MIAMI UNIVERSITY the Graduate School Certificate for Approving The

Home , Cheryl Chase (activist), Cock ring, Del LaGrace Volcano, The List (South Park), The Snuke, The Vagina Monologues

MIAMI UNIVERSITY The Graduate School

Certificate for Approving the Dissertation

We hereby approve the Dissertation

Susan Pelle

Candidate for the Degree:

Doctor of Philosophy

______Director Dr. Stefanie Kyle Dunning

______Reader Dr. Madelyn M. Detloff

______Reader Dr. Kathleen N. Johnson

______Graduate School Representative Dr. Emily A. Zakin

ABSTRACT

(DIS)ARTICULATING BODIES AND GENDERS: PUSSY POLITICS AND PERFORMING VAGINAS

by Susan Pelle

The vagina has metaphorically and metonymically been the body part that stands in for the category “woman” and it is this emphatic and fabricated link that imposes itself on bodies, psyches, and lives with often horrifying consequences. My goals in exploring performative and performing vaginas are many. I not only lay out how, why, and in what ways the “normal” and “abled” female body established in both dominant and mainstream discourses is, simply put, one with a specific type of vagina, but I also confront the “truth” that vaginas purport to tell about women and femininity. Ultimately, I maintain that representations of vaginas and the debates and discourses that surround them tell us something about our culture’s fears, anxieties, and hopes.

Living life as abject can be painful, even unbearable, yet as individuals negotiate this life they can experience pleasure, assert agency, and express ethical and just visions of the world. The artists, writers, and performers explored in this dissertation strategically perform vaginas in multiple and disparate ways. As they trouble, resist, and negotiate “normative” understandings of vaginas, they simultaneously declare that the “problem” is not about bodies at all. The problem is not the vagina. Instead, the problem concerns our cultural attitudes that regard non-normative bodies and identities as abnormal, perverse, disabled, pathological, and incomplete.

As performing vaginas disarticulate, disrupt, and reconceptualize the assumed connections between anatomy and identity, a world that could be, a future not so far away, begins to open up. As a result, we might imagine an alternative future where queer, raced, and/or disabled bodies are not named, categorized, fixed, shunned, shamed, and/or punished. One cannot merely counter “negative” representations of the vagina, nor can the vagina solely be embraced as a woman’s center or her connection to all women. Instead of determining and limiting just how one should live out her life as a woman, is it possible for vaginas to determine nothing specific at all thereby opening up both the category “woman” and vaginas to infinite possibilities?

(DIS)ARTICULATING BODIES AND GENDERS: PUSSY POLITICS AND PERFORMING VAGINAS

A DISSERTATION

Submitted to the Faculty of

Miami University in partial

fulfillment of the requirements

for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

Department of English

Susan Pelle

Miami University

Oxford, Ohio

2008

Director: Dr. Stefanie Kyle Dunning

Susan Pelle

2008

TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Figures iv

Dedication v

Acknowledgements vi

Prologue “Performative and Performing Vaginas” 1

Introduction “Is a Cunt Ever Just a Cunt?: The Politics of a Counterdiscursive Pussy Pride” 6

Chapter One “‘I Am No More. And Satisfied’: The ‘(Dis)Abled’ Vulva in Alice Walker’s 37 Possessing the Secret of Joy”

Chapter Two “The ‘Grotesque’ Pussy: ‘Transformational Shame’ in Margaret Cho’s Stand-up 60 Performances”

Chapter Three “‘When Is a Tulip Not a Tulip?’: Bodies and Pleasures in Jeanette Winterson’s 89 The PowerBook”

Chapter Four “‘It Began with an Image’: Loss, Disorientation, and Vulnerability in Shani 114 Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night”

Epilogue “There are No (Happy) Endings: Always Becoming Otherwise” 135

Works Cited 141

iii

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1 Chicago, Judy. “Sojourner Truth Plate” from The Dinner Party. 18 July 2008. . 19

Figure 2 Chicago, Judy. “Virginia Woolf Plate” from The Dinner Party. 18 July 2008. . 20

Figure 3 Musa, Hassan. The Origin of Art. In Looking Both Ways: Art of the Contemporary African Diaspora. Ed. Laurie Ann Farrell. New York: Snoeck, 2004. 120. 29

Figure 4 Sherman, Cindy. Untitled, #261. In Cindy Sherman: Photographic Work, 1975-1995. Eds. Zdenek Felix and Martin Schwander. Schirmer Art Books, 1995. 88. 31

Figure 5 Cho, Margaret. I’m The One That I Want. . 67

Figure 6 Cho, Margaret. CHO Revolution. 18 July 2008. . 77

Figure 7 Cho, Margaret. Assassin. 18 July 2008. . 77

Figure 8 Niebrugge, Ron. Red Tulip. 18 July 2008. . 98

Figure 9 Rembrandt, Harmenszoon van Rijn. “Portrait of Saskia as Flora.” 23 July 2008. . 105

For Melissa

You imagine her in a huge velvet hat with great dangling black feathers, but she shaves her head instead and goes for three-day midnight walks. ~ Judy Grahn

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

There are those. . . . whose speaking is so profound, so intense, whose voices pass gently behind things and lift them and gently bathe them, and take the words in their hands and lay them with infinite delicateness close by things. ~ Helene Cixous

I am moved, humbled, overwhelmed, and changed by the profundity and intensity of the exchanges I have had over the past six years. How, then, do I even begin to acknowledge those who have graciously, gracefully, and with care, somehow, in someway, shaped me as a human being? My dear friend Connie Kendall has earnestly and repeatedly stressed to me a sentiment passed on to her long ago: that when an individual agrees to mentor you she simultaneously agrees to “take on your life.” My living is better having been touched by the presence, movement, intellect, thoughts, words, concerns, and hopes of a small group of women who agreed to guide me, teach me, and form my committee. Professors Stefanie Dunning, Madelyn Detloff, Katie Johnson, and Emily Zakin, through your “infinite delicateness,” you have shaped my way of thinking, my sense of self, and my place in and connection to the world. Without your presence and ability to “take on my life,” this dissertation would not exist. To Emily, who encouraged me to engage with philosophical issues I initially resisted. Thank you for your time and thoughtfulness. To Katie, who is overwhelmingly compassionate, rigorous, and sincere, and who stood behind this project from the get go and nuanced it in exhilarating and unforeseen ways. To Madelyn, who is lovely, who imagines, believes in, and actively strives for a more just world. Through your own living, you have taught me that there is an anxious beauty in acknowledging that who we are at this moment is not who we once were or who we might become. I am honored to sense traces of you throughout this dissertation. And finally, to Stefanie, who led me to this dissertation topic, whose brilliance astounds me over and over, and whose humor reminds me that

there are some things we needn’t take too seriously. Your long-term dedication to, passion for, and interaction with this project has made it something I’m proud of. Although all errors and flaws are my own, I hope I do all of you justice. There are also individuals who taught, guided, and supported me and whose lives are intricately intertwined with my own. To Mary Jean Corbett, who helped me find my way back and I strive to be more like. To Catherine Fox, Connie Kendall, and Jeanette Herman, who went before me and flourished. I reach out to each of you for advice, look up to you as mentors, confide in you as friends and colleagues, and find you to be always radiant, lovely, and exceptional. Your honesty, empathy, and willingness to engage with me have made all of the difference in my living. To Erin Douglas, Jen Cellio, Amie Fletcher, and Jamie Calhoun for revealing your own lovely eccentricities, while all along embracing my own. We have been and continue to be humored, disappointed, ecstatic, moved, and changed as we walk together through this odd little space better known as graduate school, our second home, our second family. Without your perpetual splendid presence, I would not have made it through. To the glorious Debbie Morner, who gracefully guided me through the personal and academic challenges of graduate school. To Cindy Lewiecki-Wilson and Jay Dolmage, who offered up brilliant lessons in disability studies. Chapter two would not be what it is without your guidance. To Lynn Rapin, who quietly got me unstuck. To Anne DiNardo, Nick DiNardo, Karen Boyhen, Ellie Wilke, and Heather Burr, who bring empathy, humor, art, and literature into my world. To Candace McClelland, the poet I continue to dream with. To Jennifer Junker, who is a lovely constant. And finally, to Melissa Spencer, who deeply and genuinely embraces all of me. Your own movements in the world remind me of what it is I love in life. My existence is richer, sweeter, and more delicious because of your presence.

vii

Prologue

Performative and Performing Vaginas

The vagina, like the category ‘woman,’ is a political category (Kim Q. Hall 113).

Concepts, categories, and abstractions […] can effect a physical and material violence against the bodies they claim to organize and interpret (Judith Butler, Gender Trouble 116).

Pussy, cunt, vagina, vulva; a lack, an absence, a dark hole, a grotesque perversion; a mystery that is “hungering, voracious, excessive, without restraint” (Bordo 160); “a sheath for a sword” (Muscio 4); “veiled in an impenetrable obscurity” (Freud 17); “an unoccupied space; a cavity (perhaps decaying – that foul odor!); a hollow that is hollow (only air, and besides that, worthless)” (Frueh, “Vaginal Aesthetics” 138). Vaginas are performative, in part, because they are constructed, understood, experienced, and internalized through the repetition of discourses that surround them.1 Dominant discourses about the vagina would have us believe that the established “normative” vagina actually exists. While the discourses of sexology and psychoanalysis referred to active female sexuality as perversions, comparative anatomy and eugenic discourses centered their investigations on corporeal signifiers, particularly sexual anatomy, as a way to distinguish so-called normal from abnormal bodies, moral from immoral behavior, and citizens from non-citizens. In American Anatomies: Theorizing Race and Gender, Robyn Wiegman writes that during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries these discourses fabricated inherent connections between race, gender, sexuality, anatomy, and desire as the body and its acts now reveal an innate and inevitable

1 Judith Butler defines “performativity” as “not a singular or deliberate ‘act,’ but, rather, as the reiterative and citational practice by which discourse produces the effects that it names” (Bodies 2).

“character” (22).2 Michel Foucault defines this shift from acts to identities as a “perverse implantation” that encourages self-surveillance. Not only are we ordered and categorized through corporeal markers and sexual acts, but we now negotiate our positions in a culture where dichotomies between so-called normal and abnormal bodies and acts are biologically and anatomically fixed. As a result, the vagina becomes a signifier of whom and how one should desire, and where and how one should experience pleasure. Moreover, the size, shape, and existence (absence/presence) of this body part come to determine whether one has an uncontrollable, uncontainable, and/or abnormal sexuality. And being defined as innately inferior allows for the legitimation of violence and oppression. The above epigraphs by Kim Q. Hall and Judith Butler assert that categories and concepts, such as the vagina, are not only political constructions, but that any system of human classification and interpretation can have devastating effects on an individual’s quality of life. Drawing from Brenda R. Silver’s methodology in Virginia Woolf Icon, I analyze what performative and performing vaginas might have to tell us as I lay out how they are artistically, performatively, and discursively constructed, represented, refashioned, and debated by feminist, queer, race and disability artists, performers, and theorists, as well as by journalists, politicians, and celebrities. If we piece such narratives together, what patterns or themes might we find? What stories are told about power, politics, and ideology? The vagina’s exact meaning can never be spoken as truth; instead, the vagina’s ever-changing signification can only be traced, mapped, outlined, or charted as we look for discrete and obvious patterns. In other words, we cannot fix the vagina in time and space, but, as Silver suggests, we can try to map out the cultural and political “anxieties” and the “issues and stakes” surrounding such representations (5). One could convincingly say that both Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues, first performed in 1996, and her subsequent V-Day (Vagina Day) productions, begun in 1998 and performed to raise money to end local and global violence against women, have

2 Wiegman writes, “the human being acquires for the first time in history an organic body and an interior psychic depth, becoming the primary object of investigation and making possible a host of new technologies, institutions, and disciplines” (22).

achieved international mainstream success. The monologues have not only been applauded and praised as revolutionary and life altering, but also condemned and repudiated as a sign of the end of feminism, as responsible for the fragmentation of women’s bodies, as pornographic and hedonistic, and even as a direct cause of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Alongside the never-ending responses to Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues stands the Brooklyn Museum of Art’s recent 2004 acquisition of Judy Chicago’s ambitious and controversial 1979 artistic installation entitled The Dinner Party, once deemed “obscene and pornographic” by Congress. Not only has the vagina achieved popular status through The Vagina Monologues, The Dinner Party, and Inga Muscio’s celebratory feminist manifesta entitled Cunt: A Declaration of Independence, to name but a few examples, but it has also, in 2006 and 2007, been represented as a (problematic) character of its own in South Park and Drawn Together, both of which are Comedy Central’s made-for-adult cartoon series. Further, the mythical “vagina dentata”3 is offered to us in the grotesque “Avant- Punk” novellas of Carlton Mellick III. Mellick’s The Haunted Vagina and Razor Wire Pubic Hair overtly engage with male fears of (and fascinating with) being “eaten alive” and/or “swallowed whole” by insatiable vaginas. In fact, the back matter of The Haunted Vagina boldly and solely states, “It’s difficult to love a woman whose vagina is a gateway to the world of the dead.” We are then offered up a similar vaginal representation in the critically acclaimed recently released 2006 “feminist” horror flick entitled Teeth, written and directed by Mitchell Lichtenstein. This film tells the tale of a young girl who is sexually assaulted, only to find that her vagina possesses teeth and has the power to “bite back” and castrate the violating penis/phallus. Possibly as a response

3 In The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis Barbara Creed discusses the prevalence of the myth of the vagina dentata. She writes, “Despite local variations, the myth generally states that women are terrifying because they have teeth in their vaginas and that the women must be tamed or the teeth removed or softened – usually by a hero figure – before intercourse can safely take place” (2). In “Medusa’s Head,” Freud states that Medusa’s decapitation is symbolic of the “terror” of castration (273). Interestingly, Creed points to the paradox in Freud. The young boy’s first glance at his mother’s “lack” is what he “fears” because he too could be castrated. Yet, at the same time, the woman becomes the threatening castrator herself (7).

to Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues, Teeth’s tentative tagline according to Lichtenstein is, “The time for talking is over” (YouTube). As the above examples illustrate, representations and debates surrounding the vagina range from one extreme to the other and often intersect. As the vagina is embraced as a hero and liberator only to then be demonized as a hedonist and a grotesque monstrosity, it becomes a literary or popular figure all on its own, a metonym, albeit one that often betrays the “woman” attached, as in Denis Diderot’s 1745 French “Forbidden Classic” entitled Les Bijoux Indiscrets/The Talking Jewels. Yet, despite this betrayal, there are always moments when the performing vagina fails to signify coherently, when it “troubles” or “exceeds” its meaning. Because performance theory is specific to this project on performative and performing vaginas, I repeatedly return to the complicated, complex, and productive connections between bodies, affects, and discourse. Performance theory works well with studies of sexuality, race, and disability because of their overlapping desires to depathologize “non-normative” bodies and sexualities and their similar relations to excess, trouble, and failure. Queerness, race, and performance all “defy categorization,” as E. Patrick Johnson has noted (2), as does disability. Because of such defiance, we are now able to approach identity and anatomy not as something “essential,” but instead, as a cultural and political construction that will forever be in flux. In other words, because it is impossible to meet the ideal of how a “woman” should appear and act and whom she should desire, all women fail to signify in one way or another. Making such failure visible is where we can imagine the possibilities for agency and politics. Through this exploration, I hope to (dis)articulate the emphatic link between the vagina and the category “woman,” but I do not want to deny that the vagina still matters. If we understand that the vagina as a signifier has limitations, then we can complicate notions of power and resistance as we think about the many ways the vagina has been reiterated in culture. Living life as unintelligible,4 as other, or as abject can be horrifying, yet negotiating such a life can be both pleasurable and political. Resignification then must be

4 The term unintelligible is borrowed from Judith Butler.

about a justice and an ethics that will allow all of us, without sounding hopelessly romantic, to peacefully coexist. 5

5 In Undoing Gender, Judith Butler again asserts that resignification is not always politically advantageous. The notion that resignification must be intimately and forever connected with a sense of justice is borrowed from her theories (225).

Introduction

Is a Cunt Ever Just a Cunt?: The Politics of a Counterdiscursive Pussy Pride

The question of how to embody the norm is […] very often linked to the question of survival, of whether life itself will be possible (Judith Butler, Undoing Gender 217).

Responding to both current understandings of the vagina, as well as past psychoanalytic, scientific, and medical discourses, Virginia Braun and Sue Wilkinson assert that our society is still entrenched in two specific flawed ideologies surrounding sexed and gendered bodies. The first is that we can only understand bodies within a two- sexed model, as either male or female. The second is that “genitals are a crucial part of difference and identity” (“Vagina Equals Woman” 509).6 The mysteries surrounding the category “woman” have prompted and shaped historical, cultural, and political investigations into her nature. Sexology and psychoanalysis, in particular, have had a significant impact on the way a woman and her body is interpreted, defined, responded to, and lived. In describing the nature of “woman” in his 1903 “Sex and Character,” for example, Otto Weininger asserts, To put it bluntly, man possesses sexual organs, but [woman’s] sexual organs possess her. […] The relation of man to woman is simply that of subject to object. Woman seeks consummation as the object. She is the plaything of the husband or child, and, however we may try to hide it, she is anxious to be nothing but such chattel. (qtd. in Bland 13, 27) Through the language of sexology, it is utterly impossible for a woman to be the “subject” of anything for she possesses “nothing.” In fact, Weininger would have us believe that a woman can only be possessed and desires nothing more than to be man’s

6 “Psychoanalysis, which has given the vagina a central place (although less central than the penis), is informed by Aristotle and Galen’s theorization of woman as ‘lack’” (Braun and Wilkinson, “Socio-cultural Represenations” 19).

plaything. As a result, “the relation of man to woman is simply that of subject to object.” It is that simple. And just as sexology borrowed from racist, homophobic, and xenophobic narratives,7 so psychoanalysis also borrowed from and built upon the language of sexology. It is imperative to point out that while the vagina has both metaphorically and metonymically been the body part that stands in for the category “woman,” in psychoanalytic discourses it is actually the absence of a penis, not the presence of a vagina, which determines and limits just how a “woman” should live out her life. Because a psychoanalytic understanding of sexual difference relies on anatomy, particularly the penis, as a crucial signifier of difference, the result is that it often affirms a supposed “natural,” “essential,” and “absolute” distinction between man and woman. In an ironic twist though, such constructions of the phallus disregard the vagina as an absence or lack, while simultaneously representing the vagina as a toothed predator or a castrating presence to be feared. If femininity, female sexuality, and the category woman are no longer measured against, determined by, and understood through a woman’s absent or castrated penis, the assumed connections between anatomy and identity might be challenged, troubled, disarticulated, and reconceptualized. In other words, the phallus can no longer shape how we understand “woman,” but neither can the vagina, which has its own sordid history. As the absence of a penis or the presence of a vagina became a signifier of a woman’s “essential” difference from man, this lack also determined how one should act out her “appropriate” femininity. In 1931 Sigmund Freud emphasizes a dependency on visibility and a comparison of differences as he writes, The little girl, frightened by the comparison with boys, grows dissatisfied with her clitoris, and gives up her phallic activity and with it her sexuality in general as well as a good part of her masculinity in other fields. The second line leads her to cling with defiant self-assertiveness to her

7 Sexology itself borrowed from travel narratives (Traub) and anthropology (Foucault), as well as the discourses of “racial and medical science and evolution” (Raiskin, “Inverts and Hybrids” 158).

threatened masculinity. To an incredibly late age she clings to the hope of getting a penis some time. That hope becomes her life’s aim. (“Female Sexuality” 229-30) To attain a normative femininity, the young girl must renounce her “active” clitoris (which Freud posits as “analogous to the male organ”) and replace it with her “passive” vagina (228). Through such theorizations, the vagina becomes either unmentionable and lacking (invisible) or dangerous and devouring (hypervisible). Although Freud articulates a continuum of perversions that all subjects pass through on their way to a “normative” heterosexuality, he also makes clear “that the desirable developmental path leads to heterosexual object choice with coitus as final aim” (Chodorow qtd. in Freud, Three Essays viii). Whiteness and heterosexuality, then, become the normative national subject position, according to Michelle Wright.8 In psychoanalytic theory, the vagina is rarely spoken or described solely by what it is not. Approximately one hundred years later little has changed.9 If there is not an overt silence surrounding the vagina then it continues to be interpreted and described as the body part to be feared or the absence or void that cannot be articulated. Although I use the terms vagina, vulva, pussy, and cunt interchangeably so each is in harmony with the individual writers, artists, and performers I explore, it is important to point out the distinct differences between all four terms. While the vulva consists of external parts, such as the clitoris and labia, the vagina is an internal muscular canal that leads from the vulva to the uterus. Interestingly, the terms pussy and cunt, when they are not being used offensively and disparagingly, are sometimes understood as encompassing both the vulva and vagina. While my use of the terms is sometimes inaccurate, speaking out loud and exploring the vagina, vulva, pussy, and cunt is political in itself.

8 In Becoming Black: Creating Identity in the African Diaspora, Michelle Wright asserts, “the nationalist myth that produces a racial Other also insists on a heteropatriarchal structure wherein men and women who fail to conform to the idealized heterosexual relation of active male and passive female are also produced as Other” (6). 9 Braun and Wilkinson in “Socio-cultural Representations” assert, “Mild, non-specific (if not actually inaccurate) euphemisms are employed to not name that part of women’s bodies” (19).

As the vagina is metaphorized as passive and lacking (invisible), excessive and insatiable (hypervisible), foul and nasty (grotesque), toothed and predatory (castrating), and simply as shameful, it appears to signify something “essential,” “natural,” and “fixed” about “woman,” although this something cannot be pinned down. Responding to the problematic and shameful construction of “woman” in psychoanalytic theory specifically, Luce Irigaray decries, “They’ve left us only lacks, deficiencies, to designate ourselves. They’ve left us their negative(s)” (“When our Lips Speak” 84). Irigaray’s “This Sex Which Is Not One” and “When Our Lips Speak Together,” as well as Eve Ensler's The Vagina Monologues, Inga Muscio's Cunt: A Declaration of Independence, and Judy Chicago's The Dinner Party challenge, negotiate, and counter discourses of sexology and psychoanalysis as they distinctly assert a form of “pussy pride.” “Pussy pride” as a specific feminist counterdiscourse is an attempt to surpass feelings of shame and violation as it reclaims and represents the vagina as active and present, rather than as passive and lacking. In fact, numerous feminist counterdiscourses adamantly assert that without a vagina or without developing a sense of pride for one’s vagina (by surpassing shame), the implication is that we cannot survive as healthy, whole, and abled “women.” For Irigaray, woman is not a lack or absence, nor is she forever doomed to be solely represented through patriarchal language. Irigaray is equally interested in women’s pleasures and women’s specific language of desire and therefore invokes and then disidentifies with psychoanalytical discourses by returning woman to the Imaginary. Because psychoanalytic discourses privilege presence (the visible) over absence (lack), Irigaray’s theoretical, sensual, and utopic writings are an attempt to transport us into a space of female plentitude, wholeness, touch, and unity. In psychoanalytic theory in general, the “normal” progression and development of one’s subjectivity is dependent upon vision, recognizing difference, particularly sexual difference, and seeing oneself in relation to others. In “The Mirror Stage,” Lacan asserts that it is only when one moves out of the Imaginary and into the Symbolic order that he or she develops a sense of self that is distinct from his/her mother’s body. In other words, as one acquires language (the Law of the Father), one also recognizes a distinct “difference” that prompts feelings of

misrecognition, loss, and fragmentation. It is within this Symbolic space that subjects repress the desire for touch and the desire for a reconnection with the maternal body (for it is taboo and doubly so for girls). The time and space of the Imaginary, then, is a time and space before an individual understands herself as an autonomous “heterosexual” subject, a time and space before she has acquired language, a time and space before ideology has been both internalized and imposed upon her body, a time and space before her own painful fragmentation and alienation from her mother, and a time and space before a sense of isolation and shame.10 Both of Irigaray’s canonical essays have been interpreted as parodic, mimetic, and performative. In each piece, her reimagined woman has a present and plural sexuality, two lips that continuously touch one another, and two lips that speak their own “feminine” language. Through Irigaray’s strategic use of woman’s “two lips,” she not only illustrates the interconnected pleasures of sexuality and discourse, but she also puts forward one form of pussy pride. Through her assertion that “Woman ‘touches herself’ all the time, and moreover no one can forbid her to do so, for her genitals are formed of two lips in continuous contact” (“This Sex” 249), Irigaray brings together a bodily and feminine language as a political tactic: just as woman’s body can experience pleasure all over, so too can she also speak from this same body. The multiplicity of language and sexual pleasure is where a revolutionary, just, and ethical potential resides, because, for Irigaray, woman is not only removed from a heterosexual imperative, but she is also able to “rediscover” and “re-present” herself (“This Sex” 254). The political and strategic use of woman’s “two lips,” two lips that are always and forever touching, two lips that together make a whole, allows Irigaray to biologically distinguish “woman” from “man.” In fact, her imaginings are dependent upon sexual difference theory itself. As Ensler, Muscio, and Chicago articulate the vagina as that which is the source of a woman's pleasure and brings all women together, they too

10 Irigaray takes pride in women’s bodies in an attempt to transport us, her readers, back into the Imaginary. She writes, “Our [women’s] depth is the thickness of our body, our all touching itself. Where top and bottom, inside and outside, in front and behind, above and below are not separated, remote, out of touch. Our all intermingled. Without breaks or gaps” (“When Our Lips Speak” 87).

depend upon and reinforce our current understanding of sexual difference. Muscio claims that “besides global subjugation, our cunts are the only common denominator I can think of that all women irrefutably share” (xxxi), Ensler asserts that the goal of her work is to make vaginas “visible so they cannot be ravaged in the dark without great consequence, so that our center, our point, our motor, our dream, is no longer detached, mutilated, numb, broken, invisible, or ashamed” (TVM 1998, 102), and Chicago reveals her artistic tactic in creating The Dinner Party as she writes, “The woman artist, seeing herself as loathed, takes that very mark of her otherness [the vagina] and by asserting it as the hallmark of her iconography, establishes a vehicle by which to state the truth and beauty of her identity” (qtd. in Ardener 133). The purpose of this dialectical relationship between lack/presence is not only to make the vagina, vulva, or clitoris hypervisible, but also to reclaim this organ as an active presence. Although Ensler speaks of and about traumas inflicted on the body (rape, incest, and FGM) in The Vagina Monologues, she ultimately sees the reclamation of the vagina, a reclamation that began in the 1970s feminist movement and continues today, as the only way to heal and survive such trauma. Pussy pride and visibility as a resistance to discourses that posit woman as a lack or absence makes sense, especially when we think about the implications of the metaphors that open this dissertation. Unfortunately, when the vagina becomes an essential signifier, a signifier of woman’s pleasure, a signifier of her sense of being, a signifier of her connection to all women, or a signifier of an entire race or nation, for example, its relationship to power is simplified. As such an all- powerful signifier, the vagina, in response to its history of examination, violation, ordering, regulation, and commodification, is often reappropriated and transformed into a spectacle and a source of pride and/or resistance against some anonymous pocket of power posited “out there.” In a noble attempt to reclaim the pleasures and power of the vagina, Muscio’s Cunt is a playful reconciliation of the wonder, joy, strength, and pleasure of one’s own “cunt” as it puts forward a sex-positive, cunt-positive, and cunt-loving type of feminism: “Cuntlove is in your head, on your heart, between your legs” (166). Cunt, a text more

frequently read in academic and feminist circles, is also a wonderful resource for girls and women seeking information, education, and activism on sex and sexuality. But, after receiving endless inquiries from transgender, transsexual, intersex, and gender-queer individuals11 concerning feelings of exclusion and alienation when they read Muscio’s declaration that “womankind is varied and vast. But we all have cunts” (241), Muscio rethought her stance that the cunt is the one common denominator of all women: “I have changed and things have changed” (235). As a result, in her 2002 second-edition of Cunt, Muscio reconsiders that “women with dicks [and] men with cunts” challenge her feminist politics that were once determined solely by biology (235). Yet, despite her empathetic and honest attempts to work through the critiques directed at her political manifesta, Muscio still “needs” the cunt to assert her politics. After all, the title of the book is Cunt. The second time around, Muscio moves beyond biology and radically expands her notion of who can count as a “woman.” She does not care if one’s cunt is biological, surgical, or metaphorical, but she still believes that an individual has to possess a cunt to actually be a woman. In addition, she asserts that as “women,” we can be united through this shared, biological or constructed anatomical part. All one need do is “claim” it: “A cunt is a cunt” (xxvi).12 But is that all it really is? Is a cunt ever just a cunt?

“The Hoopla Over Hoohaa”

Our nation and our culture have pronounced many of the pieces discussed in this introduction as obscene, pornographic, immoral, queer, and hedonistic. For example, Katha Pollitt, discussing Dinesh D’Souza’s The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11, condemns his theory that The Vagina Monologues is but one cause of 9/11 and that 9/11 is a “divine rebuke to ‘the pagans, the abortionists, and the

11 For example, Zabrina Alequire states that Muscio’s book excludes gender-variant folks, such as tranny boys “who have cunts” and “women without cunts,” (qtd. in Muscio 241), 12 Feminist backlash against transgender and transsexual individuals comes from an “essentialist sort of feminism that relied on biologically-determined differences between men and women to fuel its call for social change” (Califia, Sex Changes 7).

feminists, and the gays and lesbians’” (qtd. in Pollitt, “Ayatollah D’Souza” 1). And in an absurd conservative Christian right-wing essay entitled “Feminism’s Dead End,” Henry Makow connects The Vagina Monologues to worldwide contempt and violence that is directed at the U.S. He writes, “we must face the fact that feminism is a homosexual movement in deadly competition with heterosexuality. […] We are exporting our homosexuality and depravity to the world. Muslim fundamentalists are fighting back” (3). In an ironic twist, D’Souza and Makow both, in an attempt to counter acts of terrorism by pointing to the “source” of the world’s hatred of our excessively “queer” culture, end up defending and supporting such acts. In contrast though, Time’s long-ago 1998 use of The Vagina Monologues alongside an image of Ally McBeal was an attempt to illustrate that feminism is, for sure, dead and gone, having degenerated “into self- indulgent sex chat” (Pollitt, “Vaginal Politics” 1). And in February (the month of all V- Day performances) of 2007, after complaints about a public advertisement for The Vagina Monologues on a theater marquee in Atlantic Beach, Florida, the word vagina was replaced by “Hoohaa”: The Hoohaa Monologues (“Play’s Controversial Title”). In the same month, in an attempt to promote a university performance of The Vagina Monologues and to simultaneously raise money for V-Day, students at the University of Missouri, Kansas City created promotional t-shirts that displayed “artsy anatomical drawing[s],” specifically vaginal iconography that sported the catchy phrase, “made in vagina.” But, UMKC Women’s Center has banned the shirts. In fact, when students showed up to purchase them, the director of the Center would not allow the boxes to be opened (“Vagina Veto”). Is the vagina dangerously and queerly alive, as D’Souza, Makow, and our national leaders fear, or is it now simply self-indulgent and apolitical, as U.S. mainstream culture annoyingly and repetitively asserts? Wanting nothing but the vagina to disappear, it seems as if the left and right have joined tactical forces. Ironically, despite wanting the vagina to remain an absence or lack, nobody will leave it alone. The reception of Ensler’s piece is so overwhelming that it opens up a perfect opportunity to talk about what vaginas might mean in our culture. Ensler herself asserts that The Vagina Monologues were prompted by the fact that: “I was a feminist. I had

been violated sexually and physically by my father. I had exhibitionist tendencies. I have been known to outrage, and I longed with all my being to find a way back to my vagina” (TVM 2001 xiv). Many women adamantly assert after witnessing the show that not only have they been given “permission” and the know-how to explore their bodies and sexualities, but they also experience a more intimate connection with their vaginas. Ensler even dedicates one monologue specifically to Betty Dodson: “For twenty-five years Betty has been helping women locate, love, and masturbate their vaginas. […] She has helped thousands of women reclaim their center” (Ensler, TVM 2001, 41). Katha Pollitt in “Vaginal Politics” speaks of her own elation after seeing the play as she writes, “it reminded me that […] in the real world there are still such people as women, who share a common biology and much else besides. And the power of feminism […] still resides in its capacity to transform women’s consciousness at the deepest possible level” (2). Further, Virginia Braun and Sue Wilkinson, speaking specifically of The Vagina Monologues, rightly assert that “positive” representations of the vagina can counter “negative” ones and therefore effect political change (“Liability or Asset?” 39). Of course it should be more than obvious that the vagina is not a lack or an absence. Instead, as Catherine Blackledge details in The Story of V: A Natural History of Female Sexuality, the vagina is “an amazing, expanding, contracting, sensitive muscular organ, [with] multiple erogenous zones. […] In fact, flexibility and fluidity, not unyielding dentition, is the vagina’s key design concept (171). Despite current scientific investigations and constructions of the vagina as something other than a mysterious gaping hole or wound, its historical construction, as illustrated above, as well as its etymology, reveals quite a different story. Braun and Wilkinson reveal that the vagina was once referred to as “parts of shame” in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century France and that “the term ‘pudendum’ derives from the Latin pudere, meaning ‘to be ashamed’ [or, to cause shame]” (“Socio-cultural Representations” 22). Further, Francis Grose’s 1796 Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, defined “cunt” as “a nasty name for a nasty thing” (Hunt, “Cunt: A Cultural History”). Given such ideology, it is understandable that official discourses surrounding and constructing vaginas might prompt feelings of shame.

