ who âshines like a beacon in the dark worldâ [9], celebrate fantasies of the divine feminine, and remind us of the sacred sanctity of woman as mother, driving all notions of monstrosity aside. The air-brushed Hollywood film star, perfect in face and family values, carries this mantle into the twenty-first century. However, there is a dark undercurrent to this apparent admiration or worship. Karen Homey has argued that the idealised vision of woman we see in art (or film) is not a glorification of woman, but a reflection of man's âdesire to conceal his dreadâ, for âthere is no need for me to dread a creature so wonderful, so beautiful, nay so saintlyâ [10, p. 136]. The pedestal is a precarious place to be: the woman positioned there has to remain perfect, in order to avoid falling into the position of monster incarnate.
The female nude, icon of idealised feminine sexuality, most clearly transforms the base nature of woman's nakedness into culture, into âartâ, all abhorrent reminders of her fecund corporeality removedâsecretions, pubic hair, genitals, and disfiguring veins or blemishes all left out of the frame.1 However, the languid, passive pose of the nude, waiting to be consumed by the gaze of the spectator, can only momentarily assuage fears of the danger and decay lurking within. For as Lynda Nead has argued, âthe classical forms of art perform a kind of magical regulation of the female body, containing it and momentarily repairing the orifices and tears. This can, however, only be a fleeting success; the margins are dangerous and will need to be subjected to the discipline of art againâŠand againâ [11, p. 7]. This accounts for the ubiquity of the female nude in both âhigh artâ and popular culture; the fantasy of containment requires revisiting of the image to keep anxiety about the unruly fecund body at bay.
Art is not the only discipline which requires revisiting. In pornography, we see recurring representations of the female body most graphically exposed, the splayed vagina revealing pink glistening fleshâreassurance that there is nothing to recoil from here; no teeth to bite. In hard-core porn, the next stage of this particular story, the vagina is repeatedly penetrated by the penis of the all-conquering man. Gargantuan, never failing, anxiety about the vagina dentata, or the monstrous feminine, is pushed out of the picture, and firmly to the back of the mind [12].
Performing genderâself-surveillance and self-policing
Mythology, because of its rich symbolism, and its exaggerated lore, is easy to dismissâat least by those of us who live in a secular, scientific, modern (if not post-modern) age. The notion of the menstruating woman endangering crops, of her contaminated flesh necessitating seclusion from the community, raises smiles, or feelings of wonderment, rather than fear. Equally, the image of the all-consuming sexualised mother, or the Medusa, can be ridiculed as the stuff of misogynistic fantasyâmothers are good (or good enough), our modern cultural representations make clear. Art, film or pornography are created as fictions for our pleasurable escape, we may argue. It is possible to suspend disbelief and entertain the fantasies evoked, whilst convincing ourselves that these images are not âtrueâ; they are merely fictions that have no impact on the lives of women. However, this is not the case. Representations reflect and construct the regimes of truth within which women become âwomanâ. For gender isn't the cause of acts or behaviours; rather, as Judith Butler argues, gender is a performance, discursively constituted, something one does rather than what one is: âGender is the repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory framework that congeal over time to produce the appearance of substance, of a natural sort of beingâ [13, p. 91]. People who fail to âdoâ gender correctly, she argues, are punished by cultures and laws which have a vested interest in maintaining a stable distinction between masculine and feminine; a vested interest in positioning idealised constructions of woman and man as natural and uncontestable.
