word flesh

“The Fairy Wedding" by Hilda Cowham c.1923 

Both, screen captures from Ms. 45, directed by Abel Ferrara, 1981.

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Medical anthropologist Thomas Csordas would call this a “somatic mode of attention,” the way that bodies are in tune with other bodies or their relation to the world. We don’t give our bodies enough credit: they are dynamic, they are lived, they are more than the passive objects upon which violence finds its expression, as rationality would have it. But in our society, rationality overrides embodiment. How many cases of assault or rape have we heard of in which we learn that the victim had previously filed a report against her attacker, only to have it dismissed at the time because there was not enough evidence for the police to act?

Amanda Mae Yee, from Bad Vibes, for The New Inquiry, February 2015. Via.

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“For me, the insistence that misandry is mostly only a joke undermined its most potentially subversive quality: women’s unequivocal assertion of their own rage.” Misandry-as-meme, Shane suggests, lets people off the hook because of its jokiness, its exclusivity, and its ironic impotence. But Shane sees a future for misandry as praxis: “My larger hope,” she says, “is that we find a way of engaging with each other that uses misandry’s cathartic power, condemnation of masculinity, and emphasis on female strength towards a more long-term restorative end." 

Chelsea G. Summers, from The Year in Mala Tears, for Vice, December 2015.

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Time and again I, too, have felt so full of luminous torrents that I could burst - burst with forms much more beautiful than those which are put up in frames and sold for a stinking fortune. And I, too, said nothing, showed nothing; I didn’t open my mouth, I didn’t repaint my half of the world. I was ashamed. I was afraid, and I swallowed my shame and my fear. I said to myself: You are mad! What’s the meaning of these waves, these floods, these outbursts? Where is the ebullient, infinite woman who, immersed as she was in her naiveté, kept in the dark about herself, led into self-disdain by the great arm of parental-conjugal phallocentrism, hasn’t been ashamed of her strength? Who, surprised and horrified by the fantastic tumult of her drives (for she was made to believe that a well-adjusted normal woman has a … divine composure), hasn’t accused herself of being a monster? Who, feeling a funny desire stirring inside her (to sing, to write, to dare to speak, in short, to bring out something new), hasn’t thought she was sick? Well, her shameful sickness is that she resists death, that she makes trouble.