X-out Boundaries Private & Public Symbolic Essay

1. Introduction

Gender interactions perplex human beings. Intimate unresolved space, complex background stories and taboos impede subjects’ expression, counteracting and deterring insight capacity. Hindrance to vent and to confront deeply entrenched personal events and feelings in the midst of the public arena heats the cauldron where gender inequalities are brewed and institutionalized.

A reserved and excluding geography of sexuality precludes women, young women, and girls from constructing an alternative thinking, exercising their citizenship, maintaining an open dialogue, and taking subsequent empowered actions (Hubbard 2001:52). Such customary, jagged topography deflects social enrichment coming from forces that could otherwise foster untested foundations of moral progress.

The symbolic essay being presented here aims to provide supplementary support to a discourse of openness and acceptance around sexuality, and to counteract double standards and consequent sex-related harassment, corruption, and crimes against women and children (Saunders 2008:1). It also intends to demonstrate that the stiff and brittle frontiers between what is private and what is public are intimately related to patriarchal values and praxis.

Images, in two different categories, make up the essential product of this symbolic ethnology. They support a form of activism that aspires to elicit a collective change of consciousness in regards to the private/public dichotomy:

A. -informants, who consented to portraiture of their erotic

interactions, showing waist up .

B. Images that artistically compare the sexual organs of tropical plants and of

humans, made possible by the voluntary posing of professional artists.

The following visual-arts and accompanying research work have been assembled here in

Montreal, beacon city, wherefrom women’s studies are generated, broadened, and diffused throughout the world. It is responsive to the present, challenged by issues of corruption, women’s oppression and child sexual commercialization. It aims to soften monolithically constructed vision by motivating a more assertive and vanguard political- will for change in relevance to social interplay within the private/public frontiers.

2. Problem Statement

In the year 2010 nudity and sex are still taboo around the world with the exception of small and localized social groups. Talking overtly about sex raises deep emotional reactions or stern political stands. Binary oppositions, such as those of body and soul, flesh and spirit, instinct and reason, provoke cheerless controversy or mute silence.

Even though our civilization has made large strides in the study and the explanation of non-Western peoples, we find it difficult to talk reflexively, or to question deep-rooted patterns that cause serious social disruption in our own society. This is especially true when such culturally constructed expressions are related to convention, behavior and crimes over sex.

The severity of a worldwide problem to which humanity is just starting to awaken with news broadcasted almost every week about boys and girls abused in all kinds of institutions and contexts, hits our sense of humanity, and makes us wonder, in what kind of fundamentalist and oppressed societies we still live.

Taking an example about a reality occurring in almost every country around the world, I will transcribe some statistics revealed in recent reports pertaining to a public motion carried at the Colombian Congress, pursuing condemnation of crimes related to forced sexual commercialization and abuse of children:

In the last year, at police stations and social institutions, 18 000 cases of sexual violence against children were reported, representing only 30% of the estimated occurrences.

Authorities reckon that there may be 35 000 children under the age of 14, who are sexually exploited and forced into prostitution (El Tiempo 2009).

Throughout the world, as I write in April 2010, it is estimated that 1.8 million children are being propelled into the macabre market of sexual exploitation! And, what is even more scandalous than constructing wider spaces for sex talk, imagery, and openness, is the fact that, according to UNICEF surveys, around 150 million girls and 73 million boys worldwide have been either abused or sexually commercialized (Mojica 2009:1).

On the Internet, pornography, a swelling and mutating mammoth industry, largely disseminated in the last decades, has opened the doors to more tolerant social attitudes toward sexual portrayals. This virtual trade, in 2003, comprised 260 million Web pages, and in 2006 produced 97 billion dollars in revenues worldwide (Techmision 2008:1).

We also know that in this same year, according to studies of the London School of

Economics, 9 out of 10 children of ages ranging between 8 and 16 years have accessed pornography on the Internet, unintentionally in many of the cases; and that in the same year, over 20 000 images of child pornography were posted online weekly (Techmision

2008:2). A pornography that dehumanizes and is structurally violent against women has the worst of effects on children who are discovering their erotic selves.

