‘The tension between sexual danger and sexual pleasure is a powerful one in women’s lives. Sexuality is simultaneously a domain of restriction, repression, and danger as well as a domain of exploration, pleasure, and agency.’

– Carole S. Vance¹

‘In spite of the obviously maximized visibility and the seemingly ‘frank’ revelation about sex, what the money shot² accomplishes is a systematic denial of difference […] As a representation that tries to discover ‘knowledge’ by looking hard, the money shot also invents ways of not looking at all when it comes to female genitalia…’

– Rey Chow³

THE two quotations above mark the two main, and related, vectors of this essay. The first looks back to a time in 1980s when anti-pornography debates were shaking up the feminist and queer communities in the United States of America. In 1984, Carole Vance, along with a group of other feminists, including Kaja Silverman and Gayle Rubin, published an edited volume titled Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality,⁴ intended especially to explore the tensions between sexual danger and sexual pleasure in feminist theory/practice.

Vance and her collaborators were, from the start, committed to exploring the subject in all its complexity, neither shying away from the risk and messiness of desire, nor denying the actual presence of violence at the heart of what were considered explicit erotic scenarios: ‘The cultural mythology surrounding sexual violence provided a unique and powerful route for it to work its way into the heart of female desire. […] If female sexual desire triggers male attack, it cannot be freely or spontaneously shown, either in public or in private.’⁵

Vance’s claim here is clear: as long as heteropatriarchal cultural mythologies and discursive structures are still in their place, it would be impossible to speak of female desire⁶ without simultaneously speaking of danger, because the apprehension of danger continues to colour the heart of that desire. However, Vance’s project was also deeply invested in resisting the policing of desire, even while keeping in mind the clear and present dangers of sexual violence.

 

The second quotation goes to the core of some of the questions that trouble discussions on pornography vis-à-vis feminist politics even today. Is pornography a way of looking and making explicit that potentially could be liberatory? Or is pornography a way of not looking at and obscuring certain bodies, while claiming to make them explicit? Does pornography, which claims to make the hidden visible, remain blind to certain kinds of explicit and liminal corporeality?

Much of this essay will be invested in looking back and revisiting. The first section tries to historicize and define pornography for the purposes of the present discussion. The second briefly reviews the primary terms of the debate around pornography, pleasure and violence as they emerged in 1980s America, when demands for legal curbs on the pornography industry were made by feminists. The third section briefly analyses the work of a few female American performance artistes (1960-1990), while also looking at one instance of a feminist protest in Northern Ireland (1980s). These events, I will suggest, point us towards modalities of making the female body explicit that destabilize established ‘partitions of the sensible’⁷ in their particular contexts.

 

The first intent of the present essay is to ponder upon the relative valence of pleasure and danger in feminist political projects, looking back at how some of these debates have historically condensed around the question of pornography. The question of ‘pornography’ has, in different contexts, frequently polarized feminists across the two axes of pleasure (emphasizing sexual liberation) and danger (emphasizing sexual violence). In his essay ‘The Discreet Charm of the Bhadraloks: An Excursion into Pornotopia’, Sibaji Bandyopadhyay looks at the highly coded textual worlds of Bengali print pornography and its politics as symptomatic of the gendered pathologies of the Bengali bhadralok middle classes.

Bandyopadhyay succinctly sums up the position of those he terms ‘champions of sexual libertinism’⁸ on pornography: One well known line of argument regarding ‘pornography’ is offered by the champions of sexual libertinism. They hold: in ‘pornography’, in that world of pure fantasy, unrepressed desire is allowed full and free play, social taboos and strictures are transgressed and subverted by unmediated sexual impulse […]⁹

Obviously pornography must not be policed. But what good does that do? What does pornography, in effect, destabilize? Whose and what kind of pleasure does it speak for? What dangers does it consistently refuse to see? What instabilities does the pornographic grammar of bodies (arguably a near totalizing market driven visual regime today) keep from emerging within publicly shared visual and sensory fields? What kind of explicit corporeality does pornography disallow? Bandyopadhyay suggests that pornographic codes are predominantly heteropatriarchal and misogynistic, arguing finally that pornography controls more than it liberates: ‘Just as pornography invites policing, it is itself a policing agency.’¹⁰ Is there, then, the possibility of a feminist negotiation with the question of pornography and ‘explicitness’ that does not necessarily take a pro-censorship/carceral position, but rather points towards a more troubling ideological and totalizing violence at the heart of the pornographic discursive enterprise? There are more serious questions to be asked of pornography, I believe, that do not lead towards statist and puritanical dead ends.

