Unruly Bodies Research Articles

Encountering Unruly Bodies: Posthuman and Disabled Bodies in Under the Skin

Encountering Unruly Bodies: Posthuman and Disabled Bodies in Under the Skin

Plastic Bodies: Sex Hormones and Menstrual Suppression in Brazil by Emilia Sanabria

Reviewed by: Plastic Bodies: Sex Hormones and Menstrual Suppression in Brazil by Emilia Sanabria E. Hella Tsaconas (bio) Plastic Bodies: Sex Hormones and Menstrual Suppression in Brazil by Emilia Sanabria. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016, 264 pp., $25.00 paper. Grounded in an ethically rigorous ethnographic account of the widespread administration of hormone regimes to manage menstruation and fertility among racially and socioeconomically diverse populations of Brazil’s northeastern Bahia region, Emilia Sanabria’s Plastic Bodies: Sex Hormones and Menstrual Suppression in Brazil promises a uniquely valuable contribution to the concerns that, well beyond the parameters of geography and case specificity, have animated scholars working at the nexus of feminist science studies, trans studies, biopolitical theory, and new materialisms in recent years. Sanabria’s fieldwork orbits the empire of Dr. Elsimar Coutinho, “a polemical and highly mediatized doctor” who has, with much fanfare, “ ‘declared a war on menstruation’ ” (1). Coutinho, professor of human reproduction at the Federal University of Bahia’s medical school, author of Menstruation: Useless Bleeding, and director of the Centre for Research and Assistance in Human Reproduction (CEPARH), is widely influential in his advocacy for the use of long-acting reversible contraceptives in order to suppress fertility as well as eliminate monthly bleeding, which he and his followers figure as medically unnecessary, bothersome, and unproductive. Situating herself within the framework of feminist science studies and participating in the progressive anthropological tradition of “studying up” (Nader 1972), Sanabria’s project uses a framework of plasticity, drawn from Catherine Malabou, to investigate the ways in which sex hormones “are enrolled to create, mold, or discipline social relations and subjectivities” (5) within the intensely biomedicalized Brazilian context. Chapter 1, “Managing the Inside, Out: Menstrual Blood and Bodily Dys-Appearance” performs the contextualizing work of investigating the cultural narratives of menstruation in Bahia, drawing on interviews with over sixty women from diverse racial and class backgrounds. Moving past a simple positive/negative binary, Sanabria is most interested in the “ambiguous aspects of menstruation,” which she argues are often perceived as “unsettling a state of normal embodiment” (43, 44). Sanabria differentiates her goals from existing menstruation scholarship in classical anthropology, which is more concerned with the symbolic function of menstruation than it is with phenomenological dimensions, turning instead to the experience of menstruation and [End Page 255] its management. Sanabria synthesizes the findings of her interviews through theoretical engagements with Julia Kristeva, Mary Douglas, and Elizabeth Grosz in order to consider the materiality of blood itself, arguing that menstrual excretions “continually re-attest to the porous nature of bodily boundaries,” producing such boundaries while troubling “the very distinction between them” (63). The following chapter, “Is Menstruation Natural? Contemporary Rationales of Menstrual Management,” continues in this vein, following menstrual discourse into the clinic through ethnographies of women who use uninterrupted hormonal contraceptive methods as a means of reducing or removing monthly bleeding from their lives. Sanabria also analyzes the language of clinics, doctors, and pharmaceutical companies who advocate such methods, demonstrating that masculinist biases privileging bodily fixity as the norm mobilize a narrative in which medical interventions are called upon to save women from the unpredictable and unsafe volatility of their otherwise unruly bodies. In this context, pharmaceutically managed female bodies are recast as more natural, while “hormonal intervention is mobilized as a means to mold the body back to a purportedly original state” (102). The third chapter, “Sexing Hormones,” opens with a brief foray outside the context of menstrual management toward “more marginal hormonal practices” (107) that illustrate the ways in which hormones destabilize ontologies of sex while always already participating in the materialization of sexed bodies. To this end, Sanabria gestures toward two practices: the largely improvised and unregulated1 use of hormones within Bahia’s travesti and transsexual communities, and the increasingly prevalent phenomenon of prescription testosterone supplementation as a means of for libidinal augmentation for women within an aggressively heteronormative, medically sanctioned paradigm. While a comprehensive account of transsexual and travesti hormone usage in Brazil is understandably beyond the scope of Sanabria’s expertise and present project, her brief engagement would have done well to draw on existing scholarship within transgender studies. Hailey Kaas’s (2016) short essay...

