The Student Body in the Text

Mannequin in the Window
(view from my hotel window in Bruges)

" . . . for whatever else we are or may pretend to be,
we are certainly our bodies" (19).

"To refuse hobbles and deformity
and take possession of your body
and glory in its power, accepting its own laws of loveliness.
To have someting to desire, something to make,
something to achieve,
and at last something genuine to give" (328).

Germaine Greer
from The Female Eunuch

"What would happen
if one woman told the truth about her life?
The world would split open"

Muriel Rukeyser
from the poem "Käthe Kollwitz"

"Men have had every advantage of us in telling their story.
Education has been theirs in so much higher a degree;
the pen has been in their hands."

Jane Austen
from Persuasion

" . . . phallocentrism . . . raises the masculine
to the universal human, beyond gender,
so that the feminine alone
must bear the burden of sexual difference" (163).

Jane Gallop
from Thinking Through the Body
When I gave a paper, "The Student Body in the Text," at the Indiana College English Association Conference, "New Insights for the Nineties" (University of Notre Dame, September 1991), my presentation was preceded by a paper which inadvertently illustrated a number of the problems I was attempting to solve. The paper preceding mine concerned the rhetorical analysis of speeches with some historical or social significance (either as written text or speech act) as a topic for freshman research papers. First, the names of no women appeared in the list of speakers / writers given as exemplary of this tradition (Jesus, Gandhi, Churchill, Nixon, etc.). When asked about this omission, the panelist hastened to explain that indeed many students had chosen female subjects (they were absent,apparently, only from his script, not from the entire tradition).

Second, every successful rendering of the assignment described had been written by a male student. The single example of a "troubled" approach, on the other hand, had been the work of a female student. Again, when questioned, the panelist was quick to say that many of the best results had been produced by female students (it's just that these particular success stories were not mentioned in the script of his conference paper). In his presentation, the female did not bear the burden of sexual difference so much as the burden of struggle and failure to master material in the academic setting -- as well as failure to produce material worthy of study.

I couldn't help thinking of how the term co-ed is impossibly gendered, despite it's implication of balance and equity. On my permanent taboo list, this unfortunate word (kind of like co - pilot: are they equal or not?) should point to an integrated student body, men and women educated together; but instead co-ed, the word -- and co-eds themselves -- "must bear the burden of sexual difference," often in a belittling (old - fashioned girls in sweater sets) or insulting (irresponsible party girls) way.

Similarly, "Women's Studies." Intended to signal enlightenment and equality, it is just as likely to make the history and literature of women bear the burden of sexual difference. Insead of highlighting, it marginalizes, implying that these gender studies are secondary to the real, universal studies, that women's literature is a subsidiary of the real, universal literature written by men. How about adding more novels by women to the curriculum without singling them out and calling them "women's fiction." Like "doctor" (male, universal) and "nurse" (female) -- "nurse" must bear the burden of sexual difference. Hopefully the days of specifying "female doctor" (and I don't mean gynecolgist) and "male nurse" (a la Greg in Meet the Parents) are coming to an end as both professions welcome both men and women.

Gallop's observation of raising "the masculine to the universal human, beyond gender, so that the feminine alone must bear the burden of sexual difference" occurs in her discussion of pink for girl babies / blue for boy babies:

"If blue, outside the infantile realm, is no longer a particularly masculine color, might not that relate to the phallocentrism which in our culture (as well as in most if not all others) raises the masculine to the universal human, beyond gender, so that the feminine alone must bear the burden of sexual difference? Pink then becomes the color of sexual difference, carrying alone within it the diacritical distinction pink / blue. Sexual difference itself becomes feminine" (163).

Disclaimer: I have to say that my husband and sons -- Renaissance Men, to be sure -- have never shied away from wearing the color pink. With a little help from Mom, Lands' End, and Brooks Brothers, the fashion world urges us a step forward in sharing the burden of sexual difference. A baby step.

Spring 2008 ~ Gerry (far right) wearing pink silk tie
with (l to r) Provost, CFO, and President of Purdue University

Spring 2009 ~ My Funny Valentines

RELATED POSTS:
Try to See It, Try to Feel It: The Body in the Text ~ Part 1
Try to See It, Try to Feel It: The Body in the Text ~ Part 2

Throwback Letter to Editor
Too Beautiful to Go on a Diet
Weighing In
The Fire Was Hot Within Here

"Right to Life" by Marge Piercy

Right To Life

A woman is not a pear tree
thrusting her fruit in mindless fecundity
into the world. Even pear trees bear
heavily in one year and rest and grow the next.
An orchid gone wild drops few warm rotting
fruit in the grass but the trees stretch
high and wiry gifting the birds forty
feet up among inch long thorns
broken atavistically from the smooth wood.

A woman is not a basket you place
your buns in to keep them warm. Not a brood
hen you can slip duck eggs under.
Not the purse holding the coins of your
descendants till you spend them in wars.
Not a bank where your genes gather interest
and interesting mutations in the tainted
rain, any more than you are.