 

It would no doubt be absolutely essential here to historicize ‘pornography’. Notions of what counts as ‘pornography’ change drastically depending on geographical, linguistic and cultural contexts. Post-internet ‘porn’ is a considerably altered beast from what was known as ‘pornography’ in the age of print media or video cassettes. Bandyopadhyay writes in an essay called ‘Defining Terror: A "Freudian" Exercise’– ‘"Pornography", understood as risqué but forbidden stuff, is now passé – man has entered the post-pornography age. Much of the erotic exchanges via the Internet seem to indicate that we are in fact living in a new sexual ecosystem, a system geared to "speed", "acceleration" and swift "disposal".’¹¹

 

Bandyopadhyay’s distinction between ‘pornography’ (print) and ‘porn’ (internet), marking a historical shift characterized by greater speed, instrumentality, overexposure and perhaps boredom is a useful and productive one. The representational codes of pornography as a genre obviously change significantly in the shift from the textual to the audiovisual fields and thereafter through cyber distribution. However, they do not quite go from ‘misogyny’ to ‘freedom’ in the course of that transition, as Rey Chow points out in the second epigraph to the present essay. It seems more productive for me to think of ‘pornography’ then as a deeply gendered discursive regime significant features of which survive translation, resiliently, from one medium of circulation to another, even if we were to accept that the ‘genre’ itself changes form significantly in the process.

Rey Chow, in my view, puts it most effectively when she says: ‘Typically, representation as objectification is conducted in the name of knowledge: to represent something in objectified form is assumed as a way of "knowing" it. The extreme case of such representation is conventional, heterosexual pornography, in which lurid, tabooed images of sex are accompanied by narratives of exploration and discovery, of the curiosity to reveal the secrets or truths about the human body. […] Following Foucault’s analysis of power as discursive, (Linda) Williams bases her inquiry on the question: how is pornography as a type of "knowledge" produced? […] Arguing that pornography is in part a logical outcome of the steadily enhanced techniques of cinematic vision, which have since the beginning been relying on strategies of fetishization […].’¹²

For Rey Chow and Linda Williams then, ‘pornography’ pertains entirely to the audiovisual medium and is concerned with the circulation of increasingly sophisticated cinematic images of the female body. The crucial thing is that these ‘images’ claim to produce more and more intimate knowledge of the female bodies interiors, its pleasures, its experiences. I feel most comfortable sticking to this definition of pornography: pornography is a discursive regime concerned with producing particular kinds of knowledge about explicit bodies (especially the female/non-male, non-heteronormative body). It puts in place a set of representational codes which go towards exercising a considerable amount of power over the modalities in which such bodies are subsequently seen, experienced, performed or even lived.

 

The ‘Lesbian’ and the ‘Masturbator’ – Pornography Debates in the 1980s: ‘Two women sleeping together have more than their sleep to defend. […] when did we ever choose to see our bodies strung in bondage and crucifixion across the exhausted air when did we choose to be lynched on the queasy electric signs of midtown when did we choose to become the masturbator’s fix emblem of rape in Riverside Park the camp ground at Bandol the beach at Sydney?’ – Adrienne Rich.¹³

Adrienne Rich¹⁴ wrote these lines a few years before Andrea Dworkin’s book Pornography: Men Possessing Women¹⁵ appeared in print. The poem registers an important trope that seems common to many of Rich’s poems from this period. Erotic love between two women is presented to us as a fragile and infinitely delicate thing, permanently under threat of assault from a hostile external world dominated by shallow machismo, pornographic fantasies, heterosexual violence and the commoditization of women’s bodies. Women seem to have little but each other to fall back upon, and the truly erotic seems to be in constant need of protection against potential attacks, battery, rape and lynching. Here, ‘the masturbator’s fix’ is in fact a violent and rapacious intrusion: the masturbator imagined as male, heterosexual and potentially violent.

 

Such imaginations clearly pre-figure the bitter and hostile tussles that anti-pornography feminists would soon find themselves engaged in with many others in the movement who defended ‘pornography’ primarily in view to their commitment to the idea of ‘free speech’. Rich would, before long, become part of one strand of the growing debate that was soon to split American feminists, as a group, right down the middle. According to the anti-pornography group, women had little or no agency in choosing what happened to them within the industry, and no power to prevent or resist the violence that was done to them. Beyond this level of direct harm that the industry caused to the women it exploited/coerced (especially since, it was argued, much of the sex that was represented was violent and degrading to women), there were other far-reaching social ramifications.