Telling the Flesh: Life Writing, Citizenship, and the Body in the Letters to Samuel Auguste Tissot by Sonja Boon

Reviewed by: Telling the Flesh: Life Writing, Citizenship, and the Body in the Letters to Samuel Auguste Tissot by Sonja Boon Carolyn C. Guile and Susanne Schmid Sonja Boon, Telling the Flesh: Life Writing, Citizenship, and the Body in the Letters to Samuel Auguste Tissot (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2015). Pp. 324. $37.95. Sonja Boon’s valuable study on medical sociability contributes to several academic fields at once: the history of medicine, gender studies, and research into epistolary culture as well as life writing. At its center is the famous Swiss physician Samuel Auguste Tissot (1728–1797), author of the best-selling Avis au peuple sur sa sainté (1761), a practical guide to health, which invited patients seeking medical advice to go for epistolary consultation. The 1,300 surviving patient letters in the Fonds Tissot archive in Lausanne document the Europe-wide response that the doctor elicited from individuals, many of them from the upper echelons of society. As a body of material open to academic consultation, the archive posits an unusual situation for scholars of eighteenth-century epistolary culture: the letters, though written by about a thousand individuals, all have the same recipient. This “body of stories” (4), of autobiographies, these constructions of self, are at the center of Boon’s work on the Tissot archive as a specimen of Enlightenment epistolary culture. She shows how the letters and their authors link corporeal practice and citizenship, perform family and kinship, display physical pleasure and disorder, and stage health as a citizen’s duty. Patients addressed Tissot with manifold queries: “You would accomplish a great work if you could bring to health a respectable mother who is very useful to those who surround her” (85); “The seizure was preceded by an abuse of sweet pastries” (114); “. . . there is something strange about my situation, but of what are hypochondriacs not capable?” (220). Chapter 1 sets the framework for a study that is throughout strongly founded on an array of well-explained theories. It introduces the reader to the Tissot archive in terms of both textual and material criticism, including recent debates about genre conventions of the letter and its liminal nature as well as concepts of autobiography. Thus the tone is set for the subsequent chapters, which look at [End Page 543] various aspects of this “collective autobiography of embodiment” (49). Widening the concern with epistolary culture, chapter 2 starts with the question of how the corporeal self imagined him- or herself in letters at a time when bodily suffering was an inevitable part of life. Five different types of narrating selves are found: the quantifiable, the storytelling, the emotional, the confessional, and the resistant self, all “ideal” types that can overlap with or contradict one another. What is so convincing about this typology is that it is applicable to other epistolary exchanges about bodily reactions and illness, from the confessing Pamela to the moaning Horace Walpole. Chapter 3 focuses on “corporeal virtue” and “embodied citizenship,” describing citizenship as a performance that aims to provide strength for the homeland [patrie]. Thus, in the Tissot correspondence, the healthy male body, for example, is sometimes cast as a virtuous body, one that fulfills its duty. Health becomes a marker of good citizenship, whereas illness caused by overindulgences in luxuries can be read as a visible sign of “failed” citizenship, as posited by Samantha Murray in “(Un/Be)Coming Out? Rethinking Fat Politics” (2005) (93). Unruly bodies, damaged by excess (irregular diet, illicit sexual activities) but also by circumstances such as upsetting events, may fail to be useful not just to the individual but also to the community. Through his medical advice, Tissot rendered service both to his patients and to society at large, as many of his correspondents claimed. Chapters 4–6 concentrate on three major fields in which the corporeal identities brought forward in the letters manifest themselves: kinship and reproduction, pleasure, and nervous disorder. It is in these three latter chapters that the concepts developed in the first half of the book find their full application. Chapter 4 highlights how health-seeking individuals linked discourses of health to matters of lineage and inheritance. Mothers who wrote to Tissot...

The anxious production of beauty: Unruly bodies, surgical anxiety and invisible care.

This study is based on ethnographic fieldwork at a plastic surgery clinic in Seoul, South Korea. Examining the three phases of plastic--consultation, operation and recovery--I show how surgeons work to shape not only patients' bodies but also expectations and satisfaction. Surgeons do so in part to assuage their own anxieties, which arise from the possibility of misaligned beauty standards and unforeseen anatomies, as well as the possible dissatisfaction of the patient. I offer the concept of 'surgical anxiety', which occurs in relation to inherently unruly patient bodies in which worries, fear, frustration, self-pity, cynicism, anger and even loneliness are symptomatic. The unpredictability and uncontrollability of patients' bodies, which generates anxiety for both patients and surgeons, work to constrain the power of plastic surgery and making it inherently vulnerable. This study also pays attention to the invisible work of taking care of surgical anxiety, as practised by female staff members, and surgeons' dependence on these workers. My focus on anxiety is a kind of remedy for the predominant concern with 'ambivalence' in constructivist science and technology studies; rather than continue to highlight the power differentials between experts/practitioners and lay people/patients, this study illuminates surgical anxiety as their shared vulnerability. Thus, this study proposes a new politics of care in technoscience and medicine, which begins with anxiety.

