Sunday, June 3, 2012

Saline: Feminine Products & Queer Objects (Interlude)


*************************************
This summer,  I am beginning by closely reading Humoral Theory besides philosophies regarding contemporary Physics, Biology and Chemistry. Again, I am thinking about key terms. Thus I set a challenge to myself: to pick a few key terms and think through their implications for how we look at the production of bodies, particularly gendered bodies, and how this has in term been exploited in one way or another by State and Capitalist Engines. My initial research produced the following terms, which will each be explored in a series of three posts highlighting one of the three inter-penetrating disciplines of contemporary science: Heat (Physics)Estrogen (Biology), and Silicone (Chemistry).

*************************************

Salt infuses and slows us down. It enhances flavor and it preserves. It raises our blood pressure and in solutions it can hydrate. It sticks to our butts when we lay on the beach and it crusts our hair as we soak in the ocean. It's on our glasses as we drink our summer drinks. It's on our meat as we grill under the evening sun. We pay and we kill for salt. Salt is medical, its political, its culinary, and it doesn't give a shit about us.

As I outline the key terms for my summer research, running quick to paint the picture of where I   (might) go, I thought it would be good to take a moment and remember to slow down. In looking at things, I step on the toes of theorists that would rather look at objects in themselves and not bring it back to the human epidemiology. In looking at women, I step on the toes of theorists that would rather look beyond women as objects and not bring gender back to material definitions. Here I will respond with a few thoughts on how women as objects in all their salty obstinacy are integral to material feminisms and how things are never without their political or gendered component when we come to the table (salt).

*************************************
*************************************

Beach Bums

Laying out on the beach or by the pool this summer, I am aware of the gaze. Besides me as I soak in the HEAT of the sun, I read about Trans People and Repudiation in a book by Christopher Shelly. I think about what my eyes do and what the rest of my body does to the eyes of others. I think about their eyes and what they do to mine and to the rest of my body. I think about representation and I think about how sometimes I just don't give a shit.

Butts, full moons, the salt that sticks to their surfaces, they could largely care less about what we say about them. Now, we can make these mounds feel the power of our sight. These salty orbs on the beach and in the sky may bare the impressions of hands that took just "a light touch" or preserve the feet prints of "one small step for man." Violence can come from the consequences of moon gazing. There are consequences of being seen. But as much as the old romantics might wish that they could drink in the vibrant orbs they watch day and night, they cannot stomach as much as they claim. Salty bodies may have a vibrancy which makes the thing stand out, but neither the salt nor the body will ever fully divulge its secrets.

Thing theorists talk about the interiority of the object. Women know about being objects, about being others, and about claiming interiority. The issue is not being regarded as an object, when you walk along in your bikini, its about being emptied of everything but representation; about becoming no-thing but desire. Talk about gaze can fixate on desire and representation, turning discourse meant to defend the object at hand into yet another method of divesting its substance. At a certain point you just need to say to the lookers and the talkers, to enjoy their circles of thought and desire, I could care less because they have little to do with me.

While you watch me, you may wonder what it is I am doing, what it is that makes me so special, what makes me me. But you will never know, even if I tell you. Translating myself to myself or to others is just a fraction of what I do. Appearing is only a hobby, and one I don't live for. Hardly. As I lay here, me, my sister ass, moon, and saline are going about our own business. We talk sometimes, we look over to see whats going on with each other, but we don't take looking too seriously. Wondering is fun, but wonders are sometimes just looking to get some sun.

*************************************
*************************************

Sand

Sand gets everywhere and just when you think you got rid of the last of it, you find its still there. Like the salt in the sea, the sand on the beach is evidence that even our hard substances fall to pieces. And yet, like a loved one's ashes dumped in the ocean, we can count on our disintegrated bodies to become what they couldn't be while they held fast to itself: plural.

The wet sand that sticks to my legs, that I wipe off with my hand, just finds a new place to stick. I repeat the process in reverse and in time the pieces just get so separate that I know my hand and my legs are still sandy, but I can no longer see them well enough to wipe them away. There is a persistence in going to pieces which thwarts erasure. No thing is never made into nothing. 

The dirty salty sand only becomes disturbed and transforms, finds nooks and crannies, in our hair, in our shoes, in our cracks and pores, in our eyes and in our mouths, filling us with all that we tried to abject. Sure we can wash off, but over dinner we will just be adding more sea salt onto our dinner, letting it join with all the saline that's already coursing through our blood. The victor becomes conquered by the occupying force of the fallen apart. 

The human becomes salt as the salt becomes human; and each carries with it the legacy of the things it was before. The salt becomes a part of the lineage which carried mother and father, through the gilled fetus, through little girl, through the lady at the beach. The woman becomes a part of the line of flight through magma, through mountain, through boulder, through sand and ocean. We become more as we retain less. This is the other motion of our material bodies. As it exists, it withholds itself and tells others to fuck off. As it falls apart, it goes out and transforms, translates and fucks around like a molecular whore. Sand is after all, the herpes of the beach, one you pass along as soon as you sit in someones car.

*************************************
*************************************

Saline Solutions

Salt holds onto water and that's one of the many reasons we find it in saline solutions that are designed to hydrate us. For those who have lost a lot of blood or water, taking in salt water allows us to hold on to the water when the solution gets into our veins. Saline performs the simultaneous function of holding fast and keeping things together and spreading out and integrating with the world.

Material feminisms must perform the same actions. Saline solutions are in the second part aimed at "flushing the system," it grabs on to what it passes through and carries it along for a ride, so too with our material identities. Judith Butler, in Undoing Gender, beautifully defined identities as ways of being dispossessed by others, ways of being FOR others. So yes, there are dangers in opening up discourse to discussing what things make us and unmake us. There is a danger that in studying our bodies, as women, as lesbians, as trans women, as objects, this open relation to the world might give others the powers to break us apart or further subjugate us. And yet, as we discussed, this can never be fully accomplished, our saltyness always keeps secrets in reserve, 

Identities can become directions, lines of flight which allow assemblages to take shape; like sea-water dripping through a cave causing salt mounds to form where the fall from the ceiling and where they impact the ground, causing stalagmites and stalactites. So too we create ourselves under the banner of identities. We make alliances under the banner of identities. Identities are philial and material bonds. Material feminism may be as much about expanding what it means to be a woman to include a diverse crowd of objects. From the cyborg, to the prosthetic, to the saline solutions given to the transgender woman undergoing surgery to combine them all together under one identity, there is a material feminity in each of them.

Gender as epistemology is a way of knowing things, and yet the light brings out a vibrancy in these things that may very well be there. Salt raises the boiling point of water, allowing it to become super-heated, more intensified, before it breaks apart. Our materiality, when embraced, opens us up to reveal new levels of brilliance. Judith Butler's Performativity, Gilles Deleuze's Becomings, Elozabeth Grosz's Flows and Jane Bennette's Vibrancy may come together to speak on behalf of a queer material feminine movement which qualifies bodies and ecologies under a certain banner. SALINE, HEAT, ESTROGEN, and SILICONE, may not be feminine products in their entirety, they hold more secrets and tell more tales, but insofar as we exist with them, they are a part of the political, social, democratic struggle that we call material feminism. 

*************************************
*************************************

No comments:

Post a Comment