Talking Gender

Public Images, Personal Journeys, and Political Critiques

Nancy A. Hewitt, Jean Fox O'Barr, Nancy Rosebaugh, Nancy A. Hewitt, Jean Fox O'Barr, Nancy Rosebaugh

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2000
• Print ISBN: 9780807845974, 9780807822883
• eBook ISBN: 9780807866795
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Talking Gender assesses the state of women’s studies in the 1990s. The contributors write from the perspective of their own academic disciplines and experiences, but they also address more general issues of women’s lives and circumstances. The result is a broad picture of women’s studies and feminist scholarship, which emerge as a rich, if sometimes dissonant, chorus of voices. These original essays cover a range of topics and a variety of times and places: images of women inherited from Roman oratory, visual images from cultures of trauma; verbal imagery in today’s pornography debates; political and social identities in the state of Israel; boundaries between private and public lives of African American women leaders; voices and audiences of African American women writers; stereotypes of HIV-positive women; what women’s studies can teach men about themselves; and the place of women in global industry. The introduction and conclusion place the collection within the context of historical debates in women’s studies and suggest some new directions for the field. The contributors: Cynthia Enloe (Clark University) Sara M. Evans (University of Minnesota) Kathy E. Ferguson (University of Hawai'i at Manoa) Karla F. C. Holloway (Duke University) Michael S. Kimmel (SUNY-Stony Brook) Mandy Merck (London) Barbara Ogur (Cambridge Neighborhood Health Centers) Amy Richlin (University of Southern California) Kristine Stiles (Duke University) Deborah Gray White (Rutgers University).

Originally published in 1996.

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Shaved Heads and Marked Bodies

Representations from Cultures of Trauma

Kristine Stiles

A multitude of representations and cultural productions emanate from social and political events located in, and imprinted with, trauma, the ancient Greek word for wound.¹ These images and attendant behaviors constitute the aggregate visual evidence of the “cultures of trauma,” a phrase I want to introduce to denote traumatic circumstance that is manifest in culture, discernible at the intersection of aesthetic, political, and social experience.² While research in traumatogenesis has proliferated during the past two decades, few have examined the cultural formations that result from, and bear illustrative witness to, the impact on world societies of the ubiquitous wounds of trauma. Meditating on the history of trauma, British psychiatrist

Michael R. Trimble observed that its “etiology and pathogenesis . . . remains invisible” (my emphasis) .³ Yet, however invisible its origin and development, I maintain that the cultural signs of trauma are highly visible in images and actions that occur both within the conventional boundaries of visual art and in the practices and images of everyday life. This essay explores two of these sites: shaved heads and marked bodies.

Trauma may be defined concisely as “an emotional state of discomfort and stress resulting from (unconscious and conscious) memories of an extraordinary, catastrophic experience” that shatter “the survivor’s sense of invulnerability to harm.”⁴ War, with its institutions and practices, is a ubiquitous source of trauma. But the genesis of trauma is not limited to the effects of war since the abuse of bodies destroys identity and leaves results parallel to war and its consequences. For several centuries trauma was diagnosed as neurosis.⁵ But the term “post-traumatic neurosis,” used to describe the symptoms of shell-shocked World War I veterans, was changed to “post-traumatic stress disorder” (PTSD) in the 1970s when the symptoms of Korean and Vietnam war veterans began to be diagnosed as stress.⁶ This diagnosis refers to a heterogeneous group of causes with a homogeneous set of behaviors: disassociation, loss of memory coupled with repetitive, intrusive, and often disguised memories of the original trauma, rage, addictive disorders, somatic complaints, vulnerability, guilt, isolation, alienation, detachment, reduced responsiveness, inability to feel safe or to trust, and numbing.⁷ Causes include war, shock, concentration camp experiences, rape, incest, sexual abuse, racism, shocks related to natural disasters or accidents, prolonged periods of domination as in hostage and prisoner-of-war situations, and the brutal psychological conditions perpetrated by some religious cults. I do not want to suggest that the omnipresence of trauma means that all traumatic experiences are the same. But if one considers the genocide of Cambodians, Indians and Pakistanis, Bosnians, the Kurds, or blacks in the United States, or the cultural influence of the “disappeared” among Argentinians, Chileans, and El Salvadorans, or the Boat People of Vietnam and Haiti, or the effects of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, then the occurrence and advance of trauma is staggering and global. Indeed, the world’s some 40 million refugees, most of whom are women and children, offer a material image of trauma. If I were to identify the capitals of the cultures of trauma, they would be such places as the second-largest city in Pakistan or the third-largest city in Malawi, both of which are refugee camps!⁸

