Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body (2 page)

At different historical moments, out of the pressure of cultural, social, and material change new images and associations emerge. In the sixteenth century the epistemological body begins to be imagined not only as deceiving the philosopher through the untrustworthy senses (a Platonic theme) but also as the site of our
locatedness
in space and time, and thus as an impediment to objectivity.
1
Because we are embodied, our thought is perspectival; the only way for the mind to comprehend things as "they really are" is by attainment of a disembodied view from nowhere. In our own time (as another example of the emergence of new meanings), the "heaviness" of the bear has assumed a concrete meaning which it probably did not have for Schwartz, who uses it as a metaphor for the burdensome drag the body exerts on "the self"; my students, interpreting the poem, understood it as describing the sufferings of an overweight man. For Schwartz, the hunger for food is just one of the body's appetites; for my female students, it is
the
most insistent craving and the preeminent source of their anger and frustration with the body, indeed, of their
terror
of it.

Not all historical conceptions view the body as equally "inescapable." The Greeks viewed soul and body as inseparable except through death. Descartes, however, believed that with the right philosophical method we can transcend the epistemological limitations of the body. And contemporary culture, technologically armed, seems bent on defying aging, our various biological

"clocks," and even death itself. But what remains the constant element throughout historical variation is the construction of body as something apart from the true self (whether conceived as soul, mind, spirit, will, creativity, freedom. ) and as undermining the best efforts of that self. That which is notbody is the highest, the best, the noblest, the closest to God; that which is body is the albatross, the heavy drag on selfrealization.
2

What is the relation of gender to this dualism? As feminists have shown, the scheme is frequently gendered, with woman cast in the role of the body, "weighed down," in Beauvoir's words, "by everything peculiar to it." In contrast, man casts himself as the "inevitable, like a pure idea, like the One, the All, the Absolute Spirit."
3
According to Dinnerstein, as a consequence of our infantile experience of woman as caretaker of our bodies, "the mucky, humbling limitations of the flesh" become the province of the female; on the other side stands ''an innocent and dignified 'he' . . . to represent the part of the person that wants to stand clear of the flesh, to maintain perspective on it: 'I'ness wholly free of the chaotic, carnal atmosphere of infancy, uncontaminated humanness, is reserved for man."
4
The cost of such projections to women is obvious. For if, whatever the specific historical content of the duality,
the body
is the negative term, and if woman
is
the body, then women
are
that negativity, whatever it may be: distraction from knowledge, seduction away from God, capitulation to sexual desire, violence or aggression, failure of will, even death.

Although Schwartz's conception of the body is indeed gendered, it is not guilty of such projections. The "heavy bear" is clearly imaged and coded as male (and, arguably, racially and classinflected as well). King Kong is evoked ("climbs the building"), as is male gang warfare ("boxes his brother in the hateridden city"), and one of the most striking metaphors of the poem is that of state of nature as football game ("the scrimmage of appetite"). It is not a maternal or feminine primitivity that is constructed, but a lumbering, rough, physically aggressive and emotionally helpless male animality. The feminine presence in the poem consists in the nostalgic memory of womblife (the "water's clasp") and the present

beloved, the "very dear" with whom he yearns for relations unbefouled by the crude instincts of the bear. Woman exists in this poem as a wrenching reminder both of past bliss and of present longing, but a reminder that is experienced without rancor, resentment, or anger at the object of desire. Schwartz, while projecting everything troubling onto the body, does not perform the additional projection of the body's troubles onto the figure of woman. He owns those troubles, albeit painfully and in estrangement, through the "bear" that is his body.