It was contended that pornography bolstered the sexual exploitation, repression and violence meted out to women in society. Men took pornographic images as prototypes and exemplars by which to conduct their lives. By this logic, of course, pornography caused rape. This was clearly an unambiguous argument for direct social impact, and Robin Morgan is often quoted as having famously said: ‘Pornography is the theory, and rape the practice.’¹⁶ In such a scenario, the only thing that could protect women with any efficacy was the law: not just laws against sexual violence, but exemplary laws against the making and distribution of pornography.

 

However, things remained difficult to resolve within the feminist movement. There were voices from amongst the community who saw sexual liberation as an intrinsic and necessary part of the feminist project. Some of them chose to oppose any form of censorship, legal or social, in the fields of cultural expressions or practices, believing that such censorship would ultimately feed a paternalistic and repressive statist enterprise of controlling desire. Some were concerned that the anti-pornography movement was bolstering the right wing puritanical forces in America.

More important than this was the fact that many from within the lesbian community began resisting what they perceived as ‘bullying’ by anti-pornography crusaders. They perceived the movement as an imposition of a new kind of stricture against sexual experimentation/adventurism, as well as women’s exploration of multiple and risky erotic possibilities/practices – as if these choices belonged exclusively to the heterosexual hedonistic male. Many felt that the monogamous lesbian couple was now replacing the heteronormative couple as the norm within this particular discourse, and resented what they saw as a growing strand of sexual puritanism within the movement.

 

Many lesbians who saw themselves as ‘sexual dissidents’,¹⁷ for instance, and some who were part of collectives endorsing sadomasochistic practices were part of this group. If, as Rubin points out, sexuality and danger were separate but overlapping ‘vectors of oppression’,¹⁸ then the deeply entrenched sexual hierarchy (between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ sex) in society meant that the further one moved from the norm in terms of sexual practices the more one was liable to be open to harm and punishment. Puritanism, even in its feminist forms, was likely to make the lives of ‘sexual dissidents’ more vulnerable to danger. ‘A radical theory of sex’, Rubin asserted, needed ‘a convincing critical language that could convey the barbarity of sexual persecution.’¹⁹

The ‘feminist sex wars’ of the 1980s brought these entrenched sexual hierarchies into focus once again, ‘pornography’ (for some) epitomizing everything that was ‘bad sex’. Vance summed up the problem with the anti-pornography ideology succinctly: ‘Feminists are easily intimidated by the charge that their own pleasure is selfish, as in political rhetoric which suggests that no woman is entitled to talk about sexual pleasure while any woman remains in danger – that is never.’²⁰ In Pleasure and Danger, Rubin went so far as to claim that a theory of sexuality entirely distinct from feminism as a political project was necessary in order to make sense of the messiness of how sexuality and desire were experienced by people in society: Could pornography provide a space for women to ‘act on their own behalf’?²¹ Could there, in fact, be a feminist pornographer?

 

In her book, The Sadeian Woman and the Ideology of Pornography, British author Angela Carter presents us with the figure of a ‘moral pornographer’, in whose work, unlike in most conventionally misogynistic pornography, the genre would be put to use in order to advance a critique of entrenched sexual hierarchies in society. In Sadeian Woman, even while acknowledging de Sade’s misogyny, Carter defends him for his vision of sexual experience as unmitigatedly political and his championing of women’s right to pursue sexual pleasure as aggressively as men. In Carter’s imagination, the ‘moral pornographer’ exposes the violence of society’s contempt for women, while simultaneously creating ‘a world of absolute sexual license for all genders’.²²

Aspects of this imagination are reflected in Carter’s fictional work, whether it be in her novel Nights at the Circus (1984), where she creates the marvellous figure of the ‘bird woman’ Fevvers, or in her collection of feminist fairy tales, The Bloody Chamber (1979). In Nights at the Circus, Fevvers is a monster of sorts: large, sexually voracious and universally desired. She is also a famous aerialist and acrobat. In the novel, it is the inaccessibilty of Fevvers’ body, along with its strangeness, that makes her so desirable. As a performer, her body is constantly defamiliarized by her own actions, it is simultaneously present and absent, forever hovering just outside her audience’s reach.

Fevvers creates a space for herself outside the limits of the familiar and apprehendable, a space that is ‘outside’, but not marginal, precisely because the desires and gazes of so many converge on it. Fevvers uses her giant wings (that monstrous part of her body that male pornographers are never quite able to control) to make fascinating escapes, away from men who attempt to trap her in peepshow houses and other patriarchal cages.