“Cock Mouth Kill Cock”: Language, Power and Sexual Intimacy in Constructions of Caribbean Masculinities

since Foucault's association of language and power or his connection of dominant discourse with social privilege, we have become more sensitive to the ways in which the disciplining of unruly bodies as a means of asserting one's authority and power position has incorporated control of meaning. How gendered bodies, for example, are interpreted and made legitimate to a dominant group becomes central to its assertion of power. Often, however, the very aggression in these discursive assertions or the excessive language performance betrays the slipperiness of this attempt to confer or confirm power. What Noel Cowell has referred to as exaggerated rituals1 includes exaggerated [speech] rituals, as Moji Anderson and Nadine McLean demonstrated in their article 'Straighten Up Your Argument': Language as Shibboleth of Jamaican Masculinity which appeared in the previous issue of Caribbean Quarterly.2 Yet, this very hyperbolic verbal exhibition is an attempt to mask men's anxiety about and investment in the changing norms/roles/expressions of masculinity. In this way, mouth kill cock - in other words, it is what comes out of your mouth that condemns you, or the hyperbolic statements of hyper-masculine men expose their own embrace of the very subjectivities they appear to condemn and their own discursive investments. The more public the display, the more magnified the exposure is. And the very excess in public display seems to be a strategy to camouflage heteronormative and patriarchal complicity with transgressive intimacies. Public speech rituals contrasted with private transgressive intimacies expose the contradictory and complex negotiations of masculinities in Caribbean societies. As a way to theorise the complexity of gender construction in general, and masculinities in particular, Caribbean critics have been making significant use of popular culture. 3 In this special issue, for example, sociologists Clinton Hutton and Rhoda Reddock mine popular music to demonstrate the discursive manoeuvres of the everpersistent patriarchal operatives in the construction of Caribbean masculinities, but they are also aware of the ways in which those very strategies of legitimisation announce patriarchy's undoing. Both recognise the way in which sexual intimacy and women's bodies become central discursive tropes in the construction of 'legitimate' masculinities and in the disavowal of not so much alternative, but more accurately, subjugated versions of transgressive masculinity.The possibility of deviation from gender norms is recognised by those who seek to police these vulnerable stereotypes by their implicit acknowledgment that these are constructions open to transgression. Not surprisingly, patriarchy's fear of women's (and some men's) ability to challenge gender norms is performed in the theatre of sexual intimacies. Because of the recognition of the possibilities of transgression, women's bodies and their expressions of sexual intimacy have been heavily policed by anxious men. Of equal significance is a discursive surveillance - the ways in which the language associated with women and women's bodies becomes a way of marking the feminine as a site of deviance and deficiency and as the boundary line of legitimate masculinities. In this regard, Clinton Hutton's essay begins an excavation of how this primarily patriarchal stratagem works. Hutton locates in 1990s popular street expression and dancehall music what he calls the gyalification complex. In examining the speech rimai of cursing that has elsewhere been associated with Afro-Caribbean men,4 Hutton shows how the female body is marked as a site of deviance from gender norms for some men. By marking these men as gyal, their gender designation is hegemonically repositioned so that their masculinity is brought into question. Via what Hutton calls symbolic castration, these patriarchal and hyper-masculine manoeuvres prepare the stage for violence to the body and in some cases involve making the gyal-man a passive sexual subject in a punishing aggressive sex ritual. …

Disciplining the Unruly (National) Body in Staceyann Chin's The Other Side of Paradise

In 2009, during a period of intense debate surrounding lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) rights in Jamaica, Staceyann Chin published the first memoir of growing up lesbian in Jamaica. While Chin's lesbian identity is a major theme of the text, also important is documenting the child abuse and homophobic violence she suffered. This essay makes visible the connections between physical punishments during slavery (with particular reference to “The History of Mary Prince”), practices of child abuse and homophobic violence in Jamaica, and contemporary modes of recognizing legitimate subjects by the state. In contrast to research focused on homophobia in the Caribbean as largely a product of religious teachings or a relic of the Victorian era, this essay instead suggests that powerful histories of physical control and discipline influence contemporary beliefs about the “threat” LGBT individuals present to the nation. Chin's identity as a woman of Chinese and African descent calls into question a unitary identity or origin story for Caribbean subjects and asks which bodies are allowed to be legitimate citizens of the postindependence Caribbean. Chin's personal experiences are put into the context of larger debates within Jamaica about sovereignty in the wake of US and UK announcements linking budgetary aid to compliance with international LGBT rights norms.

Alterity In/Of Happiness: Reflecting on the radical possibilities of unruly bodies

This paper examines how fat and disabled subjects may be taught to appear as happy through biopedagogies in order to manage shame and disgust evoked by their unruly, non-conforming bodies. We begin by articulating what we mean by “biopedagogies”. We then unpack how the requirement to be happy feeds directly into a neoliberal agenda, which demands we must take care of ourselves both economically and emotionally in order to be considered good citizens. We explore how, in the midst of the requirement to be happy while living in bodies not recognised as inhabitable, we create and find moments of alterity in/of happiness. Through analysing art by disabled and fat activists and artists, we examine how disabled and fat people find happiness in difference, rather than in spite of it while at the same time, hanging on to rage and dull pain within this alterity of happiness.