At the nexus of the cultures of trauma is the highly celebrated new world order, which, I think, did not begin with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, but with the ethos of the Holocaust and nuclear age. The epoch of the Cold War and its aftermath might be understood as an age of trauma whose threats increase exponentially, especially with the grim reality of the thriving global business in weapon-grade plutonium and enriched uranium contraband and such nuclear-industry disasters as Three Mile Island (1975) and Chernobyl (1986).⁹ In this regard, the U.S. response to the so-called rape of Kuwait was, perhaps, as much an excuse to dismantle Iraq’s nuclear-weapons capacity as it was to restore Kuwait’s sovereignty. Where such continuous peril exists, trauma is constant. The task is to undermine its invisibility. For its concealed conditions, its silences, are the spaces in which the destructions of trauma multiply.

My past research attended to the impact of destruction in the formation of works of art that grew out of violent experience.¹⁰ In particular, I studied the use artists made of their bodies as the primary signifying material of visual art performances, actions removed from the context and history of theater. While certain antecedents in futurism, dada, the Bauhaus, and surrealism exist for this historically specific phenomenon, it developed as a viable independent visual art medium in Japan, Europe, and the United States in the 1950s and, I think, must be correlated directly to the corporeal threat experienced by populations living in the geographical spaces most terrorized with destruction.¹¹ The actualization of destruction in performative works of art was a cultural sign, I suggested, a techne for making one’s life into an aesthetic coefficient of survival. Such art not only bore witness to various survival strategies by converting invisible trauma into a representation, but, more immediately, into a presentation. Simultaneously representational and presentational, this art offered an alternative paradigm for cultural practices, one that appended the traditional metaphorical mode of communication, based on a viewing subject and an inanimate object, to a paradigm of exchange, based in the connectedness implied by metonymy. In this model, the human body held the potential for an exchange between individual subjectivities.

While I concentrated on the unprecedented physical and material violence and destruction that artists used, paradoxically, as the creative means for making art, that research was confined generally to the topic of war. Typically, although not exclusively, questions related to the interconnection between sexuality, identity, and violence I filter through that lens. Now my work examines the shared symptoms that result from the interrelated causes of trauma in war and sexual violence. This work poses such questions as what are the visual codes of trauma? and how does an understanding of these representations facilitate knowledge of the cultural effects of trauma? Such questions are not, however, concerned with the history, methodology, or therapeutic aims associated with either the research or practice of art therapy, practice that involves the treatment of individual cases. Nor does it engage in a psychoanalytic analysis of individual works of art. Rather, I seek to map the behavioral symptoms identified with trauma onto cultural representations and actions produced in conditions where trauma occurs. For I reason that the heterogeneity of traumatic causes that results in a homogeneity of symptoms may equally produce a heterogeneous body of images and actions that can function as homogeneous representations of trauma.

This study explores how visual responses to trauma may assist peoples of diverse individual, social, and political experiences in arriving at a shared language from which to construct different cultural, social, and political institutions and practices. In seeking to identify a shared body of visual representations of trauma, I have no lingering desire for holistic humanism or any need to attempt the constitution of false homogeneous communities. Rather, the goal is to acknowledge the growth and development of global networks of information-sharing systems and shared ecological concerns, and to reclaim for visual art the powerful role it is capable of playing in the development of a global humanitarian discourse of humane concern—a role threatened by the disempowering conditions of the economies and markets of art and usurped by the cynical denials of art’s contemporary efficacy by many theorists of postmodernism. Identifying the visual results of cultures of trauma may hasten development of shared cultural terms through which to address disparate cultural events. Transforming visual representations into textual analysis may increase insight into, and compassion for, suffering, which is the first and necessary stage for reform.

This essay considers two sites within the cultures of trauma. Shaved heads is a representation that refers both to an image and a style resulting from a wide variety of social and political experiences outside of the context of the visual arts. Marked bodies is a representation that pertains to the performative paradigm that developed within the visual arts, an aesthetic practice that I believe is rooted deeply in cultures of trauma in accordance with larger political frames of destruction and violence.

Image 1: The community gathered in French towns and villages to shear her head with animal clippers and then smear the sign of the swastika in soot on her bald forehead. The citizens judged her a “horizontal collaborator” for having sex with German soldiers during World War II. Denigrated and denounced as a whore, she was even stripped naked sometimes before being paraded through town, a token of the emblematic territories, defamations, and controls of war. She remained solitary amidst the molesting, persecuting assembly, exiled in a particularly sordid historical moment in a throng of her countrymen and women.