 

Similar depictions of ‘monster-women’ appear in other British fiction of the time, for example, in Jeannette Winterson’s 1989 novel Sexing the Cherry, where we find the figure of the ‘Dog Woman’ in 17th century London. The Dog Woman is indeed so big that her one attempt at heterosexual intercourse results in the swallowing up whole of her lover: literalizing misogynistic fantasies of the vagina dentata, which have plagued occidental imaginations of the sexually powerful woman for centuries.

Explicit feminist fiction from 1980s England and America is fiction that concerns itself with the power of pornographic discourse over women’s bodies and the social fears that mark the making of non-heteronormative sexuality at its roots. Such works return continually to figures of monstrous women, who are simply so large as to keep spilling out of the strictures of the pornographic frame.

 

Feminist Performance Art – Prisons and Whorehouses: ‘Male fantasies, male fantasies, is everything run by male fantasies? Up on a pedestal or down on your knees, it’s all a male fantasy: that you’re strong enough to take what they dish out, or else too weak to do anything about it.’ – Margaret Atwood²³

In this essay, I am not interested in reading pornography per se. I will attempt rather to look back at some instances of radical bodily assertion by women that were, in fact, not ‘porn’/pornography. Some of these were also critical, humourous and angry takes on the power of conventional pornographic discourse over the female body. These artistes/protesters, whether or not avowedly feminist, were taking on statist/communitarian paternalism and censorship for sure, but they were also challenging the power of pornography as a discursive/visual framework over their bodies. Some of these performance/protest events picked up popular forms of pornography and twisted them around, playing with them, pushing and undoing their limits, while all the time attempting to lay bare the terms of their discursive power.

To frame the nature of the shift I am trying to mark in these kinds of explicit bodily assertion, I will return briefly to the work of Kate Millett. In the first chapter of Sexual Politics, Millett makes an important distinction between the depictions of explicit sexual experience found in the work of three writers: Henry Miller, Norman Mailer and Jean Genet, all deemed, in a range of ways, as ‘pornographic’ in their own time. Genet stands out in this triad, Millett seems to suggest, by an angle of vision which allows him to see (as well as represent via pastiche) the violence inherent in the popular scenarios of conquest and control frequently enacted in heteronormative ‘erotic’ encounters.

 

Quoting Sartre’s biography of Genet (‘the fairy is only a receptacle, a vase, a spittoon’²⁴), Millett contends that the condition of ‘the encule’ (faggot) is a description of what it is to be female in society: ‘In this feudal relationship of male and female, pimp and queen, one might expect exchange of servitude for protection.’²⁵ Millett’s suggestion is that in the earlier descriptions of pornographic encounters in the chapter (Miller and Mailer), what we have witnessed in the guise of the erotic triumphs of the male hero are, in fact, reenactments of this fundamentally feudal relationship. Genet’s descriptions of ‘pornographic’ encounters differ from them, not by escaping into some utopian land of autonomy/ freedom, but in making explicit the brutal terms of that supposedly erotic exchange. The violence now appears openly as such – the ‘encule’ or the ‘fairy’ overtly emphasizing her/his role as the sexual ‘spittoon’: a receptacle, a fantasy, a container to be masturbated into, always-already the place of the ‘female’ in the male-authored pornographic scenario.

 

In the instances of feminist performance art we will be looking back towards, we find a similar shift in an angle of vision and a comparable commitment towards bringing to light the violent terms on which the non-male, non-heterosexual body enters the field of explicit representation. Peggy Phelan has called such subversive feminist games with objectifying discursive frameworks as the making counterfeit of ‘the currency of our representational economy’: an economy in which women are always/already passive and invisible, while requiring to give the impression of maximum exposure.

As an example of such subversion, Phelan describes performance artiste Angelika Festa’s work ‘Untitled Dance’ (1987), where Festa lay suspended from a pole in a room in a New York gallery for twenty four hours. Her body was bound up or bandaged to resemble a cocoon or a mummy, and more important than that, her eyes were taped shut in a refusal to gaze back at the spectator who entered as witness to her state of absolute abjection.

