Pain, Wounds and Body Manifesto
i hereby bashfully post some writings from the past. It is one of those one of those cases that is useful to remember your own niavity and force an inspirational new trajectory. it maka me cringe but it also make me work harder, get bigger and be nicer…. so, this is where it all began - an extract from my MA thesis. This (presented rather poorly) is what i continue to aspire to… the TOE of body manifesto, physical fuck ups and the contemporary image.
If, as it has been stated, cognitive capacities centrality is based on a modular relationship with its bodies connections to the world, there must be available an instance of understanding in which one experiences something through the body and memorises it. This, physiologist Margaret Wilson, refers to as ‘priming’ in which she states “visual input can activate covert motor representations in absence of any task demands” or indeed direct agency play, refining the definition of memorising as “the encoding of patterns of possible physical interaction with the three-dimensional world” (Wilson:11). Further more, such instances of the embodied memory can then provide an extensive knowing on a greater scale in which the body assimilates an incident or object directive to a source external from the self and comprehends it, some sort of shared, social definitive. An interpretive aid in the physical assimulation process of viewing.
Foucault notes just such a heritage in human understanding as he suggests terrestrial affiliation with pain stems form historical legislative operation and conduct, or corporal punishment. Pain, he suggests, is relationary to this public display that primarily presents “the triumph of the law, but at the same time it becomes possible to suspect perverse relationships between crime and power” (Miglietti:31). Examining the lineage of pain it is notable that the criminal fractures the hierarchies of power in legal infraction. In doing so this body has regained control from its source and if only for a moment attains rebellion through its criminality. This righteous action of admonishment thwarting coercion then brands the body in punishment, and so with amputation, torture and death order is restored. So pain becomes symbolic of rebellion, be it in consequence of action or as action itself. It is chaotic, an abnormality and as such the ability to inflict pain on oneself or others becomes affirmative. In every dent, laceration, perforation and indentation of the flesh a manifesto is carved indelibly into the skin.
Ginger Snaps
There is no compulsory form or avenue that a body must abide to successfully communicate its purpose, self-sacrifice applies yet, as above, martyrdom merely leaves a residue of the departed and no whole carnal campaign remains. In protest the body may be damaged, torn, ripped, stripped and undone. Yet, it may reassemble itself to remain and stand proud with its own edict. Such edict is evident in scrutinising the mutating body of Ginger in Ginger Snaps, as her mortal figure begins to transgress into monstrosity. This transformation is paralleled with the development to womanhood and commencement of menstruation, activity that is the right of every female body.
Menstruation, the approximately monthly shedding of the uterine lining in most women of reproductive age, is both a biological event and a cultural event. The biology cannot be separated from the culture, and interpretation of menstruation is always ideological. Menstruation and its associated practices and rituals are important symbols of femaleness; indeed, how a society deals with menstruation may reveal a great deal about how that society views women
(Kissling).
As a social event the treatment and delivery of such material is telling of the subordination and humiliation that such a taboo subject projects onto the female sex. Here the ‘practices of division’ construct a sexual segregation subordinating the female of the species. Contextually the comparative positioning of menarche is, in this instance, empowering as it exposes the taboo unapologetically.
“The idea that menstruation must be hidden is the basis of social practices and meanings regarding menstruation in Western industrial societies (Laws, 1990). The taboos that enforce this isolation and secrecy are material, physical, and linguistic; menstruation must be concealed verbally as well as physically, and communication rules and restrictions define and enforce the concealment and activity taboos. These rules and restrictions make media representations of menstruation, and interaction surrounding it, rare”.
(Kissling)
It should also be accepted that this is a monstrous depiction of menarche and its consequential developments and so simultaneously a degrading representation of femininity. This compulsory symbol of sexual maturity suggests compliance to a specific social order. In fact, such events are celebrated outside of Western culture, and to therefore willingly dismiss this duty is to defy nature and physiologically categorical norms and exist inextricably in entire otherness. Ginger continues to bleed as though completing her transcendence from adolescence but it is only surface activity, as outwardly she holds all the characteristics of humanity yet inwardly is dead.
“Bodies as places of existence, the body that decides wittingly to give life to existence, and therefore willing to rethink itself, bind, multiply itself, belong to itself, bend, excite, stretch itself and take possession of itself. Thus existence becomes a form of expression, and its is this same expression that is inscribed on the body, through the cruel and necessary signs that transform it into a manifesto in which the obligatory and catatonic docility to which the body has been abandoned is opposed by the evidence of the body exhibited to society, witting and scandalous, against a body that is captive and resigned to muteness”.
(Miglietti:20)
Ginger is becoming a Werewolf, a mythological figure that is inherently Othered, threatening in its synonymous relationship with death. It is monstrous. As a figure it is contradictory as it inhabits polar positions and harbours the capacity to transform itself inside and out. It is a body of anomaly, one of fission. That is a single body that houses separate personas yet they are segregated, the body may not be both simultaneously. These characters occupy different spatiotemporal perimeters. So the Werewolf, constructed in duality must suffer internal conflict as its conflicting components toil with one another for their time in the flesh. Inside this body a war wages. An internal confliction that could be best correlated with such neurological disorders as split-multiple personality disorder and schizophrenia. Dysfunctions that society condemns and disassociates itself with in its practices of division as it attempts to segregate such abnormalities thrusting them into submission through excommunication.