Whilst Butler's analysis primarily focuses on the construction and performance of gender within a heterosexual matrix, where drag, or the lesbian phallus, stand as examples of gendered transgressions, her argument equally applies to the construction and regulation of femininity through fecundity. For the reproductive body is central to the process by which women take up the subject position âwomanâ; central to the performance of normative femininity. Women's bleeding, and the embodied changes that come with pregnancy, birth, and menopause, are irrevocably connected to the discursive positioning of female fecundity as site of danger or debilitation, with these signs of fecundity standing as signifiers of feminine excess. There is no ânaturalâ reproductive body that prefigures discourse. Indeed, it is discourse, and the enacting of femininity within a highly regulated framework, which produces notions of the ânaturalâ reproductive body having particular effects, reifying the woman who is in control of the unruly reproductive body as a creature of substance; an ideal to which we, as women, should aspire. Women who fail in this control, who fail to perform femininity within the tight boundaries within which it is prescribed at each stage of the reproductive life cycle, are at risk of being positioned as mad or bad, and subjected to discipline or punishment, which masquerades as treatment or rehabilitation to disguise its regulatory intent. As Butler comments: âIf the âcauseâ of desire, gesture, and act can be localized within the âself of the actor, then the political regulations and disciplinary practices which produce that ostensibly coherent gender are effectively displaced from viewâ [13, p. 110]. Positioning my mother's depression as âpost-natalâ, located within her dysfunctional body, displaced from view the ways in which the normative role of wife and mother can be a source of distress and despair; distracted from the political regulations and disciplinary practices that kept my mother, and other women like her, in a subordinate role, where she had no power or agency, yet was expected to be happy and functioning as every âgoodâ wife and mother should be.
The fecund female body thus stands at the centre of surveillance and policing of femininityâboth externally, and from within. Michel Foucault [14] described self-surveillance as the modern replacement for external, authoritarian, methods of surveillance and social control. Today, he argued, discipline is instilled within, and punishment, if we waver from the norm, self-induced. As Gordon [15, p. 155] comments:
There is no need for arms, physical violence, material constraints. Just a gaze. An inspecting gaze, a gaze which each individual under its weight will end by interiorising to the point that he is his own overseer, each individual thus exercising this surveillance over, and against, himself.
[cited by 16, p. 18]
The effectiveness of this disciplinary power lies in the fact that it doesn't require coercion, but relies on the willingness, or desire, of individuals to submit to it [17]: a submission that is invariably unwitting because of its taken-for-granted nature. Thus identifying and naming specific forms of self-surveillance and self-policing is the first step in exposing and challenging the regulatory practices that can act to subjugate womenâthe first step in facilitating resistance.
However, self-surveillance is not the only mode through which the fecund body is judged. In her analysis of disciplinary control of the body through dieting, exercise and eating disorders, Sandra Bartky has commented, âthe witnesses for whom the feminine body is constructed as spectacle are external as well as internal: we are under surveillance from without as well as withinâ [18, p. 21]. Jeremy Bentham's description of panopticismâthe centralised prison system, with a guard at the centre, and prison wings leading outwards like spokes of a wheel, which permits no escape from the surveillant gazeâhas been used as a metaphor for this external gaze [16], which comes to be internalised as self-regulation. The external gaze which pervades cultural discourse and institutional practices, and is taken up by significant others in our lives, can thus act to position us as mad, bad or dangerous because of inhabiting a fecund bodyâa positioning which many women take up, and reinforce as truth through this process, even if this is unintentional. For as Bronwyn Davies and Rom HarrĂ© outline in their seminal paper on positioning theory:
Positioning as we will use it is the discursive process whereby selves are located in conversations as observably and subjectively coherent participants in jointly produced story lines. There can be interactive positioning in which what one person says positions another. And there can be reflexive positioning in which one positions oneself. However, it would be a mistake to assume that, in either case, positioning is necessarily intentional. One lives one's life in terms of one's ongoingly produced self, whoever might be responsible for its production. [19, p. 48]
This analysis goes beyond the individual woman, for the fictions framed as facts that circulate about the fecund body are central to the definition and maintenance of social order. As Judith Butler argues, âwhat constitutes the limit of the body is never merely material, butâŠthe surface, the skin, is systematically signified by taboos and anticipated transgressionsâŠthe boundaries of the body become the limits of the social per seâ [13, p. 105]. She is drawing on Mary Douglas [20], who argued that the limits of the social are defined by that which is âout of placeââsubstances deemed dangerous and polluted, which threaten the symbolic sense of order, yet through their containment and control, function to rationalise beliefs, maintaining social divisions and order:
ideas about separating, purifying, demarcating and punishing transgressions have as their main function to impose system on an inherently untidy experience. It is only by exaggerating the difference between within and without, above and below, male and female, with and against, that a semblance of order is created.
[20, p. 4]
The margins of the body, in particular the markers of fecundity...