But, a more important question might be, how does an assertion of “pussy pride,” a politics meant to counter the above “negative” and shaming representations prompt similar feelings of abjection and alienation? A politics organized around a sense of pride, one that demands the erasure of shame, is filled with inconsistencies. In Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick writes, “the forms taken by shame are not distinct ‘toxic’ parts of a group or individual identity that can be excised; they are instead integral to and residual in the processes by which identity itself is formed” (63). In other words, she declares that pride movements neglect the impact that shame might have in shaping one’s identity. Further, Elspeth Probyn too interrogates political pride movements such as black pride, national pride, gay pride, and fat pride, for example, as a way to detail how such movements are solely concerned with ways to eradicate shame. “By denying or denigrating it [shame] or trying to eradicate it (as the countless self-help books against various strains of shame), we impoverish ourselves and our attempts to understand human life” (Blush 3). By exploring the promises and dangers of a politics based on pride, I am by no means attempting to devalue this form of activism. After all, as illustrated above, not only have Ensler’s performances had positive and life-altering effects on an individual’s quality of life, but so have numerous other feminist counterdiscourses, past and present (think: Anne Koedt’s “The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm”). Instead, I am interested in how a politics based on reclamation and pride, a politics that demands the denial of shame, can inadvertently neglect the pains and violences that an othered subject negotiates on a daily basis. Shame, after all, is a “social” phenomenon. Just as Sedgwick declares that feelings of shame are always about nonrecognition, not misrecognition, Kathryn Bond Stockton asserts in Beautiful Bottom, Beautiful Shame: Where ‘Black’ Meets ‘Queer,’ that feelings of shame are intimately connected to “communication” (16). Because we all have the basic need to be recognized as human beings, feminist, queer, race, and disability theorists, artists, and activists who view subjectivity as fragmented and forever transforming, often articulate contradictory sentiments concerning (the always political) representations of vaginas.

Working against the numerous and disparate stances toward the vaginal representations detailed above, these individuals do not want to embrace the vagina, nor do they want it to disappear; instead, they want to resignify its fixed meaning.

“The Best Homemade Pussy in America”

One essential critique of Ensler’s performance piece concerns the legitimate fear that it “threatens to reduce the complexity of sexual difference to anatomy” (Renshaw 319). Because Ensler privileges the vagina as the “origin” of a “woman’s” physical and psychical wholeness, her monologues shape and reinforce the notion of a “normal” and “abled” body as one with a specific type of vagina. Simply put, “the normality of female bodies with vaginas is made possible by the abnormality of female bodies without vaginas” (Hall 109). In Read My Lips: Sexual Subversion and the End of Gender, Riki Anne Wilchins points to the violent implications of politically constructed identity categories as she illustrates that any system of categorization has devastating effects. Speaking specifically of her own transgender identity that is culturally situated outside of the boundaries of who counts as human, valuable, or worthwhile, Wilchins reveals, “That so many of us try to take our own lives, mutilate ourselves, or just succeed in dying quietly in shame, depression, or loneliness is not an accident. We are supposed to feel isolated and desperate. Outcast. That is the whole point of the system” (25). Because our normative understanding of sex, gender, and desire dictates exactly what the “normal” female body is and isn’t, this system imposes itself on bodies, psyches, and lives with often horrific consequences. In Ensler’s intersexual monologue we are introduced to a young woman “who had been born without a vagina” (Ensler, TVM 2001, 99). Yet all ends well as her father acquires for her “the best homemade pussy in America.” He then tells his daughter that when she meets her husband “‘he’s gonna know we had it made specially for him.’ And they did get her a new pussy, and she was relaxed and happy” (Ensler, TVM 2001, 99-

100).13 What goes unmentioned here is that the “correction” of an intersexual body depends upon violent and traumatic genital reconstructive surgeries. Echoing Ensler’s “happy ending,” Suzanne Kessler in Lessons from the Intersexed asserts that intersexual “normative” surgeries are only considered success stories when the vagina turns out aesthetically pleasing, showing no traces of “excess,” particularly clitoral excess and when it is able “to receive a normal-sized penis” (26). After all, the new and improved surgically constructed vagina is made “specially for him.” And it is this “successful” manipulation of anatomy and sexuality, asserts Cheryl Chase, which is believed to lead an intersexual to feelings of wholeness and happiness (qtd. in Hegarty 78): “she was relaxed and happy.” Ensler’s monologue reinforces all of the myths that both Kessler and Chase point to. Further, the new pussy that is bought and constructed is not only aesthetically pleasing, heterosexual, and able to be penetrated by a penis, but is also “made in America.” In other words, this pussy reifies a specific Western, if not patriotic, norm. Intersexual activist and director of the Intersex Initiative14 Emi Koyama feels that Ensler’s monologue perpetuates the shame, secrecy, and sexual trauma surrounding intersexual bodies and intersexual “normative” surgeries (“Being Accountable” 2). She herself confesses that after reading this particular narrative, “I felt invalidated” (“Writing Our Own Monologues” 10), and numerous other intersexual activists, such as Esther Morris Leidolf and Thea Hillman, articulate similar sentiments. Hillman writes of her pain, “I felt hurt when I heard Eve tell that Vagina Fairy Tale. It hurt to be in a place where I was supposed to feel safe to be a woman, but instead ended up feeling like I was in a place that was promoting violence against women like me” (2). And Leidolf continues, echoing Wilchins above, “We are not told that we are viable just the way we are” (“Beyond the Monologue” 3). Because the intersexual body is culturally unintelligible and, as a result, produces “cultural anxieties,” Koyama and numerous other

13 Juxtaposing The Vagina Monologues’ representations of an African FGM and a U.S. intersexual “corrective surgery,” Kim Q. Hall asserts that the only tragedy in Ensler’s intersexual monologue “seems to be the fact that she was born without a vagina” (104). 14 The Intersex Initiative was founded by Koyama in 2003.

intersexual activists have already forged intimate connections with disability studies as a way to depathologize intersexuality. Responding to the implications of “curing,” “fixing,” or “correcting” “abnormal” bodies, well renowned disability theorist Rosemarie Garland-Thomson writes, “The emphasis on cure reduces the cultural tolerance for human variation and vulnerability by locating disability in bodies imagined as flawed rather than as a social system in need of fixing” (“Integrating Disability” 14). Borrowing from and expanding upon “New Disability Studies,” then, allows transgender, queer, and intersexual activists to shift from the supposed inferiority of “disabled” bodies to interrogate the political, cultural, and systemic construction of all bodies as either normal/abled or abnormal/disabled (Garland-Thomson and Holmes 74).15

“My Vajayjay is Painin’”16

Judy Chicago’s reasons for creating both The Dinner Party and Beyond the Flower: The Autobiography of a Feminist Artist were in part shaped by outraged and outrageous national responses to feminist “cunt art,” which illustrates that her art is performing something. In her attempt to make public an artistic and active female sexuality through her depictions of 39 sculpted vaginas that were created as place settings, Chicago chose and represented women throughout Western history whom she felt had been silenced or neglected. Chicago’s hopes were “to turn society’s definition of the female around and make it positive, instead of negative” (Through the Flower 55), to rewrite history in an attempt to include women, women who were creative, rebellious, and sexual, and to also get our culture to value women's work and women’s art which utilizes many multi-media genres. As The Dinner Party was deemed “sexually explicit, obscene, and pornographic” by Congress for its “active sexuality,” Chicago expresses the

15 Both Emi Koyama and Cheryl Chase have replaced “intersex” as an identity category with the controversial term “disorder of differentiation” (DSD). Many have accused Koyama and Chase as both trans- and homophobic for labeling their bodies as “disabled,” but both insist that this is a strategic political move as it opens up a space for an alliance with disability activists and medical “reform.” 16 Oprah Winfrey.

rage she felt as her plates were “misunderstood” and/or “misrepresented.” She accurately asserts, “the fact that they [her plates] are described as pornographic or obscene says something about our culture's view of women and women's sexuality” (Beyond the Flower). The exhibit itself, completed in 1979, was constructed as a Dinner Party that illustrates not only the consumption of women's accomplishments, but also highlights the value of traditional women's work. Further, the place settings were exhibited upon needlework runners that women volunteers had put thousands of hours into. Because the vagina is the essential link between these historical women and because, as elaborated previously, this symbol culturally signifies the source of a woman’s essence, we begin to question whether or not she was able to imagine black women as women. In The Dinner Party, Chicago artistically constructs ceramic plates as she represents the vulvas of infamous women throughout history, but she chooses to construct Sojourner Truth’s plate without a vulva, and instead uses three faces (see Figure 1). As a result, Truth was “the only black guest [to] make it without a pussy” (O'Grady qtd. in Ring 101).17

Figure 1. Chicago, Judy. “Sojourner Truth Plate” from The Dinner Party. 18 July 2008. .

17 The 39 place settings ranged from goddesses, saints, queens, activist, artists, and authors. Mary Wollstonecraft, Emily Dickenson, Georgia O'Keefe, and Virginia Woolf are just a few examples. Chicago's exhibit also contained a Heritage Floor made of tile that was inscribed with 999 other women's names.

Next to the beautiful, elaborate, and colorful sculpted vulvas of Virginia Woolf (see Figure 2) and Georgia O’Keefe is Truth’s imagined “three faces” (ironic given that Truth has been immortalized through her rhetorical question, “Ain't I a Woman?”).

Figure 2. Chicago, Judy. “Virginia Woolf Plate” from The Dinner Party. 18 July 2008. .

In fact, Alice Walker has critiqued the Truth plate as she writes, “it occurred to me that perhaps white women feminists, no less than white women generally, cannot imagine black women have vaginas. Or if they can, where imagination leads them is too far to go” (Walker qtd. in Ring 101). Walker points to the ambivalent position of African American women in Western culture. Either Truth is not a real woman or her sexuality is imagined as so excessive that it can’t be visually thought or represented.18 Alongside Alice Walker’s critique of Chicago’s The Dinner Party, we have the pairing of Walker with Oprah Winfrey. Together, they might seem to be an unlikely coupling, but it was Oprah who provided one of the first public platforms for Walker to campaign against the ritual of “female genital mutilation.” Over the past year, Oprah’s own vagina has received constant notoriety and scrutiny. Not only were her vagina and asshole personified as separate entities in the April 2006 South Park episode “A Million

18 Further, Valerie Traub touches on this as she discusses travel narratives of the 16th and 17th C.

Little Fibers,” written and directed by Trey Parker and Matt Stone,19 but the status of Oprah’s “real” (read: sexual) relationship with her “best friend” Gayle King, has been deconstructed online and on national television (conducting my own Google search of “Oprah and Gayle” on July 16, 2007 revealed 323,000 hits). Such speculation continues today, despite the fact that Oprah has always been forthcoming and chosen to publicly reveal her “private” secrets (as an incest survivor, for example). In addition to the “national scandal” surrounding her sexuality, Oprah’s now ever-popular mantra, “My vajayjay is painin’,” has been repeatedly run on late-night talk shows and can be instantly accessed on YouTube. Why the public fascination with Oprah’s vagina and sexuality? If we momentarily hearken back to Freud, we find that in her refusal to give up the clitoris for her passive vagina (the “masculinity complex”), the lesbian is innately marked as excessive, perverse, and pathological (Freud, “Female Sexuality” 232).20 And, as “perverse” beings with uncontainable desires, lesbian, queer, and raced subjects are discursively joined. The perceived “naturalized” connections between race, sexuality, and the “uncontrollable” pussy that science responded to, depended upon, and shaped are further articulated in Hattie Gossett’s poem “Is it True What They Say about Colored Pussy.” In this piece, Gossett powerfully illustrates the disparate ways vaginas are vilified: you have heard how black and latina pussies are hot and uncontrollable and i know you know the one about asian pussies and how they go from side to side instead of up and down and everybody wants to know about squaw pussies and how once a whiteman got him some of that he was never no more good

19 In addition to the parody of Oprah Winfrey in “A Million Little Fibers,” South Park has more recently released an episode entitled “The Snuke,” a parody of racial profiling in the U.S. In this episode, it is slowly revealed that Russian terrorists have hidden a suitcase nuclear bomb, a snuke, in Hillary Clinton’s snatch: “Mrs. Clinton, it appears that terrorists have snuck a snuke up your sniz” (“The Snuke”). 20 Sander Gilman in Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race, and Madness asserts a similar link as he writes that H. Hildebrant connects “the overdevelopment of the clitoris . . . to those ‘excesses’ which are called ‘lesbian love’” (89).

now at first i thought the logical answer to these stories is that they are ignorant racist myths but this i thought: what about all the weird colored stories about colored pussy? (411-12) Being deprecated through “all the weird colored stories about colored / pussy,” renders queer and/or raced bodies, in addition to and because of their innate excess and pathology that are connected through the vagina, as threats to the nation. In fact, according to Siobhan Somerville in Queering the Color Line: Race and the Invention of Homosexuality in American Culture, any identity that cannot perpetuate the white race is classified as pathology (31).21 As a result, asserts Evelynn M. Hammonds, black women have always had “to develop ways to be recognized within the category of woman” (96). As alluded to above, as Oprah swings back and forth in a harness on a ropes course at an Arizona spa she screams into the camera, “my vajayjay is painin,’ reinforcing the fact that yes, she does possess a vagina and she is a “real” woman. After The Soup and Jimmy Kimmel Live, among many other late-night talk shows, poke fun at this clip, responses to Oprah as both asexual and invisible and monstrous and grotesque began to surface on blogs everywhere, with one poster referring to Oprah as “fucking sub-human” (comment on “Jimmy Kimmel’s Monologue”). And in May 2007, another blogger ponders whether or not Oprah, as a powerful woman, is into S&M, lesbianism, and group sex. In response, posters reply: “I think she’s just an old fashioned take-it-up- the-butt chick,” “She’s definitely a sadist. Her life is one long power trip,” “Ewwwwwww. […] I don’t think Oprah believes in sex at all,” “Yuck! Ewwww! Just GROSS!,” “I shudder at the thought that Oprah is a sexual being,” “I personally cannot stomach thinking about Oprah’s sexual life,” and “Just the thought of Oprah doing

21 Somerville writes, “Methodologies and iconographies of comparative anatomy attempted to locate discrete physiological markers of difference by which to classify and separate races. Sexologists drew on these techniques to try to position the ‘homosexual’ body as anatomically distinguishable from the ‘normal’ body. Likewise, medical discourses on sexuality appear to have been steeped in pervasive cultural anxieties about ‘mixed’ bodies, particularly the mulatto, whose symbolic position as a mixture of black and white bodies was literalized in scientific accounts” (37).

anything sexual whatsoever is enough to make me vomit” (“Freaky Friday Question”). Detailing the myths surrounding black women’s sexuality specifically, Patricia Hill Collins points to the stereotypical figures that shape the ways African American women are interpreted and approached. Whereas the mammy figure became the nation’s “mother” who always nurtures and provides insight, the matriarch is often feared for her “unfeminine [and] castrating” qualities (Gilkes qtd. in Collins 73). Unlike Tyra Banks, for example, who is interpreted and responded to as hypersexualized (the figure of the Jezebel, according to Collins), I would argue that Oprah is, instead, a hybrid. Not only is she desexualized as a mother-like figure (the mammy), but she is also overtly threatening because of her powerful cultural position (the matriarch). Eerily echoing the display of Sarah Baartman’s body and genitals, detailed in chapter one, Oprah’s body is constructed and responded to as both desexualized and threatening, all while being presented to mainstream culture as an exotic curiosity, as a monstrosity, and as a freak of nature. Parker and Stone’s South Park episode “A Million Little Fibers” reveals such long-standing racist and heterosexist assumptions about black women’s bodies and sexualities. “A Million Little Fibers” is a parody of the controversy surrounding James Frey’s 2005 A Million Little Pieces, as well as Oprah’s endorsement of the “memoir.” In this episode, Oprah’s vagina and asshole become characters of their own, Minge and Gary, who possess cockney male accents. Both Minge and Gary decry how Oprah has neglected them over the years because of her power and her popularity as a national icon. Minge confesses that Oprah “never gives her old minge a nice rub now and again. A minge needs some attention. At least a scratch once and a while. Used to be a time when Oprah would play with me night and day. She’d pet me for hours using every finger.” And when Minge gives Gary a hard time for also desiring some attention, Gary responds, “Assholes need stimulation too, you bastard.” So, in a plot to destroy Oprah’s reputation and in turn get her fired so their insatiable desires can be attended to, the two reveal that the author of A Million Little Fibers is posing as a human when, in fact, he is a towel named Towelie who is a reoccurring character on South Park.

As a way to save her reputation and maintain her fans’ loyalty, Oprah has the author back on her show, angrily confronts him, and works her audience into a frenzied “good old fashioned lynch mob.” Because Oprah has the audience on her side, Minge fears that he will never be fondled again and rebels by pulling a gun on Oprah and her audience. As the gun stands in as a phallic symbol, rigidly sticking out of the zipper in Oprah’s pants, Oprah, her vagina, and her asshole are completely separated. In fact, when Oprah protests this fragmentation, her vagina threatens, “shut up you miserable old cow or I’ll blow you’re brains out.” In the ensuing frenzy, Minge proceeds to kill a police officer. At this point, Oprah is on the ground motionless, voiceless, and unsexed. After all, her vagina and asshole are no longer her own. As a way to end the chaos, a sharp shooter kills Gary, Oprah’s asshole, and a devastated Minge commits suicide. Throughout this South Park episode, Oprah’s body parts are constructed as monstrous, excessive, hypersexual, depressed, suicidal, and homicidal. And when we consider the recent speculation of her lesbian relationship with Gayle, Oprah becomes even more threatening, excessive, and Other. Despite the fact that the “good old fashioned lynch mob” is after Towelie, it is Oprah who is ultimately “castrated” and “ungendered” through a violent disciplinary act that echoes the lynching, castration, and feminization of black male bodies in the U.S. As Oprah’s asshole is shot dead, leaving her pussy with no other option but to commit suicide, Oprah’s phallic power is destroyed. As a result, Oprah and her unruly body are violently forced back into their proper place as feminine, and, in the same moment, power is “rightfully” restored. In the end though, all is well with the world as the episode ends with a news anchor reporting, “Oprah’s going to be okay. Wish I could say the same for her vagina and asshole.” As “A Million Little Fibers” brings the hungry, threatening, and destructive vagina to life, speculations concerning Oprah’s lesbianism, in addition to her status as a national icon, inform the distinct differences between representations of her “disciplined,” “tamed,” or could we say “corrected” African- American vagina and the “mutilated” and “victimized” African woman’s vagina.

Global Vagina Dialogues?

Although corrective surgeries imposed on intersexuals and the ritual of FGM are, for sure, politically interconnected, current cultural representations, debates, and legislation22 refuse to see them as such. As illustrated above, intersexual activists have specifically critiqued Ensler’s intersexual monologue as a “fairy tale,” while critical race theorists have critiqued the monologues on African FGM and female Bosnian war victims as violent and tragic, leaving the woman of color in a position of hopelessness, despair, and lack. Ensler admits in her 2004 The Good Body that after “coming home” to her vagina (after TVM) the shame and pain surrounding this body part simply moved elsewhere: to her stomach. In contrast to the intersexual girl highlighted in The Vagina Monologues who finds happiness after the surgical construction of a new pussy and in contrast to Ensler’s own personal confession that the construction, performance, and reception of her piece allowed her to ultimately feel at home with her vagina, stands the woman of color who can never “return to” or find oneness with her vagina because it is represented as having been horrifically mutilated, destroyed, and violated beyond repair. Ensler is lucky enough to have surpassed the pain, shame, and violation that she experienced. Yet, the implication of Ensler’s monologues is if one cannot overcome such traumas, then one is doomed to fragmentation, incompleteness, or death, a topic explored in-depth in chapter one using Alice Walker’s Possessing the Secret of Joy and Warrior Marks. Kim Q. Hall, Susan E. Bell, Susan M. Reverby, Sea Ling Cheng, and Christine M. Cooper all critique the women of color monologues. As Ensler posits female genital mutilation in the U.S. as a thing of the past (62), she inadvertently sanctions the trauma of intersexual corrective surgeries. At the same time, she positions an African FGM as an ever-present and ever-urgent “issue” for Western feminism. Quoting a 1996 New York

22 US Congress passed legislation outlawing FGM, but it “was drafted in a way that tried to avoid protecting intersexed children” (Chase qtd. in Hegarty 79). Despite this neglect, changes are being made at the local level. For example, in 2005 in San Francisco, the HRC declared that forced corrective surgeries that are violently imposed upon intersexual infants is a crime against one’s human rights.

Times editorial in The Vagina Monologues, Ensler writes, “In countries where it is practiced, mostly in Africa, about 2 million youngsters a year can expect the knife – or the razor or a glass shard – to cut their clitoris or remove it altogether, [and] to have part or all of the labia […] sewn together with catgut or thorns” (63). Speaking of the tragic representations of African women and their mutilated vaginas and fragmented bodies, Cooper writes that the feminism upheld in the monologues “serves as a missionary feminism, where the (white, affluent, Western) feminist is positioned to aid, if not save, her others by witnessing their pain” (“Worrying about Vaginas” 12). In the monologue “My Vagina was My Village,” Ensler writes of the violent and repetitive rapes of Bosnian women who were targeted during wartime. In fact, in 1993, Ensler dedicates an entire book of monologues entitled Necessary Targets to the atrocities that Bosnian women war refugees survived: “There is something between my legs. I do not know what it is. I do not know where it is. I do not touch it. Not now. Not anymore. Not since” (Ensler, TVM 2001, 61). Through this construction, Ensler posits both Bosnian and African women as having lost something that can never be overcome or recovered. Instead of finding their way to “happiness” or “wholeness,” they are revealed to Ensler’s readers and audience members as victims, disabled, incomplete, and tragic, left to suffer from a “fractured subjectivity” (Cooper, “Worrying about Vaginas” 14). While Western feminists have joined the bandwagon to eradicate African FGM, Chase expresses outrage that these same feminists simply ignore the injustices done to intersexual bodies (qtd. in Hegarty 76). As African feminists have been more open to the plight of intersexual rights, Chase reveals that she has received no response from Alice Walker concerning her stance on (again, an always African) FGM: “Walker has never acknowledged that clitorectomy continues in the US” (Chase qtd. in Hegarty 76). Further, Koyama and other intersexual activists have unsuccessfully attempted to converse with Ensler about her intersexual monologue (Koyama, “Writing Our Own Monologues” 10). Because particular intersexual, feminist, queer, and critical race activists and theorists feel that their voices are dangerously silenced in Ensler’s performance piece, they urgently call for a dialogical approach to the monologues. For

example, Koyama requests that nation-wide campus V-Day performances incorporate “The Missing Vagina Monologues,” created by numerous intersexual activists and available on Koyama’s website, as a supplement to Ensler’s performance piece and as a way to end the silence and shame that surrounds intersexual existence. Yet, she reveals, “Unfortunately, the 2004 edition of ‘The Vagina Monologues’ apparently does not allow ‘plug-in’ monologues” (“Read Intersex Monologues” 1). Surprisingly, in addition to the prohibition of “plug ins,” Ensler also has a set of specific rules that must be followed concerning any and all V-Day performances of the monologues. In “Vagina Dialogues?”, Cheng details the “rules” and “restrictions” that Ensler places on V-Day performances of the play: You must use the V-Day version of the script of “The Vagina Monologues” that will be made available to you. No other version of the play is acceptable for your production. Do not use the book of the play or versions of the script from previous Worldwide Campaigns. The new script must be followed. You may not edit any introductions or monologues. And you may not exclude or change the order of any of the monologues. (327) To counter the silence of alternative and global voices that Ensler’s rules enforce, Cheng interviews local Hong Kong women and creates her own set of monologues entitled Stories of Our Little Sisters. Through the performance and distribution of her monologues, Cheng hopes to “decenter the center” through a dialogical approach to promoting women’s sexual autonomy worldwide, rather than what she sees as a hierarchical one (333). Cheng asserts that her piece will not only provide a “‘culturally appropriate’ adaptation of TVM, […] but also a critical engagement with it” (326). Janell Hobson too23 challenges the results of Ensler’s prohibitive “rules” as she asserts, “Perhaps a goal for global feminism should not be the creation of ‘vagina monologues,’

23 Bell and Reverby too critique the prohibitive “rules” that Ensler enforces concerning the production of The Vagina Monologues by asserting, “It discourages student and community involvement in the practice of translation and adaptation” (Bell and Reverby, “Vaginal Politics” 440).

but instead dialogues, for what good can come from turning the gaze inward” (Venus in the Dark 70). The hopes of all of these critiques is to examine the “epistemological violence inscribed in the play in its representation of difference” (Cooper 2), to challenge Ensler’s one-dimensional perspective on the vagina, to reveal the silencing of “othered” voices, and to disrupt the reified link between the vagina and the category woman.

Visibility Politics and Disidentificatory Aesthetics

Again, as the vagina is pronounced pornographic, excessive, grotesque, monstrous, and a direct cause of 9/11, as it is embraced and honored as a source of pride, and as it is asked to resignify something new, something less violent, exclusionary, essential, and fixed, these moments illustrate that the performing vagina has a life of its own outside of the “intentions” of the performers and artists. But this doesn't simply open it up to fear and condemnation, it also allows for playful possibilities. In a brilliant analysis of Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues, an analysis informed and shaped by disability studies, Hall seeks out possible alternatives to visually reclaiming and representing the vagina and proclaims that one responsible and ethical way to do so is through acts of disidentification (113). Such acts of disidentification, discussed in-depth in chapter two, not only work on and against ideological notions of the vagina, but they also have the power to resignify its predetermined meaning. As a result, we realize that we do not have to forego visibility politics altogether in order to release the vagina from its ideological significations. Hassan Musa, a postmodern Sudanese artist, writer, and performance artist now living in France, illustrates how the exhibition of art is itself a performance and can therefore have both devastating and liberating effects on bodies and lives. Musa’s 1998 The Origin or Art (see Figure 3) composed of textile ink on cloth is one attempt to disidentify with specific stereotypes surrounding the sexualized female body. As Musa strategically attaches the top section of Leonardo da Vinci’s sixteenth-century Mona Lisa (from her nose upward) onto Gustave Courbet’s 1866 French “realist” painting entitled

L’Origine du monde/The Origin of the World, Musa, in a sense, bastardizes both infamous works of art. Writing specifically about The Origin of Art, Salah Hassan

Figure 3. Musa, Hassan. The Origin of Art. In Looking Both Ways: Art of the Contemporary African Diaspora. Ed. Laurie Ann Farrell. New York: Snoeck, 2004. 120. writes, “By juxtaposing these popular but diametrically opposed masterpieces of Western Art, Musa produces a powerful critique of capitalist culture, its construction of the female body, and Western art history, in which the female figure has always been available for visual exploitation as spectacle” (121). Interestingly, Courbet’s once censored and banned Origin, which depicts a woman’s exposed breast down to her thighs lying on a bed with an exposed and vulnerable vagina, has not only been perceived as erotica, but has also been interpreted as a “realist” portrayal of a woman’s “essence” or “center” as it finally uncovers or exposes an essential “truth” about her. Lacking a head, mind, or eyes, this fragmented woman becomes all body. In contrast, da Vinci’s Mona Lisa is better known for her enigmatic smile and straight-on gaze. Because “woman” has historically and culturally been understood as all body, as nature, while man has stood in the position of mind/culture, the Mona Lisa can be interpreted as a radical statement.

Writing about a cardboard cutout of Virginia Woolf’s head attached to Marilyn Monroe’s body housed in a Chapel Hill café, Silver asserts the “horror” that the juxtaposition of a brilliant mind and sexualized body might instill. She writes, “Instead of combining two ideals of what a woman could be, the figure becomes a doubled image of horror, in which head and body, intellect and sexuality, whether on their own or together, prove multiply monstrous” (Silver 256). As Musa chooses to crop off the Mona Lisa’s smile, he attaches the remaining part of her infamous gaze to Courbet’s giant vagina; as a result, she is now sexualized and embodied. At the same time, Musa strategically grants Courbet’s figure a mind or a position in culture. Although Musa’s The Origin of Art depends upon the vagina as a signifier of woman, he is able to queer two well-known visual depictions of “woman” and, in turn, complicate the diametrically opposed stereotypes of lack/excess, nature/culture, mind/body, and male/female. Judith Halberstam, too, writes of the disidentificatory potential of the visual through her own analysis of transgender photography and art, photography and art that, unlike Musa’s The Origin of Art, fully disarticulates genitals from gender. Halberstam describes the particular transgender aesthetics of Jenny Saville, Del LaGrace Volcano, Eva Hesse, and the Australian art research group SymbioticA as “a repetitive series of gestures that in these instances, depict identity as process, mutation, invention, and reconstruction” (111). Utilizing mannequin and prosthetic body parts as the focus of her 1992 performative photography series entitled “Sex Pictures,” Cindy Sherman disrupts the naturalized categories of sex, gender, and sexuality that are determined solely by anatomy and she simultaneously emphasizes that both subjectivity and embodiment are fractured and fragmented. As a result, her photographs can be understood as putting forward Halberstam’s notion of a “technotopic” transgender aesthetic or “an aesthetic of turbulence.” Sherman’s “Untitled, #261” (see Figure 2) depicts a “male” mannequin head positioned upside down, with a blank stare that meets both the camera lens and the viewer’s gaze. The mannequin’s mouth is slightly open and his neck is awkwardly bent, almost as if dead, and this fragmented and pieced together “human” form has no legs. Sherman then chooses to attach breasts and a vagina onto the shortened torso. In a

similar manner, “Untitled, #263” (see Figure 4) presents an “amputated” torso and an exposed vagina with an obvious tampon string hanging out. Then, affixed upside down to the top of the “female” waist is a shortened “male” torso, signified by the presence of a penis and cock ring. A piece of fabric tied into a bow transforms the two separate pieces into one.

Figure 4. Sherman, Cindy. Untitled, #261. In Cindy Sherman: Photographic Work, 1975-1995. Eds. Zdenek Felix and Martin Schwander. Schirmer Art Books, 1995. 88.

Although Sherman herself has been characterized as a “sexual terrorist” and her work is often responded to as pornographic, she does not claim a transgender identity for herself, nor does she claim to represent transgender bodies in her “Sex” series. Elisabeth Bronfen asserts that Sherman instead seeks “to evoke those images of horror that are usually repressed – anxieties about fragmentation, dissolution, or the substitution of the human body with artificial body parts and prostheses” (16). Sherman’s series then, can be described as both a parodic and traumatic realization of one’s own bodily instability and transformation. While both Musa and Sherman illustrate how a visibility politics might work to resignify the vagina’s ideological signification, Sherman takes a strategic political turn to not only (dis)organize and (dis)articulate sex, gender, and sexuality, but to also emphasize that the vagina is a cultural construct that will forever mutate and

transform. In the end, Sherman herself takes pleasure in the realization that all bodies are always already fragmented, dislocated, and unpredictable as she confides, “I see myself as a composite of all the things I’ve done” (qtd. in Bronfen 15).