This refusal to return the gaze, according to Phelan, made the violence of this encounter more palpable, putting the spectator in a position of culpability vis-à-vis the victimhood (s)he witnessed: ‘Festa cannot see her body because her eyes are taped shut; the spectator cannot see Festa and must gaze instead at the wrapped shell of a lost eyeless body. […] the pain inscribed in Festa’s performance makes the viewer feel masterless.’²⁶ Refusing the comfort of the returned gaze meant the emphasizing of the relationship of power that marks the space between the watcher and the watched, especially the passive status of the performer’s body as an object of consumption. Phelan writes scathingly, following Foucault, that ‘the performer is always female in relation to power’, i.e. a silent and objectifying audience: ‘Women and performers, more often than not, are ‘scripted’ to ‘sell’ or ‘confess’ something to someone who is in the position to buy or forgive.’²⁷

 

Many years before Festa performed her work in New York, another American feminist performance artiste had grown exasperated with what she saw as her position as ‘cunt mascot’ in the radical circles of male avant garde performance artistes. In 1963, Carolee Schneemann created a work called ‘Eye/Body: 36 Transformative Actions’ where she appeared in the nude in her own art installation. Schneemann was raising a question that would remain important to her for the rest of her working life: ‘Could a nude woman artist be both image and image maker?’²⁸ In ‘Eye/Body’, she lay amongst shards of broken glass and mirrors, motorized umbrellas, photographs and other moving/non-moving objects, painting, greasing and chalking herself.

Schneemann had appeared in the nude many times before this in several contemporary ‘Happenings’ authored by her male cohorts. Rebecca Schneider records that she was widely known in these circles as ‘body beautiful’.²⁹ This time, however, accusations of self-indulgence and narcissism were suddenly rife. Schneider writes: ‘In the 1960s embodied works by women could not be easily digested into the territorial ‘bad boy’ oeuvre of the avant-garde. Their authorizing signatures were suspect. […]’³⁰ In a way, Schneemann’s intervention was also her critique of the male dominated art world, which was ever ready to consume spectacles of her naked body as long as it was authored/used by avant-garde male artistes of ‘genius’. Her own making of her body into an installation was, however, immediately deemed ‘exhibitionist’.

 

Indeed, this was the experience of many feminist performance artistes of the time. The same audiences that had adored Yves Klein’s use of nude women as brushes in the works which he called the ‘Anthropometrie’ series,³¹ found it difficult to deal with women’s experiments with nude installations. Consequently, in a few years, Schneemann went further. In ‘Interior Scroll’ (1975), performed in East Hampton (New York) and in the Telluride Film Festival (Colorado), Schneemann painted her nude body in mud, stood on a table and extracted a scroll of writing from inside her vagina, from which she read out a poem.

In a way, Schneemann’s piece was speaking against a certain representational regime’s blindness to the vagina, even as it constantly played at exposing it. Like her earlier work ‘Fuses’ (1964-1967) and ‘Meat Joy’ (1964), where she responded harshly to conventional pornographic depictions of heterosexual erotic exchange, ‘Interior Scroll’ seemed to assert the existence of the vagina as a speaking ‘thing’, an organ disgorging the written word, from whose interiors knowledge was produced, declaimed and circulated. It was no longer simply the source/end of masculine pornographic knowledge/control, but a maker of meaning. It demanded to be listened to, and not simply consumed.

Rebecca Schneider speaks also of Annie Sprinkle’s 1989 performance ‘Post Porn Modernism’, where the question of ‘pornographic’ (and its solipsistic games of exposure/secrecy with the female body³²) is taken up far more directly. The piece was performed in a place called The Kitchen in Manhattan. A ‘trendy art space’,³³ The Kitchen in Sprinkle’s performance also constantly invoked the shadows of a shady peep show house or a downtown porn theatre. Added to this was the fact that the artiste herself was no elite professional vanguardist, but a practising prostitute herself: a fact that played dangerously with the fashionable New York art audience’s notions of respectability.

 

In ‘Post Porn Modernism’, spectators stood in line in order to enter a darkened performance space where they shone flashlights into Sprinkle’s vagina, at the mouth of which she was holding a ‘speculum’. Even without summarizing Schneider’s long and astute analysis of this performance, it is possible to see in it a feminist performer’s playful debunking of the pornographic mode. In my view, Sprinkle’s pushed to the limits the pornographic desire to ‘expose’ the vagina, to make it an object of visual knowledge: especially by the addition of the gynaecological instrument (the speculum, meant to produce medical knowledge of the cunt) as well as the flashlight, the visual aid you might take on a night-time mystery tour or treasure hunt.

 

We will now look at one last instance of feminist bodily assertion that turned explicit corporeality unmitigatedly political, before turning towards the Indian subcontinent. In February 1980, female IRA prisoners of the Armagh prison in Northern Ireland decided to protest the deplorable conditions that the prison authorities had forced them into: prison staff had locked up their toilets, wash basins and baths, while locking the women into their cells. The female prisoners responded with a ‘no wash’ protest, where they simply refused to clean themselves for days on end. They smeared excrement on the walls of their cells, inscribing messages of protest and poetry. A similar ‘no wash’ protest had already taken place in a men’s prison in Northern Ireland (Long Kesh), but here, in the women’s prison, things moved differently when the women used menstrual blood to paint slogans on the walls.