Horizontal collaborators served as metonymic signifiers for the “vertical collaborators” who, under the Vichy government, maintained an upright appearance while they capitulated to the Germans, raised their hands in the Nazi salute, and welcomed “the New Europe” into their beds. These women with shaved heads were used as communal purgatives, scapegoats for the French who themselves had whored for jobs in Germany, for extra food, and for peacetime amenities, especially during the years 1940 to 1943. In 1944 and 1945, photographers Robert Capa and Carl Mydan documented the terrible brutality to women accused of sexual collaborations with the Germans; and Marcel Ophuls included documents of one such incident in the town of Clermont-Ferrand in his 1969 film The Sorrow and the Pity.¹² Female collaborators whose crimes were not sexual were not treated with the same kind of corporeal violations as the horizontal collaborators, whose primary sedition was to have slept with the enemy. The ritual scrutiny by French communities of the intimate affairs and bodies of “their” women suggests that these women’s crime was vulvic, the vaginal betrayal of the patrimonial body of the State. The assault on, and psychological domination of, the female body and the photographic and filmic records “taken,” or “shot,” of her display on communal viewing stands all typify physical and scopic aggression linked to sexuality, especially sanctioned in the “theater of war.”¹³ War condones and ritualizes the destruction and occupation of territories and bodies. Marked as properly owned by the community, the shaved head confirms feminist’s observations that wars are fought for, among other things, privilege to the bodies of women.¹⁴

The visual discourse of the phallocratic order may be seen in the shaved female head, the site where rule by the phallus joins power to sexuality.¹⁵ Phallic rule is fundamental in cultures of trauma and forms the nexus between war and sexual abuse, a site where assaults on the body and identity produce similar traumatic symptoms. In his important new book Shattered Selves: Multiple Personality in a Postmodern World, political theorist James M. Glass argues that the justification for taking women issues from the same “perversion of power and the arrogance of patriarchal assumptions over the possession of women” that results in incest and other kinds of sexual abuse. He concludes that “to the extent that power moves beyond its ordered field and beyond its respect for the lives and bodies of others, it is not much different from political forms of power which define sovereignty as the infliction of harm, the punishment of bodies, and the depletion of life.”¹⁶

Nowhere is this conjunction more agonizing than in the testimony of Bok Dong Kim, a Korean military “comfort woman” (jugun ianfu), one of the many Asian women abducted for sexual service during World War II by the Imperial Army under the name of the Japanese emperor. Kim testified about war crimes against women on June 15, 1993, at the Center for Women’s Global Leadership during the International Conference on Human Rights in Vienna. She explained that after her body was unable to continue to provide sexual services for as many as fifty soldiers a day, her blood was used in transfusions for the wounded. The comfort woman provided the furniture of sex, and her body, when broken, became a mere blood bag from whose veins the life of one woman was drained into the health of many men. The ferocity of her experience is unbearable and related to the pornography now being made of the rapes of Bosnian women conquered as territory, possessed, and displayed.¹⁷

Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clement, French feminist theorists, identify the “intrinsic connection . . . between the philosophical, the literary . . . and the phallocentric”—which, they argue, is a bond “constructed on the premise of woman’s abasement [and] subordination of the feminine to the masculine order.”¹⁸ Shaved heads signify humiliation, a visual manifestation of a supralineal condition of domination and power that joins war and violence to the abuses of rule by the phallus. The doctrine of male hegemony is global and founded in the texts of organized world religions. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, this instrument is the Bible:

I want you to know that the head of every man is Christ; the head of a woman is her husband; and the head of Christ is the Father. Any man who prays or prophesies with his head covered brings shame upon his head. Similarly, any woman who prays or prophesies with her head uncovered brings shame upon her head. It is as if she had had her head shaved. Indeed, if a woman will not wear a veil, she ought to cut off her hair. If it is shameful for a woman to have her hair cut off or her head shaved, it is clear that she ought to wea...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Talking Gender
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• How Putting the Man in Roman Put the Roman in Romance
• Shaved Heads and Marked Bodies: Representations from Cultures of Trauma
• MacKinnon’s Dog: Antiporn’s Canine Conditioning
• Writing “Kibbutz Journal”: Borders, Voices, and the Traffic In Between
• Private Lives, Public Personae: A Look at Early Twentieth-Century African American Clubwomen
• Classroom Fictions: My Tongue Is in My Friend’s Mouth
• Smothering in Stereotypes: HIV-Positive Women
• Men and Women’s Studies: Premises, Perils, and Promise
• Feminists Try On the Post–Cold War Sneaker
• Afterword
• Notes on the Contributors
• Index