“Becoming Otherwise”

I find myself continually returning to queer theorist Robert Reid-Pharr because he charts a path similar to my own as he details the intimate connection between affects and anatomy: If there is one thing that marks us as queer, a category that is somehow different, if not altogether distinct, from the heterosexual, then it is undoubtedly our relationship to the body, particularly the expansive ways in which we utilize and combine vaginas, penises, breasts, buttocks, hands, feet, stomachs, mouths, tongues in our expansions of not only intimacy, love and lust but also and importantly shame, contempt, desire, and hate. (85) As Reid-Pharr articulates a queer’s relationship to his/her own body, he ably connects a multiplicity of affects to the expansive utilization of body parts. As I make my own connections between affects and anatomy, I will incorporate transnational, race, and queer theories of power and pride, trauma and pain, shame and disgust, bodies and pleasures, and loss and vulnerability into an analysis of the disparate representations of “performing vaginas” put forward in literature, art, and performance. Judith Butler’s theories of a paradoxical agency work well with my explorations of performative and performing vaginas. In Undoing Gender, Butler beautifully speaks of our paradoxical relationship to norms that dictate, yet exceed our lives. She asserts that we rely on norms because of our need for recognition, yet such norms can be violent and imposing: “the question of how to embody the norm is thus very often linked to the question of survival, of whether life itself will be possible” (217). Butler also writes that agency exists within and because of such tensions (3). There have been and continue to be numerous attempts

to renegotiate and reconceptualize vaginas and their relations to race, nation, sex, gender, sexuality, and sexual practice. Of course, it would be impossible to detail every tactic that has been and is still being imagined, but there are significant responses in particular that I find myself drawn to. The movements that performing vaginas make between identification, counteridentification, disidentification, and (dis)articulation “trouble” normative conceptions of vaginas while simultaneously depathologizing “abnormal” ones. Chapter one, “‘I Am No More. And Satisfied’:24 The ‘(Dis)Abled’ Vulva in Alice Walker’s Possessing the Secret of Joy,” both expands upon and further complicates the politics of pussy pride detailed in this introduction. Walker’s Possessing is not only a response to dominant discourses that construct “woman” as lack, but this fictional narrative also works against other feminist counterdiscourses that are incapable of imagining black women’s sexuality as anything other than hypersexual. Despite the constructions that Walker is contesting, in her attempt to make the world a less violent and more accepting place to live, female genital mutilation (FGM) in Possessing comes to stand in for the African woman’s otherness. As Possessing asserts that a woman who has undergone the ritual of female genital cutting is utterly traumatized and wounded, it also asserts that this same woman can never experience sexual pleasure or personal joy. By putting Walker’s text into conversation with non-fictional narratives by circumcised, infibulated, and disabled women who are adamant that they can and do experience sexual pleasures through the realignment of erogenous zones and acts of fantasy and imagination, I offer a slightly nuanced re-envisioning of the way the West interprets and constructs (an always African) FGM. My hope is that such re-envisioning might open up spaces where we begin to question, rethink, and reimagine normative conceptions of erotics as body centered and woman as vagina. In chapter two, “The ‘Grotesque’ Pussy: ‘Transformational Shame’25 in Margaret Cho’s Stand-up Performances,” I explore how a traumatized body can discover creative ways to experience pleasure, rather than be condemned to suffer. Because pride as an

24 Tashi speaks this line after her execution in Walker’s Possessing (281). 25 Borrowed from Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Touching Feeling (38).

organized politics can sometimes expel the shame and violence that is fundamental to transformations of the self, I turn to the disidentificatory performances of Margaret Cho, a queer Asian-American stand-up comic, to illustrate, borrowing from Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, that the negotiation of shame can be transformational. As Cho makes obvious that bodily boundaries are metaphoric for any boundary the nation feels is threatened or susceptible to invasion, the way she is frequently perceived and/or attacked illustrates that her performances, as well as national responses to such performances, are shaped by and depend upon ideological constructions of the “excessively” raced and sexed body. Yet it is Cho’s playful juxtaposition of pride and shame, agency and fear, and pleasure and pain that makes for effective queer performances. In the end, as she negotiates and troubles how she is read by our culture at large, Cho urges an intersectional approach to gender, sexuality, race, and nation and an attention to how opposing affects inform the transformations one continually experiences. In chapter three, “‘When Is a Tulip Not a Tulip?’:26 Bodies and Pleasures in Jeanette Winterson’s The PowerBook,” I turn to Jeanette Winterson’s reappropriation and transformation of the language and imagery of flowers (vaginal iconography). In The Powerbook, as the virtual character Ali, also known as “the Exotic of the East,” is plunged into the early historical accounts of “tulipomania” in sixteenth-century Holland, Winterson is able to transport us away from a politics of sexual difference and into “a queer time and place” (Halberstam 1). Ali not only performs an alternative masculinity as she/he “straps on” a tulip and two tulip bulbs as a way to illegally transport them across geographical borders, but she/he also cultivates an unsanctioned pleasure garden that is about community, coexisting with each other and the natural world, sex, pleasure, ethics, and justice. If we trace the diasporic travels of Ali and the tulip, we get a sense of the culture’s movements, transformations, and desires. And if we interpret the newly transplanted flower garden, we find that space, identity, and nation can be queered. Ali’s cultivation of a tulip-filled pleasure garden, alongside her/his encounters with the Captain from Istanbul and the pirates and princess from Genoa, illustrate that although the tulip

26 From Winterson’s The Powerbook (9).

cannot be disconnected from colonial exploration, exploitation, and a desire for all things exotic, its dispersion across the globe is specifically about the spread of the community’s bodies and pleasures. And finally, in chapter four, “‘It Began with an Image’: Loss, Disorientation, and Vulnerability in Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night,” we are asked to reconsider our understanding of place, space, and identity and it is Mala’s interaction with her garden that articulates this hope. Unlike vaginal iconography, the language of flowers, or “cunt art” that emphasize woman’s “natural” difference from man, Cereus troubles the seemingly “essential” connections between nature/the female body and the flower/vagina. Cereus does not deny that the violence imposed upon Mala is wielded against her body, but it does illustrate that this same violence is implicated in and complicated by decades upon decades of Trinidadian history: British colonialism, slavery, indentured servitude, racism, homophobia, and displacement. Cereus then incorporates imagination, ritual, and a return to the body into how one might negotiate a seemingly personal trauma. The many discursive silences surrounding Mala’s vagina encourage us to acknowledge that how direct, how loudly, or how vividly one’s story is recounted is, inevitably, as different as the stories and storytellers themselves. We may feel alone, isolated, vulnerable, and disconnected from others, asserts Mootoo, but if we pay close attention to alternative methods of disclosure, we can openly acknowledge that the traumatized vagina always has a story to tell. As a result, Mootoo emphasizes that there is always the hope of reorientation and reconnection as she envisions, through her fiction, the potential and ethics of interrelationality. What is it that I’m asking of the vagina and those who inhabit it, refuse it, desire it, reiterate it, and reimagine it? Although the vagina can perform multiple things as it takes on a life of its own, it is imperative to think through the implications of using such a symbol as the source of what it means to be a “woman.” In “The Desire for Gender,” Robyn Wiegman alludes to the dangers of demanding that our objects of inquiry, the vagina in my case, perform acts of justice, wholeness, and freedom. She writes, “if we find ourselves repeatedly disappointed when categories congeal into unities, […] perhaps

we should stop blaming the category or its user and explore instead what it is we expect our relationship to our objects of study do.” What is it then that I expect my own personal and political relationship to the vagina to do? If we confront the ideological connections between sex, gender, and desire, which I hope this dissertation halfway accomplishes, we might be on our way to imagining an alternative future where queer, raced, and/or disabled bodies are not named, categorized, fixed, shunned, shamed, or punished. The vagina can no longer be the signifier that connects all “women,” nor is it necessary to live a “healthy,” “abled,” and “complete” life. When the vagina is used to signify pleasure, desire, gender, race, sex, sexuality, and nation, it always pushes someone to the margins and this push can be unbearable. If we approach the vagina as a category that is not only reified through political and cultural discourses, but as a category that is fleeting, fictional, transformative, unstable, and elusive, might we alter who counts as worthwhile and valuable? Might we develop more empathetic, compassionate, and non-violent ways of approaching each other as we always and forever become “otherwise” (Butler, Undoing Gender 29)?

Chapter One

‘I Am No More. And Satisfied’:27 The ‘(Dis)Abled’ Vulva in Alice Walker’s Possessing the Secret of Joy

There is a woman in Somalia / […] She lives a life she didn’t choose / And it hurts like brand-new shoes / Hurts like brand-new shoes (Sade,“Pearls”).

There are numerous Western mainstream discourses, international and national policies, and postcolonial critiques concerning that which has been termed African “female genital mutilation” (FGM).28 Eve Ensler, Mary Daly, and Alice Walker are only a handful of feminists who have declared the practice a form of “torture.”29 In fact, Walker’s purpose in writing Possessing the Secret of Joy, a fictional African tale of tradition, nationalism, revolution, and justice, was to end the practice of FGM. Using Tashi, her protagonist, as the voice of “reason,” Walker is able to construct a narrative that illustrates the damaging emotional and physical repercussions of FGM. In “To the Reader” found at the end of Possessing, Walker addresses her audience in a straightforward manner as she details that she has chosen to deviate from Tashi’s original story that was briefly introduced in her 1982 Pulitzer Prize winning novel, The Color Purple. Walker writes, “I have claimed the storyteller’s prerogative to recast or slightly change events alluded to or described in the earlier books, in order to emphasize and

27 Tashi speaks this line after her execution in Walker’s Possessing (281). 28 International policy has declared FGM a human rights’ abuse (the 1993 Vienna Declaration and Programme of Action, 1996 World Health Organization/WHO, 1995 at the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, 1981 UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women) (James 96). “Clitoridectomy and infibulation practiced by foreigners were outlawed by the U.S. federal government in 1996 in a campaign led by Congresswoman Patricia Schroeder” (Robertson 58). 29 In Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism, Mary Daly, echoing Walker, describes the practice of female genital cutting as a “Sado-Ritual Syndrome,” as “barbaric rituals/atrocities,” and as a “living death” (154, 57). But she also reduces this practice, echoing both Ensler and Walker, to the patriarchal oppression of all women. She explains that “mutilation” is “precisely what is done to women’s bodies/minds/spirits under patriarchy: they are divided and fragmented into disconnected pieces” (endnote 164).

enhance the meanings of the present tale” (283-84). By taking certain liberties with Tashi’s fictional story, Walker is able to emphasize and enhance her political and creative agenda. Because of her plan to end FGM or to at least “save” one little girl from such a fate,30 Walker asserts that Possessing is the story of “a daughter whose culture demands the literal destruction of the most crucial external sign of her womanhood: the vulva itself” (21). In fact, she dedicates this text to “the blameless vulva,” personifying it as victim and fragmenting the body as a whole. Through this representational act, the body is metaphorically “cut” into pieces and the vulva strategically signifies one’s womanhood. As a result, the Western abled female body that possesses a clitoris serves as the normative body against which the “mutilated” body is measured. Quite often, the absences and silences surrounding an active and pleasurable sexuality for women who have gone through the body ritual of female circumcision are shaped by a heteronormative culture where the idea of a sexual body is dependent upon the vagina as the primary location for penetration and the clitoris as the sole location of pleasure. As a result, according to Christine J. Walley, what is then missing from discourses surrounding female genital cutting “is how women who have had such procedures experience their sexuality” (49, n.14). In the non-fictional Warrior Marks: Female Genital Mutilation and the Sexual Blinding of Women, a companion piece to Walker’s documentary of the same title, Walker reinforces the notion that the mutilation of the clitoris and labia signals a woman’s insurmountable lack as she transcribes a conversation between herself and a circumcised woman named Mary. The conversation is specifically about the “mutilated” woman’s sexual desires and pleasures, but notice Walker’s response, marked off in a parenthetical aside, which is significant. Walker asserts, “You know, I said, that the removal of sexual organs lessens sexual response and destroys or severely diminishes a woman’s enjoyment. Well, she [Mary] responded, my sex life is perfectly satisfactory, thank you very much! (How would you know, though, I thought.) I said a heartfelt Good for you!, slapped her palm, and let it go” (44). Because

30 Responding to her reasons for constructing Tashi's narrative, Walker writes, “I don't have a big plan, a big scheme about all this. I have one requirement: that, because of this book, one little girl, somewhere, won't be mutilated. And that's plenty. . . . That's enough” (qtd. in Giddings).

Walker understands the “presence” of her own “intact” vulva as the sign of her wholeness, she not only seems astounded at Mary’s response, but she also closes down any possibility of living a full and complete life as a fragmented subject. But how could Walker possibly know whether or not Mary experiences sexual pleasure? Walker’s response to Mary is partially shaped by her belief that the way to cease the practice of female genital mutilation is to allow “more educated women in the world, more conscious women” to teach the African woman that this practice is morally, spiritually, physically, and sexually destructive. Walker states, “sometimes you have to take a political or moral stand, whether it’s your own or someone else’s culture. […] Somebody needs to help children free themselves from oppression, because they have nothing else, they have no one else. […] It is all about consciousness” (Warrior Marks 270, 278). Believing that African girls and women have nothing or no one to “help them free themselves,” Walker’s response reads as a frustrated attempt to bring Mary into a “higher” consciousness and convince her otherwise. Yet the “I slapped her [Mary’s] palm, and let it go,” reads as if it just isn’t worth Walker’s time and effort, that Mary will never “get it.” Instead, Walker “lets it go” rather than inquiring, rather than really wanting know how one’s desire/sexual life might be experienced differently from her own. It is through Walker’s reliance on the clitoris and the vulva as a signifier of a “true” and “abled” womanhood, as well as her assumptions that African women who participate in the ritual of female circumcision are not only child-like, but also suffering from a false consciousness, that Mary is understood as a completely determined subject who is unaware of her own oppression. As a result, we are left with a teleological narrative of healing and Mary is left with a “wound” that can never be transcended. In Walker’s view and many other Western feminists, the normal and abled body is the straight, healthy, and whole body; and the straight, healthy, and whole body relies upon the existence of particular body parts that signal one’s proper gender and sexuality. Robert McRuer and Abby L. Wilkerson in “Desiring Disability: Queer Theory Meets Disability Studies” detail how ablest norms, such as “perfect bodies and minds, which constitute goodness in terms of health, constancy, energy, wholeness, and strength” (8),

are dependent upon and constructed in opposition to disabled and/or queer bodies. And in Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability, McRuer, borrowing from and extending Judith Butler’s theories of gender trouble, puts forward the possibilities of “ability trouble” (31). One outcome of approaching disability in this way is that “the problem” is no longer an individual one, but is now interrogated as a cultural and political attitude. If the clitoris and/or vagina or its rediscovery is posited as necessary to a “woman’s” development as a “whole,” “healthy” and “abled” human being, then the removal of such a signifier or the inability to surpass the pain and shame that often surrounds this “lacking” or “mutilated” body part, would be detrimental and “disabling” to one’s sense of self. Because Tashi, a willing participant of female genital cutting, is represented by Walker as an abnormal and disabled body unable to experience pleasure and joy, I’ve found the connections between disability, trauma, and queer studies to be a productive way of pointing to alternative possibilities that are foreclosed in Walker’s Possessing. Like Mary, the possibilities for Tashi of actually experiencing an active and erotic sexual life are not explored. In An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures, Ann Cvetkovich articulates the possibilities that are opened up if we begin to think about how one negotiates her pain and trauma, rather than being forced to “overcome” it.31 Echoing the narrative she creates for Celie in The Color Purple, Walker asserts that despite her own patriarchal wound, she was able to negotiate this pain and transform herself “into someone who loves life and knows pleasure and joy in spite of it” (17). Instead of articulating Tashi’s trauma, shame, and “loss” as clinical or something to be overcome, as Walker does, could it be approached as something cultural, something we negotiate? If so, might Walker have been able to offer Tashi the ability to transform her own pain into something constructive, creative, and fulfilling, while continuing her own personal and political condemnation against the practice of FGM? Despite the fact

31 Cvetkovich writes, “Thinking about trauma from the same depathologizing perspective that has animated queer understandings of sexuality opens up possibilities for understanding traumatic feelings not as a medical problem in search of a cure but as felt experiences that can be mobilized in a range of directions, including the construction of cultures and publics” (47).

that our gendered, sexual, and able-bodied identities are constituted through repetitive performances, we all “fail” to live up to the ideal in one way or another. By putting Walker’s text into conversation with non-fictional narratives by circumcised, infibulated, and disabled women, as well as by queer, transgender, and intersexual individuals who are adamant that they can and do experience sexual pleasures through the realignment of erogenous zones and acts of fantasy and imagination, I hope to point to a radical shift from heteronormativity that posits the vagina and the clitoris as a woman’s only option for penetration and pleasure and into an erotics that is not dependent on the vagina or the body at all. After all, clitoral stimulation and vaginal penetration are not the only sites where women can experience sexual pleasures. The vagina and/or clitoris are not necessary to live life as a “whole,” “healthy,” “abled,” and “complete” “woman,” nor are they the source of our universal connection to all women. The potential of this move might offer up a slightly nuanced re-envisioning of the way the West interprets and constructs (an always African) FGM as torture, erotics as body centered, and woman as vagina.

“Hurts Like Brand-New Shoes”

In Warrior Marks, Walker brings together FGM with various forms of terror that all women face under the constraints of patriarchy. Walker writes, “the genital mutilation of women is really just a part of the global mutilation of women, the terrorization of women, one of the numerous things done to keep them in their place, under the foot of the dominant patriarchal culture” (282). With this belief as her guide, Walker constructs Tashi’s fictional and textual body as a way to make sense of her own experience of a patriarchal “blinding.” As a child, Walker was shot in the eye by her brother and then betrayed by her parents who approached the “accident” with apathy (Warrior Marks 16-7). As a result of these “similar” betrayals and mutilations, she sees Tashi as her sister (Possessing 285). Walker then extends this notion of a universal sisterhood to include every woman. For example, according to Walker, just as numerous

African women experience the patriarchal mutilation of FGM, U.S. women experience such mutilations and tortures through our (unconscious) use of particular commodities such as bras and high-heeled shoes.32 Walker is not the only woman to conflate the pains of African women with the pains of wearing “brand-new shoes,” as the epigraph by Sade illustrates. But it is through such associations that every “woman” now has intimate psychic connections with women worldwide who too have been “blinded” by patriarchal ideologies. For Walker, then, patriarchy violently inflicts a wound (a literal or sexual blinding/mutilation) and the wound stands in as a constitutive element of one’s identity as a woman. By claiming a universal understanding of and connection with all women based on male violence against women,33 Walker participates in creating a “politicized identity” suggestive of Wendy Brown’s notion of “wounded attachments.” In States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity, Brown details a paradigm wherein a universal connection with others is based on one’s wound or injury. Approaching the dangers of these forms of “wounded attachments,” Brown asserts that we trivialize “‘difference’ so as to remain part of the ‘we’” (56), thus the injury is disarticulated from its historical and cultural specificity.34 Further, as the category “woman” can only be articulated through this wound, identities are not only inevitable, but also “fixed,” and we can’t understand our positions in the world except through this injury. And finally, because women are viewed as “victims” of patriarchy, we are left with a one-dimensional understanding of the ways in which power works: men are oppressors, women are oppressed; men are all- powerful, women are wounded. As a result, in an attempt to surpass or overcome universal patriarchal mutilations, women must direct their suffering outward towards the objects (patriarchy, or more specifically, circumcisers in Walker’s Possessing) that have

32 She states, “it's why we have bras that make it impossible for us to breathe freely, high-heeled shoes that destroy our feet” (Walker qtd. in Parmar 305-06). 33 Not only is Celie in The Color Purple connected to Walker and Tashi through her own traumatic violations, but Walker also mentions that in writing Celie she was hoping that readers would come to understand the “two-spirited nature” of her own experiences (qtd. in Fraile- Marcos 117). 34 Sara Ahmed in The Cultural Politics of Emotion compliments Brown’s theorization of wounded attachments (173).

inflicted the wounds. Brown writes, “In locating a site of blame for its powerlessness over its past – a past of injury, a past as a hurt will – and locating a ‘reason’ for the ‘unendurable pain’ of social powerlessness in the present, it converts this reasoning into […] a politics of recrimination that seeks to avenge the hurt even while it reaffirms it, discursively codifies it” (74). In other words, according to Brown, to condemn the practice of FGM, Walker must point to the “source” of Tashi’s mutilation. Implicit within Possessing is the betrayal of young girls and daughters by women and mothers. Walker emphasizes this betrayal in Warrior Marks as she says, “Children place all their love and trust in their mothers. When you think of the depth of the betrayal of the child’s trust, this is an emotional wounding, which will never go away” (274). In addition to the physical wound of her circumcision, Walker implies that Tashi’s emotional “wound” is the result of M’Lissa’s betrayal. As Possessing comes to its conclusion, Walker has Tashi murder M’Lissa, the woman who “mutilated” her body and spirit; and it is this murder that is set up as a form of resistance and a form of justice in the text. Because Tashi’s “revenge” leads to her execution by the nation-state, I question, following Brown, if there are other alternatives for both surviving and thriving. In a conversation between Tashi and M’Lissa in Walker’s Possessing, Tashi disavows the pleasure she once received from anal sex and recognizes that her mutilation has made her incomplete: Don’t think the women never receive pleasure, either, says M’Lissa. I never have, I say. That is your own fault, she says. The pleasure a woman receives comes from her own brain. The brain sends it to any spot a lover can touch. […] I recall the feeling of a banished sensation. I did have pleasure, once or twice, after my ‘bath,’ I say. Yes? she says. But my pleasure shamed me. Ah, says M’Lissa, your man gave it to you from behind. What is shameful about that? […] My pleasure angered me, I say. It made me hate my husband. It was pleasure, wasn’t it? I felt I had been made into something other than myself. (245-46)

Embedded within Tashi’s “anger” and “shame” is the rejection of the anus as just one site of pleasure/possibility because this sexual act seems to transform her “into something other than herself.” The permeability of bodily orifices that are not sanctioned by the state or nation are almost always read as perverse, nonproductive, immoral, dirty, and infectious. Gayle Rubin in “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality” asserts that despite the 2003 Supreme Court decision that overturned Bowers v. Hardwick,35 the homophobic national policy that determined that queers have no right to privacy when it comes to how one practices sex, “sexual acts [continue to be] burdened with an excess of significance” (11). Further, both Rubin and Jelto Drenth in The Origin of the World: Science and Fiction of the Vagina detail that particular sexual acts such as anal sex, S/M, cross-generational sex, and masturbation are still considered perverse because their only aim is pleasure (Drenth 83).36 Because taboos define and dictate how, why, and where one can be penetrated and how, why, and where one can experience pleasure, such restrictions reinforce the binary between a “normal” heterosexuality (where a specific type of vagina is penetrated by a penis for reproductive purposes) and an “abnormal” and/or “perverse” queerness (where penetration and/or pleasure often defy taboo). Because the vulva signifies one’s identity as a “real” woman, Tashi now understands herself as a “something,” a non-identity, a thing. And although this “something” is not identified, we are left to believe that through this act, Tashi feels as if she has become either queer, perverse, abnormal, pathological, unhealthy, shameful, or all of the above. Ironically, a significant effect of Possessing’s message concerns the individual sense of power one can gain by defying taboo.37 Speaking of the debilitating silence that

35 For a fascinating read of the ways in which the rhetoric of Lawrence v. Texas denies/erases the sexual act/practice of anal sex that was ever-present in Bowers v. Hardwick see Teemu Ruskola’s “Gay Rights versus Queer Theory: What is Left of Sodomy after Lawrence V. Texas?” Ruskola asserts that Lawrence institutes a “regime of normalcy” (244). 36 Freud had already established by the early 1900s that as we became more “civilized,” anal sex became “unserviceable for sexual aims” (“Character and Anal Eroticism” 171). 37 William Ian Miller in The Anatomy of Disgust articulates, “the overcoming of prohibition is itself a pleasure independent of whatever pleasures may lie in the acquisition of the object so prohibited” (114).

enshrouds the practice of FGM, Tashi reveals, “they’ve made the telling of the suffering itself taboo” (Possessing 165). The protest signs that appear at Tashi’s execution powerfully defy the taboo of publicly speaking of one’s suffering. Interestingly though, the taboos surrounding “perverse” sexual acts remain unchallenged. Tashi’s move across continents that coincides with her feelings of inadequacy transforms her tabooed (African) pleasures into a tabooed (Western) shame. While in Africa and before her “mutilation,” Tashi experiences heightened sexual pleasures by herself and with Adam because of certain cultural taboos that “prohibit” specific sexual acts, such as masturbation, having sex with Adam in the Olinkan fields, and practicing cunnilingus. In other words, such prohibitions fill Tashi with a sense of fear, danger, and excitement that only intensify her pleasures, allowing her to always experience orgasm (Possessing 122).38 As a result, Tashi, as a “whole” and “abled” human being, is able to defy taboo as a way to enhance her pleasures. But such possibilities must be foreclosed after Tashi’s mutilation and her move to the West. In the moment of Possessing when anal sex is “spoken,” Walker alludes to the possibilities of fragmented pleasures, yet because she is working within a binary understanding of women’s sexualities as either active/passive, healthy/pathological, abled/disabled, and normal/abnormal, there is no room for Tashi to defy taboo or even negotiate her pleasure, pain, and shame in the face of this prohibition. To allow Tashi to become an active agent with a “wounded” vulva would significantly diminish the political effects of Possessing.

Moving Into Non-normative Spaces: The Negotiation of Pain, Trauma, and Shame

Many postcolonial theorists have critiqued Western readings of African female genital cutting as a practice that is “primitive” and “barbaric,” and as a practice that

38 Raye asks Tashi, “It is from this time, before circumcision, that you remember pleasure? When I was little I used to stroke myself, which was taboo. And then, when I was older, and before we were married, Adam and I used to make love in the fields. Which was also taboo. Doing it in the fields, I mean. And because we practiced cunnilingus. Did you experience orgasm? Always” (Walker, Possessing 122).

reduces “woman” to her (wounded) vulva and clit.39 Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan in “Warrior Marks: Global Womanism’s Neo-Colonial Discourse in a Multicultural Context” detail the dangers in “naming” the practice a mutilation or a form of torture. Both Grewal and Kaplan assert that our individual choice of terminology is a political move with potentially damaging repercussions. They state that this choice, as well as the ways in which female genital cutting is often represented in the West, are both “attached to a history of colonialism and linked to the Enlightenment concepts of individuality and bodily integrity, medicalized notions of ‘cleanliness’ and ‘health,’ sexualized notions of the primacy of ‘clitoral orgasm’ and cultural organizations of pleasure” (10). In addition to postcolonial critiques that emphasize how able-bodied norms shape our understanding of the practice, queer, transgender, and intersexual activists in the U.S. have also been challenging the ways in which the West reads and represents FGM. More specifically, in “‘Cultural Practice’ or ‘Reconstructive Surgery’?: U.S. Genital Cutting, the Intersex Movement, and Medical Double Standards,” intersexual activist and theorist Cheryl Chase responds to both feminist counterdiscourses concerning FGM and ideological notions of sex, gender, and desire that neglect the intersexual body. In her critical essay and as a way to complicate Walker’s political move to end African FGM, Chase details a violent contradiction as the West reads African FGM as a mutilation to the “normal” body, yet defines Western “corrective” surgeries performed on intersexuals as the “normalization” of an abnormal body.40 Echoing Grewal and

39 For example, see Stanlie M. James and Claire C. Robertson’s edited collection entitled Genital Cutting and Transnational Sisterhood: Disputing U.S. Polemics, Giulia M. Fabi’s ““Sexual Violence and the Black Atlantic: On Alice Walker's Possessing the Secret of Joy,” Olankunle George’s “Alice Walker's Africa: Globalization and the Province of Fiction,” Chase, Cheryl Chase’s “'Cultural Practice' or 'Reconstructive Surgery'?: U.S. Genital Cutting, the Intersex Movement, and Medical Double Standards,” Angeletta Gourdine’s “Postmodern Ethnography and the Womanist Mission: Postcolonial Sensibilities in Possessing the Secret of Joy,” and Kadiatu Kanneh’s “'Africa' and Cultural Translation: Reading Difference.” 40 “Congress passed the Federal Prohibition of Female Genital Mutilation Act in October 1996. That act specifically exempted from prohibition medicalized clitoridectomies of the sort performed to ‘correct’ intersex bodies” (Chase 141). One of many similar responses from those who avoid intersexual issues is, “We are not concerned with biological exceptions” (Hosken qtd. in Chase 141).

Kaplan’s assertion that the way we understand FGM is shaped by “Enlightenment concepts” of health, freedom, wholeness, and pleasure, Chase writes, “we have science, and science is linked to the meta-narratives of enlightenment, progress, and truth” (142). Chase then goes on to assert that the racist and paternalistic denial of the connections between African and U.S. practices of genital operations “exposes some of the complex interactions between ideologies of race, gender, colonialism, and science that effectively silence and render invisible intersex experience in first-world contexts” (140-41). As a result of the discourses, policies, laws, and activism that place FGM in an African context only, not only is a strict division between “primitive” others and our “civilized” selves constituted and reified, but also critical discussions of the heteronormative violence and shame imposed on intersexual bodies through “corrective surgeries” are altogether denied, avoided, and/or neglected. As a result, the discourses and ideologies surrounding sex, gender, and desire remain unchallenged and are able to dictate exactly what the “normal” female body is. And it is this regime of normality that imposes itself on all bodies, psyches, and lives often with horrific consequences. As a result of such negligence, the proliferation of discourses that detail non- normative ways of experiencing pleasure while negotiating power, pain, shame, and trauma, echoing Cvetkovich, might actually make a difference in the world. Alexa Schriempf in “(Re)fusing the Amputated Body: An Interactionist Bridge for Feminism and Disability” seems to speak to and directly counter Walker’s fictional conversation between Tashi and M’Lissa as she asks, “any human body has erotic sites that produce pleasurable sensations when stimulated; but how are these sites located and identified?” (71). Schriempf attempts to answer this question as she details that our understanding of specific corporeal pleasure points are informed by both bodily responses and ideological discourses of sex, gender, and sexuality; as a result, she understands pleasure itself as a construct. If we understand pleasure in this way, a host of other possibilities open up. Pointing specifically to the disabled body, Schriempf writes, “this is what Ellen Stohl means when she says, ‘even where I have lessened feeling, on my legs, if I can watch a lover touch me, I can be visually stimulated. Orgasms really happen in the brain, after

all’” (71). Reminiscent of both Schriempf and Stohl, M’Lissa herself attempts to articulate to Tashi that sensations can shift and be felt all over the body; but because M’Lissa is demonized throughout Possessing,41 her “radical” notions of the body, sexuality, and pleasure are immediately questioned. As a result, the possibility of expanding the meaning of the body and the body’s permeability is disavowed in both Possessing and Warrior Marks through Tashi’s shame and Walker’s dismissal of Mary’s own active sexuality: “(How would you know, though, I thought).” Pointing to the possibility of survival for Tashi through the practice of anal sex is not an attempt to “romanticize” the transgressions of the body in pain, discursively transform this body into a newly “abled” one, or transcend the body altogether; nor is it an attempt to make women’s practice of anal sex mean something specific.42 Instead, it is about releasing specific sex acts from “meaning” altogether. By offering up a lens with which to reimagine Tashi’s “disabled” body, I hope to do more than challenge or oppose “negative” representations and stereotypes. Instead, as detailed by McRuer above, I hope to trouble the cultural and political construction of bodies and identities altogether.

The Possibilities of Community

As Tashi’s fictional narrative ends with “I am no more. And satisfied” (281), Celie’s narrative in The Color Purple ends as she proclaims, “I am so happy. I got love, I

41 The epigraph that Walker chose to open Possessing is, “When the axe came into the forest, the trees said the handle is one of us.” M'Lissa is demonized as the tool that carries out the bloody fate of patriarchal African tradition. She has no regrets for her life decision to circumcise “unknowing” girls, and her decision to dedicate her life as a tsunga has raised her status to the level of a national treasure. Speaking of a circumciser that she is interviewing for her documentary Warrior Marks, Walker says, “I glanced at her hands – extremely dirty, with black gunk under the nails – and thought of their course hardness against the tenderest parts of these girls” (47). 42 Speaking of the lack of discourses surrounding the practice of anal sex for women, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick in Tendencies writes, “although there is no reason to suppose that women experience, in some imaginary quantitative sense, ‘less’ anal eroticism than men do, it can as far as I can determine almost be said as a flat fact that, since classical times, there has been no important and sustained Western discourse in which women’s anal eroticism means. Means anything” (Sedgwick’s emphasis 204).

got work, I got money, friends and time” (222). In both texts, Walker details the effects of patriarchal violence upon a “universal” black woman’s body. The differences surface as Tashi moves from being “complete” to becoming fragmented and unstable after her mutilation, while Celie moves from being a woman with no agency to a wholly “complete” and sexual subject after the discovery of her vagina and clitoris. In The Cultural Politics of Emotion, Sara Ahmed writes, “the very words we use to tell the story of our pain also work to reshape our bodies, creating new impressions” (25). Applying Ahmed’s analysis to Walker, because Tashi is purposefully constructed as a wounded, disabled, and traumatized body in pain, her only option in transcending her “mutilated” and “incomplete” body is death. Tashi herself confesses, “Maybe death is easier than life” (Possessing 253). Yet, if we heed Ahmed’s warning and embrace her hope concerning the discursive representations of bodies in pain, then we are freed to acknowledge that Walker’s representations of African women, Africa, and “female genital mutilation” have the power to influence what her readers know of the people, the continent, and the practice. The question isn’t about whether or not to get involved in the campaign to end female genital cutting; instead, the question concerns how to do so responsibly and ethically. It is imperative to mention that African women are successfully running their own campaigns (education and awareness through documentaries and theater, working to implement policy change, etc.) to end the practice of female genital cutting. Therefore, any attempt at Western intervention must be aware of and compliment such efforts. Further, for many women in African countries where clitoridectomy and infibulation take place, this practice may be on the bottom of the list of “issues” that need immediate attention (James and Robertson 2). And finally, women who have already undergone the ritual of female genital cutting experience this “lack” as part of their bodily reality; as a result, their responses cannot be feelings of lack and disability. Instead, they must incorporate it into their identities. I must again stress that Walker herself reveals, “Those of us who are maimed can tell you it is possible to go on. To flourish. To grow. To love and be loved, which is the most important thing. To feel pleasure and to know joy” (Warrior Marks 19). Walker is

adamant that not only has she survived, but also by loving and being loved, which is the most important thing, she has flourished and knows both pleasure and joy. Walker then reemphasizes this story of transcendence through Celie’s journey in The Color Purple. In The Color Purple, Celie too is a victim of horrifying abuse. She is repeatedly raped as a child, forced to give up her children, and is physically and psychologically abused by her husband, a man she is forced to marry. After living this life, it seems that Celie would suffer a fate similar to her daughter-in-law, Tashi. Having been abused and sexually violated, Celie refuses to approach her body as a desiring or desirable sexual body. Yet, through her relationship with Shug Avery, a relationship that is based on learning to “love and be loved,” Celie is, for the first time, able to experience erotic sexual pleasure, rather than humiliation and pain. Celie says, “Hard not to love Shug, I say. She know how to love somebody back” (289). Through this relationship, Shug is able to teach Celie about her own body and her own sexuality. As Shug realizes that Celie has always been alienated from her body, she playfully suggests, echoing the 1970s feminist consciousness-raising practice, “here take this mirror and go look at yourself down there, I bet you never seen it, have you?” (81). As Celie excitedly follows Shug’s advice she is set free.43 In the end then, Celie is provided with a community of black women, a lesbian lover, and the discovery of her own body as erotic and self-fulfilling so that she can metaphorically escape her scars. As a result, Celie’s fictional story is one of freedom and triumph as she pieces together the fragments of her existence, finds community, and learns to love again. To emphasize the implications of FGM, not only is Tashi denied the possibility of experiencing an active and pleasurable sexuality, but she is also denied any sort of life at all. Disability theorists Rosemarie Garland-Thomson in “Shape Structures Story: Fresh and Feisty Stories about Disability” and Lennard J. Davis in Bending Over Backwards: Disability, Dismodernism and Other Difficult Positions both assert that in addition to

43 Speaking specifically of The Color Purple, Charmaine Eddy points to the shortcomings of positing the discovery of one’s own clitoris and vagina as the moment that sets Celie free because such representations reify an essentialism that relies upon the existence of particular body parts – the genitalia – as signifiers of one’s innate nature/character (105).

introducing stories of sexual pleasure into disability narratives, we must also introduce stories of alternative communities. While Garland-Thomson writes, “A second primary site of exuberant flourishing are the human communities that form through deliberate or situational association in which shared experience bonds people together in mutually sustaining groups” (115), Davis likewise contends that we must “create a new category based on the partial, incomplete subject whose realization is not autonomy and independence but dependency and interdependence” (30). Placing Tashi alongside a community of African women or permanently locating her in the West on Celie’s front porch “might” have opened up a space where Tashi could have thrived or even transcended her “wound.” One reason Tashi participates in the female ritual of circumcision is so she will no longer feel alienated from the women in her community. In search of an identity and sense of connection with her villagers, for she is no longer “African” because of white colonization, Tashi is attempting to make sense of her contradictory position as a 20th century postcolonial African woman.44 Interestingly, if Tashi had been allowed to join an African community of women who had been circumcised, and there find healing and satisfying reintegration and “wholeness,” then the basis for healing would be non-clitoral and non-American. It is a fact that speaking to another of one’s own trauma(s) can be understood as a form of resistance as it transforms the pain into something livable. Tashi herself supports this as she reveals, “It is only the cruelty of truth, speaking it, shouting it, that will save us

44 The relationship between Europe and Africa that occurred during colonialism was profoundly played out upon the black female body, and Walker does not deny this. In the fictional Olinkan culture that Tashi is a part of, African revolutionaries – the Mbele rebels – are warring to reclaim and liberate their people and their land. In an unstable position, African nationalism had to defy colonial rule in specific ways, but the implications for women further reveal the masculinist discourse behind the movement. Echoing the sentiments of Jomo Kenyatta in Facing Mount Kenya: The Tribal Life of the Gikuyu who asserts, “the abolition of irua [clitoridectomy] will destroy the tribal symbol which identifies the age-groups, and prevent the Gikuyu from perpetuating that spirit of collectivism and national solidarity which they have been able to maintain from time immemorial” (135), Tashi recalls that “Our Leader” advocated “that we must return to the purity of our own culture and traditions. That we must not neglect our ancient customs” (Possessing 117). Tashi's decision to join the Olinkan nationalist movement as her clitoris is removed is a result of the movement between and within the powerful forces that surround her life. Tashi is working with and against white colonialism and a black gendered nationalism that has appropriated her body for the betterment of each nation.

now” (Possessing 275). There are numerous non-fictional African narratives that articulate the ability to survive, thrive, and experience a fulfilling sexual life “in spite of” a body that has been modified voluntarily or involuntarily. For example, Hanny Lightfoot-Klein in Prisoners of Ritual: An Odyssey into Female Genital Circumcision in Africa, Efua Dorkenoo in Cutting the Rose: Female Genital Mutilation: The Practice and its Prevention, and Sudanese doctor Nahid Toubia,45 all oppose the practice of FGM, yet all three insist that many circumcised and infibulated women experience sexual pleasures through fantasy and imagination46 and as erogenous zones shift from the genitals to other parts of the body. Lightfoot-Klein, supported by her ethnographic and qualitative studies of circumcised and infibulated women in Sudan, cites “mutilated” women’s confessions of intense sexual pleasure followed by orgasm and she asserts that this experience “is far from being rare” (81). Lightfoot-Klein reveals, “when asked to name the most sensitive parts of their bodies, circumcised women generally refer to their breasts, bellies, thighs, or necks. The genital region is almost never named spontaneously” (93). Further, Dorkenoo details that many women who have undergone circumcision are “adamant that their sexuality has not been affected” (20). In fact, she details that many heterosexual couples, because of the pain of vaginal intercourse, choose to practice anal sex (21).47 Placing Tashi within this possible alternative community, a community where women exchange intimate stories of pain and pleasure, could then challenge, or even reveal, the essentialist way that Walker thinks about lesbianism and women’s communities that are based on connection and healing through a single body part. Opening up a space for potential belonging is all Walker provides us with in regards to Africa and African women.48 Celie’s sister Nettie articulates that Olinka

45 See Christine J. Walley’s “Searching for ‘Voices’: Feminism, Anthropology, and the Global Debate over Female Genital Operations” for more information on Toubia’s assertions concerning the sex, sexualities, desires, fantasies, and pleasures of circumcised women. 46 We know that Tashi has an active fantasy life, one that allows her to begin to sort through the traumas that have affected her living. Tashi says, “My fantasy life. Without it I’m afraid to exist” (Walker, Possessing 36). 47 Dorkenoo is quoting a 1967 study conducted by Shandall. 48 Tashi feels a sense of isolation and disconnection from her community because her mother did not put her through the initiation process as a child. Tashi feels unattached to an African nation,

women “will do anything for one another” (The Color Purple 172), but nothing ever comes of this possibility. Denied bonding with her Olinkan community, could Tashi have been provided with opportunities and possibilities in America? Because Walker so vehemently contends that recuperation, healing, and transcendence is possible in America, she could have politically chosen to geographically locate Tashi permanently in the West. After all, loving and being loved in return are the necessary components to transformation in an American context. Hauntingly, Adam assures Tashi “that it was she he loved and that in America she would have country, people, parents, sister, husband, brother and lover” (Color Purple 286). As Tashi moves to America, she is embraced by Celie (at the end of The Color Purple) and given promising hope by her therapist, Raye. If a community of women who emotionally and/or sexually love other women is so desperately called upon in Walker’s The Color Purple, why isn’t Tashi encircled by the women who sit upon Celie’s front porch, the women who nurture and love Celie as she finds her way to wholeness? Furthermore, why isn’t Tashi offered the opportunity to experience a transformation with the guidance of Raye, her American therapist? Tashi speaks highly of Raye: “In my heart I thanked Mzee for her, for I believed she would be plucky enough to accompany me where he could not. And that she would” (Walker, Possessing 132). But does she? As Walker attempts to discursively represent a livable life through an active sexuality for women of color, she simultaneously forecloses one for Tashi, an act that, in the introduction, Walker accuses Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party of doing.