The authorities had meant to punish the prisoners by withholding sanitary facilities and especially menstrual care, but this protest transformed menstrual blood (that particularly ‘dirty’ aspect of female corporeality) from an object of shame and secrecy to an especially powerful maker of meaning. Blood became the voice of a political collective resisting the state’s carceral control over their bodies. For women prisoners, denial of toilet facilities and sanitary care meant a special kind of humiliation that did not remain confined to questions of health/cleanliness. It extended to the shame they were meant to feel, as women, when the hidden and filthy substance of menstrual secretion was compelled to become ‘public’. The turning on its head of this violence by the women prisoners resulted in a state of absolute collapse of discipline and carceral control within the prison.

Analysing the political significance of such a protest, Leila Neiti writes: ‘[…] their refusal to use the toilets even after they were opened would seem to be a specific attempt to convert their punishment into a means of protest. Over time, the walls of Armagh were not only smeared with faeces and urine, but also with menstrual blood. […]’³⁴ A specially intensified degree of horror and repulsion marked the response to this ‘menstrual protest’ from the prison authorities, visiting journalists and even the British government. The chaos and revulsion were palpably higher, especially when journalists complained that the smell in the women’s ward was far worse than in the men’s, and ascribed it to the overflowing, disorderly presence of menstrual blood everywhere.

 

The challenge was not simply visual, but sensual; and it was thrown at both the statist control of female bodies as well as to traditional Irish communitarian conservatism. But it was also a challenge to established modes of producing explicit knowledge about female sexual organs: ‘things’ which remained to be seen and pleasured, but never to disgorge that which was dirty, messy, repulsive, fearsome – namely ‘blood’. This protest was anti-state, but, if anything also ‘anti-pornographic’. Meaning in words was being made out of the spectre of a bleeding vagina: smelly words that plastered themselves all over prison tenements.

In the context of the Indian subcontinent, where the popular consumption of various modes of pornographic representation is beyond question, to raise political questions about sexual freedom and pleasure (as well as being openly expressive on taboo subjects relating to the gendered body) is still seen as a luxury that is available only to an elite coterie of feminist activists/academics, who do not need to deal with the mess of quotidian brutalities that mark the lives of the less privileged. It is true that the voices raised over the last two decades from the LGBTQ movement, demanding an urgent negotiation with the questions of sexuality and sexual identity (where danger is an intrinsic part of the quotidian lives of ‘sexual dissidents’), have forced the women’s movement in the subcontinent to take stock of its own blind spots, especially its unexamined hetero-normativity. Yet certain non-porous boundaries have continued to mark the divide between these movements.

 

There are several recent instances of events where these limits become apparent. For example, the uncomfortable silence from many in the women’s movement when a group of female students at Jadavpur University in Calcutta started a campaign on menstruation, which they called the ‘PERIODS’ campaign.³⁵ The shock generated by this campaign in Calcutta, even within progressive movements, was surprisingly palpable. The series of events were such: students (mostly women) from the university wrote messages on sanitary pads decrying patriarchal control over the female body and the sense of shame/inhibition associated with menstruation. These pads were then stuck on trees and walls in public spaces on the campus. University authorities reacted with alarm, and the pads were removed overnight.

 

An enquiry committee was set up to find out which students were behind the campaign. The reactions that the ‘PERIODS’ campaign elicited from the university establishment were not surprising, but what was worth noting, in my view, was the discomfort the campaign caused amongst both the orthodox and the far left, as well as amongst certain sections of feminists in the city. Some feminists even felt that the ‘shenanigans’ by these elitist youngsters took away attention from real issues of violence, discrimination and injustice that marked the daily lives of disadvantaged women. What Audre Lorde had once called the ‘hierarchy of oppressions’³⁶ was once again at play here. This allowed many to dismiss the movement as politically irrelevant and frivolous.

