Chapter One: Ecstatic Spillage

ECSTATIC SPILLAGE

THE PLEXUSES THE GLANDS THE GANGLIA THE LOBES THE MUCOSAE THE TISSUES THE CALLOSITIES THE BONES THE CARTLIDGE THE OSTEOID THE CARIES THE MATTER THE MARROW THE FAT THE PHOSPHORUS THE MERCURY THE CALCIUM THE GLUCOSES THE IODINE THE ORGANS THE BRAIN THE HEART THE LIVER THE VISCERA THE VULVA THE MYCOSES THE FERMENTATIONS THE VILLOSITIES THE DECAY THE NAILS THE TEETH THE HAIRS THE SKIN THE PORES THE SQUAMES THE PELLICULES THE SCURF THE SPOTS.18

Bodies swell and overflow from the pages of The Lesbian Body in thick, viscous drips. I become enveloped in their sticky corporeal discharge, soaked by their violent excretions. I swim in the effluence and roll among the decay of Monique Wittig’s textual body, devouring her foul yet delicious prose, quietly revolted but eager to read on. My eyes linger on the grammatically chaotic descriptions of somatic metamorphosis, as if I’m caressing the cracked epidermis of a scab. Each page turned is a gentle scraping at my edges, a fresh layer of matter revealed. I become raw, exposed, stripped of my skin as the text pushes me to re-inhabit my repressed teenage body. Memories of being surgically cut, drained and penetrated are soothed by tender images of carnal dissolvement and resurrection. Immortal, infinite becomings recite the female body with scientific detail and ravenous devotion. The Lesbian Body marks the impetus for this writing. I begin to unravel and trickle toward an acceptance for my own body and it’s vulnerable material wetness.

This text was suggested to me by a friend who is a non-binary dancer and poet. I first met this friend in the toilets at a Princess Nokia gig and asked to take her portrait. Since then we have collaborated yearly on video and photography projects. Within her femme queer identity she holds the capability to pivot between masculine and feminine energy in a perfect symbiosis when dancing. As she unfurls in rhythmic motion, she finds embodiment that expresses a blurring of the female body to inturn evoke corporeal shapes that are indistinct of gender or sex. Her muscular back, shaved head, wide hips with slow feminine, fluid movements are hypnotic to the point where my heart swells to see the beauty of her performance. The desire she affects within me when I photograph her or film her moving is not sexual in nature, but it does follow the transparent, tangled threads of eroticism, circling around the love and appreciation I have for her and her art, which then spills over into a queering of our collaborative image making.

This anecdotal tracing of my initiation to the text outlines my personal interpretation of a queerness that has informed my reading of The Lesbian Body. A queerness that speaks to Naomi Wolf’s autobiographical stories of female intimacy and the intricacies and complexities of relationships between women.19 A queerness that, as defined by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, operates within ‘the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone’s gender, of anyone’s sexuality aren’t made (or can’t be made) to signify monolithically.’20 Queer is multiple and many, lacking edges and definability, personal to each subject. This is not to say I’m claiming queerness for myself or approproating it to fit into a heterosexual lens, but rather situating my ideologies amongst its fluid essence because its teachings on identity and sexuality are so rich and relevant to all bodies. Wittig’s treatment of pleasure between bodies focusses on non-heteronormative desire. For this reason I follow Mary Catherine Foltz’s approach by oscillating between the terms ‘lesbian’ and ‘queer’ when examining this text.

My friend’s shape-shifting and gender-morphing movements are articulated through the fluid body. Bodies are filled with internal waters comprising of blood, interstitial and cerebrospinal fluid that facilitate the dexterity of our bones and muscles, and the elasticity of our skin. ‘Our bodies are hydrophilic, through and through.’21 Saliva, mucus, spit, snot, discharge, milk, jelly, and excretes form a language of the queer and desirous body in The Lesbian Body. The texture of these biological waters and feminine liquids are vital in Wittig’s queer representation of the female body. Her erotic and visceral descriptions of bodily excavation transform abject fluids into sublime corporeal rapture and deluge.

‘Great fragments of gelatine become detached trembling transparent. The parted lips tyrian pink on the inside let the fragments pass in ever-increasing numbers. The fingers caught in the flux move slightly elongate relax draw their tips along the lips move straighten out palpate the mucous membranes with dawdling movements. The flow becomes continuous, the foamy juice whitened in its eddies rises to the shoulders, the head emerging hair spread out cheeks pale. Now the fingers tap continuously on the membranes. An agitation disturbs the flow of transparent juice fluid water. Abundant salty tears are shed into the flow, I drown, the water re-enters by m/y eye juice tears.’22

Bio-fluids leak from orifices in purifying streams which are embraced eagerly and with ecstatic appetite. By way of the saliva and mucus the female body slips past heteronormative sexuality and desire. Foltz, writing on The Lesbian Body notes:

‘bodily subjects are lesbian because of how they delight in the excessive mess of the body, how they acknowledge and consume excreta and thereby discharge rigid gendered movement by revelling in the bodily fluidity that surpasses the “natural” mandates for women’s pleasure and bodily performance.’23