You plant corn and you harvest
it to eat or sell. You put the lamb
in the pasture to fatten and haul it in
to butcher for chops. You slice
the mountain in two for a road and gouge
the high plains for coal and the waters
run muddy for miles and years.
Fish die but you do not call them yours
unless you wished to eat them.

Now you legislate mineral rights in a woman.
You lay claim to her pastures for grazing,
fields for growing babies like iceberg
lettuce. You value children so dearly
that none ever go hungry, none weep
with no one to tend them when mothers
work, none lack fresh fruit,
none chew lead or cough to death and your
orphanages are empty. Every noon the best
restaurants serve poor children steaks.

At this moment at nine o'clock a partera
is performing a table top abortion on an
unwed mother in Texas who can't get Medicaid
any longer. In five days she will die
of tetanus and her little daughter will cry
and be taken away. Next door a husband
and wife are sticking pins in the son
they did not want. They will explain
for hours how wicked he is,
how he wants discipline.

We are all born of woman, in the rose
of the womb we suckled our mother's blood
and every baby born has a right to love
like a seedling to sun. Every baby born
unloved, unwanted, is a bill that will come
due in twenty years with interest, an anger
that must find a target, a pain that will
beget pain. A decade downstream a child
screams, a woman falls, a synagogue is torched,
a firing squad is summoned, a button
is pushed and the world burns.

I will choose what enters me, what becomes
flesh of my flesh. Without choice, no politics,
no ethics lives. I am not your cornfield,
not your uranium mine, not your calf
for fattening, not your cow for milking.
You may not use me as your factory.
Priests and legislators do not hold
shares in my womb or my mind.
This is my body. If I give it to you
I want it back. My life
is a non-negotiable demand.

by Marge Piercy (b. 1936)
American poet, novelist, social activist
from The Moon Is Always Female
(copyright by Marge Piercy; published by Alfred A. Knopf)

Brush and ink drawing
from "Studies of Flowers & Animals"
by Shen Cou, 1494, Ming Dynasty

"She leaves" by Marge Piercy

Love Your Body Poster Contest
Grand Prize Winner, 2005
designed by Diana Fabre of Canton, Ohio
As you know there's nothing I love better than a literary coincidence; and who doesn't love finding something that's been lost for ages?! So I was doubly delighted on my birthday (two weeks ago today), when my friend Katy gave me a poster, featuring the above design by Diane Fabre and the following lines from Marge Piercy's poem "Right to Life":

"I will choose . . .
what enters me,
what becomes flesh of my flesh.
Without choice,
no politics, no ethics lives.
I am not your cornfield,
not your uranium mine,
not your calf for fattening,
not your cow for milking.
You may not use me as your factory.
Priests and legislators
do not hold shares
in my womb or my mind.
This is my body.
If I give it to you I want it back.
My life is a non-negotiable demand."

(copyright by Marge Piercy;
published by Alfred A. Knopf)

The words of this poem were new to me; however, they rang a bell of familiarity in my mind. What was it I could hear? Click! Something in the tone, the imagery, made me think of "She leaves," the poem whose author I have been in search of for such a long time. Click!

Over the years, I have googled so many names, so many keywords, with no result. But this year, on my birthday, something clicked! I tried "Marge Piercy" along with the title . . . and . . . yes! Success at last!

Thanks Katy! ~ for some of the best birthday presents ever: an inspiring anthology entitled Click: When We Knew We Were Feminists, a "Trust Women" button, a bold, beautiful poster by Diana Fabre, and -- at long last! -- a rewarding solution to the protracted mystery of who wrote one of my all-time favorite poems.************************
Here's a repeat of my post from awhile back, about the poem "She leaves" which -- as I now know -- is by Marge Piercy and can be found in her book To Be Of Use (copyright by Marge Piercy; published by Doubleday):

Save Your Own Life
Wednesday, November 25, 2009

And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.
--Anais Nin (1903– 1977)
French / Cuban author, journal writer

Twenty - five years ago, I copied a couple of poems -- "She leaves" and "The Journey" -- into one of my special notebooks. The timely message of these poems spoke to my past experiences with painful accuracy. It was a big breakthrough for me to realize that I had to save my own life, that no one else could to do it for me. I have long admired the wisdom of these two authors and have tried to hold their insights in my heart. Re-reading the poems slowly and carefully has shown me how applicable they are to making any kind of life - changing transition, to cutting free from any kind of overly binding connection, bad romantic liaison or otherwise.

Strangely, however, I neglected to include the author's name on my photocopy of "She leaves," then also failed to write it in by hand. No, it's not like me to lose track of a source like this, but somehow it happened. So for the past two decades, I've been trying to recall who wrote this poem and what book I found it in. I have searched through every poetry book I own and typed in every google search I can think of, but no luck yet. If anyone can think of any way to track it down -- or better yet, if you recognize this poem and know who wrote it -- please advise. It must be out there somewhere!