Children are also confronted with the Primal Scene fear—a locus of observed, imagined or fantasized sights of parents’ intercourse, perceived as a scene of violence happening in darkness and clandestinity (Mijolla-Mellor 2005:1). No doubt, sexual education can benefit from more open artistic representations of sexuality within familial, institutional and cultural spaces.

Understanding the true weight of the above-mentioned statistics and facts raises the deepest of questions in regards to what is wrong in our social order concerning sexuality and how it is dealt with. The emotion and meaning concerning the suffering that children undergo on behalf of the society that still feels pride in basing its values on dire patriarchy (Bailey 2000:388) will shake any foundation.

3. Background

I walk through life as a communicator, as a recognized professional photographer, and as an aspirant anthropologist contesting the expressions of masculine hegemony, which are reproduced in the behavior of men and women among all societies where males are dominant. In this sense, identifying myself with centaur Chiron, who was irremediably injured, and still a healer, I obey an imperative necessity to alleviate by unveiling.

Performing as any other father, I experienced an all pervading foggy and undeterred idiosyncrasy diffused socially and throughout the media, instilling patriarchal values of superficial becoming on an exceptionally brilliant girl who was soundly curious and assertive about knowledge. It rendered her self-conscious, spending precious time almost every day embellishing and trimming up her face, hair and body, insecure and obsessed in front of a mirror.

4. Environment

The use of personal problems for intellectual purposes, the turning of inner debates into social studies, and the dramatization of the essential characteristics of our time, conform a dialectic synergy between self perceived reality and action for change (Mills and Mills

2000:201 in Brewer 2005:672). Bearing this approach in mind, kindly construe from some of the following paragraphs expounding strong statements.

Current means of communication allow broader views of humanity. Glances at peoples’ actions in any corner of the world, or how their self-representations are exposed, reach us in instant image and sound clusters. Social networks on the Web, videos, e-mails, Web logs, self-casts, cell-phones, reality shows, and investigative journalism are some of the tools that are gradually erasing the barriers between the private and the public realms.

Sexual, economic and political power constitutes the principal domain, in which ethical issues are discussed within society. Les bijoux indiscrets (Foucault 1978:77) of modernity, the ubiquitous voice of social response over pan-media information, presses parameters on sexuality secrecy, on economic confidential procedures, and on political murkiness. A haunted ring made of an alloy of social networks and information forces is magically exposing classified, or sensitive, information about familial, corporate, and government realms. This heightens a sense of openness and of visible responsibility with alleviating implications for the social discourse.

The muting of sex seems to have come along with the surge of capitalism as a disciplinary power that commands all bodily forces to production and to the benefit of corporations. The suppression of eroticism by religious morals, likewise, restricted carnal expression to the bedroom of our parents, where they hid to procreate (Dreyfus

1983:128). Women’s dissatisfactions were also confined there.

The patriarchal apparatus has utilized the potential of marketing strategies and communications to maintain masculine hegemony in command of an extreme form of capitalism, which buys, defiles and plunders. This system, for the sake of individualistic and commercial interest, diminishes women and lures them away from power (Krystal

2008:1). Women, therefore, fail to be equally represented at the head of social, scientific and political institutions. Rights of self-determination, earning capacity and political influence of women are still clearly inferior to those of men.

Women are also markedly subservient to men in the realm of mass communications.

Articulated stereotypes in market advertising and entertainment media (i.e. movies, music lyrics, and music video) degrade women’s roles and selves to be perceived as commodities or as incapable. Practices based on the objectification of women have redefined their self-esteem, often overshadowing differentiated abilities and potential, and limiting their perceived, possible realm of action. The lifebuoy-man/luxury-woman culture is a trend that pervades communications exported from the First World (highly developed and influential countries) all across geographic and ideological borderlands

(West 2008:1). Television, within a considerable portion of its broadcast, acts as a giant cyclopean patriarch of greed, spreading cosmetic or combative interpretations and solutions to assorted aspects of life, colonizing home space, collective imagery and values.