Queer sex and carnal female pleasure become political embodiments of phallocratic subversion. When Wittig writes about the lesbian body, she is responding directly to heterosexuality as a ‘polictical regime.’24 Her radical prose offers lesbianism as a renunciation of the gendered female body. Wittig see’s lesbians not as ‘women’ but beyond gender because they are outside of the straight contract, therefore saturated lesbian sex and female corporeal fluids are materials for binary resistance. Furthermore, overflowing female wetness disintegrates the sterile feminine body. Bodies melt into the earth as material corporeal compost. However, the bodies in the text are not impure or defiled, quite the opposite. As ‘tears vaginal juice saliva’25 act as salve for bodily annihilation, the fragmented body is coalesced with cleansing female discharges anointed to lacerations, transmuting abject juices into ritualistic purification. The mucus is present within The Lesbian Body to write the whole female body, from breasts to bile, and to decenter the male gaze. Similarly, Luce Irigaray’s use of the ‘mucus’ symbolises female subjectivity and resides in opposition to the image of the phallus. Her philosophy overall, as Braidotti writes, ‘challenges the univocity of the masculine saturated

phallogocentric symbolic and opposes to it the possibility of a virtual feminine symbolic, as a project for feminist women to actualize.’26 For Irigaray, the feminine body is watery and secreting a flow27 with the mucus being a material of symbolic and physical resistance. The gooey filament is enduring and continuous, produced by the body in a cyclical movement. It embodies Sartre’s ‘slimy’ and devouring feminine nightmare. In Irigaray, the abject bodily fluid is sublimated into a vital lubrication to assist the progression of women’s voices, thought and discourse. Her ‘two lips’ speak to a plurality and mutuality of female relationships, ‘between our lips, yours and mine, several voices, several ways of speaking resound endlessly.’28 Wittig’s all female society is concerned with relationships and love between women and their bodies. As Foltz affirms, the text isn’t ridgedly about lesbian identity ‘but a way of moving in relationship to other bodies gendered as women.’29 For me, as a heterosexual woman, this text provokes a recalibration of how I see my own female body and its fluids, teaching me to revel within my own corporeal waters, exclusive to the abject. The Lesbian Body remedies the stagnant trauma of discovering my deviant female anatomy during my growth into womanhood within a hospital regime that is still ink stained by its sexist beginnings.30

Fifty years prior to Kristeva’s meditation on abjection, Bataille named spit the ultimate motif of the l'inform (formless).31 Ontologically in between states, neither solid nor liquid, spit, like mucus, is a liminal and marginal substance that pertains to a duality of meaning. Spit and mucus are products of biohazardous waste yet they are primordial fluids containing the genetic DNA coding of the body. They bind signifiers of both the sublime and the abject, pivoting on exaltation and abomination. The gelatinous bio-fluid facilitates the undulating transformations of the bodily forms, from human to beast and back again, through somatic corrosion and rebirth. The Lesbian Body shows the female body as protean and elastic, lacking distinct edges, capable of reconfiguring form - defying shape, species and even death.

This perception of female morphology as formless and unstable is present within ancient philosophy such as Plato and Aristotle. As Anne Carson has noted, this mistrust of the female form can be traced back to Greek Mythology where women were regularly changing shape: ‘[d]eformation attends her. She swells, she shrinks, she is penetrated, she suffers metamorphosis.’32 The women of myth were cursed into monstrous embodiment, had the power to shapeshift into devious animal hybrids as well as cause the transfiguration of others into beastial, creatural, plant or elemental forms through sorcery and witchcraft. Wittig’s reimagination of the Amazon's of mythology as a society of specifically lesbian women with immortal abilities to reform their bodies, can be understood as a comprehension and confutation of such methods of categorizing the female body and identity. In this way, she acknowledges the patriarchal tone of associating women’s bodies and identity with fluidity and formlessness but chooses to twist the tongues of the philosophers to transform and reappropriate such epistemologies into narrative and language devoid of phallocentrism.

For Aristotle, women were soft, pliable matter to be moulded where as men were already formed, hard and solid. This hylomorphic dualism also aligns women with earth, unboundedness and

wetness.33 ‘To be wet is to be unruly and uncontainable.’34 To be unbounded is to appear to have no limits, to be limitless, expansive, oceanic. The phallocentric concepts in Aristotle denote women as chaotically overflowing from their vessels. They threaten entropy and to fold the ‘male form into fatal formlessness.’35 Wittig’s Amazons are in a constant state of flux, spilling beyond their bounds, unfurling from their skins, melting into the earth only to restore their matter. Soaking, swampy female forms embody and exploit the phallocentric fear of drowning in woman's ‘excessive’ body.

The saturated female body melts corporeal boundaries and spins in a continuous state of becoming. With water as her elemental catalyst for transformation, she assumes forms and appears to have amorphous, infinite margins. Following Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of ‘becoming’, Rosi Braidotti’s concept of the philosophical nomad is centered on fluidity, mutability and shifting material metamorphosis. The nomadic body ‘is open-ended, interrelational and trans-species.’36 In The Lesbian Body, figures shape-shift to resemble theriomorphic forms worthy of devotion and fear. Bodies morph into black bear, snake and sea creature with the recurring inclusion of teeth, fleece and flanks, central to the depiction of the slippery, lethal and ravenous female-animal body. Braidotti affirms, zoomorphic ‘modes of embodiment’ are ‘pathologized and classified on the other side of normality, that is to say monstrosity.’37 Wittig reappropriates the monstrous feminine from the clutches of patriarchy and misogyny to imbue her bodily subjects with animality and multiplicity. By slashing the subjective I of m/y (j/e) the self is split in two, a fertile incision ready to gestate further becomings.38 Bodies become-lesbian to unbecome-woman at the same time as becoming-animal, unfolding into infinite becomings, performing a constant vortex of identities and corporeal realities. As Deleuze and Guattari note, ‘the only way past dualism is to be suspended “in between.’’’39