The Politics of the Clitoris

Interestingly, many feminists have referred to the pathological construction of female sexuality as a discursive clitoridectomy. Therefore, artists and/or theorists who want to counter such representations often find themselves caught in a double bind. As and she also feels she is not a “real woman.” Tashi willingly goes through with the circumcision “to be accepted as a real woman by the Olinkan people; to stop the jeering. Otherwise I was a thing” (Possessing 122).

detailed in the introduction, the vagina and/or clitoris is deployed by Eve Ensler, Judy Chicago, and Inga Muscio as a feminist counterdiscourse in an attempt to resignify it as an active presence rather than a passive lack. In other words, positing the vagina and/or clitoris as an active presence in an attempt to counter pathological scientific and anthropological discourses of women’s sexuality can be a strategic feminist move. For example, Gayatri Spivak in “French Feminism in an International Frame” advocates the connections between pleasure, wholeness, and the clitoris because she believes this releases “woman” from her reproductive and heterosexist role. And Paula Bennett in “Clitoridectomy: Female Sexual Imagery and Feminist Psychoanalytic Theory” makes a similar move as she compares the effects of FGM with the effects of psychoanalytical discourses which both efface the clitoris. She writes, “Without the clitoris, theorists have no physical site in which to locate an autonomous sense of female sexual agency. […] With the clitoris, theorists can construct female sexuality in such a way that women become sexual subjects in their own right. […] No longer married […] to the penis or the law, they can become […] by themselves healthy and whole” (257). 49 Understanding the reasons for this political tactic allows us to better understand why Walker constructs her narratives in determined ways. Discourses and representations of FGM have a cultural history rooted in the discursive construction of “perverse” sexualities signified by one’s race, sexuality, and/or anatomy. The so-called “natural” shift from clitoral stimulation to vaginal penetration detailed in Freud’s “Female Sexuality” guaranteed a woman’s healthy transition from an (active) masculinity into a more “proper” (passive) femininity. As a result, scientific investigations of the female body grounded in comparative anatomy and eugenics made real the “dangers” of and “anxieties” surrounding raced and queer “others” and determined how we came to understand women’s sexualities as either normal or abnormal. For example, in the early 1800s, George Cuvier “discovered” Sarah Baartman,

49 In an attempt to disarticulate the clitoris from pleasure or wholeness, Teresa De Lauretis does similar work through theorizations of the lesbian phallus. She writes, “To theorize the clitoris, as such, as the primary or unique signifier of female desire is to make the clitoris (merely) the equal of the penis in the psychoanalytic imaginary that we all find so inadequate” (The Practice of Love 234).

also known as the Hottentot Venus, whose genitalia he investigated, measured, and dissected.50 Sander Gilman asserts that those who paid money to gaze upon Baartman’s buttocks viewed her “only as a collection of sexual parts” (86). In fact, because Baartman’s female genitals were hidden, audience members were fascinated with her talked-about and ever-elusive clitoris and elongated labia. As a result, she was reduced to her vulva and her body became an iconic illustration of the racist and heterosexist distinction between an “ideal” (white) femininity and a “pathological and perverse” (black and/or queer) sexuality. Further, as Baartman became a symbol of an entire race and nation, her body and desires were pathologized as hypersexual, excessive, and uncontrollable. In Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex,’ Judith Butler argues that all morphological categories are culturally constructed. The moment a “fictional” morphological category comes into being, every body must then fall inside or outside the limits that this category dictates (79). The act of gazing upon, reading, and devaluing Baartman’s body because of its marked difference became a way to “other” Africans, and in turn, “other” Africa. Baartman’s body, then, stands in as a signifier for racial inferiority. And it is this strategic rhetorical move that became a rationale for domination and invasion of the gendered and raced nation and body. Detailing a history of colonialism, examination, and categorization that posited the black female body as “‘grotesque,’ ‘strange,’ ‘unfeminine,’ ‘lascivious,’ and ‘obscene,’” Janell Hobson reveals how such constructions severely limit attempts at reconfiguring an active and visible sexuality for women of color (87).51 Not only is Walker working against the seemingly “unrepresentability,” “mutilation,” “pathology,” or “perversion,” of the discursive construction of black women’s bodies and sexualities in Western culture, she is also writing against a Western colonialism and an African postcolonial nationalism that uses the woman’s body as a symbol of the nation. To this

50 Janell Hobson in “The 'Batty' Politic: Toward an Aesthetic of the Black Female Body” asserts that scientific discourses have “framed the body in a language that ‘reads’ racial and sexual characteristics onto the flesh” (100). In other words, Baartman was “reduced to her sexual organs by the methodological practices of comparative anatomy” (Wiegman, American Anatomies 59). 51 Sarah E. Chinn in “Feeling Her Way: Audre Lorde and the Power of Touch” expresses similar sentiments (188-89).

end, Walker uses the clitoris as a way to assert the woman of color’s active presence. She writes, “Without the clitoris and other sexual organs, a woman can never see herself reflected in the healthy, intact body of another” (Warrior Marks 19). In her attempt to assign an active female sexuality to women of color then, Walker literally and figuratively “needs” the clitoris. Without it, her political and literary aim would be less convincing. Yet using the clitoris as a naturalized sign of woman’s pleasure is a lot to ask of one particular body part. After all, “one’s experience of erotic pleasure does not depend on the ability to articulate its source” (Traub 309). In the end, because it is impossible to reclaim or rediscover something that has been taken from her, Tashi is left with a corporeal and psychological void that ultimately leaves her isolated and self- destructive. As Possessing the Secret of Joy comes to its end, we are told, “RESISTANCE IS THE SECRET OF JOY” (281). But Tashi’s resistance comes in the form of murdering her tsunga, M’Lissa, the woman who mutilates Tashi and murders Tashi’s sister, which ultimately proves to be a literal self-destructive act for her. Found guilty for carrying out the murder of M’Lissa, Tashi is publicly executed by the nation-state. This form of resistance offers up the notion that Tashi is now in control of her destiny. Because Tashi is able to point to the source of her wound, she is able to direct her revenge at the woman who inflicted her pain. As a result of murdering M’Lissa, a national symbol and “tool” of patriarchy, Tashi’s act is set up as an act of revolution. In fact, this murder/execution is what appears to set Tashi free as she escapes her own flesh. As mentioned above, Brown complicates revenge as a just form of resistance and instead suggests that revenging one’s wound can be read as a “negative form of action” that weds the wound to identity.52 As a result, this understanding of transcending or surpassing one’s pain by directing hurt outward toward the object(s) who has inflicted the violence forecloses the possibility of negotiating a livable life with one’s wound, pain, and trauma: “It [revenge] can hold out no future – for itself or others – that triumphs over this pain” (74). Unfortunately for Tashi, because of her execution, there is no futurity at all. Because Walker’s ideological

52 Brown writes, “If the ‘cause’ of ressentiment is suffering, its ‘creative deed’ is the reworking of this pain into a negative form of action” (States of Injury 70).

reasons for writing Tashi into existence work against Tashi’s decision, in the end, she must die. As a result, resistance is simply resistance for Tashi, and nothing more.53

The Secret of Joy

The recent proliferation of queer narratives that articulate the realigning of erogenous zones through various and multiple erotic acts not only borrow from and shape disability narratives that do similar work, but they are also simply another rewriting of the body and its possibilities. Jean Bobby Noble in Sons of the Movement: FtMs Risking Incoherence on a Post-Queer Cultural Landscape details “a completely different relation between bodies and identities,” which he refers to as “genders without genitals” (134). Approaching his own altered body, Noble reveals the intimate connections between the material and discursive. Because Noble’s transgender identity is often interpreted as “incongruous” with his transsexual one, Noble articulates that surgical body modifications have only changed the way his body is written upon. He writes, “This is the body, the same flesh I have always known, only now its text is totally different” (27). The body in transition, the body that is disabled and/or wounded, and the body that has been circumcised, are all disparate illustrations of the ways in which bodies are continuously written upon and transformed. In “Transmogrification: (Un)Becoming Other(s),” Nikki Sullivan articulates that “the person who participates in practices which mark, wound, open, the body is often represented as a victim, as someone who is in need of being healed” (559). As a result of such depictions, these same “modified” bodies, whether or not this modification is voluntary (often conservatively referred to as “self mutilation”) or involuntary, are almost always read as unhealthy in body, mind, and spirit, wounded, disabled, pathological and/or perverse.

53 Giulia M. Fabi asserts that Walker's first-world representation of Tashi proves to be “a very moving martyr, but it weakens the portrayal of Tashi's agency and attempt at resistance. . . . In Possessing the Secret of Joy Walker does not let her protagonist entertain the possibility of a deliverance (other than death) from her imprisonment in her (absent) flesh” (233).

Discussing the effects of the pathological undertones found in society in general and in the medical profession’s “treatment” of transgender, transsexual, and intersexual individuals, undertones that are also reified in hegemonic discourses surrounding FGM, Patrick Califia in Sex Changes and Transgender Politics believes that if an individual is able to approach the pleasures and possibilities of transitioning by responding to his/her body as a text that can be forever rewritten, then we can begin to combat the negative/monstrous connotations embedded within medical discourses that approach the voluntary modification of one’s body as sick and unhealthy. Both Noble and Califia, particularly when juxtaposed with narratives by disabled, circumcised, and infibulated women, some of which are detailed above, offer up a specific methodology to depathologize the queer, disabled, wounded, and/or traumatized body and its acts as they disarticulate genitalia from gender, sexuality and sexual practice and rearticulate who can be understood as a human being. Walker once stated that “The world is not good enough; we must make it better” (qtd. in Barker 55). Yet, in her attempt to make the world a better place in which to live and love, Walker clings to the clitoris and vulva as signifiers of women’s universal connection to all women, a woman’s essential nature, and her sole location of pleasure. Queer, disability, and trauma theorists, writers, artists, and activists have been insisting on their status as legitimate subjects as they work to point to the ways in which notions of an abled and healthy body are discursive constructions that both shape and limit who they can be. My reasons for approaching Tashi’s fictional narrative of fragmentation, violence, pain, and death are twofold. The first is to understand “why” Walker is so dependent on the clitoris and vulva as I point out the strengths and the limitations of a counterdiscourse that relies upon a binary understanding of women’s sexuality as active/passive, abled/disabled, healthy/pathological, and normal/abnormal. As a result, I hope to present the readers of Walker’s texts with alternative possibilities of negotiating a livable life in the face of one’s pain, wound, and shame. My second purpose concerns the lack of a sexual language that details non-normative ways of experiencing pleasure

while negotiating power, and the hope that such articulations might actually make a difference in the world. I am not suggesting that “healing” does not matter; of course it does. Nor am I suggesting that all pains or traumas are negotiable; of course they are not. But because Walker’s textual resistance is similar to a politics of pride, she posits “freedom” as a destination and posits the body that arrives as an abled, healthy, and whole one. As a result, the only option for Tashi is to either find “freedom” as she rediscovers and reclaims her clitoris and labia, which is utterly impossible because they have been severed from her body, or escape her wounded flesh through death. In Warrior Marks, Walker writes, “the assault on women is worldwide; it is not isolated. It varies only by degrees” (276). Tashi’s mutilation is not the same as Walker’s injury that blinded her in one eye and Walker’s ability to transform her wound into a “warrior mark” is incomparable to Mary’s ability to negotiate her own. By disentangling a universal identity from the wound, we could begin to admit that bodies are constructs that are always already fragmented, in continual negotiation, and shaped by various cultural and geographical positions. Resistance may just be one of the secrets of joy, but resistance takes many forms.

Chapter Two

The ‘Grotesque’ Pussy: ‘Transformational Shame’ in Margaret Cho’s Stand-up Performances

We all have pain. We all have doubt and sadness and horrible things that have happened that shouldn’t have, and when we cover them up and try to pretend that everything is okay, then our stories are forgotten, and our truths become lies. I tell the truth because I’m not afraid to. I tell the ugliness to show you the beauty. But there is so much ugliness still left (Margaret Cho, I’m the One 166).

Shame, it might finally be said, transformational shame, is performance (Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling 38).

Margaret Cho, a queer54 Asian-American stand-up comic and performance artist, takes up space. Onstage, she is loud, fully embodied, and hypervisible; she is “pussy without borders” (Cho, “Beautiful” 1). As Cho playfully (re)stages the pains and pleasures of living in a marked body by disidentifying with pussy, she is able to negotiate the constraints imposed upon her and the possibilities that such constraints open up. In her full-length feature film Cho Revolution (2004), Cho speaks of the limited and stereotypical Asian role models that she has to choose from as she concentrates on the image of “Hello Kitty.” Cho details the importance of a voice as she says, “I don't want to model myself after Hello Kitty ‘cause she has no mouth. She cannot even say hi back to you after you say, ‘hello kitty.’ She can't speak, she can't eat, she's just a pussy with a bow on it.” Cho refuses to be the silent, submissive, and well-behaved pussy who stays within the boundaries of traditional femininity. Instead, because “pussy is not supposed to speak” (Cho, I Have Chosen 9), Cho defies the Law and makes a bold decision to use

54 I am defining Cho as “queer” because of her public discursive performances of queer sex acts, her resistance to heteronormativity, and her defiant refusal to identify herself. Cho says, “I would never think of myself as heterosexual. I would never think of myself as a straight person. So it doesn’t make sense to define myself as that in the first place” (qtd. in Esther).

her stand-up as a social and political tool to challenge the restrictive ways she has been categorized. And for Cho, such public performances come down to a matter of survival. Cho embodies the grotesque as she bursts onto the public stage and into the public sphere with an excessive mouth, body, and sexuality.55 In her study of female grotesque comedy in The Unruly Woman: Gender and the Genres of Laughter, Kathleen Rowe comments on the ways an “excessive” female body, such as Cho’s, is read: That the unruly woman eats too much and speaks too much is no coincidence; both involve failure to control the mouth. Nor are such connotations of excess innocent when they are attached to the female mouth. They suggest that the voracious and shrewish female mouth, the mouth that both consumes (food) and produces (speech) to excess, is a more generalized version of that other, more ambivalent conceived female orifice, the vagina. (37) As Rowe insightfully points out, the mouth that consumes and speaks in excess has a mythical and psychological connection to that ever-feared and ever-powerful “black hole,” the vagina: “together they imply an intrinsic relation among female fatness, female garrulousness, and female sexuality” (Rowe 37). In contrast to the normative body that is always bound, contained, autonomous, and fixed, Cho’s body is interpreted and responded to as excessive and threatening because it is big, loud, leaky, perverse, abject, dangerous, and always transforming.56 In addition to Cho’s big mouth, (sometimes) big body and defiant pussy, her queerness, along with her Asianness, mark her as even more excessive, uncontainable, and unrepresentable. In other words, it is Cho's Asianness and

55 Look to Kathleen Rowe, Lisa Merrill’s “Feminist Humor: Rebellious and Self-Affirming” (272), Philip Auslander’s “‘Brought to You by Fem-Rage’: Stand-up Comedy and the Politics of Gender” (316), and Danielle Russell’s “Self-Deprecatory Humour and the Female Comic: Self- Destruction or Comedic Construction?” (3) for a gendered analysis of stand-up comedy. For a more in-depth discussion of the intimate connections between the grotesque and Bakhtin’s notion of carnival and carnivalesque see Stallybrass and White (247) and Mary Russo’s The Female Grotesque: Risk, Excess, and Modernity (7). 56 Just as Cho’s raced and queer body is often read as an “excess” that has the potential to threaten the system, so too is her (sometimes) heavy body. Kathleen LeBesco in Revolting Bodies: The Struggle to Redefine Fat Identity articulates the connections between the ways fat bodies and queer bodies are read as “grotesque perversions” (83).

queerness that nuance Rowe's notion of the grotesque. But it is specifically because she is read as such that Cho is able to play on such notions of excess. Karen Shimakawa in National Abjection: The Asian American Body Onstage describes the category of Asian American as something that is “both produced through and in reaction to abjection,” and as a category that both “describes” and “calls that category into being” (2). In other words, the way Cho is responded to as a queer Asian American woman shapes her own conception of self, as well as her paradoxical movements in the world. Cho wearily reveals, “I deal with something racial everyday – something everyday” (I'm the One). “It has gotten into the way I think, the way I live, the way I feel about myself, the way I feel that I’m being perceived” (I Have Chosen 67). In an attempt to negotiate and take pleasure in the demands and desires that are placed upon her and the demands and desires that she has for herself, Cho walks an ambiguous line between identification and counteridentification, between the desire to be accepted and the desire to resist hegemonic culture. In Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics, José Esteban Muñoz is interested in the survival strategy of disidentification that is utilized by minority groups in varying ways and is articulated and made visible in many queer performances. Disidentification is an often violent, shaming, and traumatic collision where a queer, a person of color, or a queer person of color negotiates her/his subjectivity in a culture that often defines such a person as abject, ultimately denying her/his existence (161). Muñoz defines the performative aspect of disidentification as: A mode of performance whereby a toxic identity is remade and infiltrated by subjects who have been hailed by such identity categories but have not been able to own such a label. Disidentification is therefore about the management of an identity that has been 'spoiled' in the majoritarian public sphere. This management is a critical negotiation in which a subject who has been hailed by injurious speech, a name, a label, reterritorializes that speech act and the marking that such speech produces. (185)

For Muñoz, it is the mismatch, the failure, or the troubling which disidentification makes visible that has the potential to affect change. It is about taking hold of, reenacting, and negotiating the effect of “toxic,” “shamed,” and “spoiled” identity categories in an attempt to illustrate the absurdity of such characterizations (185).57 Because Asian and Asian American female bodies are always already sexualized, Cho takes pleasure in refusing, embracing, and negotiating such images as she pulls from a wide index of available stereotypes.58 As Cho herself identifies the extreme pleasures of performing as both a sexualized subject and object, she takes particular representations, representations that are shamed and shaming, and throws them back upon the perpetrator, and/or radically twists their meanings. In all four of her independent theatrical releases, Cho brings the performing vagina to life as she discusses “eating out” a woman for the first time, g-spots, fisting, exploding pussies, the cavernous and mysterious dark hole, the dirty and consuming vagina, strap-ons, S/M, and porn. What’s more, she makes sex public. After witnessing a friend giving birth, for instance, Cho details the sudden and unexpected violent and grotesque explosion of the friend's pussy. She then walks around the stage anxiously collecting small fragments of the bloody and torn vagina so that it can be sewn back together. Cho also performs the mysterious and engulfing vagina as she discusses her G- spot. After many frustrated attempts searching for her G-spot and after many earnest moments of listening to descriptions of how to find it, Cho works against the myth of the voracious pussy as she says, “I don't have a lot of area to cover. I don’t have some kind of cavernous pussy that I've gotta spelunk in with a helmet and a light on it, bringing a canary down in there with me” (Notorious C.H.O.). Yet her ambivalence concerning such myths surfaces as she has sex with a woman for the first time. Cho confides, “I just kind of went down there” (I'm the One that I Want). In Cho’s attempt to eat the vagina, the vagina instead eats her first. Cho dramatically holds her breath and frantically swims

57 Speaking of the transformative possibilities of performance, Muñoz asserts, “a performative provisionally succeeds if its actions echo prior actions, and accumulates the force of authority through repetition or citation of a prior, authoritative set of practices” (128). 58 In Revolution, Cho disidentifies with many Asian stereotypes as she comments on the acting roles that are available for Asian and Asian American women.

around on stage desperately looking for an escape. Her facial expressions next to her bodily performance signal that this free-floating space is simultaneously fearful and pleasurable. Unlike Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues or Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party where the vagina is politically reclaimed and redeployed as a source of pride, an active presence, a signifier of woman’s innate feminine nature, and/or her universal connection to all women, Cho makes the vagina conspicuous without reifying it or universalizing women’s biology. The vagina is a prominent figure in all of Cho’s performances, as the above examples illustrate. Because pride and pleasure as an organized politics can sometimes expel shame and violence that is fundamental to transformations of the self, Cho refuses to excise the traumas of being raced, sexed, sexual, and sexy. Speaking of the paradoxical and transformational nature of shame, Sedgwick writes, “Shame effaces itself; shame points and projects; shame turns itself skin side out; shame and pride, shame and dignity, shame and self-display, shame and exhibitionism are different interlinings of the same glove. Shame, it might finally be said, transformational shame, is performance” (Touching Feeling 38). Because Sedgwick’s understanding of “transformational shame” is performative, it is undeniably connected to studies of performance, particularly analyses put forward by those whose queer, raced, and/or disabled bodies experience an excess of shame in complicated, overlapping, and nuanced ways.59 Theorists who analyze the performative/transformative possibilities of living in a body marked as abject, such as Judith Butler, José Esteban Muñoz, E. Patrick Johnson, Carrie Sandahl, Joseba Gabilondo, and Robert Reid-Pharr, are able to insightfully point to and articulate the paradoxical, jarring, and continual movement between pride and shame, agency and fear, and pleasure and pain that Sedgwick points to. Cho's playful juxtaposition of these competing affects – she continually asserts agency, while having a vexed relationship with her sexed, raced, and sexual identity – makes for effective and troubling queer performances. Cho does not embrace shame as an act of transgression,

59 For a detailed analysis of the intersections between queer and disabled bodies look to both Robert McRuer’s Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability and Robert McRuer and Abby L. Wilkerson’s “Cripping the (Queer) Nation.”

nor does she attempt to surpass or excise it. Instead, she inhabits the complicated and contradictory process of negotiating and transforming shame. As Cho negotiates and troubles how she is read by our culture at large – a culture whose investments in race, sexuality, and nation have grown anxious, xenophobic, and aggressive – she illustrates that her performances, as well as national responses to such performances, are shaped by and depend upon ideological constructions of the “excessively” raced and sexed body.60 As a result, she beautifully illustrates that shame is productive and performative not in what it “is,” per se, but in what it “does” to individual bodies and social relationships.61

The “(In)Authentic” All American Girl

Cho’s first full-length feature film, I’m the One that I Want (2000), details her traumatic entrance into Hollywood’s racist and sexist entertainment industry as she is offered a leading role at age 23 in All American Girl (1994), a new sitcom about a young rebellious Asian-American stand-up comic being raised by a “traditional” Korean family, which ironically mimics her own life. In I’m the One, Cho performs the shame and trauma surrounding public reactions to her “out of control” race, body size, and vagina. After All American Girl’s initial airing, it was critiqued for not being “Asian enough.” Cho reveals, “I was not whole-heartedly embraced by all of the Korean community. One Korean media action leader decided I was dangerous and that he would be monitoring my activity” (I’m the One). In addition to Cho being labeled a “traitor,” an “Uncle Tom,” and an “insult” (Cho, “Bamboozled” 2), a twelve-year-old Korean girl sends her a letter stating, “When I see Margaret Cho on television, I feel great shame” (I’m the One). In her show, Cho parodically responds to the public outrage concerning her Asian

60 Roderick A. Ferguson in “Of Our Normative Strivings: African American Studies and the Histories of Sexuality,” Jasbir K. Puar in “Queer Times, Queer Assemblages,” and Siobhan Somerville in Queering the Color Line: Race and the Invention of Homosexuality in American Culture all emphasize the intricate connections between the historical and cultural understandings of sexuality and race. 61 My theorizations of shame are borrowed from Sara Ahmed, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Elspeth Probyn, and Kathryn Bond Stockton.

“authenticity.” Contemplating why a young Korean girl might feel shame at the sight of her body and performance, Cho asks, “Why? Why? I guess this was because they had never seen a Korean American role model like me before. You know, I didn’t play violin. I didn’t fuck Woody Allen.” In response to these public sentiments of shame, rage, and surveillance, as well as public demands for “authenticity,” an Asian consultant is hired because Cho “was fucking it up so bad” (I'm the One). bell hooks and José Esteban Muñoz articulate the dangers of such cultural appropriation and simultaneous normalization of an “Other.” In “Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance” hooks writes, “marginalized groups, deemed Other, who have been ignored, rendered invisible, can be seduced by the emphasis on Otherness, by its commodification, because it offers the promise of recognition and reconciliation” (186). During the time her body and acts were being trained and disciplined by Asian consultants62 and mainstream viewers, Cho recalls in I’m the One, echoing hooks, the triumph, pleasure, recognition, and acceptance that she felt for the first time in her life. As All American Girl (and Cho) was fine-tuned and as ratings improved, Cho says, “I felt real. I felt alive. I felt like for the first time in my life I was not invisible. It was a glorious feeling. It was a thousand champagne corks popping.” In order to gain acceptance, the now “tamed” Cho experiences what Muñoz identifies as “the burden of liveness” (182). Carrying this burden, Cho is transformed into a stereotype. Ironically, it is this transformation of “otherness” into a commodity, reveals Cho, that allows her to momentarily experience a sense of national belonging: “It was a glorious feeling” (I’m the One), and “Finally, there’s a reason to be me” (All Things Considered). Interestingly, as Cho recalls and performs her All American Girl journey years later in I’m the One, she appears comfortable in her “heavy” body wearing a snug hot-pink outfit, platform boots, with pink streaks in her hair (see Figure 5). As Cho recounts her own very personal encounters through public performance, she subverts the normative demands that are violently placed upon her as well as her “failure” to be interpellated. By doing so, Cho is able to negotiate her feelings of pleasure, pride, pain, inadequacy, and agency.

62 “The network mobilized the troops and launched a full-scale war against my body” (Cho, I’m the One 109).

Figure 5. Cho, Margaret. I’m The One That I Want. .

Stereotypes of any minority group exist in abundance and they can violently limit one's existence in the world. Because of her sexed, sexual, and raced identity, Cho is often simultaneously embraced as a fantasy and a threat. Mutual feelings of disgust and desire for the “other” are shaped by sexualized fantasies and stereotypes that are constructed and reified not only in political policy and medical and anthropological discourses, but also through representations in mainstream culture. Susan Koshy in Sexual Naturalization: Asian Americans and Miscegenation points to the contradictions that are placed upon Asian-American women because of the competing and interconnected fantasies/stereotypes of the compliant and submissive Asian woman and the alluring and exotic one (12).63 Together, the dual stereotypes embedded within representations such as the dragon lady, the geisha girl, the lotus blossom, the live Thai sex show worker, and the mail order bride, imply a sexy and sexed obedience concerning the Asian woman. Cho demonstrates through her performances that she is often interpreted as hypersexual because of her racial identity. Cho illustrates such complexity

63 Lynn Lu in “Critical Visions: The Representation and Resistance of Asian Women” (17), Pandora L. Leong in “Living Outside the Box” (350), and Unbroken Thread: An Anthology of Plays by Asian American Women edited by Roberta Uno all articulate the specific stereotypes placed upon Asian women.

as she reveals, “I was walking down the street and I walk past this guy and he goes, ‘me so horny.’ Everyday it’s something” (I’m the One). Because such fantasies shape Cho’s understanding of herself as a queer Asian-American woman, she articulates that her only options are “to be either invisible or a sexualized object” (qtd. in Lau and Otani 4). If the (generic/white/straight) female body is always already understood as pure chaos, as Rowe asserts, then an Asian and queer female body such as Cho’s must be triply burdened.64 Cho performs this “triple burden” as she details how her “excessive” face, body, and vagina were tamed for network television. Immediately after her first screen test, Cho receives a phone call from the producer of All American Girl and is told that her face is too full and her body too big. Cho sarcastically reflects on this moment and says, “I had no idea I was this giant face taking over America. [Screaming] ‘Here comes the face.’ How do you keep going when somebody tells you there is something wrong with your face?” But in a desperate attempt to “keep going” and to alleviate the threat that her (big Asian) face posed to mainstream America, Cho rapidly loses the weight required and immediately suffers from kidney failure.65 As a “secreting” and “uncontrollable” Asian- American queer, Cho is rushed to the hospital where they scrutinize her “dirty” vagina. Cho details that as she waits on the examining table a nurse walks in and dutifully reveals, “my name is Gwen and I'm here to waaaarsh your vagina” (I'm the One).66 As Cho performs Gwen’s declaration, she bends over at the waist with exaggeration. She maintains this pose as a way to both peer into and wash the vagina and as a way to gather enough energy to release the guttural line, “Hi, my name is Gwen and I’m here to waaaarsh your vagina.” Cho repeats this bodily movement and boisterous line seven times, at a fast pace, as she runs the length of the stage, hits the end, turns around and runs back, only to start again. In addition to being physically bent over, Cho mimics the movement of Gwen’s arms and hands as if she possesses a scrub brush and is

64 The phrase triply burdened is borrowed from Muñoz (188). 65 Cho lost the weight through diet and exercise, “but mostly through fear” (I’m the One). 66 Lee complicates Cho’s performance of Gwen. Lee writes, “To be sure, the “Gwen” routine is not without its problems. The working-class orderly – only a functionary in the public management of Cho’s body – bears the brunt of the comedienne’s own attempts to jettison the medical procedures that return her body to bits and pieces” (121).

