Insomnia, Take Five Thousand Eight Hundred and Twelve

Ack. Again, insomnia rules my life. I am subject to the whim of a tiny brain fever, I think. In the 19th century, they would have hydro-blasted me before putting me under strict bed rest (ah, the irony). I am addled by my not-yet completed chapter. I am constantly seduced away from ethnology and 19th century American social stratifications by the lure of gynecological practice and discourse, Kara Walker's new installation and film in L.A., dissection and the eroticization of innards; the way men's obsessions with a woman's interiors transmutated from metaphorical to literalized, and the way midwifes were criminalized in order to make way for the "hard," masculine science of gynecology. I'm fascinated by tissue and dissections and how signs of interiority were contextualized by medical signifiers, but how these signifiers (and their construction of meanings for these signs) was purely arbitrary (after all, 19th century science could only actually see the correlation between exterior symptoms and interior disease once the subject was dead--for that matter, only once dissection was practiced legally and sanctified by the medical community). The symptom (the sign) and the cause of the symptom (doubly signified) were subject to analysis, subject to a linear set of signifiers. The body was seen as a radically illegible text, made radically legible through the social constructions of medicine and science. A confounding paradox, indeed. Charles Meigs argued that a white woman's epideral layers were so drastically altered when she was sexually fertile that her epideral layers resembled that of a Black man. Gender was racialized through science and medicine, and race was certainly pathologically codified. Women were just fucked (pun intended). And along comes Kara Walker....In her silhouettes, Black women are tucked under the skirts of southern belles, their faces buried in white crotches; in turn, white and black men suckle from their breasts. These women slit their wrists and piss and shit all over the art gallery walls. In these moments, the burden is lifted from the shoulders of Black women as either seducer of white slaveholders or pitiful victims of white slave-holding violence. Ms. Walker negotiates the edges around these representations. I liken her work to Octavia Butler's _Kindred_ wherein a Black woman in the 70's is transported back in time in order to save the slave-holding ancestor. By the end of the novel, she sits and waits in the 70's, desiring with her whole being to return to the 19th century, to the company of the slave-holder. The last transport from 19th to 20th century occurs when he attempts to rape her. Still, she desires a return to him and to the 19th century. As horrific as it may seem, Walker suggests that sexual violence presents itself as a titillation for both parties. An enjoyment that kindles shame, a shame that wrecks a woman's body so much more than the sexual assaul, indicating that the true violence (perhaps) is the way sex is signified and not the actual physical act. Gynecological exams function similarly, I think: they are both keenly uncomfortable and a site for potentially exquisite pleasure. However, they are sanctioned (like early dissections) for their medical import and are, therefore, not acts of violence. But I ask: what is the difference between the insertion of an unwanted dick and the insertion of an unwanted, cold, clinical speculum? Simple: social construction of acceptable sexual acts. My dissertation director, after I had told her that I was oddly aroused by an exhibit of 19th century gynecological tools in a museum in Philadelphia, told me that I would love giving birth to a child because you get fisted in the process. These medical moments are so hotly charged with shame and an awareness of medical and physical violence; yet, I think they also serve as oddly, highly sexual moments of self-determination and aggressive agency--if you let them be. Ms. Walker is aware of this razor-edged argument, I think. I am so very, very curious to see what she has in store for us all on Saturday night.