Introduction: Towards a Fluid Body

TOWARDS A FLUID BODY

The pathologised female body is fertile ground for abjection, but to assign my fears of my corporeality to innate abject horror at the sight of my sick body would be to ignore the social and cultural factors that inform the perception of women’s bodies. I recall that Hysteria derives from the Greek hystera, meaning ‘womb’, and that such an affliction was thought to be caused by a wandering uterus.4 The female anatomy is seen to be inherently troublesome and at the root of feminine deviance; therefore my mysterious and mischievous organ embodies the historical weight of the pathologisation of the female anatomy. With its mutatious form and double body my womb signifies duality, a two-ness, an unwholeness within me. ‘The Double is a complex even riddling concept; it can mean a second self, or a second existence, usually coexisting in time.’5 The Uterus Didelphys is a potent image of duality that manifests woman’s slippery and duplicitous ‘nature’, exploiting a societal fear and apprehension regarding the female body. To be dual, unwhole, multiple, rejects binary identity and embodiment. Witches with human bodies and magical powers, shape-shifters with an animal form and monsters with multiple heads incarnate this doubling of self. As Luce Irigaray teaches us, ‘we haven’t been taught, nor allowed, to express multiplicity.’6 To be double, to be more than one, to be multiple is to transgress.

A ‘vortex of summons and replusion’7 defines the abject and therefore situates it within a duality, a pulling and pushing of self. The female body is at the crux of the abject as it is simultaneously seductive and repulsive and has powers of doubling through processes of gestation and birth. The pregnant female body is the ultimate provocation of the abject as the fetus is between the inside and outside of the mother’s body, that is to say, it’s between the subject and object. It is this boundary violation which gives the abject its strength. As Laura Mulvey explains, ‘although both sexes are subject to abjection, it is women who can explore and analyse the phenomenon with greater equanimity, as it is the female body that has come, not exclusively but predominantly, to represent the shudder aroused by liquidity and decay.’8

Julia Kristeva’s and Mary Douglas’ work on abjection provides a baseline thread that runs through this writing. I am interested specifically in these corporeal waters and bodily materials which provoke abjection, as well as their sticky correlation with the female body. I oscillate between the terms fluidity, liquidity and watery-ness when referring to bodies and bodily fluids as a means of recodifying the abject body within language. Perceiving and writing bodies and identities as water, fluid or liquid speaks succinctly to the texture of the bodies and identities that I discuss in the preceding chapters. This writing is an exploration of spillage, porosity and liquidity within a tentacular analysis of bodies, fluids and language. I wish to distil the essence of what somatic discharges represent in their very materiality. The definition of the abject body is usually a female body undertaking a process of physical change, where fluids are released or absorbed and threaten to defile, therefore modes of transformation, both somatic and psychic recur within this text.

In order to attempt a recuperation with my body I must reject my abject body and reconcile with my fluid body. To see my body as fluid, beyond the lens of the abject, requires me to reconsider

my internal waters and look past the patriarchal and pathological modes of knowing my body. It allows me to re-examine the phallocentric signals that have told me my body is impure, a conclusion derived from the medical complications caused by my sexed body at age fifteen.

This writing looks at how the fluid body manifests in its physical, social, political and psychological forms. I attribute fluidity not only to femininity but also to queerness since the corporeal flows of the bodies I use as examples within my argument resist the stagnation, sanitisation and fixity associated with phallocratic and binary logic. I use ‘fluidity’ with the awareness that it holds longstanding negative associations of woman as uncontainable, disruptive and unstable, influenced by Hippocratic medicine.9 Of course, it is not that women are of water and men are not, ‘[t]he masculine, too, experiences embodiment as a composition of blood, bile, tears, saliva, perspiration, ejaculate, urine, and breathy vapour,’10 but, it is women’s corporeality that is ‘inscribed as a mode of seepage.’11 Also, pertinent to abjection, ‘it is not the case that men’s bodily fluids are regarded as polluting and contaminating for women in the same way or to the same extent as women’s are for men.’12 Therefore, my focus is largely on the corporeal waters of the female body since feminine fluids are so potently threatening.