D/DEAF and d/DUMB: A Portrait of a Deaf Kid as a Young Superhero by Joseph Michael Valente (review)

d/DEAF and d/DUMB: A Portrait of a Deaf Kid as a Young Superhero, by Joseph Michael Valente (New York: Lang, 2011, 144 pp., paper, $29.95, ISBN 978-1 -4331 -0714-6)CURRENTLY AN ASSISTANT professor of early childhood education at Pennsylvania State University, Joseph Michael Valente has written a book that is part autobiography, part autobiographical novel, and part autoethnography work chronicles his as a deaf person struggling with the hearing world, which still maintains a pathological view of deafness. He also discusses the cultural view of Deaf people. Incorporated into each chapter are action, adventure, comedy, and history, genres that make the work very entertaining. He interviewed his family and classmates for their thoughts about his life. He said that he tracked his life as a young deaf kid to my development as a scholar and as a Deaf person up to this very moment that am now realize that this work and this journey will never be complete (11).When he was in elementary school, his favorite teacher told him about the power of words. He recognized then that he had the skills to use his words. are power. Words are superpowers, he relates. I start grasping how words can help me. can defend myself when I'm in trouble, and can come up with comebacks when kids tease me (5). He saw himself as a caped superhero that tries to fit into the world. school and people around him wanted to fix him. They did not want him to use sign language. Learning sign language would be learning literacy, as in reading and writing. He learned that literacy could both lead to punishment and also be a powerful tool: The power of literacy is coveted by both the marginalizers and marginalized (37). He recognized the oppressive nature of those in his school who were against learning sign language.Valente quotes many researchers, including Michel Foucault, who support his points. On page 36 Valente mentions Foucault's (1992) observation that our bodies are a batdefield that forces us to navigate the binary fields determined by normative power/knowledge constructs: we can see in the slapping of children's hands by a teacher under the sway of audism the workings of the humanizing process of normalizing and disciplining the failing, unruly body (38) .Valente remembers being slapped on the hand as a message that signing is unwanted, whereas speech is desirable. He points out that many Deaf people are set back tremendously because of not being able to sign at an early age, which is critical for language learning. According to Foucault, a power struggle exists between Valente and the pathological view of deafness held by hearing people. experiences ofValente and many other Deaf people is that the pathological perspective amounts to a social control that prevents him from being who he really is. Instead, he was trained to be like everyone else - to adopt the view of hearing people who oppose the use of sign language.Valente did not learn ASL until he enrolled in college, where he realized that the cultural view of deafness is very positive. He could see that the other deaf students were quite happy to be deaf. …

Unpacking the discursive Irish woman immigrant in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Newfoundland

From the late 1600s to the early 1800s, Irish migrants journeyed to Newfoundland to take advantage of opportunities in the lucrative Newfoundland cod fishery. Focusing on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, this essay explores constructions of Irish-Newfoundland womanhood as articulated by local British officials, the Catholic Church, and male-centred family history narratives. These discourses located women at the margins of early settlement experiences or rendered them invisible altogether. Yet Irish-Newfoundland women were able to negotiate their own subjectivities within this discursive terrain, finding spaces for identity construction in the disjuncture between rhetoric and lived experiences. Some resided more immediately under the hegemonic gaze and struggled to break free from dominant narratives. But most became essential workers in household fishing production outside the capital of St John's, and their vital contribution as shore crews gave them considerable power and authority both in their households and in the broader community. Performing demanding physical work on stages and flakes (elevated wooden structures) or in gardens and fields, carrying out various economic activities in their own right, they were hardly the unproductive, unruly bodies of British official discourse or the passive flowers of civilisation narrated from Catholic pulpits. And far from being absent from the migration story, they were central players in community formation and the economic life of the island. In this historical context, proximity to/distance from hegemonic knowledge production created variations in identity construction within a group often represented in the literature as homogeneous and powerless.

Scandalous women: Gender and identity in top-notch smut

Examining a diverse range of texts offering controversial representations of female sexuality, this paper demonstrates a persistent link between literary scandal and anxieties about women's sexuality. Texts from Madame Bovary (1857) to The Sexual Life of Catherine M (2001) have provoked various arguments, from debates about the need to restrain the unruly bodies of women to contestations about aesthetic merit, morality, and obscenity. Indeed, the scandalous literature of sexual women is distinguished by efforts to reduce its transgressions into something manageable, whether through naming and categorisation (‘chick lit’ and ‘posh porn’), textual analysis, public censure, or critical excoriation. The desire to manage controversial material signifies a discourse of containment that suggests both women and literature require strict control. As this paper will argue, the relationship between women, literature, and scandal is one marked by both intra- and extra-textual efforts to restrain not only the unpredictability and power of female sexuality, but also the unruly energies of literature itself.

The Birth of the Obesity Clinic: Confessions of the Flesh, Biopedagogies and Physical Culture

The recent construction of a so-called “obesity epidemic” has been fueled by epidemiologically-based studies recuperated by the media and suggestions of the rapid acceleration of obesity rates in the Western world. Studies linking obesity to ill-health have also exploded and greatly impacted our “physical” culture. In this article, I present a series of postcards to summarize the dominant obesity discourse and document the rhetorical terrain of the impending epidemic. I also offer counter-postcards to dispute the postcards’ objective postulations and contextualize the birth of what I call the “Obesity Clinic.” I then characterize this polymorphous clinic as an apparatus of capture sustained by biomedicalization, bioeconomics, and biocultural discourses and speak to its regulation and abjection of unruly (fat) bodies. I conclude with a few reflections about the territorializing nature of the Obesity Clinic as well as what it means for individuals and, more generally, for physical culture and its study.

