Session 9: The Monstrous (Wo)Man
1st Global Conference
Friday 1st May 2009 – Sunday 3rd May 2009
Budapest, Hungary
Conference Programme, Abstracts and Papers
Tits & Bea(s)ts
Zuzana Kepplova
Department of Gender Studies, Central European University, Budapest
This paper will study a recent phenomenon of so-called topless DJ-ing that consists of female DJ spinning records at a party while wearing almost nothing. The planned paper would be relevant to these topics: 1)Sexualizing the Female or Evil Objectification, 2)Beauty as threatening or evil, 3)Vampires, Witches and Sirens, 4)Case Studies.
Are topless DJs embodiments of sexual vibes of electronic music, modern sirens that seduce dancers into a sensual trance? Or are they rather voice-less dolls that signify pornification of the pop-culture and on-going hierarchical inequalities? As a fan of electronic music, party enthusiast but also a feminist, how do I intellectually digest this controversial phenomenon?
The comments that topless DJs receive draw a reciprocal proportion between the boldness of their presentation and their skills as DJs. Both of the following comments refer to Hungarian DJ Nikki Belucci: ”Contains nudity and old-school house music some may find offensive” or elsewhere “The music is pretty typical Euro-dance with a heavy beat, shitty keyboards and some basic English lyrics that anyone in any of the EU member countries can understand. She’s better to look at than to listen to” . Do ‘tits’ automatically eliminate ‘wits’?
According to some comments from female DJs, topless DJs are a shame for the trade:
“It’s hard for [oneself] to be a woman dj and be [taken] seriously so we don’t need any bouncing tits to reinforce the prejudice” . Widely despised for poor professional skills as DJs, for bad taste and bodily display, topless DJs embody everything that female DJs struggle with to get recognition from their colleagues and clubbers in general. Do topless DJs reiterate the whore/good girl distinction?
Is it the excessive, almost graphic femininity of topless DJs that is perceived as threatening? Is it not just indecent but monstrous even? For whom is it threatening? (In a particular clubbers’ discussion of the phenomenon, the issue of male heterosexuality emerges recurrently in a rather pushy way as ‘if you don’t like it, you must be gay!’) Frequently discursively dismantled into body pieces, attached to technologies, disindividualized by their replica-image (plastic doll, porn pin-up, ex-porn actress), what is topless DJs’ relation to the figure of the feminist cyborg?
Is it the connection of the naked skin with commercial purposes and power hierarchies that is the most offending (at least for the feminist audiences)? Is topless DJ-ing symbolically close to women trafficking? While ‘founding mothers’ of topless DJ-ing DJ Diva and Portia Surreal are solitary figures in the ‘West’ and present themselves as fetish artists for specific audiences, ‘Eastern’ topless DJs seem to have made topless DJ-ing mainstream and institutionalized. How does the ‘Eastern’ factor play into the ways in which topless DJs are perceived? Are they literally ‘dumb blonds’ as some of them “don’t speak a word of English” and have their voice completely substituted by their male managers or booking agencies?
Download Draft Conference Paper (pdf)
One Thousand and One Feminine(s)
Sigrid Hackenberg
Division of Media and Communications, European University for Interdisciplinary Studies / Europaeische Universitaet Fuer Interdisziplinare Studien (EUFIS), Saas-Fee, Wallis, Switzerland
Imagine (that is) fancy the figure of a stranger consort, the feminine, virgo intacta (untouched virgin) and cortigiana di lume (courtesan), the one who escorts accompanies accompanien (Middle English) keeps shares another on a journey; a diabolical figure that manuevers upon another, a shameless commoner, evel (Middle English) Uebel (German) Euvel (Dutch) Ueber (German) over and up carrying Evil Eye, and sickness unto death (or so it is whispered by the Jealous Overlords) like the plague, outsider and exiled, healer, keeper of the secret, the supernatural and the likes of sorcery; foreign, no other than the keeper giver of life itself, immemorial. The A Schefeminine, not only capable of singing disgorging setting free (her) mystic speech, but of raising all the powers of Hell in summoning the very figures of speech, Land Desert and Body Corpus, silent trees swaying (Mary Daly), the silent silence spoken unspoken primordial songline that is knowledge: Sarasvati, Hindu Goddess, folding upon the edges of the her Rivers the rivers her rivers rivers rivers the river of rivers and/or the dreaming. This Woman, then, woman of woman, the Woman that is Woman or WOMAN primordialwoan woman, a her, and a sche (Middle English), serpent, Python, Cobra, and shapeshifter, witchlike, nymphlike, haglike, calling forth the very fires of death and destruction, eternal life and immortality. Sche, at once, befriending Eros and Thanatos maintaining remaining herself/itself/heself in “borrowed tongue” (Julia Kristeva, Strangers To Ourselves, 9), like a Siren, Shahrzād (Persian: شهرزاد Šahrzād), multiplying her song, gently, whist fully (wistfully), eternally, whilst upon the virgin Night (never to return), sche incites and ungathers ancient vertigo and chaos. Ancient, before time and light, that is before the word, the first sex, or before sex, after sex, an-archic (Levinas), feminine spirit, a three headed creature, like Hekate, or, as it were, Nyx wandering the ever faithful shadows of the Night(s). This stranger made up of stranger tongues, sings the song of another “empty [foreign] name” (Ibid., Kristeva quoting Hegel, 145), or strangernameless or stranger stranger still, singing the song of another “intruder” and “revealer” (Ibid.,147). Sphynxlike, ungathering herself upon ancient Egypt, caressing the body of Africa, cunning and agile, the lioness undreams one thousand and one dreams of the feminine.
Download Conference Paper (pdf)
When he is a she is a he is a she is a…The Case of the Pregnant Man
Vivienne Muller
Creative Writing and Literary Studies, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia
Media and social response to the “pregnant man”, Thomas Beatie, has been loud, diverse and fascinating. Thomas was born a biological woman, but as a result of confusion about her sexual identity, decided to become a man. Beatie had breasts removed and hormone treatment, but chose to leave uterus and fallopian tubes in tact. When his wife could not become pregnant, Thomas decided to have a baby and his eggs were fertilised by donor sperm under the guidance of a sympathetic woman doctor.
On the Oprah Winfrey show Thomas claimed that it was because he might want children at some later stage in his life that he made the decision to keep his reproductive body: “I actually opted not to do anything to my reproductive organs because I wanted to have a child one day. I see pregnancy as a process and it doesn’t define who I am. I feel it’s not a male or female desire to have a child. It’s a human need. I’m a person and I have the right to have a biological child.” (http://abcnews.go.com/Health/story?id=458194)
Thomas’s situation has generated mixed reactions, some supportive and indicative of changing and progressive ideas around sex, gender and sexuality. On the other hand, many respondents see Thomas and his decision as an affront to the laws of Nature or God. These varied responses, even those which are encouraging and compassionate, identify the ways in which Western views about sex, gender and sexuality remain predicated on obdurate ideas about masculine and feminine bodies, about pregnant and non-pregnant bodies. This paper will analyse the media and public response to the case of the pregnant man arguing that most repulsive and disturbing of all it seems, is the body in-between (Kristeva), the one that visibly defies the binary oppositions of male and female in its insistence on being a “third space of enunication” (after Homi Bhabha). The paper will also refer to Banana Yoshimoto’s fictional piece, Kitchen , as a site which conjures a more instructive image of the transgressive mothering body.
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