“waaarshing” Cho’s vagina with all the muscle strength she has. Cho says, “You could just hear the hose, and the bucket and the suds. ‘I'm here to waaarsh your vagina.’ Like she's going to beat my vagina against a rock.” The repetitive nature of this performance moves from total shock into utter hysterics. It is almost as if we, as spectators, are coming to the slow realization, just as Cho did, that a stranger will actually be sanitizing her pussy, only to then peer into its depths with a microscopic camera.67 If we situate the way Cho’s body is continually read as too much alongside the ways in which she was disciplined, we come to realize that Cho is constructed as a pathological and grotesque threat to the national body (she is “queered”). Rachel C. Lee in “‘Where’s My Parade?’: Margaret Cho and the Asian American Body in Space” speaks specifically of the intersections between race and an excessive body within Cho’s I’m the One that I Want. Through this analysis, Lee insightfully articulates Cho's encounter with Gwen as “the embodiment of the nation's obsessive-compulsive desire to cleanse itself of foreign, dirty matter” (120-21). As Gwen beats Cho’s pussy against a rock in an attempt to purify her contaminated body, Cho’s racialized, grotesque, and dirty vagina becomes a signifier of the unbound body. As I thought more about Gwen’s “sterilization” of Cho’s dirty pussy, oddly enough, I thought of Pamela Anderson, Paris Hilton, and Anna Nicole Smith (Cho and Anna Nicole Smith seem like an unlikely pairing, but Cho once “topped” her at a New Year’s Eve party as she slammed Smith into a wall and made out with her. She also recently dedicated a BLOG in Smith’s memory). All three are/were often referred to as “sluts” or “whores,” as excessive, but their excesses are significantly different from the woman of color. Interestingly, these three white women appear to be “fantasies” of the nation, not “threats” to the nation. They either are reminiscent of or are America’s Playboy bunnies whose vaginas have often been shaved and/or surgically altered to “remove” and/or “tighten” any signifiers of “excess.” In Comedy Central’s recent 2005 Roast of Pamela Anderson Uncensored, Pamela Anderson’s vagina and breasts receive constant attention and scrutiny. Courtney Love refers to Anderson’s vagina as a “Barbie

67 Speaking of Gwen, Cho writes, “She cleaned me out and the doctor catheterized me. He then filled my bladder with water and inserted a tiny camera” (I’m the One 111).

pussy.” Further, speaking of Anderson, Sarah Silverman reveals, “Let’s talk about say, her vagina. It’s the only way you can tell a woman’s true hair color and lucky for you I actually caught a glimpse of it backstage while she was changing and her true hair color: bald, totally bald” (Comedy Central Roast). In other words, what we get from the Playboy-like fantasy is closer to the normative conception of the vagina. Here, vaginas are tight and shaved, almost always white and plump, but not excessive. Here, legs are never spread (to reveal the mysterious and engulfing “dark hole”) and penetration is never imagined. Cho’s pussy can never be likened to “Barbie’s pussy” because it is understood and interpreted as foreign and contaminated. And because of her proclamation that she is pussy without borders and that she has done everything sexual that one can do, Cho is pathologized as queer, hedonistic, perverted, and hypersexual. After renting and forgetting to return the porn video Beaver Fever, Cho comments on the excessive way she is read. Cho first receives a message from her video store telling her that Beaver Fever is long overdue and she needs to return it. Cho then sarcastically says, “So now my video store thinks I can’t return movies on time because I am unable to stop masturbating. It’s very hard to go back in there with my head held up high" (Notorious C.H.O.). If we juxtapose Gwen’s gaze between Cho’s legs with the gaze that penetrates Tashi’s “mutilation” in Possessing, detailed in chapter one, we notice that even with the clitoris intact, the vagina continues to inform how the woman of color is read.

“My Puss Is Keepin’ it Real”68

Cho emphatically asserts that her Americanness was and continues to be “hard won and fought for on a daily basis” (I Have Chosen 66). In simple terms, Cho desires to be recognized as an American citizen because she is one; yet to “perform” this national identity, she is forced to expel or deny certain aspects of the self. As a result, she often feels shame and rage for being excluded and for trying so damn hard to be recognized. In her recent Assassin tour (December 2004), Cho details her avoidance of and negotiations

68 From Cho’s “My Puss” video.

surrounding the current political tensions between the U.S. and North Korea. She speaks of a fear of being perceived as “the enemy”: after all, N. Korea is part of the “axis of evil,”69 shame for her avoidance of issues of race: “Any attention paid to me being different was incredibly shameful for me” (I Have Chosen 50), and anger and self- contempt that she has internalized feelings of self-hatred: “I hate feeling this way, because it forces me to see how deeply racism has affected me” (67).70 Cho’s shame and fear of being identified as Korean is shaped by the political and mainstream discourses surrounding Korea, as well as the demands placed upon othered bodies to assimilate into U.S. culture. Borrowing from Silvan Tomkins’ theories on affect, both Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Elspeth Probyn assert that shame cannot be experienced unless one holds an “interest” in the object or ideal that performs the shaming act. Probyn writes, “we have to care about something or someone to feel ashamed when that care and connection – our interest – is not reciprocated” (Blush 14). Despite her best attempts to be perceived as a U.S. citizen-subject, Cho reveals in her BLOG, “I cannot be claimed 100% American, even though by all rights, I am. I was born here, I live here, I make my money here, I spend my money here, I pay my taxes here, I make art for American audiences, yet my ethnicity will precede me everywhere” (“Bamboozled” 3). Cho is continually referred to as Japanese, Chinese, and simply as an unwanted immigrant from some “unknown” Asian country of origin. U.S. and Korea’s historical and political relationship is messy and entangled,71 yet the same people who refuse to see Cho as

69 This phrase, “axis of evil,” was used by George W. Bush in his 2002 State of the Union Address to depict the terrorist dangers/threats posed by Iraq, Iran, and North Korea (Syria is now included in this list). Bush’s “war on terror” is specifically aimed at the “axis of evil.” 70 Cho asserts that she does not want to become the disembodied voice concerning all Asian issues or politics, nor does she want to become the political spokesperson for Koreans and/or Korean-Americans. Further, Cho has been rebuked by many in the Korean-American community which would complicate her position as a spokesperson for Korean/Korean-American issues. She sarcastically reveals, “I’m sorry Korea has me to represent it” (Drunk with Power). 71 In Compositional Subjects: Enfiguring Asian/American Women, Laura Hyun Yi Kang writes, “Since the arrival of the first contingent of U.S. GIs to the Korean peninsula with the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950, there has been a complex and bidirectional flow of bodies, cultural practices, and socioeconomic arrangements between the United States and Korea” (262). See both Kang and Susan Koshy’s Sexual Naturalization: Asian Americans and Miscegenation for a detailed history of U.S./Korean relations.

American can’t seem to “read” her as Korean either. In Cho Revolution, Cho parodically performs what seems to be the stereotypical sorority girl who approaches her and says, with nervous laughter and the typical white-girl accent, “I just can’t tell any of you Asians apart” (Cho Revolution). Because there are pleasures to be had through intelligibility, Cho has an intense, complicated, and contradictory interest in being recognized as a U.S. citizen-subject, rather than an unwanted sexualized and foreign Asian immigrant invading the imagined sanctity/purity of the nation. Not only is Cho frequently read as shameful, excessive, grotesque, and disgusting, but she sometimes responds to her own race, sexuality, and body with similar affects. She confesses, “I am forever uncomfortable with my sexuality” (qtd. in Epstein 5), and “I’m very at odds with my ethnic identity” (Assassin). Yet in her performances, as Cho reveals this vulnerability, she also illustrates that there is pleasure to be had in negotiating and then transforming the shame that is thrown upon her and internalized. In other words, Cho takes pleasure in defiance and transgression. In “Sex Acts: Two Meditations on Race and Sexuality,” filmmakers Celine Parreñas Shimizu and Helen Lee are interested in how Asian and Asian American women engage with “the powerful fantasies established about them” (1399). Shimizu asserts that to simply condemn stereotypical representations as negative is irresponsible in that such condemnation denies the complex and contradictory experiences of women who must negotiate the threats and fantasies that surround their bodies and sexualities. Instead of an easy dismissal or rejection of the fantasies surrounding Asian sexuality, Shimizu writes that we must “recognize not only the pain but also the pleasure provoked by these images” (1386). Because of her own sexual and racial ambivalence, Cho chooses to sometimes highlight, exaggerate, and target the differences between her Asian American self and Asian “others” as she vacillates between refusing and embracing particular stereotypes. As Cho performs a push and pull of sorts, she borrows from the multiple images of Asian and Asian American women as a way to negotiate the contradictory feelings of shame, self-hatred, pride, and pleasure because of her Korean identity, sexuality, and sexual acts.

Cho has been both scathingly condemned and lovingly adored for specific performances of Asian and Asian American women. Beloved by Cho’s fans are the ever- famous interpretations of her mother. In an interview on “Talk of the Nation,” Cho confesses that as she was growing up she was “mortified” and “embarrassed” by her mother’s presence, always viewing her as a “foreigner.” Cho asserts though that comedy allowed her to work through the shame and intolerance she once felt. In her stand-up, as Cho humorously and lovingly transforms into and then performs the character of her mother, she contorts her face, squints her eyes, and utilizes the stereotypical “traditional” Asian accent. Leaving a message on her daughter’s answering machine, “mommy” asks: Are you gay? Are you gay? Pick up de phone. If you don't pick up de phone dat mean you gay. Only gay screen call. You are gay. Why don't you talk to mommy about it? You can talk to mommy about everything. You have a cool mommy. Mommy is so cool and mommy know all about de gay. I know all about de gay. There are so many gay. So many gay all over de world, all over de world, but not Korea, not Korea. (I'm The One That I Want) Performing her mother’s phone message, Cho is actually doing multiple things. As she pokes fun at her mother’s “cool factor” and takes advantage of particular lesbian stereotypes, Cho is simultaneously pointing to the invisibility or disavowal of queer Asians in both Korea and the U.S. Through this specific performance, Cho articulates the fears that many Asian Americans have about coming out as queer. So many folks who publicly come out, despite their race or ethnicity, suffer from familial alienation; but because there is a belief that there are “so many gay all over de world, […] but not Korea, not Korea” (I'm the One), a queer Asian identity may come with additional feelings of shame and guilt. Cho points to the fact that “in Korean communities, there’s a kind of denial of the existence of homosexuality” (qtd. in Lau and Otani 4). She further reveals that in addition to this denial, that Asian gays and lesbians are also not fully accepted into the queer community. Therefore, Cho’s position, as well as her public performances, is an articulation that yes, we are out here and we do exist. Yet, because Cho appropriates

the heavy Asian accent alongside the dramatically squinted eyes, she is often (prematurely) attacked for perpetuating dangerous and inauthentic Asian representations. Cho rebelliously continues such “trouble” as she transforms herself into a commodified pussy after an encounter with the “dangerous and desirous” Southeast Asian sex worker. Again, employing the heavy Asian accent, Cho performs new and innovative marketing strategies for female Thai sex workers. After traveling to Bangkok and experiencing the multiple (failed) attempts to beckon and lure her into their live shows, Cho offers up alternative creative and outrageous strategies that will entice more spectators and, as a result, more money for the workers. As Cho transforms herself into a voracious and extraordinary Asian pussy, she bellows, “Pussy write letter,” “pussy play ping pong,” “pussy come with fruit on bottom,” and “pussy come free with purchase of pussy of equal or greater value” (Cho Revolution). As Cho personifies pussy and others the “other,” she emphasizes that as Asian women, the sex workers are always already sexualized. Through these anxious, hysterical, and uneasy performances, it appears as if Cho resists categorization as she points to a distinct difference between herself, the inassimilable Asian immigrant (mommy), and those hypersexual Asian women “over there.” But because Cho is much more clever, strategic, and honest than hysterical and one-dimensional critiques seem to allow, she is doing much more than simply repudiating such representations. As a way to complicate the adamant declarations that Cho is dangerously and irresponsibly sexualizing and othering herself and, as a result, all Asian and Asian-American women, Cho borrows from the hypersexualized stereotypes and disidentifies with them for her own “erotic and self-affirming” pleasures. The messiness of living is never as easy as choosing the “right” way to express or perform a particular identity. To illustrate this messiness, Cho delights in dizzying instability and unexpected transformation. Echoing Shimizu and Lee’s interest in the negotiation of “negative” images, Muñoz speaks of a disidentificatory pleasure in both refusing and embracing stereotypical representations. This pleasure concerns “the way a subject looks at [or performs] an image that has been constructed to exploit and deny identity and instead finds pleasure, both erotic and self-affirming” (Muñoz 72). In

fascinating and numerous ways, the “mysteries” and “excesses” surrounding Cho’s own Asian female body and queer sexuality and the “exoticism” and “eroticism” that she designates to Southeast Asian sex workers have played out in Cho’s own life and performances. Cho has recently embraced and performed belly dancing and burlesque in public venues – both of which have intimate ties to the (coerced, forced, and voluntary) bodily displays of “exotic others” and function in the public imaginary as sexual, alluring, and dangerous. Cho not only performed in and hosted the 2006 “Miss Exotic World” pageant, started up her own live monthly “The Sensuous Woman” show72 in L.A. that showcases both belly dancing and burlesque, and launched a belly dancing clothing line, but she also unabashedly declares a defiant “slut pride.” After being invited to perform her stand up for Olivia Cruises, Cho reveals: “I had sex with a woman on the ship. And I went through this whole thing. I was like, ‘Am I gay? Am I straight?’ And I realized, I'm just slutty. Where’s my parade? What about slut pride?” (I'm The One). Cho is raunchy, brazen, and sexual and she never denies this: “I’ve done everything sexual that you can do” (Notorious C.H.O.). As Cho both others herself and embraces the “other,” she is also able to rework the shaming “loose” and “sexually available” stereotypes that often get placed simultaneously upon Asian, Asian American, heavy, and/or queer women who assert any form of sexual agency. As a way to shamelessly compliment her slut pride, Cho posts a “genital rhyme” (Aug. 2006) and a parodic hip-hop music video (Nov. 2006) entitled “My Puss”73 on her BLOG, MySpace, YouTube, and VideoSift. Although both the poem and song assert the wonder, joy, and greatness of her own “puss” as she slams someone else’s, Cho takes immense pride in her jewel: “My puss is so fine that I flaunt it.” Interestingly, as Cho’s puss “is the best on the block,” “make […] all kind of money,” and “is hot and ready to please,” this performative act echoes the personification, commodification, and miraculous feats of the

72 Concerning “The Sensuous Woman” show, Cho declares, “There’s a lot of gender swapping and gender play. It’s the gayest show you could have with women stripping in it” (Cho Bio). 73 Cho’s “My Puss” is a parody of and homage to Mickey Avalon’s “My Dick” hip-hop song and video. "My Puss" is performed by Margaret Cho, Diana Yanez, Kurt Hall, Princess Farhana, Ian Harvie, Nancy Kissam, Vivian Marie Varela, and Kara Stephen, is directed by Margaret Cho, and shot on location by Lorene Machado. Music is by Kurt Hall.

Thai pussies, as well as the exoticism, eroticism, and slut pride that Cho herself claims. Speaking of the transformative possibilities of performance, Muñoz asserts, “a performative provisionally succeeds if its actions echo prior actions, and accumulates the force of authority through repetition or citation of a prior, authoritative set of practices” (128). As Cho pulls from historical and cultural Asian female stereotypes, only to throw them back at us “with a difference,” she performs a transnational collision of sorts. Through her own bodily performances, time and space is compressed as both the “threat” and the “fantasy” of the Thai sex worker filters into Cho’s public pronouncements of pleasure. Through her complicated and strategic raced and sexualized performances, Cho illustrates that power does not simply flow in one direction, from top to bottom, or from powerful to powerless, although at times it must feel that way.

The Stand-up Performer as a Counterpublic Terrorist

Cho is adamant that her “very presence as an Asian-American woman talking about race and sexuality is a political statement” (I Have Chosen 66). In Assassin and I Have Chosen to Stay and Fight, a political manifesta that serves as a companion piece to her performance, Cho illustrates the interconnections between her personal life and our current political atmosphere. In fact, she positions herself as a warrior against injustice. As a way to promote her political performances and words, Cho pulls from a wide index of oppositional fighters, or what Muñoz would refer to as “counterpublic terrorists” who perform “the nation’s internal terrors around race, gender, and sexuality” (108). Cho not only appropriates the image of Che Guevara74 (her face is superimposed over the infamous image of Che in his beret) for the cover of Cho Revolution (see Figure 6), but she makes a similar move for the Assassin promotional poster and DVD and book covers. Cho borrows from the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA), a 1970s radical group, and

74 Speaking of the Che image, Gomoll succinctly writes, “Like the image that is neither Cho nor Guevara, but signifies them both, Cho’s stand-up work is hybrid, layered, and particular to the performance nature of her work, it oscillates. Margaret Cho moves from serious to not, from humorous to sad, from abject to empowered, from non-normative to normative, from performing herself to not, from being politically effective to not” (1-2).

poses as a particular assassin figure who originates from within our nation’s borders: as Patty Hearst, or “Tanya”, as she is otherwise known (see Figure 7).

Figure 6. Cho, Margaret. CHO Revolution. 18 July 2008. .

Figure 7. Cho, Margaret. Assassin. 18 July 2008. .

Speaking of finding the most appropriate title for her recent performance, Cho reveals, I wanted to find a name for the show that was the most volatile, provocative, incendiary name. Like, what would make the right wing just go kind of crazy? Assassin. It’s like the most hard-core thing you could

say in a day and age where people are really frustrated politically. People are really angry about what’s going on. People feel powerless. (Assassin) Rather than holding a gun across her body, as Hearst does in the widely publicized image, Cho wields her microphone. Cho asserts, “I think that words should do the work of bombs” (I Have Chosen 25). Through these reappropriations, Cho recontextualizes both the Latin American guerrilla fighter and the assassin and as a result she transforms what it means to be a revolutionary. Cho has an intended target for her rage, shame, and politics: the U.S. government, society, and culture. As a counterpublic terrorist, Cho strategically stages her own body and voice as her weapon of choice. In Assassin and I Have Chosen to Stay and Fight, Cho’s political focus is transnational. In both, she intimately connects U.S. political policy, expressions of paternalism, tenuous international relations, the Iraqi war, scenes of torture, and issues of terrorism to the traumatic consequences of how she is perceived. As Cho borrows from the assassin figure and as she lambastes the hypocritical U.S. anti-terrorist stance and its effects, she points to what Jasbir K. Puar refers to as “queer times.” In “Queer Times, Queer Assemblages,” Puar speaks of an anxious post-911 atmosphere as a specific “queer time” where race, sexuality, and gender are intimately connected to current political discourses and acts surrounding nationalism and terrorism. In this piece, she details the interconnections and overlaps between the modern and the postmodern, between the instability of national and bodily boundaries and our current war on terror (122). Puar writes, These are queer times indeed. The war on terror is an assemblage hooked into an array of enduring modernist paradigms (civilizing teleologies, orientalisms, xenophobia, militarization, border anxieties) and postmodernist eruptions (suicide bombers, biometric surveillance strategies, emergent corporealities, counterterrorism gone overboard). (121) In Assassin, Cho brings the nation’s fear of the other as well as new and improved methods of surveillance, border control, invasion, and violence together with her own

anxious movements in our xenophobic culture. Through such audacious performances, Cho negotiates how the national and global shape how she understands her own identity and how others perceive and respond to her as an excessive body. As the personal and political are intertwined, Cho continues to use her body as a launching pad and is able to illustrate the spirals of power, pleasure, shame, and resistance. Anxieties over the destabilization of personal and national boundaries and borders have manifested themselves in extreme national policies.75 Racist, homophobic, and transnational policies (i.e. DOMA, The Patriot Act, the Iraqi War, and racist and anti- immigrant and refugee policies) transform acts of violence and hate into acts of a loyal patriotism that instills one with a false sense of national pride. Because Cho’s body threatens to contaminate and infect the orderly normative one, it must be “contained,” “tamed,” and/or “eliminated;” and hate and disgust are the affects that most often “police” such boundaries (Miller 8). Martha Nussbaum in Hiding from Humanity: Shame, Disgust, and the Law articulates that disgust allows individuals to distance themselves from the perceived threat that the other poses to their fantasy of bodily integrity. She also details the intimate connections between disgust and “a highly dangerous and aggressive xenophobia” (107).76 In Assassin, Cho performs her experiences as a judge for the 2004 MoveOn.org awards for the “Bush in 30 Seconds” contest. Of course, as might be expected from any outspoken and othered performer attending a political event, Cho reveals that she centered her humor on the current dystopic political atmosphere that George W. Bush has instigated. After hearing about two MoveOn contestants who had compared Bush to Hitler, Cho found prime material for her opening act. Onstage, Cho says, “George Bush is not Hitler. He would be if he applied himself” (Assassin). Her comments were then taken out of context and posted on Free Republic, an ultra-conservative right wing website. In backlash, Cho received violent and vicious hate emails that illustrate the discursive and perceived connections

75 “The Immigration Act of 1924 was the most comprehensive in restricting Asian presence in the United States, barring the immigration of all ‘aliens ineligible for citizenship’” (Kang 130). 76 Susan Koshy in Sexual Naturalization asserts that past and present federal and state policies surrounding Asian immigrants “position Asians as racial aliens and sexual deviants” in an effort to maintain the “purity” of the white nation (1-2).

between gender, sexuality, race, nationality, and the dirty excessive vagina. Email posters, better known as “freepers,” declared: ‘FUCKING CUNTS LIKE YOU MAKE ME SICK.’ ‘A disease to this nation. A cancer upon our country. I can only pray that you will be defeated and destroyed for the good of all.’ ‘Go back to your native land you overweight fisting lesbian.’ ‘GOOK CUNT, You fat ass slant eyed WHORE.’ ‘Went to your website and soon discovered you are queer too.’ ‘GO BACK TO ASIA CUNT.’ ‘I hope you have aids and pass it to all your liberal commie homo friends.’ ‘Fuck you you Oriental cunt.’ ‘Get the fuck out of my country.’ ‘I am hoping you develop breast cancer […] you bitch.’ ‘You're a slut and a lard ass.’ ‘Fat cunt Chinese woman.’ ‘Aids Cures Gays.’ (“Attacks From the Right”) In a desire to reestablish a secured sense of fixed and stable borders, a sense of nationality, and a distance from the “other,” Cho is attacked and defined as a whore and a “gook cunt.” She is responded to as a filthy disease that threatens to infect the nation. She is violently encouraged to leave “our” country. She is wished dead. The ways in which Cho is discursively disciplined illustrate that bodily boundaries are metaphoric for any boundary that the nation feels is threatened or susceptible to invasion. As a result, Cho’s “cunt”– dirty, disgusting, foreign, Asian, queer, and infected – comes to signify all of her bodily excesses. Words hurt and the body remembers. But words can incite as well. Cho credits the early 1980s queer and AIDS activist group ACT UP for providing her with the tools necessary for her survival. Borrowing from ACT UP whose mantra was “silence = death,” Cho claims her mantra as “silence = non-existence” (Cho Revolution). She says, “when something hurts me, I have to say something because, if I don't, it will just burn me up. I feel like living as a minority in America feels like dying of a thousand paper cuts and I ain’t going out like that.” Cho reveals in her recent Assassin tour that as the hate email clogged her account, she chose to respond by posting the emails, names, email addresses, and phone numbers of the previously anonymous perpetrators on her own

MargaretCho.com site. In making such private acts of hate open to public consumption, Cho unknowingly awakens her own internal terrorist “sleeper cell” who choose to throw shame back upon the shamers. Her fans, referred to by Cho as “the Cho Army – the underrepresented, unvoiced, ignored part of our population,” relentlessly bombarded the posters with responses of outrage (I Have Chosen to Stay and Fight 10);77 as a result, many attackers came forward with apologies and pleas for forgiveness, and, of course, pleas for their emails and contact information to be removed from her site. This live performative exchange of an acknowledged disgust and public confrontation, followed by feelings and confessions of shame illustrate that such a transformation can be personally and politically moving. Elspeth Probyn in Carnal Appetites: FoodSexIdentity theorizes, “the body shamed before the sight of the body disgusted becomes a passionate witness to itself. Shame makes of our bodies a judge, but a judge of what? Well, in simple terms, a judge of our affects as actions. . . . Shame at one's initial disgust may pave the way to understanding ‘acceptance’ in a fractured sense” (142, 127).78 Probyn alludes to the promise that disgust, if it moves into shame, has the potential to alter the way one looks at and approaches the “other.” This promise at first appears utopic. But Cho's public staging of such an exchange provides us with a hope that this rare displacement can effect the way the other is violently used to makes sense of one’s self, which could in turn effect our freedom to move through the world. In the end, though, Cho can never be the “ideal” disembodied liberal subject, or the “dead citizen,” as Berlant puts it, despite all attempts to discipline her and despite all attempts at self-discipline. Interestingly, and as a way to complicate my hopes for this transformative exchange, in The Cultural Politics of Emotion, Sara Ahmed points to the difficulties in determining exactly what an apology “means” or “does.”79 In the MoveOn.org instance, many of Cho’s attackers may be expressing feelings of shame followed by apologies because Cho made their hate acts public. The intimate

77 Cho speaks of the “Cho Army”: “They can fucking fight. They will throw down in a fucking split second” (I Have Chosen to Stay and Fight 10). 78 Martha Nussbaum in Hiding from Humanity: Disgust, Shame, and the Law asserts, Disgust is “closely linked to experiences of vulnerability and shame” (109). 79 Both Ahmed and Sedgwick discuss the apology as a performative speech act.

connections between shame and interest that are explored above lead to unanswerable questions: Are the attackers “interested” in developing a connection with Cho, which would then prompt their feelings of shame? Are they “interested” in maintaining relationships with their peers, family, and friends, relationships that may “shamefully” end if their discursive hate emails are found on the Internet? Or, are they “interested” in simply getting the “Cho Army” off their backs and out of their lives?80 Despite our inability to determine the exact nature of these cries of shame and desires to be forgiven, it must be pointed out that Cho continues to be a target of hate. In viewing the other as innately inferior and threatening, as abject, those in positions of privilege are strategically “gifted” with a justification for racist, sexist, and homophobic words and acts. Biddy Martin defines such attempts to stabilize the (white and heterosexual) nation as a “purification ritual” (98), bell hooks labels it an “Imperialist nostalgia” (“Eating the Other” 25), Anne Cvetkovich theorizes it as a “national trauma” (13), and Lauren Berlant views it as a “symbolic genocide” and “hygenic governmentality” (Queen of America 185, 175).81 Berlant elaborates, “In twentieth- century America, anyone coded as ‘low,’ embodied, or subculturally ‘specific’ continues to experience, with banal regularity, the corporeal sensation of nationality as a sensation over which she/he has no control” (239). Particular conservative Blogs such as The Drudge Report, Free Republic, Ace of Spades HQ, and The Blogspirator continue to assert that Cho is a “vile terrorist-sympathizer” (“Margaret Cho Names Dog”) and that she “has a thing for communist mass-murderers” (“Alleged Comedienne” 1). Because of Cho’s appropriation of particular revolutionary figures, her outspoken politics, and her excessive bodily performances, she will always be perceived as a threat. Concerning Cho’s recent “My Puss” music video, the owner of (who remains

80 To get a sense of the different tones of the apologies, see “Attacks from the Right” at MargaretCho.com. 81 Borrowing from Foucault’s essay, “Governmentality,” Berlant defines hygienic governmentality as involving “the ruling bloc’s dramatic attempt to maintain its hegemony by asserting that an abject population threatens the common good and must be rigorously governed and monitored by all sectors of society” (Berlant, Queen of America 176). See also Barbara Creed’s The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (10).

anonymous, but uses the pseudonym Ace) and visitors to Ace of Spaces HQ shamelessly assert horrifying posts such as: ‘I hope I can get that chink bitch […] out of my mind.’ ‘No words can describe the horror.’ ‘Nasty she-junk.’ ‘She's being awfully generous referring to her ‘puss’. More like her pus.’ ‘Cho-horror. Jesus – I just threw up in my mouth.’ ‘Semi-pornographic bad rap video by a woman who is doing everything humanly possible to destroy whatever erotic energy is left in the phrase ‘Asian lesbian.’ This video makes attractive lesbians cry in shame.’ (“Don’t Click”) The hateful discourse put forward here eerily echoes the ways in which Cho was attacked after performing at the MoveOn.org “Bush in 30 Seconds” contest. Again, Cho and her “puss” are disparaged and desexualized as too queer and too butch. She is responded to and marked as foreign, aggressive, pornographic, infectious, filthy, and disgusting – as grotesque. The “horror” that Cho’s body imposes upon these conservative viewers is so shocking and immediate that their bodily reactions cannot be controlled. Cho’s body, sexuality, and politics – her differences and the anxieties that such differences force upon others – are now marked as monstrous, as something to be feared and eliminated. Unfortunately, it becomes evident as we read through these posts, that fears about the nation’s “racial purity” are intimately connected to “perverse” desires that defy the nation’s “official” sexuality. Because of her refusal to play or actually “become” a particular fixed and stable role or stereotype within her stand-up performances Cho will never be fully embraced. As alluded to above, there is always pleasure to be had in intelligibility, in not having to fight and struggle against those who hate us for who we are, but Cho’s performances, as well as her movements in the world, are not about being accepted as “normal” or “normative.” Instead, her movements are about surviving, negotiating, and even rebelling against hegemonic culture. In the epigraph that opens this chapter, echoing her own mantra of “silence = non-existence,” Cho reveals that she “must” convey the pain, sorrow, and horror in her life as she finds a way to the

beautiful.82 Through her performances, it becomes apparent that Cho has found her way, “but there is so much ugliness still left” (I’m the One 166). Muñoz proclaims that “comedy does not exist independent of rage” (xii), Cvetkovich states that trauma forges overt connections between politics and emotions (10), Butler asserts that the suffering brought about through the process of normalization can become “a potential site for politicization” (Undoing Gender 217), and Berlant details the intimate connections between pain, terror, pleasure, and survival. She writes, “The stories we tell about how subjectivity takes shape must also represent our involvement with the pain and terror, the bad memory and mental lag, that also shape our desire’s perverse, twisted, or, if you prefer, indirect routes toward pleasure and survival” (“Two Girls” 74).83 Cho feels that without self-esteem, which is of course intimately connected to self-worth, change is inconceivable and therefore impossible. I have to agree with her. When queers and people of color are continually told we are worthless, deviant, perverted, and flawed, self-esteem can be hard to come by. As Judith Butler declares in Undoing Gender, “How to embody the norm is about how to survive and whether life itself will be possible” (217). Being defined as a threatening, immoral, infectious, dirty, hypersexual, queer and fat immigrant, Cho struggles to make it through the everyday. In her BLOG, Cho confesses, “my soul feels heavy on the earth, trudging through weeks, days, months, years, with a vague hope that things might be good someday” (“No Time for Suicide”). Cho struggles to survive the everyday traumas of living in a marked and excessive body and she articulates the heaviness of getting through in a world that works so hard to demonize her existence. Yet her political performances illustrate that when anger, pain, and rage are focused and spoken that they are appropriate and productive responses to racism and injustice. Cho powerfully

82 Cho defines this way of living as she borrows from the Tibetan Buddhist practice known as Tonglen. She describes practice as, “You breathe in the suffering of the world and […]breathe out joy and contentment and compassion […] and love” (“Comedy and Race”). 83 A beautiful compliment to the connections between affects and politics would be a theoretical exploration of melancholia. Speaking of her art, Cho reveals, “There’s a kind of melodious melancholy that runs throughout” (qtd. in Donohue and Kirkman 1). See Douglas Crimp, Muñoz (67-74), Ahmed (The Cultural Politics 159), and Cvetkovich (An Archive 165).

emphasizes what Audre Lorde articulated so long ago, that “anger is loaded with information and energy” (127). Cho brings up feelings of pain, humiliation, shame, and anger because she has to; yet she is determined to demonstrate that humor continues to exist in the world as she declares, “Our ability to laugh coincides with our ability to fight.” (I Have Chosen 20).