There were fierce debates and arguments on social media and other forums to the contrary seeking to establish that sexuality and bodily autonomy were never simply elite feminist concerns. But they did not in the end have much effect, and the movement died down. Perhaps a deeper problem with the ‘PERIODS’ campaign lay elsewhere. In my view, this problem was with ‘obscenity’. Even though direct expressions of desire, riskily clad bodies or performances of non-normative sexuality were absent, the actions of the campaigners were deemed decidedly obscene. Was this because the objects made explicit by the campaign were meant to be secret objects: not just intimate to the docile female body but also symbolic of what was especially ‘dirty’ and unpalatable in that body? A lot rested on keeping this dirt hidden, and ‘PERIODS’ hit at the heart of this prohibition. Its obscenity lay not in the display of explicitly sexualized bodies but rather in the turning political of a kind of corporeality that was never meant, in the first place, to be encountered or negotiated in public.

 

This divide between ‘public’ and ‘secret’ corporealities was, of course, unambiguously gendered. In a city where men relieve themselves routinely on the streets, a woman’s sanitary pad stuck on a tree was deemed decidedly more vulgar. A vision which no decent male should be subjected to was now lying plastered across the public spaces of the campus. It certainly hurt more than hoardings of scantily clad models across the city. What was remarkable was that these responses found a broad commonality of purpose across various social and political groups, both conservative and ‘progressive’, and even within activist communities. ‘Were not these women doing an indignity to themselves by exposing the intimate secrets of their bodies in this way?’, asked some seasoned feminists. The irony was that no bodies had, indeed, been exposed. What had been exposed was, in truth, only pieces of paper and sponge, and words written with red markers over them. What caused these objects to be such an assault on the moral (and aesthetic?) sense of the public?

Somehow, then, as the question begins to turn once again on the problem of ‘representation’: who gets to represent the explicit body? What kind of explicitness can be swallowed (even enjoyed), and by whom? What kind of ‘explicit’ must be spat out? Is your ‘explicit’ eating up the space for mine? In what arrangement of visual and discursive power does menstrual blood (or even red ink signalling at absent blood) become more disturbingly obscene than semi-nude figures simulating sex on giant hoardings across the city?

The question then, I contend, is not about the presence or absence of explicit bodies but about a particular ‘partition of the sensible’, as Ranciere would have called it. Within such a distribution, certain kinds of explicit representation of sexualized bodies, while publicly deemed obscene, continue to remain as open secrets within a vast visual-political field of power that goes on unaltered or unthreatened by their presence. In contrast, certain other kinds of corporeality, when pushed into this field, may seriously destabilize the subterranean agreements between pleasure/danger, secret/explicit that continue to allow the ‘normal’ functioning of our sensual worlds, the terms of which are more often than not implicitly, and consistently, heteropatriarchal.

The work of these artistes/protesters becomes significant in that it resists statist/communitarian control over bodies, while simultaneously exposing the sham of pornography’s promise of liberation, which, to women, remains no less a grammar of restrictions and blind spots than any existing narrative of moralism. These events of protest/performance (it is not always possible or even right to distinguish one from the other), I argue, can be read as moments of double-barrelled feminist challenge to both paternalistic and pornographic control over female bodies.

Lastly, each of these instances point us towards the fact that in order to be truly risky with the possibilities of the explicit body (in ways that could shake up entrenched divisions between seen/unseen, said/unsaid, polite/obscene), it would always be necessary to speak of pleasure and danger in the same breath, because in a hetero-patriarchal world, they cannot but be tied together at the root, radically.

 

Footnotes:

1. Carole S. Vance, ‘Introduction’, in Carole S. Vance (ed.), Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality. Routledge, Boston and London, 1984, p. 1.

2. Chow writes that ‘the ‘money shot’ is the convention which focuses ‘on penile ejaculation as the climactic moment of sexual pleasure’. Rey Chow, ‘Gender and Representation’, in Elisabeth Bronfen and Misha Kavka (eds.), Feminist Consequences: Theory for the New Century. Columbia University Press, New York, 2001, p. 51.

3. Rey Chow, ‘Gender and Representation’, p. 52.

4. The essays collected in Pleasure and Danger had originated at the Scholar and Feminist IX conference, ‘Towards a Political of Sexuality’, held on 24 April 1982 at Barnard College in New York City. The most immediate context was perhaps the publication of Andrea Dworkin’s Pornography: Men Possessing Women in 1981, a book which caused vitriolic debates within the feminist community.

5. Carole S. Vance, Pleasure and Danger, p. 3.

6. It might be more correct to refer to non-male, non-heteronormative desire here, rather than female desire per se.

7. In ‘The Politics of Literature’, Jacques Ranciere writes: ‘Politics is first of all a way of framing, among sensory data, a specific sphere of experience. It is a partition of the sensible, of the visible and the sayable, which allows (or does not allow) some specific data to appear; which allows or does not allow some specific subjects to designate them and speak about them. It is a specific intertwining of ways of being, ways of doing and ways of speaking.’ Jacques Ranciere, ‘The Politics of Literature’, SubStance, Number 103, Vol. 33, no. 1, 2004.