To feel like an outsider: focus group discussions regarding the influence on sexuality caused by breast cancer treatment

The aftermath of breast cancer treatment, especially the sexual side effects, appears to be a neglected issue in developed society. The purpose of this study was to explore how middle-aged women treated for a breast cancer experienced their sexual identity connected to the community norms and values in the society as a whole. Three focus group interviews were conducted, with a total of 12 women. The discussions were analysed using qualitative content analysis. The main theme to feel like an outsider symbolises the women's situation after breast cancer treatment. They experienced their body in a wholly new unfamiliar way, which affected their sexuality in a deep and profound way. This feeling affected their female roles and overshadowed earlier experiences in life. All their female roles were suddenly vague and this was expressed in various ways across each of the four subthemes: to feel different, the unruly body, eroticism is not what it used to be and re-evaluating. From a nursing perspective, there appears to be a definite challenge to identify the women's own unique sexual needs in the rehabilitation transition and to use the skills from all team professionals to improve sexual health in this context.

Contemporary French Cinema: An Introduction

Originally published in 1996, Guy Austin's authoritative, wide-ranging and accessible study swiftly established itself as an indispensable introductory work for scholars of French films since the 1970s. The book interweaves incisive film criticism with discussion of public and critical reception, technology, economic structures and sociopolitical context. One of the major assets of the volume is its dual focus on auteurist and popular film, which allows for coverage of commercially successful yet critically denigrated genres such as the cinéma du look, porn and comedy. Moreover, any straightforward binary opposition between the cinéma d'auteur and the popular mainstream is troubled by Austin's accounts of films with widespread appeal by directors with auteurist credentials, such as Coup de foudre (Kurys, 1983), and of auteurist borrowings and deconstructions of mainstream generic conventions. The second edition revalidates the study's title by taking stock of the key cinematic trends and research perspectives that have emerged over the past decade and a half. These developments are charted in six updated and two new chapters, which incorporate analyses of around fifty additional films and productively complicate original evaluations of others. In the chapter on representations of the Occupation and colonial conflicts, for example, a revised assessment of La Guerre sans nom (Tavernier, 1992), now criticised for perpetuating a quasi-colonial vision through its shots of Algeria without Algerians, paves the way for discussion of how more recent films such as Caché (Haneke, 2005) tap into the national preoccupation with the repressed trauma of the Algerian War that began to inflect and displace the obsession with Vichy in the 1990s. Subsequent chapters on sexuality, women filmmakers and the polar, fantasy and heritage genres are brought up to date with evaluations of the recent output of some of the most acclaimed, controversial or high-profile directors working in France today, including Ozon, Breillat, Denis, Chabrol, Audiard, Besson, Jeunet, Caro, Morel and Gans, which pay particular attention to the construction of gender, sexual, class, racial, ethnic and national identities. The first new chapter, an illuminating consideration of comedy, spans café theatre-inspired depictions of unruly bodies in films by Blier, Poiré, Blanc and Balasko, Chatiliez's and Klapisch's attacks on the bourgeois family and reflections on national self-images in the Astérix and Taxi series (Zidi, 1999, 2002; Pirès, 1998, Krawczyk, 2000). Picking up where the first edition left off, the final chapter tracks the reverberations of the ‘watershed’ social unrest of 1995 and the sans-papiers affair of 1997 through the phenomenon that has been dubbed the jeune cinéma. Intervening in critical debates about the movement's sociopolitical commentaries on the fracture sociale and fracture coloniale, Austin draws on trauma theory to raise compelling questions about the political efficacy of the ‘realisms’ of Kassovitz, Veysset, Zonca, Cantet and the Dardennes and acts of digital ‘witnessing’ by Varda and Sauper. This erudite and immensely useful new edition showcases the diversity of contemporary French cinema and, in foregrounding the reinvigorated sense of ethico-political urgency driving recent trends and subgenres, provides grounds for cautious optimism about its future.

