Le Corps

I had an amazing meeting/conversation with JD last night, after we got through the "formal" part of our conversation (looking over my job letter in order to revise it for a 19th c. job and a postdoc, due dates March 1), about what it means to write about the body.

We were talking about how both of us write about the body--but what do we really know about it? She said a friend of hers told her, "you don't really have a theory about the body," and, after she got over being offended, realized she really did not. We could both write about the body, and tell you that it's a malleable text, a fungible object that has no stable referents (despite the fact that entire juridical, scientific, and medical systems are predicated on its staticity)--that it is a canvas upon which race, class, gender, sexuality, etc are projected; that it is performance of identities that are either consumed by or resist consumption by a viewer (and the best is when there's a little of both).

But what does it REALLY mean to write about the body?

She said it only starting coming to her what this means when she started seriously playing soccer: to know one's own form as it moves through a space, and between other bodies, and how this plays out into one's physical abilities (or disabilities), gender relations on the field (ESPECIALLy in co-ed soccer! that shit can get played out), build-up of scar tissue etc. There has been a direct relationship for her between learning how her body moves (and its limitations and excesses) that ahs altereed her theories about the body. You can write about gender and sexuality, and race and class, and how these are represented literarily or in pop culture--but how is all of this altered once you allow your body to collude and collide with other bodies?

She asked me about the burlesque show and if that had impacted my theories of the body in any way. I had not thought about it that way before, but I think she's on to something. It has definitely altered my approach to the way my body moves and is shaped, and I am made keenly aware of it as a female body and all of the sexual ladening, power structures, and semiotics that go along with the act of putting it on (grandiose, sparkling, half-nude) display.

As the conversation progressed, we talked about burlesque as a drag show without cock, and this, in and of itself, poses interesting challenges to body semiotics, gender politics, queer theory, and conversations about sexuality. I am interested in seeing how my daily look in the mirror, in order to assess how the direction I move affects the angles of my body on stage, will ultimately affect the contours of my work.

Perhaps I'll take this up again after the show....

I also discovered that she may be the only person willing to talk to me about Edie. Ha. She also lent me a copy of Edie's rather hard to find film, Beauty #2 (fortuitously tucked in her purse!!) and asked me to be her T.A. in the Spring. Yeah, I love this woman.