Session 2: Transgressive Bodies

3rd Global Conference

Friday 13th May 2011 – Sunday 15th May 2011
Warsaw, Poland

A Wellspring of Contamination: The Transgressive Body of the Prostitute in 19th Century Medical Discourse
J. Shoshanna Ehrlich
Women’s Studies Department, University of Massachusetts, Boston, Massachusetts, USA

During the second half of the nineteenth century, prominent male physicians in the United States increasingly blamed prostitutes for the spread of venereal disease. To save society from this deadly influence, they launched a campaign to introduce the European system of regulation into the States. Vigorously opposed by purity reformers, the sexualized body of the prostitute became a highly contested site. Drawing on articles published in leading journals of the time, this paper examines these embodied conflicts through an interrogation of the freighted symbolic construction of the prostitute.

To proponents of legalization, the prostitute was a virulent source of contamination. Likening her to the vendor of food who sells putrid goods, they advocated for a system of mandatory inspections and, if needed, quarantine, in order to protect society from contamination. As I argue, their positioning of the prostitute as a destructive and endless source of evil was layered with potent messages about the inherently unclean nature of the sexualized, as distinct from the virginal, female body.

Reinforcing this highly gendered allocation of blame, physicians naturalized male lust. Driven by physiological need, men who purchased sexual services were held harmless for the spread of disease. As I show, their bodies were effectively portrayed as passive conduits through which evil women poisoned society.

The physicians’ effort was opposed by purity reformers who engaged in a searing critique of the doctrine of “sexual necessity.” Denouncing it as a self-serving ploy to make sin safe for men, they recast the prostitute as the victim of unbridled male lust. This repositioning, I argue, enabled the reformers to shift responsibility for the spread of disease from the prostitute to her licentious customer, and to reframe the solution as one requiring male continence, rather than state control of women’s bodies.

Download Draft Conference Paper(pdf)

A Smelly Body, The Fear of the Unclean Feminine Body: A Cultural Analysis of the Debate on Perversion in Roche’s Feuchtgebiete
Christina Lammer
Graduate School Literary Studies, Free University of Amsterdam, Netherlands

Charlotte Roche’s novel Feuchtgebiete (originally published in 2008, translated into English as Wetlands) has been widely discussed all over Europe. It narrates Helen Memel’s stay in a hospital due to an anal lesion. During this stay, Helen reflects on the conventions regarding body treatment. According to Helen, hygiene is completely overrated and she seeks out taboos she can break. She does so by neglecting standards of hygiene which in turn influence her sex life. For example, Helen uses her smegma instead of perfume to turn men on and proudly talks about the smell of her vulva, which, in Helen’s own words, gets better the less you keep it clean.

As one can imagine,  these descriptions shocked many critics. They tended to evaluate the novel in terms of perversion, obsession and pornography. Also, despite of the aims of the writer the novel  was not always considered as groundbreaking with regard to modern society’s taboos. According to some critiques Wetlands misses a ‘profound’ point – to them the book is nothing else but a perverse provocation. Others praise it as a successful step towards a liberated modern body from idealistic images that are connected to hygiene and gender standards.

Moreover it is interesting that the supposed taboo-breaking elements in the novel are described as repulsive notions of perversion. Such connections question the modern understanding of the term ‘perversion’. Using Élisabeth Roudinesco’s study Our Dark Side. A History of Perversion. (Cambridge Polity Press 2009), which states that perversion nowadays indicates norm deviant behaviour rather than sexual deviations, I aim to answer why notions of taboo are so strongly interrelated to notions of perversity.

Download Draft Conference Paper (pdf)

“Watch Out Boy, She’ll Chew You Up:” Werewolf Mouths and the Vagina Dentata
Hannah Priest
University of Manchester, Lancashire, UK

A werewolf is, by definition, both human and wolf simultaneously: how can this simultaneity be visually represented? This raises issues about the body of the werewolf (e.g is it bipedal or quadrupedal?), but the depiction of the werewolf’s face is more problematic. Anxieties about a face at once human and animalistic often surface in the complicated and conflicted presentations of werewolf mouths. Some film-makers retain a human mouth (e.g. The Wolf Man (1941)); other artists opt for a wolf-like snout (e.g. New Moon). However, it is increasingly common to depict werewolf mouths as neither human nor wolf, but as something ‘other’ (e.g. Ginger Snaps, American Werewolf in London). On the one hand, this allows for the liminality of lycanthropy. On the other, it hints at the abjection of the werewolf in terms of sexuality and gender. Barbara Creed argues for a reading of the vampiric mouth as a vagina dentata; I argue that the stretched (often hairless) skin, the revelation of moist, pink flesh, the exposure of bodily fluid, the surrounding fangs of the ‘other’ werewolf mouth can also be read as castrating female orifice. Perhaps even more so: the fur of the werewolf (as opposed to the human hair of the vampire) speaks to deep-rooted anxieties about female body (specifically, pubic) hair. As this paper will show, the links between the werewolf and abject female sexuality are revealed in a number of texts, and I will offer examples from a recent horror novel, The Leaping, which explore the fear of castration inherent in an encounter with lycanthropy. While this is related to the fear of being eaten by wild animals (cf. Carol Clover), there is a sensuality and sexual pleasure in the mouth of the werewolf, pointing to conflicting responses to the ‘maneater’.