At a Loss for Words: Televisual Liveness and Corporeal Interruption

Spring 2010 117 At a Loss for Words: Televisual Liveness and Corporeal Interruption Alla Gadassik1 Introduction In the closing days of 2004, the New York Times published a list of “TV’s Best Live Moments” from the preceding year.2 By the night of its release, the list already seemed outdated, as television networks scrambled to bring viewers the first live reports from a devastating tsunami in the Indian Ocean. However, even before its historical relevance became superseded by the natural disaster, the list already presented a very peculiar survey of television.After all, no major events or catastrophes from the previous year were included in its inventory of captivating spectacles—not Hurricanes Jeanne or Ivan; not the publicized funeral of Ronald Reagan or the much-discussed re-election of George W. Bush; not the historical Olympic Games in Athens or the self-congratulatory Academy Awards. Not a single important live broadcast was featured in the newspaper’s year-end reflection. Instead, the list consisted entirely of much more banal events that somehow attained mythical status in public discourse. These included, among others: Janet Jackson’s bared breast,Ashlee Simpson’s lip-syncing embarrassment, Jon Stewart’s political commentary on CNN’s Crossfire, and Scott Peterson’s cold response to his death penalty sentence. This strange selection, which emerged amidst wider coverage of feel-good holiday stories and year-end recaps, is by no means an accurate representation of national political values. Nor do I think that its contents can simply be ascribed to journalistic contempt for television. After all, many of the selected televised moments did receive a frenzy of public attention, and were widely circulated or discussed by multiple media. Instead of dismissing these moments as historically irrelevant products of cultural consumption, I argue that they expose the significant role of interruption in establishing and maintaining the effect of television “liveness.” The attraction of television liveness, as an ideological (or simulated?) media construction, depends precisely on such brief, unexpected ruptures in Alla Gadassik is currently pursuing her Ph.D. in Screen Cultures at Northwestern University in Chicago. She is interested in the encounters between bodies and technologies in early cinema and new media and her primary research considers filmmaking and animation as technologically mediated kinetic performances. She is excited to participate in this interdisciplinary issue, which bridges media studies and performance studies. In addition to pursuing an academic career, Alla also makes digital animation films. She can be reached at gadassik@u.northwestern.edu. 118 Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism television’s controlled daily flow. In particular, these moments, which elicit fascination among media commentators and viewers, are predominantly constructed around representations of affective corporeal disruptions­ —bodies out of control, often caught by cameras that are searching for something else. The interplay of continuity and interruption is a distinguishing, though not technologically determined, televisual mode. The appeal of television liveness (its appeal to and for viewers) is the possibility that anything could happen, that real events or accidents could break through the carefully managed stream of information. Even when television is no longer broadcasting “live,” it relies on this promise (it draws on it and mythologizes it) for its claims of accessing the real. At the center of this promise is the televised unruly body, composed for performance but capable of disruption. These are exactly the type of corporeal disruptions that are captured in the New York Times list: Janet Jackson’s technological “wardrobe malfunction,” during which the celebrity’s body becomes uncontained and uncontainable;Ashlee Simpson’s awkward flailing dance, which the singer performs upon realizing that she is caught lip-syncing; Jon Stewart’s frustrated critique of Crossfire theatrics and his refusal to produce jokes on the show.3 Although these examples are drawn from live broadcasts, they reflect a model of affective disruption that extends to a much broader range of television programming. I will return to them throughout the article, to analyze what they reveal about the role of (failed) performance in generating effects of presence and authenticity.4 Our experience of television liveness is linked to our encounter with “unscripted” affective moments, when words fail and something else breaks through: gasps, pauses...

The Double Guilt of Dueling: The Stain of Suicide in Anti-Dueling Rhetoric in the Early Republic

Although unambiguously illegal in most states, dueling became an accepted honor ritual and even a mark of status among segments of America's elite in the wake of the revolution. Frustrated by duelists' indifference to the rule of law, anti-dueling activists inspired to action by the strange slaying of Alexander Hamilton in 1804, mounted one of the first moral suasion campaigns of the new republic. This essay examines their audacious efforts to build a moral majority against this form of ritual violence by obliterating long-standing notions of the duel as honorable self-sacrifice and instead recasting dueling as a unique form of homicide, a fatal compact of suicide and murder. In doing so, this essay argues, this uncoordinated collection of ministers, university presidents and professors, newspaper editors and assorted other minor public figures played upon growing contemporary anxiety about the specter of suicide, anxiety that revealed a set of deeper concerns about the ability of the young republic to elicit appropriate moral behavior and political participation from its unruly body of constituents.

Recovering "Yiddishland": Threshold Moments in American Literature (review)