The portraiture of women in advertising exploits eroticism combining on-the-brim nudity, textilism (obsessive dressing), and nudophobia (extreme fear of nudity), as a way to incite men to become conquerors and suppliers (Just 2008:1). This pounding elicitation leads men to engage in an awkward and gauche competition in order to obtain women’s favor. Men cannibalize and prostitute themselves to make money any way they can. In turn, women submit to becoming objects, sullying themselves without shame to assure material security or prestige. It is often that in the processes of courtship, conquest, preservation of family values, and material accumulation, the notions of kinship and social solidarity are dropped.

Nakedness and nudity, partial and complete, are stigmatized or criminalized in almost every place in the world (2008:2). This suppression may lead societies to morally acquiesce evasive behaviors, becoming semi-blind or blind to the fundamental causes of the sexual traffic and forced prostitution of children, sexual tourism, child abuse and pornography, and other related maladies as bulimia, anorexia, obesity, and the hyper- sexualization of minors.

The exclusion of sex in most societies as a bodily necessity, as a recreational activity, as an esoteric experience (Benn and Gauss 1998:6), or simply, as a source of personal development, is therefore only considered good when confined to the heterosexual procreative family territory. This moral stance has translated into an ample articulation of repression, which in one of its backlash manifestations, bounces and triggers an explosion of sexual media exposure and of explicitly erotic persons being portrayed today on the

Internet. In many of the cases, such portrayals become identity projects, issued as self- casts (De Voss 2002:76).

Still modeling this landscape of sexuality, a sense related to the contemporary dualistic anxiety between the notions of the private and the public is perceived as increasing under the panoptical surveillance, which the nation-state exerts over individuals. Nonetheless, it seems to concomitantly diminish as the consequence of “knowledge of pleasure, [of the] pleasure that comes of knowing, [of] knowledge-pleasure” (Foucault 1978:77), which arts, media, and public opinion, diffuse. Desire, power, and truth perceptions increasingly constitute a unity set with wider zones of intersection.

5. Methodology

In using conversation as a method of research and of gaining support for this project, I have approached people of diverse ages, backgrounds and walks of life, which I met in different places or during my visual-arts exhibitions. One such exhibition was a liberal space displaying , which compared human sexual organs to those of plants, trying to rescue those from pornography. In this atmosphere, I exposed my hypothesis and my intention to recruit models as active informants, seeking people who wish to get involved in the present project of liberalizing candid bust images of erotic engagements.

The conjectures, which I addressed in these endeavors, and which I have exposed publicly either verbally or through artistic work, have sometimes generated controversy, rejection, and even anger, but they have also managed to achieve agreement. The exertion of power between genders, the actual playing of games on desire gratification, may be chiefly based on the deep-rooted cultural fear of nudity, and therefore, on the anxiety that visual, emotional, and physical proximity, and the expression of its associated feelings, can set off. The power of nakedness, physical and moral, perceived and experienced as a tunic of light (Perinola 1989:255), is not considered anymore a path that enlightens social dynamics. Understanding this concept, all model-informants, out of love for change, posed with zealous and dazzling generosity.

6. Fieldwork Outcome

This research work, image production and exposition aim to explore and to undermine the unyielding division that exists between the private and the public borderlands. This disconnection seems to bolster the damaging secret proceedings in diverse domains: the herein discussed universal pattern of textilism or that of nudophobia, the socially unkind macho expressions, with which the world seems plagued, the cheerless female objectification, and most serious and scandalous at the end of a consequential chain, the sexual crimes against women and children. Patriarchy, as a culture, as a philosophy, as a form of government, in one of the most injurious of its modalities, operates in such a way that seems to travel in intricate and abstruse pathways, and at the same time, materializes widely accepted, but harmful, social and economic mechanisms.

