Section 2
The image of the disorderly woman as disruptive Other has, over the centuries, served as the very symbol of transgression and revolutionary conflict. Describing the first of the French June Days of 1848, Victor Hugo highlights two young women, both public whores, who appear "beautiful, dishevelled, terrifying," at the crest of a barricade, hoisting their dresses above their waists and crying,"in that dreadful brothel language that one is always obliged to translate, 'Cowards! Fire, if you dare, at the belly of a woman!'" (Qtd. in Hertz 29). Neil Hertz observes, "What the revolution is said to be doing figuratively is precisely what--in a moment--each of the women will be doing literally, suddenly displaying monstrous and unknown forms to a horrified society" (29). In this instance, clearly, Woman is the emblem of revolutionary violence, and so she has been across cultures over the centuries; thus, it seems logical that she has been appropriated by men for transgressive purposes. Natalie Zemon Davis points out that at German and Austrian carnivals, men typically dressed as women and ran jumping and leaping through the streets in ecstatic fertility rites (138). In England in 1631, men dressed as women "leveled fences against the king's enclosure of their forests: in 1718, "students followed 'a virago, or man in woman's habit, crowned with laurel' to assault a Dissenting meeting house." In 1650, men in drag tore down tollbooths and turnpikes. In 1812, transvestite males smashed steam looms and burned a factory at Stockport. In Wales, Scotland, and Ireland as well, similar events have taken place (148-49). Davis notes that such behaviors can be explained in part by the fact that, by dressing as women, these men were freed with responsibility for their actions--after all, women were considered incapable of self- responsibility. In addition, Davis suggests, these men also "drew upon the sexual power and energy of the unruly woman and on her license (which they had long assumed at carnival and games)--to promote fertility, to defend the community, its interests and standards, and to tell the truth about unjust rule" (149-50).
In each case Davis describes, real women have possessed no power of their own. Likewise, in tribal cultures, women's social status has tended to be low, and yet mystical powers have been attributed to them. Gloria Flaherty notes, "In many places, the female was considered a kind of vehicle of the divine spirit of the universe" (276). Thus, as McEvilley points out, men have appropriated female power for their purposes:
Male shamans and priests around the world, as well as tribal boys at their puberty initiations, adopt female dress to incorporate the female and her powers. In lineages as far apart as North Asian and Amerindian, shamans have worn women's clothing and ritually married other men. Akkadian priests of Ishtar dressed like their goddesses, as did Ramarkrishna in nineteenth-century India. A Sanskrit text instructs the devotee to 'disgard the male (purusa) in thee and become a woman (prakriti).' Various tribal rites involve ritual miming, by men, of female menstruation and parturition. . . . (92-93).According to Flaherty, given such primitive practices, "Eighteenth-century European thinkers reasoned that women must have once had more power." These men believed "Male transvestite shamans . . . had to be imitating shamankas so as to co-opt their boundless magic, and their fellow tribesmen accepted that because it served to keep that female magic under male control" (276). The notion of female "power" here is an interesting concept given that the constructions of Woman we are dealing with here link her to abjection, chaos, insanity, disfigurement, and lack of control. In fact, in tribal cultures, Shamanism is defined by physical weakness and mental instability. Flaherty points out, shamans are chosen while very young, and those most likely to be chosen are "delicate and effemininate children, or those who have epilepsy, St. Vitus dance, and other convulsive seizures; in that one believes that such children are already incarnately possessed by the evil spirits and are so transposed and transported during their convulsive seizures" (264). Thus, Levy asserts, "Often the individual selected for the shamanic initiation is marked by some physical or psychological trait that distinguishes him or her from the rest of society"; usually, this trait is "the result of an illness or trauma that makes it difficult for the individual to take on a normal role in tribal society" (54). Further, according to McEvilley, those chosen to be shamans typically "have also been independent, uncontrollable, and eccentric power figures whose careers have often originated in psychotic episodes." Thus, Shamanism is "what anthropolgists call the 'sickness vocation'" (92), and it is clearly gendered female.The male artist employing Shamanic and other such practices in his work has the benefit of "spirituality" on his side: he appropriates the feminine in order to control it for artistic or religious purposes. But woman herself is earthbound, ruled by her biology and not by her own consciousness. The fact is, the unruly, abject, leaky woman as woman has functioned for thousands of years as a symbol of chaos, darkness, mystery, and terror; rather than being a symbol of power, she is "out of control" and must be subjugated to her superiors (men).
As far back as Aristotle, Woman was viewed as "an incomplete or mutilated male," associated with matter and corporeality, while Man was linked to spirit; thus, man ruled the household as "reason and deliberation . . . should rule the appetites" (Merchant 13). We already know that Eve, with her insatiable curiosity, is responsible for the Fall of Man according to the Judeo-Christian tradition, that "there is no wickeness to compare to the wickedness of a woman," and that the womb is one of the four insatiable things on earth. In addition, the apocalypse described in the Book of Revelations is heralded by a woman sitting upon a "scarlet-colored beast, full of names of blasphemy." She carries "a golden cup inher hand full of abominations and filithiness of her fornication: And upon her forehead was a name written, MYSTERY, BABYLON THE GREAT, THE MOTHER OF HARLOTS AND ABOMINATIONS OF THE EARTH." This woman is "drunken with the blood of saints, and with the blood of the martyrs of Jesus," and her fate is to be devoured and burned, "desolate and naked" (15:2, 17:3-18).
Such images have thrived over the centuries. By the 16th century, every physician knew of Woman's "changeable, deceptive, and tricky temperament." Further, "Her womb was like a hungry animal; when not amply fed by sexual intercourse or reproduction, it was likely to wander about her body, overpowering her speech and senses" (Davis 124). Clearly, "The lower ruled the higher withn the woman . . . and if she were given her way, she would want to rule over those above her outside. Her disorderliness led her into the evil arts of witchcraft" (125). By the 17th century, as Gail Kern Paster elaborates, it was well established that Woman's body was leaky, overflowing with excess blood whose flow she was unable to control; further, she was incontinent, wetting herself and fornicating at every opportunity. Since the dawn of recorded history, Woman has been the paragon of Bakhtin's grotesque body: she "is not separted from the rest of the world. [She] is not a closed, completed unit; [she] is unfinished, outgrows [her]self, transgresses [her] own limits" (Qtd in Paster 14).
Given this historical construction of Woman, when a "real woman' (as opposed to a man appropriating the feminine) employs Dionysian/Shamanic/poete maudit ritual and practice in her work, she risks confirming the abject/excessive/out-of-control stereotype that already defines her; even worse, rather than subverting dominant ideologies and shattering phallocentric discourse as the male artist does, she may end up reinforcing the conception of the "feminine" as dark, angry, irrational, and so on. The problem is made even more complex when we note that, lurking beneath Angry Essentialism's roots in the male avant-garde are the powerful forces of nineteenth-century biological determinism and Freudian psychology. Holly Hughes says in Angry Women, "We are the sons and daughters of meat," and "We are barely descended from mud" (Juno and Vale 103), and C. Carr describes Karen Finley as "A raw quaking id tak[ing] the stage," observing that "she's slipped into that primeval ooze . . ." ("Unspeakable" 141). Both statements highlight the nineteenth-century ideologies built into Angry Essentialism. Hobbes claimed that aggression is innate, Darwin attributed human violence to the fact that our nearest evolutionary ancestors are beasts, Freud made us naturally, unconsciously violent, and these men's theories are so deeply entrenched in Western thinking that they have become invisible as social constructs.
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