Reviewed by: Recovering "Yiddishland": Threshold Moments in American Literature Ellen Cassedy Recovering "Yiddishland": Threshold Moments in American Literature, by Merle L. Bachman. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2008. 326 pp. $29.95. Merle Bachman begins her book with a tender photograph of herself as a baby in the arms of her Yiddish-speaking grandmother. Bachman, a poet and English professor at Spalding University in Louisville, Kentucky, yearns to make contact with the lost language and culture of her immigrant forebears. In Recovering "Yiddishland," she aims "to evoke a felt past, a 'place' to which she feels attached by family circumstance and assigned ethnic identity; a place she feels it is her obligation, as well as her desire, to 'remember.'" Bachman uses the work of several immigrant writers as her vehicle for exploring the contours of that "felt past"—New York's Jewish community, with its tenements, pushcarts, and cafes, between 1890 and 1930. Growing up, she'd been taught that Jewish immigrants had embraced assimilation without [End Page 160] ambivalence, eager to divest themselves of all things Yiddish. But now, as she lingers at the threshold where these writers first encountered America, she finds evidence of a complex resistance to Americanization. Bachman weaves colorful threads of personal, often poetic, reflection into her scholarly analysis. As she shares her close readings, we see her creating and inhabiting a "Yiddishland" of her own. The literary figures she studies become her restless soulmates as she comes to understand that even in its heyday, "Yiddishland" was always "a place neither home nor exile." So it is for Bachman herself—and for all of us who seek to connect ourselves to that once-vibrant world. Exhibit A is Abraham Cahan's Yekl, the 1896 novel that inspired Joan Micklin Silver's film Hester Street (1975). Cahan was the influential founding editor of the Yiddish daily paper Forverts. Bachman shows how the comic tale of the swaggering Jake and his wife Gitl offers a surprisingly nuanced critique of assimilation. Anzia Yezierska's novel Bread Givers, with its vivid picture of intergenerational conflict on the Lower East Side, has long been a beloved staple of Jewish and women's studies classes. Bachman examines Yezierska's lesser-known Hungry Hearts and Other Stories (1920), a collection peopled by "talkative immigrant women with unruly bodies." As Bachman observes these women's painful passage into the American mainstream, she calls herself a netorin, a seamstress whose goal is "to question the 'seamless' trajectory" from the Old World culture into the New. A sense of "in-betweenness" also permeates Yiddish poems about the African-American experience, including several about lynching, by Roza Nevadovska, Alter Eselin, Levy Goldberg, Yehoash, and Berish Vaynshteyn. Bachman explores these writers' "complicated experiences as marginalized, would-be Americans who are perceived (and perceive themselves) as both white and 'other.'" The book concludes with a look at modernist poets (such as Yankev Glatshteyn, Tsilye Dropkin, and, especially, Mikhl Likht) who knew English well but nevertheless chose, in the 1920s, to write in Yiddish for an ever-shrinking readership. Bachman sets herself the daunting task of translating Likht's 16-page experimental poem "Procession Three." If it's sometimes hard to keep up with Bachman on this final leg of her journey, she makes the going easier by bringing us close to the translation process. She lays bare her struggle with particularly difficult stanzas and introduces us to her circle of advisers—native speakers who are themselves sometimes confounded by Likht's nearly impenetrable oeuvre. Jeffrey Shandler's Adventures in Yiddishland: Postvernacular Language and Culture (University of California, 2006) helped us to celebrate our modern-day [End Page 161] experiences with Yiddish and yidishkeyt, rather than lamenting the impossibility of recapturing what once was. By the end of Recovering "Yiddishland," Bachman has succeeded in building herself a home in her grandmother's vanished world. Her book may encourage others to follow her example and put down roots in "Yiddishlands" of their own. Ellen Cassedy Independent Scholar Takoma Park, MD Copyright © 2009 Purdue University

Threads of Hope: The Living Healing Quilt Project

Canada has often been called a mosaic but I prefer the image of a tapestry, with its many threads and colours, its beautiful shapes, its intricate subtlety. If you go behind a tapestry, all you see is a mass of complicated knots. We have tied ourselves in knots, you might say. Too many Canadians only look at the tapestry of Canada that way. But if they would see it as others do, they would see what a beautiful, harmonious thing it really is. Pierre Elliott Trudeau This [quilted] picture represents our grandfather (Raksotha) Kaheroton Daniel Peter Nicholas who was born on April 1, 1901 and raised in Kanehsatake Mohawk Territory, in Quebec. He, and his two brothers, Mackay and Ernest, were sent to Shingwauk Industrial School in the early 1900s. His younger brother, Ernest, died there and was buried at an undisclosed site at Shingwauk; he was 7 years old. Our grandfather told us stories of his time at Shingwauk. Digging for food in the garbage, working very hard on the farm and academics playing a very small part. When rules were broken, he said students were taken to the basement, tied up to the rafters or pipes and whipped. He wanted to go back to visit the school before his death in 1967 but our parents didn't have the money to go. He would cry a lot when he Spoke of Shingwauk. Maybe if we could have taken him back there, our family would now know where his brother was buried. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] (1) How might one read contested histories of nation-building, trauma, and reconciliation through a textile? Opening this paper are two quotations, the first from a former prime minister using the metaphor of a tapestry to describe multicultural pluralism in Canada, the second describing a quilt square that documents a residential school experience greatly at odds with the harmonious spectacle of coloured thread described by Trudeau. use of cloth and textile as a metaphor for the nation--fragmented yet united--has become a popular one. Writes Elaine Showalter, about the United States but with a comment that might be equally applicable to Canada: The patchwork quilt [has come] to replace the melting-pot as the central metaphor of American cultural identity. In a very unusual pattern, it transcended the stigma of its sources in women's culture and has been remade as a universal sign of American identity (169). But although quilts and other textiles might offer comfort, and present strong metaphors of similarity amid difference, they are also easily torn and easily sundered. Even Trudeau notes that the harmonious whole of the tapestry is only seen as such by ignoring its knotted or fraught underside. In this article, I look at the Living Healing Quilt Project (LHQP), organized by Alice Williams of the Curve Lake First Nation (Curve Lake, Ontario) and sponsored by the Indian Residential Schools Truth and Reconciliation Commission. project involved the creation of a series of quilts by residential school survivors and intergenerational survivors and is made up of individual quilt blocks reflecting on residential school experience. I consider the LHQP as an intervention into the collected stories making up the national fabric, wherein the knotted underside of an apparently seamless entity is revealed. To do this, the LHQP is read through a series of locales, institutional spaces, ideas, and metaphors. In four sections--Fabric, Pattern, Piecing, and Binding--the LHQP is analyzed respectively as a document of trauma, an intervention into mainstream normative narratives of nation building, as part of a feminist rethinking of quilts as emancipatory texts, and as a commentary on the role of sewing and handcraft in the attempted creation of docile and assimilated Indigenous children. Running through each of these sections is a consideration of how residential school life produced a fractured sense of home, reconfiguring the domestic residence as an institutional space characterized by the loss of culture and language, abuse (emotional, physical, and sexual), and the disciplining of unruly bodies to the social norms of mainstream white society (Grant; Milloy; Paxton; Smith). …

