Dr Dikaios Sakelleriou.Professor of Disability Studies, Cardiff University
What a body can do: a politics of pleasure for monsters that matter
The body is a site of contest: what it can and what is should do, what body parts should look like and what body parts can be used for what actions, and how, are subject to tight regulation and control through a complex system involving oppressive beauty ideals, the regulation of sexual desire and practices and the uncritical adoption of biology as an immutable fact. Non-conformity threatens established order and binary identities and is punishable through forms of violence exercised upon the body.
The modern body is a body in high definition, contrasted against the flawed stranger; the wounded, the abject, who represent the unmournable and non-belonging subjectivities that disrupt the vacant promise of the responsibilisation of the individual as a universal desire and challenge the “secure, distinct, closed, and autonomous” bodies (Shildrick, 2002, p.51). Disabled, trans, poor, or racialised bodies or with non-hegenomic gender expressions, and others not confirming to the normative ideal of what a proper body is, become sites for the exercise of hegemonic discourses and their associated disciplinary practices. Unruliness must be punished.
Neoliberal language is encroaching into daily life and ways of conceptualising the self, which is increasingly linked to the desire for and valorisation of strong bodies, that know what they want and what they are. Bodies with clear boundaries, resilient, capable, able(bodied), fit, and well-managed linked to hegemonic subjectivities. Bodies oblivious to their fragility. Shildrick (2002, p.106) argued that the modern paradigm of subjectivity “has no room for corporeal being that is either uncontrollable or less than perfect. It is a model that disavows existential vulnerability’ and treats disabled people and women as representative of the alterity that the masculine logos uses to confirm its own integrity.” (Shildrick, 2002, p.106).
Deviations from the norm become exhibits. Stewart reminds us (1993) that “(t)he body of the cultural other is…both naturalized and domesticated in a process that we might consider to be characteristic of colonization in general…On display, the freak represents the naming of the frontier and the assurance that the wilderness, the outside, is now territory” (p.110). She goes on to argue that “the spectacle assumes that the object is blinded; only the audience sees” (p.108).
Tzouti’s monsters look back at the viewer. They are not mere subjects of observation. They direct their gaze to the viewer, turning the spectator into the spectacle, troubling the notion of normativity. Tzouti’s work focuses resolutely on Deleuzian becomings, contributing to the dissolution of binary frames that inform fixed categories. Monsters and monsters is a work about the potentialities of the body: bodies-in-the-making, in a process of ever-transformation, not closed nor well-defined.
Bodies that are messy and ambivalent, and in-between. And fragile, embracing their vulnerabilities. If the autonomous, unitary, normative bodies with clearly defined borders are the epitome of modernity, Tzouti’s work troubles this very basic conviction of modernity and shows bodies as porous, leaking, and in flux.
Bodies, in Tzouti’s work, matter. They become visible not through the disciplinary forms of violence exercised upon them but through their power, solidly grounded in their materiality, in the ways they present to the world and interact with it. As Mittman (2012) argued, monsters may be seen, but cannot be known through observation: it is through their impact that they are revealed. Erased or masked faces, animal-faced figures, and oversized genitalia resist established hegemonies and disrupt ways of engaging with the other.
Monsters are the inappropriate/d others (Haraway, 1999). The focus is resolutely on what these bodies can do, not on what can be done to them. These bodies are not there to please others; their role is to trouble and disrupt, and they do this through taking control of their pleasure. What mouths, vulvas, vaginas, anuses, penises, hands and feet can be used for and who can use them in what ways are deeply contested issues: who decides for whom and on the basis on what criteria, is based on a tightly constructed regulatory framework, privileging certain bodies and practices. Pleasure, and the ways it can be found, is political.
Tzouti’s bodies are defiant bodies, uncontainable by boundaries, spilling out and reaching out: figures beyond solidified gender identities, wounded bodies, pocket monsters, portraits of abjection, and the bust of a gigantic phallus. Her work mobilises the besides-the-normative to shift our attention to the acts of resistance against an ever-encroaching responsibility for bodies to conform to normative standards: appearances, practices, and desires are all tightly controlled. These monsters promise resistance. Pleasure, like unruliness, becomes a revolutionary form of defiance: Tzouti’s monsters embody the freedom to disobey hegemonic rules through practices of pleasure.
References
Haraway, D. (1999). The promises of monsters: A regenerative politics for inappropriate/d
others. In J. Wolmark (ed.) Cybersexualities. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
- 295-337.
Mittman, A.S. (2012). Introduction: The impact of monsters and monster studies. In
A.S. Mittman (ed.) The Ashgate companion to monsters and the monstrous. Farnham: Ashgate, pp. 1–14.
Shildrick, M. (2002). Embodying the monster: Encounters with the vulnerable self. London:
Sage.
Stewart, S. (1993). On longing: Narratives of the miniature, the gigantic, the souvenir, the
Collection. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.