Conjuring Queer Future(s)

The bodies of performance artists, particularly the bodies of women and/or queers of color, such as Margaret Cho, can “stage” the anxious relationship between tenuous national borders and threatening bodily ones. Lee writes, “This border trouble becomes a monstrosity written on the performer’s body, as weird appendages are evoked in order to stress the especially acute position of the woman of color in the anxious erection of walls to keep foreign bodies out” (124). As Lee points to the vulnerability of particular bodies onstage as well as to the negotiations of particular affects that such bodies perform, numerous other performance theorists illustrate that the risks performance artists take are capable of prompting change.84 As Cho illustrates how bodily boundaries come to stand in for national ones, she often restages experiences of shame and disgust by performing a shamed and disgusting body. In other instances, Cho chooses to turn such affects back onto those who have othered her and stages a very proud and resistant body. Through these complicated negotiations, Cho is able to perform and make “real” a form of national abjection that continues to violently and repetitively exclude, deny, and shape her. Through her performances, Cho is able to transform both her pleasurable and painful movements through the world in ways that alleviate the shame she once felt for her “inauthentic” racial performance and her “excessive” face, vagina, and body size that were threatening to “take over America.” As a result, Cho embraces rather than despairs

84 I have already detailed the numerous performance theorists who demonstrate this claim throughout the chapter. Others who have informed my analysis would be Rebecca Schneider’s The Explicit Body in Performance, Fabio Cleto in Camp: Queer Aesthetics and the Performing Subject, and Holly Hughes and David Román’s “O Solo Homo: An Introductory Conversation.”

over the instability of the self. As Cho negotiates what the world demands and what she herself desires, demands and desires which sometimes mirror and sometimes oppose one another, she is able to articulate how moments of shame and pain have the potential to be transformed into something that is yet unknown and unarticulated. Cho reveals, “I’m something never seen before, not yet happened, untested and unsure. How will I be received?” (I Have Chosen 4). Rightly determining that intersecting identity categories shape how one experiences and negotiates feelings of shame, Judith Halberstam in “Shame and White Gay Masculinity” writes, “Shame for women and shame for people of color plays out in different ways and creates different modes of abjection, marginalization, and self-abnegation; it also leads to very different political strategies” (223). Cho’s image of a future world is about contradiction, unruliness, love, play, imagination, and indeterminacy, and she resists defining what her hoped for future might look like, which would only be to limit it. For Cho, both her conscious and unconscious decisions to embrace and expel particular Asian stereotypes, as well as bits and pieces of her own self, are definitely about being a stand-up comedian. But such decisions are also about living a personal and political life that is more pleasurable than shameful. Don’t we all want to move through the world with as much ease as possible? As Cho performs the negotiation of particular affects, she is able to provide us with moments of imagining what shame might offer us in these politically unstable times where our connections with others are at best tenuous and at worst violent and destructive. Playfully alluding to the doubled meaning of the term “cunt” during the closing of Cho Revolution, Cho disturbingly brings together the material pains and violences of war with the discursive pains and violences of how “others” are defined and responded to. She says: I am hurt all over for this awful war and all of this stuff, but I am hurt because somebody just got called a fag, or a dyke, or a pansy, or a sissy, or a bull-dyke, or a chink, or a nigger, or a kike, or a wetback, or an injun, or a jap, or a bitch, or a whore, or a cunt. And unless to you that's a term of

endearment – in the right context it is – that person is being attacked because of who they are and I don't accept that. As illustrated throughout this chapter, Cho herself is frequently read as a “dyke,” a “gook,” a “bitch,” a “whore,” and a “cunt.” Because of this, she reveals that her performances are “about being the other, and being angry about being the other” (qtd. in Rothaus 2). Laws, discourses, stereotypes, violences, hate-crimes, homophobia, trauma, and shame shape Cho's happenings in and understandings of the world around her. Yet, Cho asserts that her humor is shaped by, arises from, and depends upon her own painful “outsider perspective” (“Talk of the Nation”). Humor is only one political tool that allows Cho to negotiate such affects and experiences as she struggles to do more than simply survive. And ironically, there is an extreme pleasure in defiance, all while Cho fears for her life. The beauty of Cho’s ambivalence is her refusal to excise fear, shame, and violence from her articulations of the performing vagina that is both experienced and read as grotesque. Further, she incorporates such affects into the complex ways she seeks and experiences pleasure. Cho proclaims, “I think if you’re oppressed over who you want to sleep with, when you actually go and do it, you’re going to have a really good time. If you’re hated for who you like to fuck, you are going to kick up your heels and fuck” (Notorious C.H.O.). Cho’s alternately playful and grotesque perversions centered on the vagina illustrate the intimate and vexed relationship she has with her body, race, and sexuality. Despite her refusal to become a symbol of race and nation, Cho illustrates that this refusal is painful and never complete. I initially believed it was solely Cho’s sense of pride that drew me to her. I was mistaken. In Blush: Faces of Shame, Elspeth Probyn writes, “shame reminds us about the promises we keep to ourselves” (x), and Cho’s promises come to life through performance. Cho assures us that she will maintain her brutal and vulnerable honesty, her truthfulness to herself and her audience, and, of course, her sense of humor. After her “My Puss” BLOG and video were publicly released, Cho posts a new BLOG entitled “Pussy Write Letters,” the exact expression that Cho uses when she transforms herself into an extraordinary Thai pussy in Cho Revolution. “Pussy Write Letters” is a call out to

her fans to create and send in their own pussy manifestas, which they do. So, as I’ve been asked in the past (yes, really) and often wonder myself, what kind of letter might pussy write? What might pussy ask for itself and the other pussies of the world? Might pussy say it is exhausted—tired of being asked to signify? Might it also say that it feels confined as it begs to be released from its “burden”? Might it reveal horrific pains? Might it confess unspoken pleasures? Might it scream revolution? As Cho fearlessly illuminates the overt connections between her shame, rage, pleasure, and politics, I recognize now that she is as much prideful and every bit as angry as she is brave. The courage behind her unruly, humorous, and painful negotiations are exhilarating. In that exhilaration, there is not only a sense of empathy, but also a sense of recognition, a connection. And through that connection there is revolution to be made.

Chapter Three

‘When Is a Tulip Not a Tulip?’:85 Bodies and Pleasures in Jeanette Winterson’s The PowerBook

“There are many legends of men being turned into beasts and women into trees, but none I think, till now, of a woman who becomes a man by means of a little horticultural grafting” (Jeanette Winterson, The Powerbook 12).

“Our civilization possesses no ars erotica” (Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality 58).

The year 1559 was surely one of celebration for the medical and horticultural sciences. Not only did Italian anatomist Renaldus Columbus (re)discover the clitoris (Harvey 316),86 but also the first tulip “definitely known to have flowered in the Europe” broke ground (Dash 32).87 In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, during the beginnings and height of “tulip mania” in Europe (1636-37), the tulip was not only a coveted commodity, but was also revered as a sexy, ravishing, exotic, intense, fancy-free, brilliant, alluring, wild, and mysterious jewel. It was known as a performer, a trickster, and a changeling, always transforming and, according to Anna Pavord in The Tulip, “always trying on new clothes” (28). The tulip was also believed to be magical; it could show us a momentary glimpse of our future(s) if we only looked and believed. Ironically, in the eighteenth century, the century that coincided with the ruinous decline of tulipomania, this flower became demonized as a capturer of hearts and a heartbreaker, as irresponsible and excessive, as a whore, a siren, a pagan, a hedonist, and a villain.88 In

85 From Winterson’s The Powerbook (9). 86 Despite the fact that Columbus’ “find” was the first to be documented, it was disputed by Gabriel Fallopia. For more information on this “discovery,” see Harvey and chapter one. 87 “Although Clusius was so closely involved in bringing the tulip into Europe, he was not the first to describe it in print. That honour belongs to the Zurich physician and botanist Conrad Gesner (1516-1565), who saw the first tulips to be noted in Europe flowering in April 1559” (Pavord, The Tulip 60). 88 All descriptions come from Pavord, Pollan, and Dash.

other words, the tulip (Nature) was both discursively and visually personified and pathologized as an infectious and invading outsider and a perverted femme fatale bent on economically and spiritually destroying man (Culture) (Pavord, Pollan, Dash). The rapid decline of the tulip’s reputation parallels the scientific degradation of the bodies of women. Interestingly, women and men have not always been analyzed, defined, and discussed through their sexual differences. Before the 1800s, in fact, male and female anatomy were theorized as a “one-sex model” where the female body was believed to be “not a different sex,” but an inferior, incomplete, or underdeveloped male body (Oudshoorn 6). It wasn’t until the eighteenth century that the two-sexed model became ideology. Margrit Shildrick in Leaky Bodies and Boundaries: Feminism, Postmodernism, and (Bio)ethics identifies significant cultural and philosophical shifts concerning subjectivity in the post-Enlightenment era, such as the mind/body split, as reasons for the development of the two-sexed model that emphasizes difference. If the (female) body is posited as inferior to the (male) mind, the next “logical” step would be to construct a “natural” connection between woman and her body. And it was natural history, comparative anatomy, eugenics discourses, and psychoanalysis that took up such a task. As a result, the essential connections between anatomy and character were fabricated and solidified and the vagina came to signify “Woman.” The tulip’s position in “nature” alongside its delicate folds, gentle scents, deep colors, and hidden depths make it an almost perfect metaphor for the vulva. Flower metaphors, specifically the flower as vulva, came to us in full force as a feminist political statement, or as “cunt art,” in the 1970s for specific reasons.89 Judy Chicago (The Dinner Party and her two autobiographies, Through the Flower and Beyond the Flower) and Georgia O’Keeffe (who painted tulips, lilies, orchids, irises, etc.) are but two of the well- known artists who visually represent this genre.90 Paula Bennett in “Clitoridectomy:

89 See Thompson’s “Dear Sisters” and “Agreeable Objects” for a historical and cultural analysis of “vaginal iconography.” 90 It is important to point out that O’Keeffe resisted interpretations of her work as vaginal iconography. She writes, “Well, I made you take time to look at what I saw and when you took time to really notice my flower you hung all your own associations with flowers on my flower

Female Sexual Imagery and Feminist Psychoanalytic Theory” refers to this specific form of feminist counterdiscourses as “the erotic use of imagery discourse” or “the ‘Language of Flowers’” (241). Further, she asserts that such use of metaphor “has been Western culture’s language of women. More specifically, it has been the language through which woman’s body and […] women’s genitals have been represented and inscribed” (242). At a time when sexual difference theory91 shaped feminist reappropriations of the vagina, pussy, and/or cunt, it makes sense that many of these artists used the flower as a symbol of their “natural” differences from men (Bennett 247). Even contemporary reappropriations of the vagina continue to rely upon this tradition. Inga Muscio’s 2002 Cunt: A Declaration of Independence’s front jacket contains a large image of a flower and one of Eve Ensler’s 1998 The Vagina Monologues asserts, “my vagina is a flower, an eccentric tulip, the center acute and deep, the scent delicate, the petals gentle but sturdy” (43). Interestingly, though, one of the many wonders of the tulip is that it continually transforms, escapes categorization, and resists any attempts to tame it: “Even now, in their dark underground grottoes beneath the rocks, the tulips were plotting new feats, re- inventing themselves in ways that we could never dream” (Pavord 21). In a way then, we could define the tulip as a “queer” little flower. And if this queer flower makes it into the garden, we could potentially have a queer space. In “New World Pastoral: The Caribbean Garden and Emplacement in Giséle Pineau and Shani Mootoo,” the essay that inspired this chapter, Sarah Phillips Casteel analyzes the space of the garden in Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night as a way to reconsider our understanding of space and place. Because garden flowers have almost always been uprooted from one locale, exported, and then transplanted into new soils (a colonial project of sorts), Casteel details that gardens can be read as spaces of rootedness and mobility. As a result of the involuntary journey that both human beings and plant

and you write about my flower as if I think and see what you think and see of the flower - and I don’t.” 91 “Sexual difference was easily quantifiable in the modernist enlightenment view: the sex to which an individual was assigned depended upon whether the person possessed, at birth, a penis or a vagina. The knowledge of the genital was to predetermine a person’s life story” (Whittle 118).

life sometimes make, the garden does not “celebrate placelessness,” suggests Casteel. Instead, it implies “the need to establish a sense of place in the face of the recognition that no absolute stability is possible” (27). If we trace the diasporic travels of the tulip, we get a sense of the culture’s movements, transformations, and desires.92 And if we interpret the newly transplanted flower garden, we find that space, identity, and nation can be queered. In The PowerBook, Jeanette Winterson reappropriates the “Language of Flowers,” but with a different purpose and different end as she transports us away from a politics of sexual difference and into “a queer time and place” (Halberstam 1).93 Ali’s cultivation of a tulip-filled pleasure garden, alongside her/his encounters with the Captain from Istanbul and the pirates and princess from Genoa, illustrate that although the tulip cannot be disconnected from colonial exploration, exploitation, and a desire for all things exotic, its dispersion across the globe and is specifically about the spread of the community’s bodies and pleasures: “Every lady of fashion longed to walk in the gently nodding garden and lie under a tree, where she could experience for herself those exquisite attributes of variation that humans and tulips share” (The Powerbook 251). As the community is drawn into the sexualized space of the public garden, Winterson, through Ali, defies the ideological notion of a “body-centered identity” (Halberstam, In a Queer Time 5) that has detrimentally shaped how we act up politically and how we approach each other as sexed, gendered, and sexualized human beings. As a result, Ali’s exile and subsequent travels allow for the formation of a “nomadic garden of queer longing” (Casid xv) or a queer counterpublic that moves sex and sexuality into the public sphere.

92 “‘Successful gardens always have been those where the ensemble of elements is not only just beautiful, but also answers to a particular society’s deepest needs’” (Hunt qtd. in Crozier 628). 93 In In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives, Judith Halberstam details just how a queer subcultural community might develop. She writes, “queer uses of time and space develop, at least in part, in opposition to the institutions of family, heterosexuality, and reproduction. They also develop according to other logics of location, movement, and identification” (1).

“The Exotic of the East”

“Ali’s story is not well documented” (The PowerBook 251). As theorists we must begin with the stories that are silenced or simply not recognized, suggests Judith Halberstam. She asserts that we have perfected the ability to critique the concept of normativity, but we have fallen short “at describing in rich detail the practices and structures that both oppose and sustain conventional forms of association, belonging, and identification” (In a Queer Time 4). The PowerBook is, in part, a fictional tale of bodies and pleasures, an imaginative journey through cyberspace where characters exist both within and outside of history. As with many of Winterson’s texts, The Powerbook addresses themes of love, romance, cliché, passion, language, and storytelling as it retells tragic canonical narratives of unrequited love. Because the narrator, Ali/x, a “language costumier,” utilizes the momentary and imaginative possibilities of virtual reality, she is able to transport herself and the object of her affection, Tulip, through time and space as she promises us, “this is an invented world. You can be free just for one night. Undress. Take off your clothes. Take off your body. Hang them up behind the door. Tonight we can go deeper than disguise” (4). In attempt to seduce Tulip, Ali/x composes imaginative online narratives where the two are able to “experience” and “express” their unrealized passions. We can never be certain that Ali/x and Tulip ever get together in “meatspace;” instead, we can only be sure that they are transformed within and because of the fantastical world of cyberspace. In one such playful narrative, because “a theft lies behind the rise of the tulip in Holland” (Pollan 83), Ali/x takes advantage of the unarticulated spaces between fact and fiction and strategically inserts Ali, a queer exotic Turkish figure, into the historical accounts of tulipomania. In the epigraph by Michel Foucault that opens this chapter we are boldly informed that no form of ars erotica exists in Western culture. Ars erotica for Foucault is a pleasure that exists solely for pleasure’s sake (57) and is opposed to Western culture’s “scientia sexualis.” For Foucault, scientia sexualis would have us believe that in seeking out and confessing the underlying reasons for and truths behind our sexual desires,

behaviors, and acts, we will discover a once hidden truth about ourselves and therein become whole: “The truth healed” (Foucault 67). Foucault has been accused of a form of Orientalism (Puar 138) as he identifies specific Eastern cultures such as “Arabo- Moslem[s]” who knew of and experienced the secrets and ecstasies of ars erotica. But, whereas Foucault asserts that only Islamic Others and/or Southeast Asians can attain this heightened/awakened state, there has been a long history of appropriating this figure only to then pathologize him or her. Not only is the Middle Eastern “exotic” female constructed as excessive and hypersexual, but, according to Marjorie Garber in “The Chic of Araby: Transvestism, Transsexualism and the Erotics of Cultural Appropriation,” the male is feminized and associated with “sexual deviance, and particularly with male homosexuality” (239). For example, Jasbir K. Puar analyzes the recent proliferation of discourses surrounding the sexual torture of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib, only to find that the “Middle Eastern” figure continues to be read and constructed as “repressed and perverse.” As a result, “the site of freedom has been relocated to Western identity” (125). And long ago in 1886, Richard Burton identifies specific geographical locations that are filled with “perversions,” perversions those those of us in the West “look upon […] with lively disgust,” as “The Sotadic Zone” (Burton 204). In his list of locales, countries and continents inhabited with people (defined as “racial institutions” by Burton) who are unafraid and unashamed to experience perverse pleasures, are the coast of Africa, Morocco, Egypt, China, Japan, and Turkey, to name but a few specifics (204). Burton defines and pathologizes “sotadic love” as “a blending of the masculine and feminine temperaments. […] Hence the male féminisme [femininity] whereby the man becomes patiens [passive] as well as agens [active], and the woman a tribade, a votary of mascula [man-like] Sappho” (204). Burton’s delineation of the Sotadic Zone is not only shaped by stereotypes of the exotic and perverse Middle Eastern figure, but it also reifies such constructions. In The PowerBook, Ali/x begins her first erotic online narrative for Tulip, the object of her affection, and constructs the tale of Ali, who illegally transports a tulip and

two tulip bulbs from Turkey to Holland in 1591.94 We immediately discover that Ali is a master of disguise. When Ali is born, her father wants to drown her rather than feed another daughter, and to avoid such a terrifying fate Ali’s mother begins dressing Ali as a boy with the hopes that she might bring in an additional income for the family. It is recorded that the tulip originated in Turkey, Ali’s land of birth. During this time, the Ottoman Empire was economically and culturally thriving as Suleyman continued to conquer, claim, and colonize new territories. To supply his army and expand his empire, Suleyman regularly traded “jewels” and “luxuries” with the English (The Powerbook 14), and because the Dutch’s love for tulips paralleled their “fascination with all things exotic” (Pavord 162), Ali is appointed by Sulyman himself to carry and present the first tulip to the people of Holland.95 Ali reveals, “in the sixteenth century the first tulip was imported to Holland from Turkey. I know – I carried it myself. […] I became a spy. Sulyman himself appointed me and his instruction now is that I should get in a boat and bear a gift to his friends, the Dutch” (The PowerBook 9-11).96 Because Ali initially makes this journey for reasons of economic survival, to journey safely, she maintains her “disguise” as a boy. As a “natural” compliment to this gendered performance of an alternative masculinity and as a way to secretly transport this coveted flower across geographical borders, Ali “straps-on” the tulip and tulip bulbs. As Ali acquires her tulip and tulip bulbs from the hills of Turkey, she/he elaborates on the ability to transform nature’s wonders into a bodily wonder: My mother got some stout thread and belted it through the natural die- back of the bulb tops. Then she sewed the lot onto a narrow leather strap and fastened it around my hips. […] At home my mother embalmed the tulip, and in a few days it was ready to wear. This was my centerpiece.

94 “Tulip Mania” in Holland took place in the years1636 and1637. 95 “Ogier Ghislain de Busbecqu, ambassador to the court of Suleyman the Magnificent in Constantinople, claimed to have introduced the tulip to Europe, sending of bulbs west from Constantinople soon after he arrived there in 1554” (Pollan 80). 96 The first tulip to break ground in Europe was described as resembling the flower that Ali brings over: “‘flowering with a single beautifully red flower, large, like a red lily formed of eight petals of which four were outside and the rest within. It had a very sweet, soft and subtle scent’” (Gesner qtd. in Pavord, The Tulip 60).

About eight inches long, plump, with a nice weight to it. We secured it to my person and inspected the results. There are many legends of men being turned into beasts and women into trees, but none I think, till now, of a woman who becomes a man by means of a little horticultural grafting. My mother knelt down and put her nose close. ‘You smell like a garden,’ she said. (The PowerBook 11-12) In this moment, the tulip is not standing in for Ali’s vagina, as it might have in second- wave feminist “cunt art.” The tulip instead sits next to the vagina as both an artificial and a “natural” penis. As a result of such transformations and travels, Ali experiences new forms of violence and pleasure with her/his new body, body part, and identity. After the tulip is secured as a “centerpiece,” Ali hitches a ride on a spice ship. Forced to journey into unknown territory, Ali is dislocated and awakened to the history of imperialism, exploitation, and war as she/he is told: “To become that city, that civilisation, you once took a pickaxe and destroyed what you hated, and what you hated was what you did not understand” (19). In addition to this dislocation and awareness concerning the violence between nations, a pirate sexually assaults Ali. As an “effeminate” young Turkish “boy,” Ali is aligned with otherness, and it is this figure, according to Joseph A. Boone in “Vacation Cruises; or, The Homoerotics of Orientalism,” who “represents one ‘face’ of orientalist homoerotic fantasy” (94). As a way to violently impose his own (phallic) power and fulfill his own sexual fantasy of colonial contact, the pirate “pulled out his own cock and held it under Ali’s nose. ‘This is treasure. You aren’t worth a flea’s ransom.’ Ali sucked it. What else could he do?” (21). Using the Other to make sense of the self is a common ethnocentric practice. Siobhan Somerville warns that the concepts and categories articulated by Burton open up a dangerous space where “uncivilized” sexual acts are pinned down and used as justification for one’s innate inferiority (“Introduction: Race” 203). Possibly because of these cultural stereotypes of the sexualized and perverse Middle Eastern Other, Winterson constructs Ali as always already queer. Just as we have spent a lifetime remaking the tulip to meet our ever-changing standards of beauty and desire, “these

plants have, at the same time, been going about the business of remaking us” (Pollan xvii). As the tulip, referred to as “the exotic of the East” (Winterson 251, Dash 83, Pavord 162, Pollan 86), literally becomes a part of Ali, Ali develops more “tulip-like” characteristics. Because Ali too is able to transform and escape categorization, she/he is approached as alluring and dangerous. But is there really a way to utilize the figure of the Other without reifying negative stereotypes, which, as we all know, have real effects on real bodies? In an attempt to complicate the colonial gaze, Marjorie Garber contends that there “is another side to Orientalism; more than one kind of Western subject looks East, and sees himself/herself already inscribed there” (245). In fact, she believes that there are ways of appropriating the Eastern liminal figure that might provide us with a “template” for transgender and gender queer individuals “to analyze and interpret the possibilities and dignities of their own social role” (244).97 The difference between the two forms of appropriation then are about whether or not one can imagine a future world where connections and exchanges between the local and the global are recognized, opening up unimagined pleasurable possibilities. In this way, the path to an open future is no longer uni-directional; it no longer moves from the West to other parts of the world and Western norms are no longer applied to the Other to categorize their sub-humanity. What are the effects of uprooting, dislocating, and transplanting an ars erotica in the West? Can this creative attempt be devoid of Orientalist tendencies? Can it disrupt the ways we organize and fix identity? Can it offer us new ways to categorize bodies and pleasures?

“The Flower Fucking Princess”

As Winterson’s narrative acknowledges the displacement and violence that occurs to Ali, pain and violence are not the only affects and acts that determine and define her/his subjectivity.98 After Ali is sexually assaulted, kidnapped, and trafficked by

97 Garber defines this as an “ethnocentric pluralism” (244). 98 Ali’s performance of a female masculinity deviates from the tragic narratives that have culturally surrounded such an identity. In “Gender Please, Without the Gender Police: Rethinking

pirates, she/he is forced to become a sexual trainer to an Italian princess. “Trembling, hungry, dirty and alone” (21), Ali contemplates her/his fate. As a woman her future is unknown, but as a boy he has something to anticipate: “sexual congress” with a princess (22). With initial reluctance that stems from a fear of being outed, Ali realizes, “Come death, come life, there is a part to play and that is all” (24) and she/he takes on this task and learns something new about power and pleasure. During their first night of sexual play, Ali reveals, “I felt my disguise come to life. The tulip began to stand. […] Very gently the Princess lowered herself across my knees and I felt the firm red head and pale shaft plant itself in her body. A delicate green-tinted sap dribbled down her brown thighs. All afternoon I fucked her” (The PowerBook 25-6). Instead of reappropriating the tulip as a traditional feminine metonym then, Winterson’s use of a tulip that comes to life and rises disrupts any equivalence between flower and vulva. In “‘Dear Sisters’: The Visible Lesbian in Community Art Journals,” Margo Hobbs Thomspson contends that using flowers as metaphors “suggest equivalences: the labia are delicate and soft to the touch like blooms” (418). In contrast, the “ideal” Turkish tulip has historically been depicted as slender and elongated (see Figure 8). In fact, “the metaphor of choice for this

Figure 8. Niebrugge, Ron. Red Tulip. 18 July 2008. .

Pain in Archetypal Narratives of Butch, Transgender, and FTM Masculinity,” Madelyn Detloff hopes that we understand that yes, violence shapes the lives of those who perform alternative masculinities; but her article is, in part, a call for us to imagine “an unpredictable, open future for the non-tragic formation of FTM, butch, and/or transgendered subjectivities” (100).

form of tulip petal was the dagger” (Pollan 81). Yet, despite the possibilities that this particular sex scene can offer us –the body is transformed, new forms of pleasure are explored, and the vagina is disarticulated from a sexed, gendered, and sexual identity – this is the moment that critics use to support their attempts to categorize Ali as a specific sexualized being. When the princess sees Ali’s “treasure,” she responds, “‘I have never seen a man before.’ (You’re not seeing one now.) ‘The stories I have heard . . . the fleshiness, the swelling . . . but you are like a flower.’ (This was true)” (25). Ali is “like a flower,” but Ali’s performance of an alternative masculinity, a performance that is accentuated by a “strap-on,” has prompted literary theorists to define her/him as a crossdresser (Onega 185, Ganteau 171), a lesbian (Palmer 189), and a postmodern lesbian (Moore 105). Even Tulip, the woman who receives the online story of Ali’s encounter with the princess, has concerns with such a story and demands to know if Ali/x (the narrator) is male or female. As Ali/x (re)creates narratives, bodies, and scenarios online, and as Ali/x and Tulip interact through an email exchange, the real and imaginary worlds momentarily merge, as do bodies and discourses. Responding to Tulip’s questions of gender, Ali/x asserts: “‘Does it matter?’ ‘It’s a co-ordinate.’ ‘This is a virtual world.’ ‘OK, OK – but just for the record – male or female?’ ‘Ask the Princess.’ ‘That was just a story.’ ‘This is just a story’” (30). A part of the confusion surrounding Ali’s sexed, gendered, and sexual performance has to do with Winterson’s own identity as a lesbian, as well as her interchangeable use of pronouns in The PowerBook. In “Who Cares About Gender at a Time Like This?: Love, Sex, and the Problem of Jeanette Winterson,” Jago Morrison distinguishes between the writer and the “institution” known as “Jeanette Winterson.” He believes that readers (sometimes unconsciously) place our own demands and desires onto Winterson’s pieces of fiction (170). Even Winterson herself finds it frustrating when critics attempt to identify her characters based on her own sexual identity as a lesbian. Winterson writes, “I am a writer who happens to love women. I am not a lesbian who happens to write” (“The Semiotics

of Sex” 104). But more importantly, the desire to attach a particular sexual identity to Ali has everything to do with anatomy. For example, in “Teledildonics: Virtual Lesbians in the Fiction of Jeanette Winterson,” Lisa Moore suggests that the strap-on tulip can be read as a dildo, and that the dildo itself is pulling from a wide index of lesbian signifiers (105). Although Moore applauds the disruptive abilities of Ali’s narrative, because Ali possesses a biological female body that is then transformed,99 Moore ultimately categorizes her as a “virtual lesbian.” Do attempts to categorize Ali that are based on the presence or absence of a vagina lead us back into a reliance on anatomy as the sole signifier of identity? Or, can we simply strap on and remove our sex, gender, and sexuality at will? In Transliberation: Beyond Pink or Blue, Leslie Feinberg identifies “the problem”: “The problem is that they are trying to understand my gender expression by determining my sex – and therein lies the rub!” (8). In an attempt to move beyond such misconceptions, Patrick Califia, a self-identified FTM, includes an honest and clever diatribe in Speaking Sex to Power: The Politics of Queer Sex entitled, “Fifteen Responses for Rejecting my Dick (and My Responses)” that playfully encourages us to question corporeal categories that initially seem “natural” and “fixed.” In this exploration, Califia’s “dick” is at once a dildo, an enlarged clitoris, fingers, and fist. This (dis)articulation and (dis)organization radically alters the notion of a fixed body, what this body can do, and how it can experience pleasure, whether or not this is the result of testosterone where the clitoris grows significantly in size, a strap-on, a disregard for genital orifices altogether, a radical refiguring of what genitals are, can do, and are called, or genital surgery,100 to name but a few examples. Califia believes that if an individual is able to approach the pleasures and

99 In “Consuming the Living, Dis(re)membering the Dead in the Butch/FTM Borederlands,” Jacob C. Hale is adamant that we cannot fold “gender ambiguity in a female-bodied person into the category ‘lesbian,’ [nor can we collapse] stone butches into the category ‘woman,’ […] without grasping that the words female-bodied and woman might not be coextensive with regard to some people’s self-identifications” (315-16). 100 In Speaking Sex, Califia defines metoidioplasty as a “genital surgery that lengthens the clitoris which has already been enlarged by testosterone. Testicular implants are usually done as well” (129). She also details phalloplasty, which is the expensive (and often unsatisfying) surgical construction of a penis (129).

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possibilities of transitioning by responding to his/her body as a text that can be forever rewritten, then we can begin to combat the negative/monstrous connotations embedded within medical and mainstream discourses that approach the voluntary modification of one’s body as sick and unhealthy. In contrast to a politics that fixes the category of “woman” to an “appropriately” sexed body, Winterson too participates in a (dis)articulation and (dis)organization of the body as she expands and blurs the boundaries that determine who can be recognized and respected as a human being. Some find this exploration terrifying, while others find it exhilarating. In an attempt to advocate a rigorous analysis of the intimate connections between the local and the global, queer theorists Arnaldo Cruz-Malavé, Martin F. Manalansan IV, and Gayatri Gopinath101 rightly assert that Western notions of queerness are not monolithic, as is often assumed. All three believe that we can “map” moments of local queerness and connect such moments to the global as a way to articulate expressions of polymorphous perversities. For example, in “Dissident Sexualities/Alternative Globalisms,” Cruz-Malavé and Manalansan write, Instead of providing a term or a grammar that would dispel the complexity of these cross-cultural interactions, making them universally legible, [we must] rather open them up, and interrupt and interrogate the hegemonic logics and moves that would prematurely solve them, reducing their meaning and their political potential. (4) As explored above, the flower has historically and culturally, in the West, stood in for the vulva. But in this story, just as the tulip continually resists categorization and classification,102 so too does Ali. If we pay particular attention to the specificities of the local in relation to the global, we come to realize that Ali, an “exotic from the East,” cannot be categorized using Western terms; as a result, her/his presence challenges

101 Look to Gayatri Gopinath’s “Local Sites/Global Contexts: The Transnational Trajectories of Deepa Mehta’s Fire” (153). 102 “In the long-drawn-out game of leap-frog between tulip and taxonomist, the tulip was always going to win. Its extraordinary diversity, its desire always to be trying on new clothes, is precisely what made it a source of wonder and delight” (Pavord 27-8).

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Western categories of identity that appear eternally fixed.103 I am referring to The Powerbook as a queer text because of the articulated pleasures that Ali and the princess exchange, as well as the liminal space that Ali now inhabits because of her bodily transformation. Laura Doan’s “Jeanette Winterson’s Sexing the Postmodern” and Bente Gade’s “Multiple Selves and Grafted Agents: A Postmodernist Reading of Sexing the Cherry” both elaborate on the trope of “grafting” utilized in Winterson’s 1989 novel, Sexing the Cherry. In this text, Winterson defines the process of grafting as the coming together of two distinct parts, “so that the two take advantage of each other and produce a third kind, without seed or parent” (84). Just as Gade asserts that Winterson’s use of this trope allows us to approach our own and others’ subjectivities as “unstable and contradictory” (29), Doan finds the promise of corporeal grafting to be its ability to naturalize that which appears unnatural or abnormal: grafting “reverses, relativizes, and problematizes notions of normal and natural in order to ‘naturalize’ cultural oddities, monstrosities, abnormalities, and conformities” (154). Interestingly, just as Winterson reappropriates the trope of grafting in The PowerBook as a way to reconceptualize bodies and their acts, this trope has also been reappropriated by transgender individuals as a way to elaborate on and depathologize their own voluntary body modifications. Jean Bobby Noble defines the process of grafting on the transgender/transsexual body as a “self-remaking and queer reproduction outside of a heteronormative model” (Sons of the Movement 83).104 But just as horticultural grafting is a controversial subject and is often read as “doing violence” to nature, its reappropriation in the transgender community is often read by mainstream society as “doing violence” to a “natural” body. What grafting leaves us with, according

103 Joseph Boone points to weaknesses in Edward Said’s theory of Orientalism as he “ignores the homosexual and homosocial aspects” between Western and Eastern gazing and contact. Garber then complicates Boone’s attempt to consider homosocial and homosexual bonds between white man and the Other by inserting “gender undecidability” and “the paradox of gender identification” into the equation (Garber, M. 231). 104“I prefer the trope of ‘grafting’ to ‘transition’ because it allows me to reconfigure what I mean by trans-gender or trans-sexual. […] My gender now looks different from the one I grew up with but my body is, paradoxically, almost still the same. […] Grafting allows me to think that relation” (Noble, Sons of the Movement 83).

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to modern day science, are bastard children “without seed or parent,” freaks of nature, “abnormalities” and “monstrosities.” Even Dog Woman in Winterson’s Sexing the Cherry surprisingly opposes Jordan’s explorations in grafting: “‘Let the world mate of its own accord,’ she said, ‘or not at all’” (85). Yet, global queer theory and Califia’s mischievous rant, alongside the reappropriation of the trope of grafting, encourage us to ask different questions. Rather than attempting to pinpoint moments in The PowerBook that will somehow allow us to miraculously “fix” Ali in time and space, can we instead think about what Ali’s performance of an alternative masculinity does. It has been historically documented that the tulip was already growing in Holland when Carolus Clusius105 arrived in the late 1500s to take over as the director of the botanic garden at Leiden, Ali’s intended destination. Clusius not only traded rare tulip bulbs with botanists and horticulturalists across the globe, but he also developed a system of classification and evaluation for the flower, although the tulip would always defy such attempts to tame it. In doing so, he had the power to determine which were worthy of our admiration, time, and money and which were only mere commoners. Today, through all of his efforts, Clusius is internationally renowned, has a tulip, Tulip Clusiana, named in his honor (“TulipMania”), and continues to hold the title, “the father of the tulip” (Dash 35). The language of natural history and the system of classifying plants (taxonomy) through sexual language was the beginning of discursively representing and constructing Western anxieties surrounding queerness and miscegenation. Grace Kyungwon Hong states that natural history was not in fact “a monolithic or uncontradictory discourse, but one that unevenly mediated the anxieties of the era” (80). In Systema Naturae, Carl Linnaeus fine-tuned the methods of plant classification that were begun by Clusius in an attempt to reify the ideology that there is a “natural” order to the world. Interestingly, for Linnaeus, a plant’s “class” was solely determined by the presence or absence of “male” and “female” sex organs (the stamen or the pistil). Because many plants could not be

105 Clusius is known as the first man in Europe to ever receive the flower (Pollan 83). He also “developed a system of classifying plants in groups according to characteristics – an idea that would later be taken up by Carl Linnaeus and turned into one of the foundation stones of modern science” (Dash 42).

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neatly categorized as “male” or “female,” Linnaeus’ system opened up a space of uncertainty. Despite taxonomy’s “imperfections,” the classification and categorization of plant-life offered a language with which the West could “scientifically” and “accurately” read and interpret its Others. As a hybrid, Ali is a “freak,” a cultural oddity, according to mainstream society; she/he is both out of place and out of time. But as her/his pleasures spread and the community takes part in strapping on the tulip that which appears “abnormal” and “pathological” is slowly normalized and depathologized.