In his ownership of the instinctual, infantile body, Schwartz distinguishes himself from most of the Christian tradition and the deeply sedimented images and ideology that it has bequeathed to Western culture, from classical images of the woman as temptress (Eve, Salome, Delilah) to contemporary secular versions in such films as
Fatal Attraction
and
Presumed Innocent.
On television soap operas, the sexual temptress is a standard type. No show can earn big ratings without a Lucy Coe or Erica Kane; the Soap Opera Awards Show even has a category for Best Villainess. These depictions of women as continually and actively luring men to arousal (and, often, evil) work to disclaim male ownership of the body and its desires. The arousal of those desires is the result of female manipulation and therefore is the woman's fault. This construction is so powerful that rapists and child abusers have been believed when they have claimed that fiveyearold female children "led them on."

Conscious intention, however, is not a requisite for females to be seen as responsible for the bodily responses of men, aggressive as well as sexual. One justification given for the exclusion of women from the priesthood is that their mere presence will arouse impure thoughts. Frequently, even when women are silent (or verbalizing exactly the opposite), their bodies are seen as "speaking" a language of provocation (Figure 1). When female bodies do not efface their femaleness, they may be seen as inviting, "flaunting": just two years ago, a man was acquitted of rape in Georgia on the defense that his victim had worn a miniskirt. When these inviting female bodies are inaccessible or unresponsive to male overtures, this may be interpreted as teasing, taunting, mocking. In Timothy Beneke's
Men on Rape,
several personal accounts demonstrate this interpretation. For example:

Image has been removed. No rights.

Let's say I see a woman and she looks really pretty and really clean and sexy, and she's giving off very feminine, sexy vibes. I think, "Wow, I would love to make love to her," but I know she's not really interested. It's a tease. A lot of times a woman knows that she's looking really good and she'll use that and flaunt it, and it makes me feel like she's laughing at me and I feel
degraded.
5

In numerous "slasher" movies, female sexual independence is represented as an enticement to brutal murder, and chronic wife batterers often claim that their wives "made them" beat them up, by looking at them the wrong way, by projecting too much cheek, or by some other (often very minor) bodily gesture of autonomy.

My point here, if it requires saying, is not to accuse all men of being potential rapists and wifebatterers; this would be to indulge in a cultural mythology about men as pernicious as the sexual temptress myths about women. Rather, my aim is to demonstrate

the continuing historical power and pervasiveness of certain cultural images and ideology to which not just men but also women (since we live in this culture, too) are vulnerable. Women and girls frequently internalize this ideology, holding themselves to blame for unwanted advances and sexual assaults. This guilt festers into unease with our femaleness, shame over our bodies, and self loathing. For example, anorexia nervosa, which often manifests itself after an episode of sexual abuse or humiliation, can be seen as at least in part a defense against the "femaleness" of the body and a punishment of its desires. Those desires (as I argue in "Hunger as Ideology") have frequently been culturally represented through the metaphor of female appetite. The extremes to which the anorectic takes the denial of appetite (that is, to the point of starvation) suggest the dualistic nature of her construction of reality: either she transcends body totally, becoming pure "male" will,
or
she capitulates utterly to the degraded female body and its disgusting hungers. She sees no other possibilities, no middle ground.

Women may be quite ready, too, to believe the cultural mythology about some other woman or women, as responses to the Patricia Bowman/William Kennedy Smith rape trial demonstrated ("Why did she go home with him?" "Why did she let him kiss her?" "Why, if she only wanted to spend the evening with her girlfriends, did they go out to a bar?"). More striking, given the numbers of women who had had similar experiences, was female skepticism about Anita Hill's sexualharassment charges against thenprospective Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas ("Why did she follow him to the EEOC?" "Why did she call him on the telephone?'' "Why did she drive him to the airport?"). Generally, such questions were raised to attack Hill's credibility rather than to suggest that she had initiated a sexual relationship with Thomas. But it seemed clear to me that underlying the specifics of the attack was a generalized condemnation of Hill's behavior as inappropriate, insufficiently cautious, overly ambitious, and "asking for"
whatever
it was that happened. The intensity and even venom with which some women engaged in such attacks is suggestive of powerful projections at work, projections which may serve to protect women against their own selfdoubts. "Why did she wait so long to tell? If what she says happened to her had happened to
me, I'd
never let him get away with it!" Thus, at Hill's expense, women

shored up belief in the robustness of their own selfrespect, self confidence, and "purity."