Kristeva refers to abjection as a ‘primal repression’ meaning it is built into the genetic DNA of our bodies and evokes a response from the subconscious, one in which evades the symbolic order.13 While I agree with her explanation of abjection stimulating a strong corporeal reaction, I disagree with its roots being solely ‘primal.’ Abjection, in relation to the female body, is learned. Even my current healthy body is still intertwined with the abject simply because it is female. Prior to Kristeva, Mary Douglas teaches us how women’s bodies can quickly slip into polluted territory and contaminate thresholds.14 The female sexual and reproductive functions (intercourse, menstruation, birth, breast feeding) are in constant danger of infringing pollution rules and structure, and therefore becoming sites of abjection. Pollution dangers are at their most potent when her body is open and her fluids are flowing. Sartre sees the female body as a series of wet holes and slimy substances. Her orifices threaten to engulf and consume the male form, enveloping him within her ‘clinging’ texture.15 Her wetness is tempting and dangerous with abilities to castrate. The female body is desired and vilified in the same breath. A stratified and calcified blueprint of patriarchal order has informed my personal fear and mistrust of my body.

Abjection is elicited by the confrontation with one’s own fleshy, mortal, animal-human body. As I have mentioned, the abject operates within margins and limits. Corporeal fluids like blood, mucus, spit, milk, and tears are cited as extractors of this horror as they transgress the boundaries of the inside body, leaking out through orifices, teats and ducts. The female body is abject because of her excretions and secretions. My blood, my mucus, my saliva, my sweat, my excrement, my urine tell me of my mortality, my mutability, my unruly shifting form, my potential for leaks and seepages. Feminine corporeal liquids are subversive substances. My body fluids indicate to me that I am a watery body in a constant transient flow. My body will attempt to heal blockages and stagnation.

Liquids enter and exit in a cyclical, vital movement. To understand my body as fluid is a manifestation of care.16

The fluid body is catharsis. It operates in a similar sphere to how I have framed the abject in the above passages as it centres on corporeal materiality and bodily fluids. However, through the fluid body, I intend to invert the abject’s repulsion toward the female body in a bid to fuse an enlightened relationship with my bodily matter and my entangled connection to my environment. For this, I turn to feminist, queer and post-human readings of bodies, fluids, sexuality, gender and ecology in order to untangle my learning and recentre my conceptions about my body. Through understanding my body as fluid and whilst reading it under the meniscus of material feminism, I look at how my fluid body is of water and connected inextricably to my environment and other bodies; human bodies, animal bodies, water bodies.

This writing explores the fluid body using a mix of personal, academic and poetic voices, drawing on scientific, philosophical, mythological and personal knowledge. My style and tone will shift depending on the subject I am commenting on. My intention is for each section to align in polyvocal harmony.

In chapter one, Ecstatic Spillage, I turn to the fictional text Le Corps Lesbien by French queer theorist and writer Monique Wittig. I interrogate my own heterosexual gaze and personal pull toward Wittig’s imagery of bodily decay and abject corporeal bio-fluids. Using Luce Irigaray’s work on ‘mucus’, I analyse Le Corps Lesbien’s wet and queer female sexuality, subjectivity and identity as an example of patriarchal and heternormative resistance. In chapter two, Permeable Boundaries, I look to Paul B. Preciado as a case study of a porous body. His experience of transitioning genders as outlined in Testo-Junkie allows me to further understand the body and its transformative capabilities, as well as the fluid nature of gender identity and corporeal morphology. I look at how the fluid body becomes physically enmeshed with bio-politics, technology and pharmaceuticals. Although I am very much focussed on female materiality and the cultural weight of female organs in particular, in this section I hope my exploration of fluid bodies affirms my alignment with a non-essentialist participation in feminism. The trans body is the ultimate form of subversion against patriarchy and I’m interested here in a dissolution of boundaries, including the binary dichotomy that binds bodies and identities within rigid ideology, hence my consistent drawing on queer theory throughout. In chapter three, Liquefaction, I use the watery and primordial jellyfish to draw on queer ecologies and to explore notions of posthumanism and entanglement. Within the writing overall, and using Deleuze and Guattari’s and Bradotti’s theories on becoming and nomadic subjectivity, I explore concepts relating to the animal and metamorphosis. In addition, motifs of the double and the split are interlaced within this writing, which I touch on through psychoanalysis and literature. Grounding the first half of the text with an academic reading of both Wittig’s and Preciado’s works, I then shift toward a poetic, fragmented and personal tone within the latter section. In the epilogue, Milk Fever, I turn my attention to my own practice as an artist and my intimate familial narratives that intersect

with my research on fluid bodies. Here, I discuss and map out future areas of research that I plan on undertaking, influenced by this writing.

Writing the fluid body has been a rip tide that has dragged me into myself, into my skin, within the folds of my flesh, into my internal waters - a journey of becoming in itself. Within the text I have included digital images that I have made in the past four months in response to my fluid body. My ambition for choosing literary references without visual elements and discluding the photographs in which I discuss is a choice driven by my desire to implore the reader to feel their own fluid bodies.

‘Let there be writing, not about the body, but the body itself.’17