8. It is not hard to see that subscribers to this view share some common ground with stalwart sex-positive feminists like Camille Paglia.

9. Sibaji Bandyopadhyay, ‘The Discreet Charm of the Bhadraloks: An Excursion into Pornotopia’, in Kavita Panjabi and Paromita Chakravarti (eds.), Women Contesting Culture: Changing Frames of Gender Politics in India. Stree, Kolkata, 2012, p. 149.

10. Bandyopadhyay, p. 164.

11.Sibaji Bandyopadhyay, ‘Defining Terror: A "Freudian" Exercise’, in Sibaji Bandyopadhyay Reader: An Anthology of Essays. Worldview Publications, New Delhi, 2012, p. 445.

12. Rey Chow, p. 50 (emphasis mine).

13. Adrienne Rich, ‘The Images’ (1976-1978), in A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far: Poems 1978-1981. Norton, New York, 1981, pp.1-2.

14. Adrienne Rich was the Jewish lesbian poet and essayist, perhaps best known for her poetry and her essay ‘Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence’ (1980).

15. Andrea Dworkin, Pornography: Men Possessing Women. Plume (Penguin), New York, 1981.

16. Robin Morgan, ‘Theory and Practice: Pornography and Rape’, in Going Too Far: The Personal Chronicle of a Feminist. Random House, Vintage, 1977.

17. Gayle Rubin uses this term in her essay ‘Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality’, in Carol S. Vance (ed.), Pleasure and Danger, p. 297.

18. Ibid., p. 9.

19. Ibid., p. 275.

20. Ibid., p. 7.

21. Ibid., p. 6.

22. Angela Carter, The Sadeian Woman and the Ideology of Pornography. Pantheon Books, New York, 1978, pp. 18-20. Cited in Robin Ann Sheets, ‘Pornography, Fairy Tales, and Feminism: Angela Carter’s "The Bloody Chamber"’, Journal of the History of Sexuality 1(4), April 1991, p. 635.

23. Margaret Atwood, The Robber Bride. Hachette, London, 2009, p. 392.

24. Millett quotes Sartre: ‘[…] the fairy is only a receptacle, a vase, a spittoon, which one uses and thinks no more of and which one discards by the very use one makes of it. The pimp masturbates in her.’ She then goes on to write: ‘This is mainly a description of what it is to be female as reflected in the mirror society of homosexuality. But the passage also implies what it is to be male. It is to be master, hero, brute, and pimp. Which is also to be irremediably stupid and cowardly.’ Kate Millet, Sexual Politics. University of Illinois Press, Urbana and Chicago, 1969, p. 17.

25. Ibid.

26. Ibid., p. 158.

27. Ibid., p. 163.

28. Quoted in Quinn Moreland, ‘Forty Years of Carolee Schneemann’s "Interior Scroll".’ (http://hyperallergic.com/232342/forty-years-of-carolee-schneemanns-interior-scroll/).

29. Rebecca Schneider, ‘After Us the Savage Goddess: Feminist Performance Art of the Body Staged, Uneasily, Across Modernist Dreamscapes’, in Elin Diamond (ed.), Performance and Cultural Politics. Routledge, London and New York, 1996, p. 164.

30. Ibid., p. 166.

31. See https://zeynepkinli.wordpress.com/2009/05/15/825/.

32. We must, here, repeatedly emphasize the importance of the female ‘role’, or more correctly the non-male/non-heteronormative role in the discursive framework of pornography, as opposed to any essence of femininity inherent in what is ordinarily deemed female biology.

33. Schneider, p. 161.

34. Leila Neti, ‘Blood and Dirt: Politics of Women’s Protest in Armagh Prison, Northern Ireland’, in Arturo J. Aldama (ed.), Violence and the Body: Race Gender and the State. Indiana University Press, Bloomington and Indianapolis, 2003, p. 77.

35. The campaign was initially begun by students in Jamia Milia Islamia in New Delhi, where it met with similar reactions. See Arshad Ali, ‘From Jamia, "Sanitary Pad" Campaign Reaches Jadavpur’, The Indian Express, March 2015. http://indianexpress.com/article/cities/kolkata/sanitary-pad-protest-spreads-to-jadavpur-university/

36. Audre Lorde, ‘There is no Hierarchy of Oppressions’. See https://lgbt.ucsd.edu/education/oppressions.html