After discussing these issues with potential models for the activist photographic essay explored here, I learned that women, mainly, out of spontaneous openness and of a tender/soft inclination to be recognized and admired in their femininity, show themselves instantly attracted by the idea of being photographed nude or seminude (Pateman

1998:298). Women, more than men, seem to sense a deeper need for a radical social transformation within domains that affect them directly, and this very fact may convey the openness they show by being subversively subservient in the realm of pornography.

For this project, to my surprise and dismay, most of the potential couples that showed themselves quite open to act as model-informants, backed out once the photographic session was seriously anticipated, envisioning recognizable identity in an art exhibition or a publication. In most cases, hetero or homo, it was him who advised not to risk.

For the abridged version of this symbolic ethnography, unfortunately, I cannot transcribe all fieldwork notes where the interactions, reactions, and agreements in regards to talks with possible and actual model-informants are expounded. Readers willing to see the complete research paper and photos, or wanting to further conversation on these or other related topics are kindly encouraged to contact me personally.

7. Analysis

The research on this photography-supported essay has led me to envision the feasibility of developing a visual anthropology theory that could work as an avant-garde telescope to disclose new cultural constellations regarding the private/public notion and making apparent how this dynamic reflects on human visual productions. The deepest intention of the iconographic heritage of civilizations would seem to expose a pattern that conveys the human paradox of revealing without conceding, admitting without avowing, and sharing without dividing—with the hope to avert death.

The dialectics in private/public assumptions attest that there are no social spaces defined solely as public or as private. Nonetheless, the necessity to unveil the sex zones, the actual organs and their behaviors, which can reemerge into society as tools for the remodeling of more respectful and egalitarian experiences of citizenship, becomes, in actuality, imperative, as an acting instrumentality capable of refurbishing male-controlled culture (Pateman 1998:289). The power of the movement here invoked compounds a symbolic key that breaks the enclosures of that which is undisclosed by government and private corporations, and from which political policies and commercial practices emanate. Several forms of legal instruments and activism are already exercising pressure for corporate bodies to infiltrate secret political and economic standards.

Consequently, in trying to amalgamate liberal research, imagery, and compassion at an artistic and academic crossroads, anthropology, a progressive and august science, nears a flaring lance that may permit the igniting of the flamboyant profit making mills under which the seeds of a better civilization have been buried.

Abstracting from the Primal Scene Angst Syndrome (the fear children associate with their parents having intercourse) and from the deepest and conditionings of humans, I imagined and constructed a locus of gestured images that could depict a tender erotic interaction between hetero, homo, or transsexual partners as “progressive Adam and Eve” political symbols.

Such icons of re-informing beauty could invite others to efface frontiers wherefrom masculine hegemony bulldozes into society a desolating enigma of gender inequality, social injustice, and environmental devastation. Certainly, this means embarking on a quixotic task, which seeks to open a pathway through which a stream of information may gush between nature and culture, power and morality, personal and political, temporal and spiritual, and self and unconscious hemispheres.

Superficial beauty and prestige symbols, attained in order to become a visible, valuable body, personify a form of conspiracy; they leak a brand of a dissocializing and contagious faculty that nourishes the avoidance of self-growth and promotes community fracture. Such emblems of bodily power inoculate, in those who attain the coveted aura, a carefree angelical predicament. Una Stannard (1988:94) illustrates such a concept, in stating:

The cult of beauty in women, which we smile at as though it were one of the

culture’s harmless follies, is, in fact, an insanity, for it is posited on a false view of reality. Women are not more beautiful than men. The obligation to be beautiful is an

artificial burden, imposed by men on women, that keeps both sexes clinging to

childhood, the woman forced to remain a charming, dependent child, the man driven

by his unconscious desire to be—like an infant—loved and taken care of simply for

his beautiful self. Woman’s mask of beauty is the face of a child, a revelation of the

tragic sexual immaturity of both sexes in our culture.

8. Conclusion

How many brilliant girls do not overcome patriarchal media’s trivializing effects and are, by method of alienation, deliberately shunned from a uniquely feminine power that could promote world change?