Unruly Bodies: Life Writing by Women with Disabilities (review)

Reviewed by: Unruly Bodies: Life Writing by Women with Disabilities Ananya Mukherjea (bio) Susannah B. Mintz’s Unruly Bodies: Life Writing by Women with Disabilities, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007 Susannah B. Mintz’s Unruly Bodies provides a much needed discussion of disabled women’s understandings of their own lives, bodies, and identities and of the meanings that their disabilities have and produce in the world—for others who are disabled and for the “able bodied.” As Mintz explains, this book links disability theory with feminist autobiography studies in discussing the illness and disability narratives of eight American women. In his classic work Stigma, sociologist Erving Goffman managed to link the experiences of people with highly visible disabilities (extreme facial disfigurements, missing limbs) with those of people with much more subtle physical anomalies, without diminishing the lives or knowledge of either group. He did so by focusing away from relative physical ability or disability and examining, instead, the concept of social identity and how, in his words, social identity can sometimes be “spoiled” by the body’s failure (refusal?) to conform to the categories and roles that others may expect of it. The disabled body, then, is not so much a determinant of individual value as its presentation, performance, and interpretation are media through which to understand what a society values and how individuals navigate such knowledge. Similarly, Mintz adapts Arthur W. Frank’s ideas that bodies give disability stories their meaning (123) and that the life writing of disabled women are life stories told through the body (9). Mintz writes, “The autobiographers studied in Unruly Bodies are compelling precisely because they write their bodies—their gendered, disabled bodies—as textually produced but also phenomenologically alive” (4). Trinh T. Minh-ha, in Woman, Native, Other, exhorted women of color to resist the seemingly rational, masculinist impartiality of academic discourse by “writing their bodies,” speaking from their own subjectivities, experiences, and practical knowledge as influenced by their physical bodies and the categories and political positions through which those bodies pass. Mintz offers a discussion of the writing of disabled women who do the same. As with Trinh’s work and women of color, the pertinence of this subject and [End Page 315] book, while certainly significant for English language studies and for disability studies, reaches beyond to gender studies, to women’s history, to sociology, and to sexuality studies. While Mintz’s book has much to offer as it studies a spectrum of life writing by contemporary disabled women, it is particularly noteworthy for highlighting the sexual and emotional lives of these writers, aspects of their lives that have been left out of much work in disability studies. Queer disability studies has been one exception to this oversight, but Mintz makes a real contribution by refusing (as do the writers she discusses) to redeem the disabled by presenting them as particularly brave, creative, or wise. Rather, it is in narrating her everyday life that Mintz disavows any need for redemption or constant comparison to the lives of the “normal” or “able bodied.” It is in such mundane reportage that the author is able to “set right” mistakes or misunderstandings from the past; in the case of Denise Sherer Jacobson’s story of parenting her infant son, “The Question of David becomes the arena in which Jacobson can transform submissive . . . behavior into scenes of . . . resolute expression” (148). In discussing Nancy Mairs’s detailed, matter-of-fact writing about her life with multiple sclerosis (MS), her experiences as the mother of adolescents, or her erotic relationship with her husband, Mintz writes, Mairs’s own phenomenology demands reckoning with a degenerative condition whose specific effects . . . force a continual renegotiation of the nature of selfhood. . . . To counteract the essentializing maneuvers of patriarchal discourse, Mairs presents a self both indeterminate and adamantly embodied, capable of becoming unhinged from cultural categories but also defined by the realities of MS. Asking that her readers acknowledge both the ordinariness and radical difference of her “crippled” female self, Mairs exposes the boundaries apparently inherent in [oppositional categories].” (26) Mintz’s focus on life writing as phenomenology and her insistence that the careful reader work hard to strike...

Signing the Body Poetic: Essays on American Sign Language Literature; Unruly Bodies: Life Writing by Women with Disabilities; Writing Deafness: The Hearing Line in Nineteenth-Century American Literature

Book Review| September 01 2008 Signing the Body Poetic: Essays on American Sign Language Literature; Unruly Bodies: Life Writing by Women with Disabilities; Writing Deafness: The Hearing Line in Nineteenth-Century American Literature Robert McRuer Robert McRuer Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google American Literature (2008) 80 (3): 624–626. https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-2008-029 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Robert McRuer; Signing the Body Poetic: Essays on American Sign Language Literature; Unruly Bodies: Life Writing by Women with Disabilities; Writing Deafness: The Hearing Line in Nineteenth-Century American Literature. American Literature 1 September 2008; 80 (3): 624–626. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-2008-029 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter Books & JournalsAll JournalsAmerican Literature Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2008 by Duke University Press2008 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Book Reviews You do not currently have access to this content.

QUEER/MIGRATION

QUEER/MIGRATION