Extracts from...
The Lesbian Body:
A discussion of disgust and its potential subversions
London Contemporary Dance School 2019
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Written as final dissertation/ negotiated project in final year of undergraduate.
Bodily Boundaries
Judith Butler (1990) uses arguments from Mary Douglas to discuss homophobia and discomfort with homosexuality. For Butler, Douglas suggests that ‘the boundaries of the body become … the limits of the social per se.’ (Butler, 1990, p. 179). Butler argues that this can explain homophobia; ‘throughout the media’s hysterical and homophobic response to the illness {AIDS} there is a tactical construction of continuity between the polluted status of the homosexual by virtue and the disease as a specific modality of homosexual pollution.’ (Butler, 1990, pp. 179 - 180). The constructed notion of the ‘polluted status’ of the ‘homosexual body’ means the ‘homosexual body’ becomes synonymous with the diseased body.
The homosexual body is assigned a polluted status because this body breaks bodily boundaries. It breaks bodily boundaries through the act of homosexual sex. This sex challenges permeability, the homosexual body is not a stable body because of the permeability of the sex act; ‘the construction of stable bodily contours relies upon fixed sites of corporeal permeability and impermeability.’ (Butler, 1990, p. 180). Homosexual sex breaks the sedimented ideas of these ‘fixed sites’ of bodily permeability. Butler argues that anal sex between men is an example of this. ‘If the body is synecdochal for the social system per se or a site in which open systems converge, then any kind of unregulated permeability constitutes a site of pollution and endangerment.’ (Butler, 1990, p. 180). This is clear in anal sex between men, in that the act breaks the boundaries of what is accepted about bodily boundaries in society.
Gendered Boundaries and Dildos
The lesbian body is ‘disgusting’ because it blurs boundaries and deregulates bodily exchanges, but it also blurs and deregulates what it means to be inside a gendered body. […]
Sex and sexuality has been used to control people: ‘Sex has become such a part of plans for power that the discourse on masculinity and femininity, as well as techniques of normalizing sexual identity, have turned into governmental agents of the control and standardization of life.’ (Preciado, 2013, p. 70). As we have seen with Butler, the standardisation of what bodily behaviour is acceptable, works as a key component in maintaining power. To normalise some bodily behaviours, and to make some ‘other’, maintains the hierarchy of placing some bodies above others. I propose that some bodies that do not pose challenges to gender norms and don't threaten the binary, regulated, sedimented systems of 'gender'. These bodies become valued more (compared with those that do threaten binaries), within the system of hierarchized bodies.
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Jeanne E. Hamming’s Dildonics, Dykes and the Detachable Masculine (2001), supports the argument that culturally the cis-male body maintains power due to the possession of the phallus. The cis-female body is considered an inferior variation of the cis-male body, and the vagina is not perceived as a possession but as a lack. Hamming is here drawing on a history of psychoanalysis which understands gender only in terms of the penis and the threat of castration. The cis-lesbian body is a ‘female’ body and so doesn’t have a phallus but also doesn’t reflect back male desire by organising itself around lack.
Citations
Butler, J. (1990). Gender Trouble. Oxon: Routledge.
Hamming, J. E. (2001).' Dildonics, Dykes and the Detachable Masculine'. The European Journal of Women's Studies, 8(3), pp. 329 - 341.
Preciado, P. B. (2013). Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era. New York: Feminist Press.