The Troubling of Empire and Paradise

“Sex has gone undercover,” declares Michael Warner (154). While many queer theorists have accurately detailed how zoning laws that push out and shut down queer space have detrimentally affected queer culture (Warner 1999, Delany 1999, Berlant 1997, Califia 1994), others have detailed, often simultaneously, the possibilities that are opened up when queer spaces prosper. In The Cultural Politics of Emotion, Sara Ahmed affirms that it is the coming together of “queer” bodies within public spaces where community is formed and where new pleasures can be invented and explored (165). Not only has The Powerbook been celebrated for its “repudiation of master narratives” (Mota 193) and its “shamelessness and obscenity” (Ganteau 174), but it has also been rebuked as monstrous and irresponsible (Cronquist 54).106 Even Tulip, the woman who is transformed into a “flower-fucking Princess,” is often shocked by the “shameless and obscene” content of Ali/x’s online narratives: “That was a terrible thing to do to a flower” (29). As alluded to in the introduction of this chapter, in 1637, after the craze of tulipomania, the tulip was knocked off of its throne and was personified as a hedonist, a

106 “Winterson’s novel is always already branded: it is a PowerBook by Macintosh. Sold, advertised, produced; a daydream nation logo. The browser she uses for her PowerBook is Netscape. This is indeed monstrous” (Cronquist 54).

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siren, and a “garden whore;”107 as a result, visual depictions of tulipomania shifted from the glorious and realistic portrayals of both the broken tulip and Flora, the Roman goddess of flowers, gardens, and springtime (see Figure 9), given to us by Rembrandt into satirical depictions of Flora. Before Flora was demonized, a six-day festival108 of

Figure 9. Rembrandt, Harmenszoon van Rijn. “Portrait of Saskia as Flora.” 23 July 2008. . unrestrained pleasure was held in Flora’s honor and those who attended took part in dancing, drinking, sex, theater, food, and, of course, flowers. Pip Wilson asserts, “The season was a celebration of general sexual freedom among the whole populace until the authorities clamped down” (1). Pleasure is not necessarily understood as a “bad” thing in our culture. In fact, we are encouraged to seek out (consume) pleasure in our daily living. The problem arises and regulation occurs when non-sanctioned forms of pleasure are sought out and practiced, particularly when such practices/modes of living move into the public sphere. As businesses, parks, sex stores, bars, parks, festivals, and gardens are

107 There are articulations that Flora had been a “notorious courtesan in the earliest days of Rome” (Dash 177) and a “prostitute famous for bankrupting her lovers” (Pollan 105). 108 This festival began in 238 BC and was known as Floralia. Flora was revived during the Renaissance and the festival (April 28th – May 3rd) continues in various forms today.

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routinely shut down and/or policed, queers who have formed some sort of subcultural community are violently forced, over and over, out of the public scene and into more isolated, invisible, and lonely spaces. Ironically, despite Clusius’ celebrity status, the cultivation and trading of the tulip in 17th century Holland was a covert operation. Because tulipomania was never “officially” recognized,109 trading took place in the middle of the night in taverns, brothels and backrooms. Clusius himself, locked away in his private garden, perpetuated the allure, secrecy, and danger of the tulip trade. Over time, as Clusius became an extravagant collector of these still “exotic” flowers, he grew to become “ostentatiously possessive” (Pollan 83). Because Clusius secluded himself and his tulips, trading only with those he knew, the garden became somewhat of an exclusive gated community. As a result, the tulip was coveted and hundreds of bulbs were eventually stolen from the garden and traded with abandon. Clusius became so disillusioned and disenchanted by the thefts of his rare and exotic tulip bulbs that he not only lost “the desire to continue their cultivation” (Pavord, The Tulip 60), but he also “vowed to give up gardening altogether” (Dash 62). Why was Clusius so possessive of his tulips, “nature’s choicest jewels” (Pavord 149)? What secrets did he share with a few select friends and admirers (a subcultural community of its own, maybe)? Did he know of the hidden pleasures of the tulip? Is this why his “loss” was so devastating? Did he fear that if a new and pleasurable knowledge became public, that the flower and its cultivation would become taboo and outlawed? It is believed that tulips are purely aesthetic, serving no scientific, medical, or practical purpose at all: “The tulip is one of the most extravagantly useless” (Pollan 86). But there must be more to the tulip than meets the eye. It must be more than just a “pretty flower.” After all, during the height of tulipomania, people were assaulted and jailed over disputes surrounding the tulip, and bulbs were traded for gold, land, businesses, and dowry (Pavord 73). A part of the frenzy concerns how and if a tulip can fulfill individual or communal desires. There are numerous parallels between the history

109 Trading “was conducted by amateurs, not professional traders, and was never subject either to the customs (however peculiar) or to the regulation of the stock exchange” (Dash 132).

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of the tulip and the history of plants, trees, and flowers that are believed to hold the key to a forbidden knowledge or pleasure. Any flower, fruit, plant, or tree that poses “a threat to the smooth workings of the social order” is soon to be outlawed (Pollan 142-43).110 In fact, any theoretical meanderings of the garden bring forward notions of an imposed exile in more ways than one. Adam and Eve’s expulsion from the Garden of Eden detailed in the story of Genesis reifies the connection between nature, temptation, power, and knowledge. As the story goes, Eve is forbidden to eat the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge because she will be turned on to a new way of understanding the world and her position in it, she will become more God-like, all knowing. As a result of disobeying the Law of the father, Eve is punished for her transgression. Not only is her fate to be forever ruled by man, but she also develops a sense of shame surrounding her nakedness, her body, and her sexuality. The significance of her fall is that we are to resist such temptations, to separate ourselves from nature, to seek out pleasure in moderation, and to maintain a specific and rigid set of morals. If we do not follow this dictum we will be forever shunned. Interestingly, the warning, “do not be tempted by the forbidden fruit” has become a euphemism for any object of desire that can and should be resisted if one hopes to become a good citizen subject. To eat of the fruit, or to indulge in sex acts or even drug use that brings one pleasure, often results in the outlawing of that particular plant, flower, and/or act itself. As Ladelle McWhorter in Bodies and Pleasures: Foucault and the Politics of Sexual Normalization engages with Foucault's discussion of bodies and pleasures, she writes of the expansion that is possible through an induced ‘high’: “We’ve got to find ways to live our bodies as who we are, to intensify our experiences of bodiliness and think from our bodies, if we are going to push back against the narrow confines of the normalizing powers that constrict our freedom” (185). Clusius definitely knew that particular flowers and plants have the potential to fulfill individual cravings,

110 Pollan draws parallels between the “original sin” and our current criminal codes surrounding the illegality of drugs because both “make a connection between forbidden plants and knowledge” (120); and as a result, he defines Adam and Eve’s exile from the Garden of Eden as the first recorded “war on drugs” (176).

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desires, and pleasures. There is the opium poppy, the ghost orchid,111 and the marijuana plant, for example, which promise to transport one into a state of ecstasy. In fact, both the tulip and the cannabis plant traveled, albeit in different centuries, from the east and into Amsterdam to fulfill just such desires. Through a combination of knowledge, power, and secrecy, Clusius spurred on the passions of tulipomania as he transformed the tulip into a much desired and glamorous commodity. Ironically, in Ali/x’s narrative, Suleyman the Magnificent instructs Ali to carry the tulip and tulip bulbs into the Garden of Leiden,112 but they never make it. Instead, the narrator reveals that Ali “bought a piece of land by the river and planted a pleasure garden for the ladies of Holland” (The PowerBook 251). While Lucile H. Brockway in Science and Colonial Expansion: The Role of the British Royal Botanic Gardens details the economic purpose of European formal gardens (6), Jill H. Casid in Sowing Empire: Landscape and Colonization approaches this garden as “the primary means through which particular formations of family, nation, and colonial empire were engendered and naturalized” (xxii). It is also imperative to point out that there were “pleasure gardens” in Constantinople beginning in the late-fifteenth century, but these spaces too were reserved for the wealthy and privileged only. Ali “whips a craving into a craze,” not through a frenzy of consumption where the tulip becomes merely a commodity, a symbol of one’s wealth and status, or a signifier of Empire, but through the transformation of bodies and pleasures that spread throughout Ali’s community garden: Ali’s story is not well documented, and the uses found by the ladies of Holland for this amorous flower have been kept a close secret. A Dutch lady, Mrs van der Pluijm, taught the Earl of Hackney’s daughter how to best arrange her bulbs and stem and the practice soon spread. Few men were aware of their wives’ and daughters’ true passion for this Exotic of the East, and as men are apt to try and please women, and love to gamble,

111 Consider Adaptation 112 Although the first pleasure garden in Constantinople was developed by Sultan Mehmed II in the 15th C. (Pavord 30), The Garden of Leiden is the actual location where the tulip trade began in 1953 as Clusius cultivated the first bulbs here (Durnford 1).

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it was easy enough to whip a craving into a craze. (Winterson, The PowerBook 251) Theories of the garden inevitably bring up questions of boundaries and borders, of an inside and an outside, of acceptance and exclusion.113 When we first read through Winterson’s description of a pleasure garden that is cultivated specifically “for the ladies of Holland,” we get the sense that this is an enclosed space for women only, a “mock” harem, a space that offers a momentary escape from the workings of power, or an ars erotica of sorts. In The Colonial Harem, Malek Alloula details that Western fantasies surrounding the exotic other are upheld by one central figure, “the very embodiment of the obsession: the harem” (3). Because of the imagined “excesses” of lesbian sex that occur behind the walls of the harem, Alloula asserts that this space is transformed into a “universe of generalized perversions and of the absolute limitlessness of pleasure” (95). The Western belief that to refuse a queer identity (often read as being “closeted”) is a sign of repression or regression has had serious global implications. Puar contends that Orientalist projections convey “much more about the constraints and imaginaries of identity in the ‘West’ than anything else” (125). By refusing to define Ali or the ladies of Holland as particular sexualized beings, subjectivity is no longer understood as a teleological journey. As a result, the sexual acts that are explored and experienced in the garden are solely about the feelings and intensities they produce, not the truth of self that they might lead to. Where Foucault’s ars erotica reified an East/West and acts/identities split, Ali’s dislocation and transplantation into the garden, then, reappropriates Orientalist notions of a “perverse” sexuality with a difference. As the “ladies” themselves learn the secrets of bodies and pleasures, such acts are not simplified into a particular lesbian or queer identity. Winterson writes, “if Queer culture is now working against the assumption of identity as sexuality, art gets there first, by implicitly or explicitly creating emotion around the forbidden” (Art Objects 106). While the harem has distinct boundaries, a distinct inside and outside, Ali’s pleasure garden has no such boundaries: “There is no

113 “Demarcation lines affirmed an ‘other side’ where, at the very least, something of a different order lay” (Beilin 763).

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limit to new territory. The gate is open. Whether or not we go through is up to us” (Winterson, Art Objects 151). As the ladies choose to go through the gate and engage with Ali’s “pleasure garden,” an ethical and pleasurable relationship between and among each other and the natural world is imagined, practiced, and articulated. Even the Earl of Hackney’s daughter is turned on to a new way of living, intervening directly in the continuation of Empire. And when we consider the previous attempts to categorize Ali, we realize that her/his body and its acts, as well as the bodies and acts of the “ladies,” cannot be contained. As Ali, the tulip, and the surrounding community establish a place/space of their own, they thrive.114 Ironically, in The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World, Michael Pollan articulates that human beings and tulips are, in fact, the same, that we share one basic hidden desire: the desire to multiply, to reproduce (xv).115 Despite agreeing with Pollan’s sense of ethics concerning the symbiotic and thoughtful relationship between human beings and the “natural” world, I find this particular analogy to be problematic, steeped in heteronormativity. Is reproduction/procreation really the deepest longing of human beings and tulips alike? Is this what connects us, brings us together, makes us the same? Winterson playfully counters such claims and puts forward non-reproductive understandings of time and space as Ali fails to deliver her/his tulip and tulip bulbs to their assigned destination. Instead, as Ali’s tulip and tulip bulbs are smuggled from Turkey to Holland only to land in a unsanctioned pleasure garden, she/he brings to life

114 A fascinating compliment to Ali’s pleasure garden would be a more in-depth exploration into the broken tulip. During tulipomania, because of their striking and extravagant variations of color (referred to as a feather or a flame), these tulips were the most desired, coveted, and expensive. In the sixteenth century, no one understood that the “break” was triggered by a virus, the tulip- breaking virus (TBV) spread by aphids. Although the virus wasn’t identified until the 1920s (Pavord 8), discussions of the Rembrandt, because of its “mixture” of colors and “weaker” make- up, soon shifted from extraordinary to disabled, perverted, abnormal, and less than its full- blooded relatives. After the identification of the virus, the Rembrandt tulip was outlawed and its public cultivation was ended or moved into private spaces. Today, in Holland, it is illegal for growers to cultivate the Rembrandt. And if a broken tulip is discovered, it is immediately destroyed. It is important to point out that today, not all broken tulips carry the virus. Yet there continues to be controversy surrounding the virus. 115 Pollan states, “All those plants care about is what every being cares about on the most basic genetic level: making more copies of itself” (xv).

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the hopes that are articulated in Sexing the Cherry, and makes “a success of the new fashion of grafting” (84): When Ali unstrapped her bulbs and planted them in the good earth, she was obeying the command of the scriptures to go forth and multiply. Multiply she did – bulbs, balls, fortune and friends – for every lady of fashion longed to walk in the gently nodding garden and lie under a tree, where she could experience for herself those exquisite attributes of variation that humans and tulips share. (The PowerBook 251-2) As Ali “goes forth and multiplies,” Winterson is disarticulating the metaphoric connections between flowers and vaginas and gardens and Empire. Those who wander in and experience Ali’s pleasure garden live within a queer time and place that Halberstam articulates: “If we try to think about queerness as an outcome of strange temporalities, imaginative life schedules, and eccentric economic practices, we detach queerness from sexual identity” (In a Queer Time 1). As we pay attention to the diasporic travels of the tulip we come to realize that multiplication isn’t about heterosexual reproduction, and the flower is no longer a symbol of the vagina or women’s “natural” differences from men. Instead, Ali’s tale of the tulip performs and transforms bodies, pleasures, and subjectivities, “making Paradise an unsettling queer place” (Casid 1).

“Beware of Writers Bearing Gifts”116

In Undoing Gender, Judith Butler succinctly states, “Life is foreclosed when we decide the right way in advance” (UG, 39).117 Instead of dictating a plan of action for our future, Butler hopes that we revel in tension, uncertainty, and unknowingness concerning our future(s). Winterson herself both lives and plays in this tension: “What keeps the tension is the tension itself – the pull between what I am and what I can

116 Jeanette Winterson, Art Objects 189. 117 In Bodies and Pleasures: Foucault and the Politics of Sexual Normalization, Ladelle McWhorter continues, “To know where we are going would be, at the outset, to have already failed” (181).

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become. The tug of war between the world I inherit and the world I invent” (The PowerBook 248). In The PowerBook, those who enter the fictional space of the garden are not limited in the pleasures they can seek out. Further, Winterson refuses to offer us a concise ending. As we are provided with alternate endings concerning Ali/x and Tulip’s relationship, we are also offered little in the whereabouts of Ali: “Was he back in Turkey, tending his mother’s eggplants and tomatoes? He might have been there, nervously dressed as a boy, telling his stories as tall as he was short” (253). Near the final pages of The PowerBook, the narrator asks, “Why did I begin as I did, with Ali and the tulip? I wanted to make a slot in time. To use time fully I use it vertically. One life is not enough” (247). Through the tropes of dislocation, exile, transplantation, and grafting, Winterson is able to provide us with a “counterlandscape” (Casid 210). And through the appropriation of Ali, an exotic Other, Winterson is able to queer time and place. Garber believes that there is an unrealized potential in the queer appropriation of Middle Eastern Others as “living metaphors that define, articulate, or underscore the contradictions and fantasies with which they [queers] live” (“The Chic of Araby” 245). Ali’s queer story and journey (dis)organizes and (dis)articulates sex from gender and sex, race, and gender from desire, pleasure, and sexual practice. It is this disruption that produces a gap and it is this gap that allows us, if we are willing, to see the constructed nature of ideology and the violence that such a construction reinforces.118 As human, animal, and environmental atrocities face us everyday, our daily choices become ethical ones. Instead of despair and numbness, we must begin to imagine a different future for ourselves. Winterson seems to creatively take on this task as she illustrates that the vagina and its fictions always collide. Winterson believes, “Art is for us a reality beyond now. An imaginative reality that we need. The reality of art is the reality of the imagination. The reality of art is not the reality of experience. The charge laid on the artist is to bring back visions” (“Imagination and Reality” 148). By

118 In “Transgender Butch,” Halberstam defines “the approximate relation between concepts and bodies” as a fiction (292). The PowerBook successfully illustrates that sex, gender, desire, and practice are “not simply performance but also fictions” (Halberstam, “F2M” 125).

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imaginatively giving voice to these collisions, Winterson, Ali/x, and Ali offer us visions, and these visions offer us a way to imagine an alternate future where queer bodies and practices aren’t named, categorized, fixed, shunned, shamed, or punished. Ali’s pleasure garden is about a way of living together, it is about community, it is about peacefully coexisting with each other and with the “natural” world, it is about the right to claim public space, and it is about sex, ethics, and justice. “Pleasure is expansive,” writes Ahmed (The Cultural Politics 164). In fascinating ways then, with the aid of a tulip, the vagina is resignified, our reliance upon static and fixed categories of sex, gender, desire, and sexual practice are questioned and complicated. As Winterson rewrites history and transplants Ali into the garden, we realize that tulips really do have a lot to tell us about our own bodies and pleasures if only we look and listen. “Could that be it – right there, in a flower – the meaning of life?” (Pollan 110).

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Chapter Four

‘It Began with an Image’:119 Loss, Disorientation, and Vulnerability in Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night

Teacher said plants respond to gentleness. He told us too that plants could show signs of trauma (Shani Mootoo, Cereus Blooms at Night 91).

Whatever is produced from th[e] condition of loss will bear the trace of loss, but how will it bear it? In what form? (Butler, “Afterword: After Loss” 468-69).

As one engages with the poetic unraveling of the many interconnected histories in Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night, it becomes obvious that loss120 is the only certainty in life. Taking place in the community of Paradise on the island of Lantanacamara and narrated by Nurse Tyler, Mala Ramchandin’s queer caregiver, witness, and translator, Cereus opens with an image of the cereus plant preparing to bloom alongside the arrival of an earthy, silent, vulnerable, and traumatized Mala at the Paradise Hill’s alms house. Tyler reveals, “An aroma resembling rich vegetable compost escaped from under the sheet. […] I could feel the fear trapped in this woman’s body. […] Sobs escaped my patient. […] On hearing my voice she began a deep, fearful moaning” (11-13). Mala has lost not only her grounding, but also something that cannot yet be pinned down or articulated. One facet of Mala’s story is that of incest: Mala, endearingly referred to as Pohpoh as a young girl, is repeatedly abused and raped by her father, Chandin Ramchandin. Having further been abandoned by her mother, sister, friend, and lover, Mala’s sense of space and time are hazy. In fact, she experiences a shattering disorientation that can be described as “a bodily feeling of losing one’s place” (Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology 160). As Ambrose, Mala’s lover, walks away from her

119 Shani Mootoo in “An Interview with Lynda Hall” (112). 120 “‘Loss’ names what is apprehended by discourses and practices of mourning, melancholia, nostalgia, sadness, trauma, and depression” (Eng and Kazanjian 2).

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for fear she has gone mad, this one loss stands in for all of Mala’s losses: “There was a bizarre familiarity in the moment. […] Long ago. Today. Mala stopped crying and sat up slowly. She looked into the yard. ‘Asha? Aunt Lavinia? You there? Mama? Boyie?’ she whispered” (Cereus 228). This disorientation is traumatic; after all, she no longer has a sense of who she is or where she belongs. After one specific act of brutality that ends in the death of Chandin by Mala’s own hands, Mala “all but rid[s] herself of words,” moves into her garden, and never spends another evening in the house that holds her most horrifying memories. Many queer and postcolonial critics point to the fact that Mootoo, through her novel, is interrogating and condemning the effects of British colonialism, racism, slavery, indentured servitude, homophobia, displacement, and violence upon the bodies of Trinidadians, particularly the bodies of Indian immigrants, specifically the bodies of women.121 For example, Gayatri Gopinath in Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures writes, “Mootoo maps the forced, traumatic, and painful movements precipitated by slavery, indentureship, and colonialism onto the very bodies of her characters” (185). Yet, as these same critics offer up explanations for Chandin Ramchandin’s horrific acts of violence against his daughter, I am left unsettled. In these readings, Mala becomes the “object” or “target” for all of British Imperialism’s deadly mistakes. She becomes the scapegoat upon which Chandin inflicts his past, present, and future traumas and furies, as well as his own vulnerabilities and losses. Without denying the political importance of these analyses that detail how and in what ways power imposes itself on specific bodies, I would like to take another direction as I enter

121 For an in-depth literary analysis of Chandin as a “product” of colonial relations, as well as the “costs” of this violent history upon specific bodies see Gayatri Gopinath’s Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures and Ann Cvetkovich’s “Witnessing Things: A Response to Sue Grand” and An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures. For a colonial and postcolonial history of citizenship, slavery, and indentured labor in Trinidad, see M. M. Adjarian’s Allegories of Desire: Body, Nation, and Empire in Modern Caribbean Literature by Women, Viranjini Munasinghe’s “Redefining the Nation: The East Indian Struggle for Inclusion in Trinidad,” M. Jacqui Alexander’s “Not Just (Any) Body Can Be a Citizen: The Politics of Law, Sexuality and Postcoloniality in Trinidad and Tobago and the Bahamas,” and Tejaswini Niranjana’s “‘Left to the Imagination’: Indian Nationalisms and Female Sexuality in Trinidad.”

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Mootoo’s narrative. It is evident that Mala has an excruciating yearning for something she can and cannot quite identify: “She wove memories. She remembered a little and imagined a great deal” (Cereus 142). Because Mala has lost the ability to speak, her traumatic past is carefully and thoughtfully pieced-together by Tyler. Yet it is nature in general, the garden in particular, and the cereus plant more specifically, that narrate Mala’s trauma, sense of loss, and healing process in ways that even Tyler’s words fail to adequately represent. After all, as Grace Kyungwon Hong and Vivian M. May assert, “not all things can be described through words” (Hong 93) and “not everything can be told anyway – there is always an ‘excess of meaning’” (May 125). In other words, it is Mala’s symbiotic relationship with nature that records, signifies, and even conveys the unspeakable. If we approach Cereus as a performance, we find that articulating one’s story through something other than words does not mean that one’s story is not being told. “The task at hand is to establish modes of public seeing and hearing that might well respond to the cry of the human” (Butler, Precarious Life 147). Or, as Kelly Oliver questions, “How is it possible to recognize the unfamiliar and disruptive? If it is unfamiliar, how can we perceive it or know it or recognize it?” (Witnessing 2). It is imperative to point out that the vagina is only overtly referenced once as it and Mala awaken to the sounds, textures, and transformations of nature. Like the diasporic tulip detailed in chapter three, the cereus too resists signifying a stable feminine essence; instead, the cereus plant’s journey parallels Mala’s own movements in the world. Not only has this flower been uprooted and dislocated, but it also transforms into something other than it was or has been. Despite the thoughtful and empathetic relationship between Mala and the natural world, the innumerable discursive silences surrounding Mala’s vagina encourage us to listen differently. Through its political persistence then, Cereus emphasizes the need for disparate and/or unrecognizable narratives of trauma and survival to be reinterpreted and properly heard. Mala offers up such narratives. She provides us with alternative methods of revealing one’s vulnerability and speaking the unspeakable. Mala’s movements in the garden illustrate that with a shattering of the self

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or one’s world, there is always the hope that one might find her footing and again feel a fleeting sense of safety and recognition. But what else can this process of disorientation and possible reorientation offer us? Or, what can such moments do? What might alternative modes of hearing, interpreting, and responding anew mean to an individual’s quality of life? The point, Sara Ahmed asserts, “is whether they can offer us the hope of new directions, and whether new directions are reason enough for hope” (Queer Phenomenology 158). If the guarantee of justice and peace “would seem to be the absence of injuring power from the world” (Scarry, On Beauty 107), how might we read for signs that were once silenced, ignored, and/or unrecognizable and bring such a world into being?

“A Girl Whom I Would Rescue”

The body implies mortality, vulnerability, agency: the skin and the flesh expose us to the gaze of others, but also to touch, and to violence (Butler, Precarious Life 26).

As most of us have internalized, any connection with another human being is precarious.122 Because our connections with others are bound to dissolve, fail, or end as individuals are ripped from us, quietly disappear, or wound us, we inevitably, throughout our lifetime, experience loss and its inescapable suffering. Anticipating such an end, we all do what we can to protect ourselves from the pain that interdependency can bring about. Of course, we can never fully overcome the tenuousness of our vulnerabilities; yet there are many ways to negotiate it: the exercise of silence, numbing, imagination, ritual, shutting down, closing off, opening up, pushing away, resisting, fantasizing, refusing, denying, transforming, disappearing altogether, or descending into what the rest of world perceives and defines as madness. Mala pulls from such strategies and incorporates her own losses into who she might become. It has been aptly theorized that any attempt to

122 See Judith Butler’s Precarious Life and Jacqui M. Alexander’s “Danger and Desire” for an exploration on the precarious nature of interdependency. Being close to another can be both intimate and violent.

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represent trauma, pain, and loss will always fail or produce an “excess” of meaning: “There is something unrepresentable that we nevertheless seek to represent, and that paradox must be retained in the representation we give” (Precarious Life 144).123 And, as recent work in disability studies has proven, it has been erroneously theorized that those who cannot represent themselves through language will remain invisible, silenced, and othered. Mala does not view herself as invisible, non-existent, or as “othered.” She does not refuse to tell her story. She simply reveals it in ways that might go unnoticed or unheard by those who feel that words are the only way to convey human experience and forge a connection with others. Not only is Mala referred to as “the twinkling star of Lantanacamara” (Cereus 209), but she is also metaphorically coupled with the cereus plant’s “two edges – one a vanilla-like sweetness, the other a curdling” (Cereus 152). As Mala develops an intimate corporeal and affective relationship with the natural world, she is participating in a ritual of healing that “engages the body” (Cvetkovich, An Archive 95): “The wings of a gull flapping through the air titillated her soul and awakened her toes and knobby knees, the palms of her withered hands, deep inside her womb, her vagina, lungs, stomach and heart” (Cereus 126-27). Mala is not only able to connect with nature, but she comes alive because of it. It both has and has not imposed pain upon her. Mala does not deny that loss and vulnerability are apart of her reciprocal relationship with the natural world; after all, she witnesses the cereus’s living and dying. Mala gives of herself, and in return, the things she cares for give her purpose and (re)memory. She digs in the soil, painstakingly bleaches and places snail shells into the earth as one form of care and protection, and tends to whatever it is that gives back: “She knelt on the ground and whispered to the grass and other young plants, encouraging them to grow, and then she listened as they stretched up to her” (Cereus 127). She is not afraid of what nature might impose upon or take from her. She welcomes everything and embraces it all.

123 See Judith Butler’s Precarious Life, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Touching Feeling, Elaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain, Ann Cvetkovich’s An Archive of Feelings, Cathy Caruth’s “Recapturing the Past” and “Trauma and Experience,” and Sara Ahmed’s The Cultural Politics of Emotion for in-depth analyses on trauma, representation, and excess or failure.

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On a path that parallels Mala’s own, Shani Mootoo has sought out, explored, and connected with nature – gardens, mountains, rivers, oceans, and streams – as way to resist containment and as a way to prove that her body was and is alive (Mootoo in Fung and Mootoo 34). Mootoo reveals, “I recognise a need for it [nature] to be that necessary place where I fortify myself, and am unconditionally welcome. As I am” (qtd. in Fung and Mootoo 35). As a queer woman of color, an incest survivor, and a diasporic subject, Mootoo admits that a portion of her sensitivity to nature comes from her gendered, sexual, racial, and geographical displacements.124 As a young girl, Mootoo believed that her grandmother might witness and protect her from the sexual abuse she was experiencing. Instead of being listened to, Mootoo was silenced and told “never to say such words again” (“An Interview with Lynda Hall” 109). Because of this painful silencing alongside a growing fear of language, Mootoo absorbs the lesson that words cause trouble and turns instead to images and metaphors to give voice to her solitary pain and trauma. Mootoo declares that she writes for several reasons: to “bring order into my chaotic world” (Mootoo, “This is the Story” 8) and to always ask why and attempt to understand: “that is the most important thing” (qtd. in “An Interview with Lynda Hall” 113). Through her art then, Mootoo reorders her traumatized and suffering self with the intention of invoking empathy, rage, energy, or a combination of these affects from us, her reading audience. Mootoo articulates that she finds it curious “which stories are told” and which stories are silenced (“This is the Story” 8). Unable to locate an empathetic witness of her own, Mootoo grows more intimate with the landscape and confides that it became a safe haven and a significant “site of reinvention and imagining” (qtd. in Fung and Mootoo 33- 5). In fascinating ways then, Mootoo’s sense of abandon and acts of imagination in nature intersect with her motivation for writing. And soon enough, her “fantasies began to include a girl whom [she] would rescue” (Mootoo qtd. in Fung and Mootoo 34). What is enthralling about Cereus Blooms at Night is that the entire story began with an image of this girl. Mootoo writes,

124 Mootoo was born in Dublin in 1957, raised in Trinidad, and is now a Canadian citizen.

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The idea for Cereus began with an image, that picture-in-my-mind, of an old woman with wild, unkempt hair, standing over a pot on a stove, steam billowing into the room as she placed handfuls of snail shells into the pot. […] As I wrote I began to feel the slightest nudge of familiarity with this woman, some unconscious knowing of her, and that was the initial compulsion toward a story: who was she, and why was she doing this bizarre act in her kitchen. (“An Interview with Lynda Hall” 112) Beginning with an image that has an air of familiarity allows Mootoo to approach and construct Cereus as a cinematographer who imagines and creates distinct, disconnected, and overlapping gaps and frames that, in the end, come together as a fragmented and incomplete trauma narrative. It is imperative to detail the stark differences as well as the striking similarities between individual and collective loss and suffering. When I think of just a few of the human atrocities that have occurred in my lifetime I think of the survivors of recent wars and those killed in Iraq, Afghanistan, Darfur, Bosnia, and Rwanda. I think of the tortured bodies of Guantanamo Bay and the humiliated bodies of Abu Ghurayb. I think of the horrors of modern day slavery. A loss of a loved one, a loss of human dignity, a loss of humanity, or a loss of an ideal occurs in all of the above instances. Individual suffering is similar in that one loses a loved one, her humanity, or an ideal of how the world should be, but it can sometimes be more private, misunderstood, unheard, or unspoken. There is often no one who is “experiencing” such a sense of sorrow at the same time, in the same moment, who is there with you, who “shares” the terrifying feeling of being haunted by a loss that can never be defined.125 Understood as a private family matter, incest narratives are often silenced or rebuked. In fascinating ways though, Mala’s story that at first appears so isolated and private is actually “both individual and collective, private and public” (Simon qtd. in May 108-09).

125 “The treatment of all trauma is predicated on a shared conviction […] that the trauma actually occurred. The establishment of the actual historicity of trauma is particularly necessary with incest. […] Survivors of other forms of trauma, such as war, kidnappings, natural disasters, all receive profound support of consensual validation from survivor cohorts and the larger culture. The incest survivor [is often] robbed of reality and of history” (Grand, 235-36).

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Cereus concerns itself, as alluded to above, with unequal and violent relationships between colonizer and colonized. We know that Mala’s grandfather arrived from India on the island of Lantanacamara as an indentured field laborer.126 Coupled with this historical narrative are the cultural anxieties surrounding queer, interracial, and cross- class desires and the losses that follow. Early in the novel, Chandin Ramchandin becomes the English Reverend Thoroughly’s “colonial project.” As the Thoroughlys welcome Chandin into their home, he is converted to Christianity and schooled in the ways of the West. With time, Chandin falls in love with the reverend’s English daughter, Lavinia Thoroughly. Despite being embraced as a success story, one who illustrates that the conversion and civilization of the “other” is possible, Chandin’s declaration of love is rejected by Lavinia and her parents because he, of course, can never fully assimilate. Chandin, in his shame, never overcomes this loss. Years later, when Chandin’s wife and Mala’s mother, Sarah, becomes lovers with Lavinia, Chandin is enraged. After all, he cannot internalize how his “respectable” (read: heterosexual) desire for Lavinia was rejected, yet Lavinia freely professes her cross-race, same-sex love for Sarah, an Indian woman. To escape his wrath, Sarah and Lavinia resolve to escape with both of Sarah’s children, Mala/Pohpoh and Asha, and journey to the “Shivering North Wetlands” to live out their lives away from the oppressive Chandin. But their plan is dreadfully disrupted. Caught by Chandin in the midst of packing their belongings, Sarah and Lavinia are left with no option but to flee without the children. As they pull away, Mala absorbs the first of her many losses. Mala’s subsequent losses are a direct result of this complicated and tenuous history. Colonialism, along with the ideologies that traveled with Britain into the community of Paradise, play themselves out on Mala’s/Pohpoh’s young female body: “Mala’s bruised and violated body becomes an archive of these histories” (Gopinath, Impossible Desires 183). Although every character in Cereus

126 The presence of British Indians in the Caribbean as indentured laborers began in the mid-19th C: “When slavery was abolished in 1838, the British colonies expressed a need for sugarcane plantation labour to replace the freed slaves, who for the most part chose to work elsewhere” (Niranjana 114). “Trinidad and British Guiana, British colonies, […] between 1845 and 1917, imported more than four hundred thousand workers from British India to work on sugar plantations” (Kale 72).