For African American critics of Anita Hill—male and female—the situation was more complicated than this, of course. In the face of pervasive ideology that stereotypes black males as oversexed animals, many felt that to support Hill was to lend credence to racist mythologies. Some African American women, while believing Hill's charges, were furious at her for publicly exposing a black man as she did. Leaving aside the question of to what degree these criticisms were just (I discuss the Hill/Thomas hearings in more detail in "Feminism, Postmodernism, and Gender Skepticism"), what they seem to overlook (and what was certainly ignored by the white, male senators and in the media coverage of the hearings) is the fact that the racist ideology and imagery that construct nonEuropean "races" as ''primitive," "savage," sexually animalistic, and indeed more
bodily
than the white "races"
6
extends to black women as well as black men.

Corresponding to notions that all black men are potential rapists by nature are stereotypes of black women as amoral Jezebels who can never truly be raped, because
rape
implies the invasion of a personal space of modesty and reserve that the black woman has not been imagined as having. Corresponding to the popular sexual myth that black men are genitally overendowed are notions, harking back to the early nineteenth century, that African women's sexual organs are more highly developed than (and configured differently from) those of European women, explaining (according to J. J. Virey's study of race) their greater "voluptuousness" and "lascivity."
7
"Scientific" representations of the black woman's body, like evolutionists' comparisons of the skull shapes of African males and orangutans, exaggerated (and often created) relations of similarity to animals, particularly monkeys. The "Hottentot Venus," a South African woman who was exhibited in London and Paris at the end of the eighteenth century, was presented as a "living ethnographic specimen" of the animallike nature of the black woman.
8
Several commissioned portraits depict her with grotesquely disproportionate buttocks, as though she were in a permanent bodily state of "presenting" to the male.

A "breeder" to the slaveowner,
9
often depicted in jungle scenes in contemporary advertisements (Figure 2), the black woman carries

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a triple burden of negative bodily associations. By virtue of her sex, she represents the temptations of the flesh and the source of man's moral downfall. By virtue of her race, she is instinctual animal, undeserving of privacy and undemanding of respect. She does not tease and then resist (as in the stereotype of the European temptress); she merely goes "into heat." Hispanic women are often similarly depicted as instinctual animals. But the legacy of slavery has added an additional element to effacements of black women's humanity. For in slavery her body is not only treated as an animal body but is
property,
to be "taken" and used at will. Such a body is denied even the dignity accorded a wild animal; its status approaches that of mere matter, thinghood.

Through a cynical and cunning strategy, Clarence Thomas was able to neutralize the damage that could have been done to his case by unconscious racist images of the black man as oversexed animal; by bringing attention to these images and making an issue of them, he engineered a situation in which any white senator who did
not
treat him with the utmost delicacy and respect would seem a racist. Anita Hill, by contrast, bore the weight of the unexamined (at the hearings) construction of the black woman as mere body, whose moral and emotional sensibilities need not be treated with consideration. In the context of this legacy, the cool detachment with which the senators interrogated Hill about penises and pornography, while apologizing profusely to Thomas for the mere mention of such subjects, resonates with the historical effacement of black women's subjectivity.

In "The Heavy Bear" the body is presented as haunting us with its passive materiality, its lack of agency, art, or even consciousness. Insofar as the "spirit's motive" is the guiding force, clarity and will dominate; the body, by contrast, simply
receives
and darkly, dumbly responds to impressions, emotions, passions. This duality of active spirit/passive body is also gendered, and it has been one of the most historically powerful of the dualities that inform Western ideologies of gender. First philosophically articulated by Aristotle (although embodied in many creation myths and associative schemes before him), it still informs contemporary images and ideology concerning