The Porous Body

The Chen article is at once the most accessible and most difficult entry to choose for a hypothetical undergrad class. The structure of the subjective narrative in the latter half combats the abstract quality of many of the articles we’ve read so far, but the variety of topics would make it a complex beast to tame in a section.

With that being said, there are two specific avenues I would address in “Toxic Animacities, Inanimate Affections,” the first being more directly related to teaching Woman on the Edge of Time.

“In this notion, asset is a good precisely because it entails capital value, but one which has unfortunately become—considering the discourse in which toxic asset has meaning—not only toxic but also perhaps ‘untouchable’ (as an affective stance), ‘unengageable’ (as tokens of exchange with limited commensurability), and perhaps even ‘disabling’ (i.e., rendering the corporations that buy up those assets invalid themselves). […] In what follows, I investigate the potential to resignify toxicity as a theoretical figure, in the interest of inviting contradictory play and crediting queer bonds already here: the living dead, the dead living, antisocial love, and inanimate affection” (Chen 266).

The concept of the toxic body and its intimacies is one that has strong associations with my novel. I would want to delve into the more capacious sense of “queered bodies” that is implicit in Chen’s article as a term that suggests bodies resisting “normative” configurations and relationships to themselves or others. Specifically, I’d focus on the sense that includes the aging body (particularly the female aging body), the disabled body, the racialized body, and, most of all, the porous, penetrable body.

While the protagonist Connie is an obvious choice for this discussion (i.e. the aging Chicana woman forced into a mental ward for her non-normativity), there is another character from the mental ward I would use in discussion.

“Sybil was crazy, but Connie had no trouble talking to her. Sybil was persecuted for being a practicing witch, for telling women how to heal themselves and encouraging them to leave their husbands, for being lean and crazily elegant and five feet ten in her bare long high-arched feet, for having a loud, penetrating voice and a back that would not stoop and a temper that stood up in her, lashing the tail of a lioness. […] Mainly, Sybil was a fighter and she fought those who threatened her, instead of hating her own self. She didn’t deny herself […] The hospital regarded Sybil as a lesbian. Actually she had no sex life.

‘Who wants to be a hole?’ Sybil asked her. ‘Do you want to be a dumb hole people push things in or rub against?’” (Piercy 76-77)

[NB: In deference to Chen’s self-described “off-gendered form” (274), as well as the resistance to gendered pronouns in nearly all of the articles/analyses on Chen that come up in a Google search, I will use the genderless pronoun “per” (short for “person”) chosen by the utopian society in Woman on the Edge of Time. It makes things terrifically defamiliarizing to read, especially if you are like me and have to force yourself to unhear the rhyme with “her.”]

In the latter half of Chen’s article, per gives an account of per experiences as a porous, intoxicated body navigating per own hyper-sensitivity to the sights, sounds, and smells of the world. I have chosen Sybil from Woman on the Edge of Time to explore the boundaries of this kind of permeability with my hypothetical class, and would do so under the following categories:

1.     Sybil as a penetrated body

a.     Examples: Sybil as woman (the always-already penetrable); Sybil as mental patient (forcibly penetrated by needles, shock therapy)

2.     Sybil as a body that refuses to be penetrated

a.     Examples: Sybil’s asexuality; Sybil’s strength and violent resistance to the nurses who attempt to drug her

3.     Sybil as a body that penetrates

a.     Examples: Sybil’s voice, which makes a number of insistent appearances even when she’s covered by a sheet, etc.; Sybil’s highly embodied presence in the world; Sybil’s tall, uncompromising stature

With the hope that the class would come up with more examples and interpretations of each category (or even more categories), I would then loop the discussion back around to Chen’s article and talk more generally about the cultural and social toxicity of penetrated bodies in our current imagination. I would ask the students to think about how we still discuss queer bodies in heternormative terms (e.g. the notion that, in a male/male sexual relationship, there must still always be a penetrator and a penetrated despite studies showing that that’s not a binary, or the depiction of female/female sex in pornography as revolving around a substitution of the penetrating object). I would ask them to think about how female social respectability still depends on a spectrum of the permeable body (e.g. there is a shifting ideal for women’s sex that floats between under- and over-penetrated). I would even ask them to think about how legislation treats certain bodies as inherently more penetrable and porous than others (the recent mandatory transvaginal ultrasound bit comes to mind, as does the very long fight against the banning of gay men from donating blood).

If there were still time after that in a section, I would end with my second avenue of discussion, which might better be called something of an exhortation, and this quote:

“It [Chen's biographical turn] is not intended as a perfect subjectivity that opposes an idealized objectivity; rather, it is meant as a complementary kind of knowledge production, a sensorium…” (Chen 273).

I think we very often try to suppress the personal when analyzing literature, a practice that can seem counterintuitive to the actual process and experience of reading. To close a class on Chen’s article, I would try to impart a sense of the fluidity of “not supposed to” in writing—yes, there are common rules and expectations, but the best writers in every generation tend to be people who resist those rules or find ways to subvert those expectations. The rules of criticism are different from the rules of novel-writing, but there’s no reason we can’t share certain methodologies. Chen writes about toxicity and uses per own experience to think through theoretical ideas in a way I found eminently readable. In other words, to want to be a subject while you write about subjectivity is not an invalid desire.