“The body thus enters into a gearing of power that ‘searches it’, ‘composes it’ and breaks it down’ into privileged zones of use; discipline becomes a ‘political anatomy of the detail’ from which emerges the ‘microphysics of power’. The set of these practices of ‘sectorialisation’ which are operated from time to time in bodies find their legitimacy in those places in which bodies are obliged to obey, conceal themselves and experience shame. Those are the place of total institutions, insane asylums, the clinic, the prison, the sanatorium”.
(Miglietti:89)
These are the places set aside for the concealment and rehabilitation of those that are effectually rebellious in their difference and defiance of cognitive norms. Places that “Foucault defines as ‘hetrotopic’, where ‘the set of vital, organic and physic manifestations seem to implore into fully codified and existential space…in the proper use of the body, which allows the proper use of time, nothing should remain idle or useless; everything should be summoned to form a support for the required act. A well disciplined body forms the operative context of the suggested gesture” (Miglietti:89). To evade such sanctioned incarceration is to place the body outside of the reigns of ideological institution whilst living amidst it and admonishing its brandishing categorisation by abstaining in Otherness.
As this segregated Werewolf body displays itself the other half (Ginger) disappears, ceases all material existence, as such when the wolf rises the humanity dies. In this the dead body refuses to be static, peaceful and unmenacing, what is presented in this animated anomalous figure is horror. Humanity’s only definitive has been annulled, death is no longer absolute, in this bodies defiance of natural law all order is lost. Their very being solidifies their social opposition to power. The monsters apparition not only murders its host but carries with it, in its new incarnation, the threat of further death as the survival of its species is reliant on procreation through the mutilation, transformation and death of others. This death it proposes is not natural death; it is violent death, as the primitive instincts of the zoomorphic monster insist brutality. The initiation to this dual figure resides in a mortal wound. To become a Werewolf the flesh must be torn and in this gash a void is opened into immortality and Otherness. The Werewolf is in this instance equated with criminality, remote to the judicial system in its deviancy and disobedience it takes life refuses to abide punishment thus exchanging the source of control and ceasing power.
This acquiescence towards authority and dominant regulatory forces is fairly apparent when examining an identifiably Othered form, but it is in the recognisably human form that Ginger makes her greatest deviant decree. Having been attacked by this creature, devastating her body Ginger survives and displays elevated regenerative capacities. Healing at an astonishing rate her form rejects all indications of pain that such wounding should yield. She carries none of the scars that burden mortal bodies making a corporal statement as she stands unharmed and unmarred by social power refusing to accept visible punishment.
In Ginger Snaps 2: Unleashed the sister, Bridget, continues this struggle creating a Werewolf lineage but she exhibits a greater charge against this mutation, which is in this case equated with blood disease, an evolving disorder that transforms her from the inside – out. Her transgression to impurity gradually manifests itself in and onto her body. The acceptance of this change is reluctant and she is initially wrought with self-loathing and the incentive to prevent it. The inner anguish is comparatively ideological as her bifurcated body battles for a singularity, each component striving for domination. This psychological pathos insights action and she subjects herself to a routine of painful procedures promising regulatory properties, all to prevent the transgression to her immanent Werewolf form. She exhibits a voluntary will to alter and contort the fabric of her construction, substituting the intense emotional agony with a more justifiable pain.
“Physical pain can cancel out psychological pain because it annuls the psychological context. Whether they be painful, pleasurable or neutral. Our acceptance of its capacity to put an end to madness is one of the ways in which we, consciously or unconsciously, recognise its power of putting an end to all aspects of the self in the world”.
(Miglietti:35)
The infiltration of the flesh addresses the intense contradictions and relationships between the body and power. In abusing of her body she prevails in her dictum against the powers that threaten her making her personal veto and manifesto, a campaign against the self and her kin. Hailing the internal/external struggle in the voluntary manipulation of her interior by altering her blood and revealing that which is intimate and ordinarily concealed her body is exhibited. This body on display becomes a body of ‘spectacle’ in the deviancy of action against those powers that already permeate every inch of her form, she is resigning her place amidst the convention. The imagery of her self-abuse resonates with a certain exploration of the self and themes of identity, individuality and belonging, constructing the body as pretext for such rhetoric. Bridget’s body has suffered, at the hands of herself and others, and as such this damaged corporal images creates space for the discussion of the methods of quiet tyranny. Her actions directly efface the rigidity of the pressures imposed on the body and with this experimentation into and onto herself her body becomes her own, as she “performs acts of reappropriation and reconstruction on the self” (Miglietti:32). With every laceration, perforation, indentation and scar Bridget is able to escape the werewolf skin of her heterogeneous body.