This is far from a concluding question. We know now that for someone to become or to be converted into a fetish, an object endowed by sexual, magical power of attraction, baits or invites enthralling privileges. Such consented embodiment seems to raise the bearer above ordinary bodies. However, charges prove high, values shuffle, and sooner or later the aftermath reflects the blunder back to the personal, the social, or the ecological dimensions. Accepting or exercising, timelessly and with no self-inquiry, any type of charming or empowered objectification is to trespass a muscular castle of kaleidoscope- like warped mirrors, to plummet at the very center of a spherical, gravity-devoid colossal trap of exploitation. No escape.

However, during this tropical, thunderbolt-beset night, in which humanity has chosen to, shut tight its eyes, and while about to rise into dawn, darkness cannot possibly last.

Any sensible father with a young daughter should dare to voice a call that threads a nest of change. Parents who are concerned with their daughters’ commoditization want to know, need to hear, and are eager to discuss, with those behind government and corporation scenes, policies beefing up barricades between the private and public realms.

Nudity and nakedness are regularly condemned in women who dare to practice topless freedom or to breastfeed in public; much less though, in places where mores are not as puritanical or in which indigenous cultures are stronger. Masculine, unjustified law enforcement suppresses these natural expressions of being or becoming. Concurrently, the mastodon patriarchal-run commercial apparatus, which operates mainly through advertising and other currently available audiovisual media, exploits women’s image in convention to all breeds of pathological on-the-brim nudity. Coarse and infantile erotic allusions of men’s power over submissive women fill the media. The hope and the struggle of progressive and bewildered parents, of girls, adult, and young women-to- come bid, invoke and demand more sensible, responsible, and categorical forms of equality.

Societies where gender leadership is more symmetrical in the sexual, economic, and political domains will soon bestow greater tenderness and concern for the third party.

There is no need for patriarchal, socially constructed women in power; rather, we need women and men, politicians and leaders, who can forge a connection to society from sensitive, caring, nurturing, and inclusive tangible attributes and hearts.

Hence, in offering these images to the community, we stand up for the X-out of private/public boundaries:

A change that envisions a leap from individuals’ sexual perplexity and obsession to community-wide compassion, repossession and solidarity “requires a transformation of the inside of citizenship—away from the privatized, de-eroticized, and depoliticized sexual citizen, to one that can accommodate a citizen whose sex is public, eroticized and political” (Cossman, 2002). The break of day towards higher forms of understanding among citizens is an ongoing cultural process of contraction-expansion. Gentle, tender, skimming hands will more rapidly sense the social warmth freeing them from the corporate neo-liberal freeze.

Individuals, families, collectivities, and nation-states have been brainwashed by the fixed, socially and environmentally harmful, material prestige donning, and covetous industry of consumerism. We will, by the power of determination and the robustness of action, outstrip secrecy, thereby prompting a radical transformation and redefinition of local and global responsibility.

Sad, very sad, with the patriarchal and puritanical double standards represented in gymnophobia—the pathological rejection of nudity—a call-out for assistance was voiced to the Campbell Soady Gallery in New York. Invitees were asked to show up textile- or skin-clad to the Divine Nature vernissage, according to their will. A loving, self-reflexive turnout, supporting the mingling of textilists and social-casual nudity, reassured its purpose. Pictures documenting the event were taken.

For this demonstrative exhibition, I created and displayed a body of work inspired by the knowledge that flowers contain the sexual organs of plants and trees; that the whole world recognizes flowers as symbols of goodness, tenderness, and love; and that the sexual organs of the human species are the flowers of our bodies.

I deliberately altered hues on the erotic details of the human body to relate them with those of flowers and leaves, thereby lifting some of the veils covering erotic imagery, with the purpose of revealing the sublime character of sexuality, be it hetero or homosexual.

I dreamt that, by allowing ourselves to admire and interject such images, it would encourage society to adopt a more natural, gentle, and spiritual approach to sexuality.

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