POEM ONE: She leaves

Someone you fell in love with
when you were virgin and succulent,
soft and sticky in strong hands.

How you twined over him, rampant
and flowing, a trumpet vine.
How you flourished in the warm weather
and died down to your roots
in the cold, when that regularly came.

Then slowly you began to discover
you might grown on your own spine.
You might dare to make wood.

What a damp persistent guilt come down
from ceasing to need.
Every day you fight free,
every morning you wake tied
with that gossamer web,
bound to him sleeping with open
vulnerable face and closed eyes
stuck to your side.

You meet others open while awake:
you leap to them. The pain
in his face trips you.
You serve him platters of cold gratitude.
They poison you and he thrives.

What a long soft dying this is between you.
Drown that whining guilt
in laughter and polemics. You were trained
like a dog in obedience school
and you served for years in bed, kitchen, laundry room.
You loved him as his mother always told him
he deserved to be loved.
Now love yourself.

BY? AUTHOR'S NAME? HELP?


POEM TWO: The Journey

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice--
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
"Mend my life!"
each voice cried.
But you didn't stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do--
determined to save
the only life you could save.

Poem found in Dream Work, 38 - 39
By Mary Oliver (b 1935)
Contemporary American Poet
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, 1984

Along the same lines as the poems above, Germaine Greer writes, "Such counsel [to break free from the "million Lilliputian threads" of a bad relationship] will be called encouragement of irresponsibility, but the woman who accepts a way of life which she has not knowingly chosen, acting out a series of contingencies falsely presented as destiny, is truly irresponsible. To abdicate one's own moral understanding, to tolerate crimes against humanity, to leave everything to someone else . . . is the only irresponsibility. To deny that a mistake has been made when its results are chaos visible and tangible on all sides, that is irresponsibility. What oppression lays upon us is not responsibility but guilt."

from The Female Eunuch (1970), 9 - 10
by Germaine Greer (born 29 January 1939)
Australian - born feminist writer and scholar

Save Your Own Life

And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.
--Anais Nin (1903– 1977)
French / Cuban author, journal writer

Twenty - five years ago, I copied a couple of poems -- "She leaves" and "The Journey" -- into one of my special notebooks. The timely message of these poems spoke to my past experiences with painful accuracy. It was a big breakthrough for me to realize that I had to save my own life, that no one else could to do it for me. I have long admired the wisdom of these two authors and have tried to hold their insights in my heart. Re-reading the poems slowly and carefully has shown me how applicable they are to making any kind of life - changing transition, to cutting free from any kind of overly binding connection, bad romantic liaison or otherwise.

Strangely, however, I neglected to include the author's name on my photocopy of "She leaves," then also failed to write it in by hand. No, it's not like me to lose track of a source like this, but somehow it happened. So for the past two decades, I've been trying to recall who wrote this poem and what book I found it in. I have searched through every poetry book I own and typed in every google search I can think of, but no luck yet. If anyone can think of any way to track it down -- or better yet, if you recognize this poem and know who wrote it -- please advise. It must be out there somewhere!

POEM ONE: She leaves

Someone you fell in love with
when you were virgin and succulent,
soft and sticky in strong hands.

How you twined over him, rampant
and flowing, a trumpet vine.
How you flourished in the warm weather
and died down to your roots
in the cold, when that regularly came.

Then slowly you began to discover
you might grown on your own spine.
You might dare to make wood.

What a damp persistent guilt come down
from ceasing to need.
Every day you fight free,
every morning you wake tied
with that gossamer web,
bound to him sleeping with open
vulnerable face and closed eyes
stuck to your side.

You meet others open while awake:
you leap to them. The pain
in his face trips you.
You serve him platters of cold gratitude.
They poison you and he thrives.

What a long soft dying this is between you.
Drown that whining guilt
in laughter and polemics. You were trained
like a dog in obedience school
and you served for years in bed, kitchen, laundry room.
You loved him as his mother always told him
he deserved to be loved.
Now love yourself.

BY? AUTHOR'S NAME? HELP?


POEM TWO: The Journey

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice--
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
"Mend my life!"
each voice cried.
But you didn't stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do--
determined to save
the only life you could save.

Poem found in Dream Work, 38 - 39
By Mary Oliver (b 1935)
Contemporary American Poet
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, 1984

Along the same lines as the poems above, Germaine Greer writes, "Such counsel [to break free from the "million Lilliputian threads" of a bad relationship] will be called encouragement of irresponsibility, but the woman who accepts a way of life which she has not knowingly chosen, acting out a series of contingencies falsely presented as destiny, is truly irresponsible. To abdicate one's own moral understanding, to tolerate crimes against humanity, to leave everything to someone else . . . is the only irresponsibility. To deny that a mistake has been made when its results are chaos visible and tangible on all sides, that is irresponsibility. What oppression lays upon us is not responsibility but guilt."

from The Female Eunuch (1970), 9 - 10
by Germaine Greer (born 29 January 1939)
Australian - born feminist writer and scholar