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experiences a devastating loss of his or her own, it is Mala who experiences more loss than seems livable. In addition to the painful abandonment by Sarah, Lavinia, Asha, and Ambrose/Boyie,127 Mala/Pohpoh loses her father, the one who stays, in a much more convoluted and devastating way. Haunted by Chandin’s torturous rapes against her, Mala proves that it is impossible to escape or “literally” represent this traumatic history. Despite this inability, Mala ultimately illustrates that one can negotiate and even survive it.

The Politics of Silence and (Non)Representation

Something bruised brews inside (no language to / describe) (Mootoo, “Language Poem” 82).

Speaking of Mootoo’s art in “Bodies Out of Place: The Videotapes of Shani Mootoo,” Richard Fung asks if we can use both our imagination and “the literal landscape” in which to carve “a space of self-fulfillment” (170). Mala uses both her imagination and the landscape to fortify herself against a world that has never protected her. In bewildering ways, despite the explicit and numerous descriptions of incest within Cereus, Mala’s vagina is only overtly referenced once when she and it, after years of terror, re-awaken to the natural world. Eventually Mala all but rid herself of words. The wings of a gull flapping through the air titillated her soul and awakened her toes and knobby knees, the palms of her withered hands, deep inside her womb, her vagina, lungs, stomach and heart. Every muscle of her body swelled, tingled, cringed or went numb in response to her surroundings – every fibre was sensitized in a way that words were unable to match or enhance. Mala responded to

127 As briefly alluded to above, Mala survives the loss of her mother, Lavinia, and Ambrose/Boyie: “‘Ambrose, don’t go. Don’t leave me, Ambrose. Please don’t go’” (Cereus 228). Asha too eventually abandon’s Mala and her home as a way to escape the violence imposed on her own body and this loss haunts Mala as intensely as every loss: “‘Asha? You know Asha? […] Where Asha?’” (Cereus 75).

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those receptors, flowing with them effortlessly, like water making its way along a path (Cereus, my emphasis 126-27). Mootoo’s own violations by her family (incest and a refusal to witness) and the losses that ensued, her growing fear of language, and her simultaneous turn to images and metaphors, allow us to better grasp Mala’s own transition from words to images to feelings. As Ambrose expresses to Mala, when the world is “freed of nomenclature, syntax, and lexical form, […] sensors in your joints open up like eager blossoms” (211). Yet, in contrast to this moment when Mala’s body opens up and the vagina is actually spoken (and in contrast to every other chapter in this dissertation that explicitly represents the vagina), Mala can “never bring herself to graphically reveal her situation” (Cereus 196). As young lovers, Ambrose speaks of “the wonder” of Mala’s vagina. As he references this “place of mystery,” Ambrose obscurely refers to it as “between Mala’s legs,” “a place he imagined would exhale hot mustiness with two very different scents,” and “a mysterious mouth” (217). And when Mala’s rapes are discursively detailed, Mootoo utilizes figurative language: “she was reminded of what she usually ignored or commanded herself to forget: her legs being ripped apart, something entering her from down there,” “entering and then scooping her insides out” (175), “she felt so much pain” (223), and “her body remembered” (175). Despite the horrific violence that Mala and her vagina are subjected to, Mala’s desire for and pleasure with Ambrose articulate her sexual agency in innovative ways. While making love to Ambrose after her traumatic rapes, it is revealed that Mala let him “touch her for his pleasure too. She met, mirrored and embraced his passion. […] It was his first time, and her first time with someone of her own choice. […] For the first time Mala felt no pain. It was the first time she felt what it was like to be touched” (Cereus 218). Unlike Alice Walker’s Possessing the Secret of Joy, analyzed in-depth in chapter one, Cereus refuses a politicized identity based on “wounded attachments” (Brown, States of Injury 56). As Mala acknowledges her ability to feel alongside the absence of pain, her sexual interaction with Ambrose

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emphasizes that despite being both wounded and traumatized, she can and does experience an active, erotic, and pleasurable sexuality as a fragmented subject. Wanting to disclose her secret to Ambrose, Mala internalizes that any attempt at literal representation is bound to fail. But Mala does “tell” Ambrose. Despite his own adamant declaration that “a word is not the substance itself” (211), Ambrose simply cannot read the signs: “how little could she tell him, she wondered, and still expect him to catch her meaning. She […] desperately hoped that he, of all people, might understand the things she couldn’t say. She wasn’t really sure why she trusted he might understand” (Cereus 196). Because words prove to be an inadequate and unreliable mode of expression for her, Mala holds onto the hope that Ambrose might be able to interpret the alternative signs she puts forward and, as a result, internalize her terror and sorrow as his own. The cereus plant comes to signify Mala’s many experiences with violence, vulnerability, desire, and loss as well as her hopes of transformation. Because the cereus plant has been uprooted from Lavinia’s English garden, exported, and then transplanted into Paradise soil (a colonial project of sorts),128 both Sarah Phillips Casteel and Vivian M. May detail that gardens can be read as spaces of rootedness and mobility. Not only does Tyler understand that to cut but one flower from a living plant would cause Mala suffering because it is reminiscent of her relationship to and separation from those she loves (69), but Mala embraces the movement, decay, instability,129 displacement, and transformation that cyclically take place in her cared for space: “It was the aroma of life refusing to end. It was the aroma of transformation. Such odour was proof that nothing truly ended, and she reveled in it” (Cereus 128). Believing in the promise of a transformation, Mala literally becomes “one” with this world: “Mala’s companions were the garden’s birds, insects, snails and reptiles. She and they and the abundant foliage gossiped among themselves. She listened intently. […] He [Otoh] could so easily have missed her, mistaken her for a shrub. […] She was unlike

128 See Casteel, May, Hong, Cvetkovich, Jill H. Casid, and Helen Tiffin for analyses of gardens as “colonial projects.” 129 “The cereus plant, which when it blooms transforms itself from an ugly and foul-smelling plant to an intoxicating aphrodisiac, is emblematic of this instability” (Casteel 21).

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any woman he had ever seen” (Cereus 127, 155). As a result, Mala is always gentle with the cereus blooms; she falls in love with their beauty and their need for her, and the way they give back. Their relationship with her is as equal and as just as her relationship with them. It is so simple: “She knelt on the ground and whispered to the grass and other young plants, encouraging them to grow, and then she listened as they stretched up to her” (Cereus 127). Mala is vulnerable and triumphant, not “mad.” As she gives of herself more freely and openly, Mala gives in and settles in and sinks into something both known and unknown, both real and unreal, and realizes that “she ha[s] survived. She [i]s alive” (Cereus 134). Mala’s seemingly romantic relationship with her garden is not a declaration that she has stumbled upon a newfound utopic space of freedom. Mala can never escape her past or her history; none of us can.130 Just as May describes Mala’s garden as “an alternative spatiality” that is both nonhierarchical and “a space of memory” (124), any creative space we might carve out for ourselves will always continue to be haunted by the experiences we have had and the people who have left us behind. The losses in Mala’s life overtly intervene in her present, transforming her memories into painful and pleasurable lived-again (re)memories. Reflecting back on the inability to represent pain and trauma detailed above, Butler affirms, “It would be a mistake to think that we only need to find the right and true images, and that a certain reality will then be conveyed. The reality is not conveyed by what is represented with the image, but through the challenge to representation that reality delivers” (Precarious Life 146). If reality cannot be accurately represented, and if, in fact, it can only “trouble” and “challenge” representation itself, the question for me then becomes, how does Mootoo’s refusal to “literally” represent the vagina intersect with Mala’s loss of language, her alternative ways of communicating, and her (re)connection with the garden, the cereus plant, and her own body?

130 Our “past is not actually past in the sense of ‘over,’ since it continues as an animating absence in the presence” (Butler, “Afterword: After Loss” 468).

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Disclosure, Witnessing, and Certainty

‘Having pain’ may come to be thought of as the most vibrant example of what it is to ‘have certainty’ (Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain 4).

The night-blooming cereus, an intoxicating and brilliant star-shaped flower, awakens and blooms only once a year “for one short, precious night” (Cereus 54). Yet, with the first sign of dawn, this same bloom trembles, closes, and wilts, emitting a foul scent of decay. In Mala’s garden the cereus plant veils the basement window and literally shields Mala from her past since Chandin’s body is contained there. Yet, as the buds “rage” over Chandin’s grave, they also prompt an unraveling of other past memories. The cereus’ anticipated arrival and all the memories that travel with it gesture to the ephemeral and fragmented pieces of a past moment that Mala anxiously senses in the approaching morning: “It was a cool morning. Rain had fallen all night and only recently let up.” As the sun hits the “jagged edge of the porch’s iron roof […] she heard the buggy rolling swiftly through the yard. She lay in a puddle on the floor of the verandah, her nose against the damp wood floor, shutting out the sounds” (60-63). Reliving the birth of the cereus alongside a day that she had already survived, she is transported to a time and space she would, on any other day, repress: the unbearable soaking in of the moment her mother left her. As a survival strategy against that which both haunts and pains her, Mala develops a meticulous, precise, and paradoxical body ritual. The feeling of being disoriented: “Time would collapse,” unable to catch one’s breath: “Every inhaled breath was a panicked tremble,” inconsolable and in anguish: “each exhale a heavy sob,” are all signs that Mala’s pain is inscribed in her body (Cereus 132). As a result, Mala begins “strategizing” against the elusive memories that will soon confront her. Not wanting to revisit the exact moment of her first loss, yet wanting to remember the moment before, when love and care were reciprocated, Mala begins her ritual and “completed her preparation, […] ground a handful of peppers” (131), and

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saturates them with limes and lime juice. “She placed the jar at one end of the porch in a bleached area that received sun most of the day. There the jar would sit, for weeks, until it was well fermented” (131). Moments later, Mala slips into her past and cries “out the only words she had spoken in ages. ‘Oh God. I beg you. Please. Doh leave me, I beg you, oh God, oh God, doh leave me, I beggin you. Take me with you’” (Cereus 132-33). As Mala relives this terrifying maternal abandonment, she “shoves” clumps of raw pepper mixture into her mouth and holds it there, giving it time to settle in. Although Mala has just spoken her first words in ages, she ritualistically mutilates her tongue, “so blistered that parts of the top layer had already disintegrated and other areas had curled back like rose petals dipped in acid” (133). Interestingly, Hong defines this moment as a disfiguring “disability” (read: an abnormal and pathological response to trauma). Yet through this act of self-mutilation, Mala acknowledges her own “certainty” and presence in the world: “Her flesh had come undone. But every tingling blister and eruption in her mouth and lips was a welcome sign that she had survived. She was alive” (Cereus 133- 34). The cereus serves as only one of Mala’s witnesses. Ritual itself, according to Cathy Caruth, or the blistering of Mala’s mouth, the peeling of her tongue, and the certainty of being alive “do not simply serve as testimony” to her losses; instead, they also “bear witness to a past that was never fully experienced as it occurred” (“Introduction: Recapturing the Past” 151). Mala’s ritual in the garden offers her a way to disclose her secret, negotiate her traumatic past, and enter into a transitory moment of contentment. Her tongue becomes a flower and without words it speaks out a lifetime of struggle and survival. After the emotionally and physically exhausting ritual, Mala seats herself in front of the cereus buds and awaits their full arrival. Both pained and alive, Mala now becomes witness to their glorious rebirth. The cereus blooms, all sixty-two, open up, gracefully sway, tenderly emit a “dizzying” scent, and willingly reveal their pure whiteness. “Mala basked” (134). In the early dawn, the flowers begin to wilt, having lived out their magnificently brief lives. “Battered and bruised, each one worn out from the frenzied carnival of moths” (140). Yet their death means no less to

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Mala. In their trembling, battered, and bruised state, Mala finds their presence just as beautiful and breathtaking. “She was content” (139). While this space of the garden is referred to as a space of “politicized nonbelonging,” “an alternative spatiality,” and a “place of refuge and resistance” (May 120-24), the Paradise Alms House and the relationships that form here come to be known as “a new form of collectivity” (Gopinath 186), a different mode “of affinity and affiliation” (Hong 76), “a new narrative of belonging” (Casteel 24), and a space “of non- violent belonging” (McCormack 5). In other words, although many analyses of Cereus detail both the garden and the Paradise nursing home as equal, yet disparate, spaces of “not home,” they all end by exploring the greater possibilities that are offered up as Mala is forcefully transported from her garden to the alms house. It is here and not the garden, according to critics such as May, Gopinath, Casteel, Cvetkovich, and McCormack, where Mala finds a “queer” community,131 one that is able to witness, read, and interpret her alternative methods of disclosure. It is here where Mala’s private, individual, and personal trauma becomes public, collective, and political. In other words, it appears that Mala thrives in this shared space. Ultimately, these same theorists who reconceptualize community based on loss, vulnerability, and interrelationality assert that Cereus also counters the painful results of “disclosure,” such as the listener’s silence, denial, inaction, apathy, and/or refusal to believe the disclosed secret. It is Tyler as empathetic witness to Mala’s elusive story who says, “I am the one who ended up knowing the truth, the whole truth, every significant and insignificant bit of it. And I am the one who is putting it all to good use by recording it here” (Cereus 7). Both Tyler and Otoh, Ambrose’s transgender son, feel an affinity and a “shared queerness” with Mala because of their differences, vulnerabilities, secrets, and ability to fortify themselves “against the rest of the world” (48); and as they play witness, they begin to embrace the very things that make them “different.” Otoh reveals, “Somehow I wanted to go there and take all my clothes off and say, ‘Look! See? See all

131 In Mootoo’s text, queerness “extends to all those […] bodies marked by rape and incest; biologically male bodies that are improperly feminine; […] and biologically ‘female’ bodies that are improperly masculine” (Gopinath, Impossible Desires 184).

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this? I am different! […] I never cared what anybody else thought or said about me, but somehow I cared so much about what Mala Ramchandin thought” (Cereus 124). Tyler cares too. As he grows more intimate with Mala and as Mala affirms him as is, he begins to shed his shame and simultaneously express/perform his queer femininity.132 Similarly, Otoh begins to feel more at home in his skin because of his place in Mala’s life and, as a result, he is able to openly express his queer desire for Tyler. Hong contends that Cereus describes “a different mode of affiliation, one forged through disidentification, alienation, and contradiction, rather than through resolution” (97). Yet, I am left confused. Although Cereus does end with Asha’s whereabouts a mystery, Tyler reveals to Otoh, “See how she [Mala] is swinging her legs? You might not be able to tell, but I can. She is happy” (102). It is at the Paradise alms house where Mala is reunited with her lost love, Ambrose, the man who had once abandoned her and caused her so much pain. Additionally, as Tyler and Otoh declare their love for each other, Mala is tenderly surrounded by friends and witnesses who “lighten the weight of Mala’s having to assert and defend her right to speak and be heard” (May 127). The cereus plant from her childhood and her garden makes this journey with her, keeps her company, and is preparing to bloom, all while Mala speaks her first public words to her younger imaginary self who has finally been set free: “‘Poh, Pohpohpoh, Poh, Poh, Poh’” (249). All ends well with everyone waiting for the potential arrival of Asha, Mala’s long- lost sister, who comes to represent “the promise of a cereus-scented breeze on a Paradise night” (249). In the end, it seems that love does conquer all. I want to believe in happy endings, yet Mala is forced to become a patient at the Alms House, despite her resistance. Earlier in the novel, in an attempt to understand exactly what his father’s connection to Mala is, Otoh masquerades as Ambrose and moves quietly into Mala’s garden. Believing it is the young Ambrose returned to her,

132 Tyler says, “I decided to unabashedly declare myself, as it were. And so, last visit, I wore lip color more thickly than usual, shades brighter than my dark lips. With powder I blotted the shine that tends to develop on my nose and cheeks on hot days. I tied a flower-patterned scarf around my neck, and on my temples I daubed enough scent to make a Puritan cross his legs and swoon. Miss Mala grinned and clapped her hands when I entered her room. She squealed when I pulled out the nurse’s uniform from behind her dresser and put it on” (Cereus 247).

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Mala dances with this apparition. To emphasize that her father, Chandin, can no longer hurt him, Mala unearths and reveals Chandin’s body to Otoh/Ambrose. Otoh panics and flees, abandoning Mala once again: “So distraught was she to see him running off and leaving her again that her cries froze in her chest” (165). What ensues is cataclysmic: Mala’s garden and home are invaded and destroyed – a heartbreaking loss of its own. As the police invade Mala’s home and enforce her expulsion from the only space she has ever felt safe, the plants, trees, and birds are ripped from their place beside her, collected as exotic species, and sold for profit: A band of men with bird cages, four each, approaching the back fence. Following them were three men with saws. As the bird catchers passed he heard them talk. ‘In a pinch ten birds could live for about two, three days in one cage.’ ‘You know how much one peekoplat fetching these days?’ ‘Divide up, a third each, a mudra that size would make each one of us a rich man’ (Cereus 187). Finding this moment to be just as tragic as all of Mala’s other losses, it is revealed that Mala feels the same: “Despair […] threatened to swallow her up. It all seemed so real” (Cereus 172). In the end, to save Mala from a possible conviction of murder, Otoh burns her home, Chandin’s body, and her garden to the ground: “The intoxicating fragrance of burning mudra wafted through the air. The fiery sky swarmed with crazed bats and moths. Fwoop. Fwoop. Fwoop” (Cereus 188). Sadly, the only trace left of Mala’s life and time with her garden is a cereus clipping that Otoh rescues. Donna McCormack asserts that interdependency itself “challenges the notion that we are separate, independent, self-contained individuals and, thereby, offers the potential to rethink communities as based on this (mutually dependent) vulnerability” (3).133 If we are able to read for new signs of loss, suffering, and vulnerability, recognition might be the result. And, as a result of this result, listening, hearing, understanding, and responding differently might be understood as an ethical responsibility. Mootoo herself illustrates this possibility as she reveals that it wasn’t until her adulthood when she

133 McCormack borrows from Judith Butler, Sara Ahmed, and Margrit Shildrick to construct her theory of interrelationality.

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“began to use those dreaded words to speak out about what happened.” As a result “in more sympathetic situations, those same words were being heard, encouraged, and believed. Validation was almost intoxicating” (Mootoo, “An Interview with Lynda Hall” [my emphasis] 109). Yet, despite such theoretical hopes, lived experiences, as well as Mootoo’s own feelings of validation, feelings I am by no means denying, I’ve come to realize that in many cases loss is simply loss, agony is simply agony, and suffering is simply suffering. But this does not mean that Mala’s negotiation of her violent past is a failure. Without the forced, abrupt, and tragic exit from her garden might Mala’s life be interpreted as a failure, as incomplete? Would Mala herself interpret it as such?

Conclusion: A Miraculous Phenomenon

Mala faced her wall of faded cereus blossoms. She was content (Cereus 139).

Because of the trauma and loss that Mala is forced to encounter, she “rids herself of words” (126), only to find that her body and her vagina painfully and pleasurably awaken and respond to the natural world. Because the cyclical nature of the garden alludes to life, death, and metamorphosis, the plants, foliage, insects, snails, and birds that thrive within it come to signify all of Mala’s losses as well as her own healing process. Not only does Mala form an intimate connection with the natural world, but this relationship also allows her to imaginatively rescue herself from a past long past. Resolving to Pohpoh, Mala’s younger imaginary self, Mala declares, Things bad at home, child? I understand. I understand everything. Everything. Today is the last day that anybody will ever be able to reach you. […] Mala will take care of you, Pohpoh. No one will ever touch you again like that. I will never let anyone put their terrible hands on you again. I, Mala Ramchandin, will set you, Pohpoh Ramchandin, free, free, free, like a bird! (Cereus 184, 173) Mala’s positioning in the garden opens up a space for her silence to be heard and her memories to be felt, and it is her intimate interaction with the cereus plant that serves as

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an archive of “loss and violence” (Marriott qtd. in May 126). Because it is a “miraculous phenomenon” (Cvetkovich, “Witnessing Things” 359) when a traumatized body is able to again feel something, anything, Mala’s survival tactics allow her to (re)experience the intensity of her body, form a loving and reciprocal relationship with her surroundings, relive, speak out, and transform her suffering, and achieve recognition, not from other people, but from nature. Interestingly and to my surprise, in “The Flight from Certainty in Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night,” Mary Condé pathologizes Mala’s attraction to and relationship with her garden. Condé asserts that Mala “has internalized alien standards of beauty, and seems to have found impossible what was a demonstrably possible escape from the most hateful patriarchal tyranny” (Condé 69). And in “The Queer – A Part of Oneself: Representations of Queerness in Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night,” Sissy Helff asserts that the garden is an unlivable space because it is too close to history, Chandin’s grave, and Mala’s traumatic past (7). In other words, the Law of the Father looms large in the garden of Paradise. But, as detailed in chapter three, gardens are texts; “gardens … mean rather than are” (Hunt qtd. in Crozier 628). Mala has spent a lifetime cultivating, nurturing, giving to, and taking from her environment. As mentioned above, Mala does not simply bury the past; instead, she spends her days unearthing a livable present. As Mala’s garden is ripped out from under her, she loses a piece of herself. Actually, as the unfeeling community absconds with the “exotic” and “strange” plant and bird life that had peacefully and without fear lived out their lives with Mala, everyone loses. The uprooting of the “commodities” in the garden feels reminiscent of the way the “exotic,” “strange,” and “slightly familiar” Mala is uprooted and dislocated. In the end though, despite the many promises that come true for Tyler and Otoh as Mala enters their lives, I believe they would agree with me. As Tyler discloses, “if it weren’t for Otoh, Miss Ramchandin might still be thriving in her own home on Hill Side, and this fact tormented him” (123), Otoh resigns himself “to the way things had turned out and the futility of dredging it all out and laying blame” (236). As their fears and regrets are internalized, they reveal that maybe they have gained more from their relationships with Mala and that

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she herself might have been better off in her garden. As a result, they empathetically offer her all they can: beauty, compassion, and gentleness.134 We are always risking something in our relationships with others, as are they. No wonder most of us, at one point in our lives, want to withdraw from the world. Despite our individual experiences with loss, we all crave a place we can call home. Theorists promise us that the empathetic, alternative, and “queer” community established at the end of Cereus is one small step towards a more just and less violent future. In fact, the interrelationality established at the conclusion of Cereus can be interpreted as “an issue of ethics.”135 In the meantime though, until we arrive at such a time and place, might there be any hope in opening ourselves up to whatever it is that moves or awakens us to feelings, sensations, emotions, and our bodies? As Cereus comes to its end, does the fact that Mala is surrounded by those who love, embrace, and encourage her mean that her methods of survival in the garden were failures or that the new alternative space at the alms house is a more livable one? Maybe there is more possibility when one’s world begins to expand again. Mala is humanly vulnerable, not mad, sick, or incurable. We are all vulnerable in the face of our losses, but this vulnerability opens us up to something new – a reorientation – not one that has to even be hopeful, but one that might be different and less painful. One in which the things that keep us from being the people we have always wanted to be slip away. One in which we feel open to the world – raw, vulnerable, able to feel anything: “The wings of a gull flapping through the air titillated her soul and awakened her toes and knobby knees, the palms of her withered hands, deep inside her womb, her vagina, lungs, stomach and heart” (126-27). “She had survived. She was alive” (134). “She was content” (128). Maybe the guarantee of peace and justice is simply “the absence of injuring power from the world.”136 Maybe a fleeting

134 John Hector, the gardener at the Paradise Alms House, experiences a transformation of his own. Speaking of his inability to confront his past and the children who used to torment Pohpoh, he says, “Somehow you don’t question things until you come face to face with the person and suddenly – suddenly you realize that behind all them stories it have a flesh-and-blood, breathing, feeling person who capable of hurting, yes! Well, ask her, na. Ask her if she want to garden” (Cereus 68). 135 See Butler’s Precarious Life (45) and May. 136 Scarry, On Beauty 107.

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sensation is “reason enough for hope.”137 Maybe the ability to feel something, anything, is a miraculous phenomenon.

137 Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology 158.

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Epilogue

There are No (Happy) Endings: Always Becoming Otherwise138

Two or three things I know for sure, and one of them is that if we are not beautiful to each other, we cannot know beauty in any form (Allison, Two or Three Things 86).

To live is to live a life politically, in relation to power, in relation to others, in the act of assuming responsibility for a collective future (Butler, Undoing Gender 39).

In our hopes of living a peaceful and empathetic existence we desire recognition and we therefore both crave and resist normalization. Yet if our bodies fail to signify correctly, norms can be both subtly and aggressively imposed. Bound up in this negotiation are the presence, absence, shape, size, color, texture, seepage, cycle, and smell of the vagina. It has been aptly theorized that affects, bodies, and discourse are social phenomena, while queer, critical race, performance, and disability studies are “representational system[s]”139 that disrupt hegemonic (read: dangerous and destructive) ways of seeing, interpreting, categorizing, fixing, and understanding difference. I strategically borrow from these theoretical lenses to articulate that vaginas are not only discursively constructed fictions, but they are also “elusive referent[s]”140 that resist containment. After all, normative conceptions of vaginas that have and continue to be constructed in official and mainstream discourses only exist as an “idea,” an “ideal,” and an “ideology,” which is not to deny their “real” effects. Vaginas are always performative, but they also speak, experience, perform, and revolt, whether or not they are “natural,” “constructed,” “mutilated,” or “imagined.” Although vaginas can reiterate

138 “A mode of becoming that, in becoming otherwise, exceeds the norm, reworks the norm, and makes us see how realities which we thought were confined are not writ in stone” (Butler, Undoing Gender 29). 139 Garland-Thomson and Holmes (73). 140 Butler, Bodies (90).

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and resist as they take on lives of their own, it is imperative to think through the implications of using such a signifier as the source of what it means to be a “woman.” Ultimately, my goals have been twofold. First, I lay out how, why, and in what ways the “normal” and “abled” female body established in both official and mainstream discourses is, simply put, one with a specific type of vagina. I also insist that the vagina can no longer be the signifier that connects all women, nor is it necessary to live a healthy and complete life as a “woman.” Secondly, I maintain that the political and cultural discourses and debates surrounding these representations tell us something about our particular cultural moment. As the vagina is feared, rebuked, violated, embraced, praised, condemned, and questioned, we realize that any attempt to define what this anatomical part signifies is utterly impossible. On the one hand, a woman’s sexual and intellectual autonomy is something not quite understood and therefore something to be feared, demonized, tamed, and/or punished. On the other, there seems to be an anxiety and an extreme pleasure because the vagina no longer signifies anything solid or fixed at all. In the end, how we define and interpret the vagina is continually mutating: it is forever a part of culture and cannot be permanently written out or pinned down; in fact, I hope it is obvious that one needn’t even possess a vagina to claim the identity category “woman.” David L. Eng, Judith Halberstam, and José Esteban Muñoz in “What’s Queer About Queer Studies Now?” detail an imperative move for queer studies, a move that is indispensable to this project. As a way to urge queer scholars to move beyond issues of sexuality and into global intersectional approaches that consider race and nation, they write, “Queer studies now more than ever needs to refocus its critical attentions on public debates about the meaning of democracy and freedom, citizenship and immigration, family and community, and the alien and the human in all their national and their global manifestations” (2). The connections between local and global constructions and understandings of freedom, citizenship, immigration, community, and the human influence and nuance the analyses I perform. What is a livable life? Who can be counted

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as human?141 And how does anatomy determine such categories? Because ideology dictates exactly what the “normal” female body is and is not, this system imposes itself on bodies, psyches, and lives with often horrifying consequences. And as emphasized earlier, living life as abject can be painful, even unbearable, yet one can express his/her politics, experience pleasure, assert agency, and put forward an ethics simply by negotiating this life. Ultimately, the artists, activists, writers, and performers explored in this dissertation, in their existence, resistance, and “failure,” not only begin to depathologize non-normative bodies, but they also declare that the “problem” is not about bodies at all. The problem is not the vagina. Instead, our anxieties and concerns should be directed toward the cultural attitudes that regard non-normative bodies and identities as abnormal, perverse, disabled, pathological, and incomplete. By pointing to the intersections between and among disparate representations of vaginas and race, sexuality, disability, gender, and nation, I reveal just how these sites work with, against, and inform one another and, in turn, affect how we understand and negotiate our own and others’ positions within and movements through the world. Performing and performative vaginas have lives of their own in spite of the ideology that surrounds them and outside of the “intentions” of authors and artists who (re)present them. But this doesn’t simply open up vaginas to fear and condemnation; it also allows for playful possibilities. If we approach vaginas as performers in their own right, we must recognize that each performance takes on a life of its own and that such public representations provide us with pleasures and possibilities that may have never been imagined. By situating particular ways of representing, negotiating, and responding to vaginas next to one another, I am by no means attempting to categorically fix each response, as there are numerous overlaps and connections, some of which I have detailed throughout this dissertation. In addition to the ways these methods bleed into one another, I actually believe that all attempts to reconceptualize bodies, lives, and livable futures that are no longer centered on or around the vagina are connected to the possibilities of fantasy and imagination. Butler writes of the necessity of fantasy in our

141 Borrowed from Judith Butler.

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ability to live a livable life. She writes, “it is important to note that the struggle to survive is not really separable from the cultural life of fantasy. It is part of it. Fantasy is what allows us to imagine ourselves and others otherwise. Fantasy is what establishes the possible in excess of the real; it points, it points elsewhere, and when it is embodied, it brings the elsewhere home” (UG 216-17). In other words, who we are, how we imagine ourselves, and who we might become are intertwined and mutually dependent upon the fantasies we are told and able to imagine and embody. It goes without saying that each individual chapter in this dissertation engages with issues of fantasy and imagination as a way to “bring home” a more open and just future. To reiterate: in chapter one, circumcised, infibulated, and disabled women emphasize that they do not want to be spoken for or about as if their lives, bodies, and feelings are not their own, are not real. If we seek out silenced, rebuked, and/or alternative narratives concerning “(dis)abled” vaginas, we find that these same women proclaim an intensification in sexual pleasure as they incorporate acts of fantasy and imagination into their sexual lives. In chapter two, as the “grotesque” pussy comes to stand in for all of Margaret Cho’s bodily excesses, she makes obvious that corporeal boundaries are metaphoric for any boundary the nation feels is threatened or susceptible to invasion. As Cho playfully offers the vagina a life of its own through her stand-up comedy, she performs how one might negotiate the competing affects of pride and shame, agency and fear, and pleasure and pain. In the end, by “troubling” how she is read by our culture at large, Cho illustrates that personal and political transformation is possible. In chapter three, through the tropes of dislocation, exile, transplantation, and grafting, Jeanette Winterson conjures up a fantastical world of pirates, a princess, an F2M tulip bandit, and an unsanctioned community pleasure garden. As time and place are queered and the vagina and its fictions collide, we are encouraged to acknowledge the constructed nature of ideology and the violence that such a construction reinforces. In Winterson’s imagined future (or is it past) world then, with the aid of a tulip, pleasure is reconceptualized, the vagina is resignified, and sex and gender are fully (dis)articulated from sexual anatomy. Finally, in chapter four, Shani Mootoo incorporates imagination,

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ritual, and a return to the body into how one might negotiate a seemingly personal trauma. We may feel alone, isolated, vulnerable, and disconnected from others, asserts Mootoo, but if we pay close attention to alternative methods of disclosure, we can openly acknowledge that the traumatized vagina always has a story to tell. As a result, Mootoo emphasizes that there is always the hope of reorientation and reconnection as she envisions, through her fiction, the potential and ethics of interrelationality. Through these disparate vaginal representations, it is easy to admit that the naturalization of gender is destructive. Of course the vagina still matters. But if we realize that such constraints actually open up spaces for movement, resistance, and possibility, we can recognize that vaginas are performers who can move us, shape us, and transform us. When the intersections between affects, bodies, and discourse become apparent, we are offered but one alternative way of contemplating how subjectivity is interrelational. Emotions and affects are not only performative, social, and bound up with issues of politics and justice,142 according to Sara Ahmed, but they are also: About time; emotions are the very ‘flesh’ of time. They show us the time it takes to move, or to move on, is a time that exceeds the time of an individual life. Through emotions, the past persists on the surface of bodies. […] Emotions also open up futures, in the ways they involve different orientations to others. (The Cultural Politics 202) In other words, as pride, pleasure, violence, shame, trauma, and loss, for example, signify just how difficult it can be “to move, or to move on,” they also have the potential to bring together disparate groups of people who feel connected because of their differences, vulnerabilities, pleasures, and secrets, as well as their ability to fortify themselves “against the rest of the world” (Cereus 48). The promise of collective (sub)cultures or alternative publics is that they offer up spaces where human beings might be listened to, recognized, accepted, and even embraced, where the threat of violence wanes, where we might again feel alive. As I near the end of this project, I anticipated ending here,

142 “Emotions matter for politics; emotions show us how power shapes the very surface of bodies as well as worlds. So in a way, we do ‘feel our way’” (Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion 12).

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theorizing the undeniable connections between affects and anatomy, while craving intimate connections and a just future. It was recently suggested that I heed my own theoretical assertions and not move through the world pretending I am an autonomous self-contained and closed-off individual. Sometimes it is easier to pretend. Yet, I grow tired of closing myself off to a world of possibilities, a world I actually believe could be: A world where there is more room to breathe, where we have a little more space to move and bend, and where we not only listen, love, and attempt to better understand, but where we can also be heard and feel acknowledged. As I genuinely inquire in the introduction, if we approach the vagina as a category that is not only reified through political and cultural discourses, but also as a category that is fleeting, fictional, transformative, unstable, and elusive, might we alter who counts as worthwhile and valuable? Might we develop more empathetic, compassionate, and non-violent ways of approaching each other as we always and forever become “otherwise” (Butler, Undoing Gender 29)? What might it be like to not have to look over our shoulder for fear someone might hurt us, to let go of the trepidation that we might be killed for the life we choose to invent, explore, imagine, and lead, to reach out and connect with another human being in spite of our vulnerabilities, or to deeply find each other beautiful? What is our obligation to the world? How might the future I theorize play out in my, your, our daily living? If I truly believe, along with Winterson, that we can change the story because we are the story (The Powerbook 288), how might we begin?

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WORKS CITED & CONSULTED

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