Thursday, July 30, 2009
Monday, July 20, 2009
----- pill
What is my body?
The obvious answer is that it can be many things- chronology, history, conformism, subversion, doubt, pain, joy, comfort, pleasure, ill, sacred, desirable,ugly - but most of all i feel it is threatening.
Threatening for different people at different points of time. For myself and my own image as " one of the boys", eventually my worried grandmother who didn't think i looked as nice as other girls my age, finally for the rest of the world for now i am a sexualized, untamed, reproductive body capable of wrecking havoc on everything thatmakes up the 'natural'.
So much power in the hands of a 'hysterical' human being the society understands as its own undoing. So grandmothers censure, fathers surveill,mothers blackmail emotinally and mostly everyone also plays each others part. But there are also mechanisms that sit you down, give you cold glass of water and then begin in soft, steady, subdued and menacing tones about how a decision to pleasure your body outside permissible limits is criminal/hallucinatory because outside of them the body IS not supposed to exist. for instance the 'friend of the liberated woman' the I-pill advertisements. first things first- thank heaven there is an emergency contraceptive and that people are being informed about it, that women have slightly more agency over their bodies and they can be less tense about physical intimacy with men, also save themselves from the harassment of a hair raisingly painful medical procedure(either way) and unnecessary societal curiosity.
NONE of the advertisements however talk of anything other than the kind of condemnation a woman can and by extension naturally ought to face in pregnancy outside of marriage. not once is the language of a woman's control on her body and therefore her sexuality foregrounded over images of nervous looking young girls or older women reprimanding irresponsible behaviour in hushed tones.
The fear of the woman is never characterized by that of the body but by that of the conscience. The all encompassing megalomaniacal conscience which assigns responsibilities to everything it coopts. The woman to be the preserver of an order that actively makes her into a fetishized sex cum morals cum 'career' crazed quick mix, the men to partake (along with women) of the delicacy and even the I-pill to march over to its side as not the beneficiary of subversionists but a 'well meaning "let me set you right" whip on the back "never to do it again" gesture from the socio-smiths.
But like my body, the pill too can be many things. Just if the way it is sent out could reclaim the 'I'.
The obvious answer is that it can be many things- chronology, history, conformism, subversion, doubt, pain, joy, comfort, pleasure, ill, sacred, desirable,ugly - but most of all i feel it is threatening.
Threatening for different people at different points of time. For myself and my own image as " one of the boys", eventually my worried grandmother who didn't think i looked as nice as other girls my age, finally for the rest of the world for now i am a sexualized, untamed, reproductive body capable of wrecking havoc on everything thatmakes up the 'natural'.
So much power in the hands of a 'hysterical' human being the society understands as its own undoing. So grandmothers censure, fathers surveill,mothers blackmail emotinally and mostly everyone also plays each others part. But there are also mechanisms that sit you down, give you cold glass of water and then begin in soft, steady, subdued and menacing tones about how a decision to pleasure your body outside permissible limits is criminal/hallucinatory because outside of them the body IS not supposed to exist. for instance the 'friend of the liberated woman' the I-pill advertisements. first things first- thank heaven there is an emergency contraceptive and that people are being informed about it, that women have slightly more agency over their bodies and they can be less tense about physical intimacy with men, also save themselves from the harassment of a hair raisingly painful medical procedure(either way) and unnecessary societal curiosity.
NONE of the advertisements however talk of anything other than the kind of condemnation a woman can and by extension naturally ought to face in pregnancy outside of marriage. not once is the language of a woman's control on her body and therefore her sexuality foregrounded over images of nervous looking young girls or older women reprimanding irresponsible behaviour in hushed tones.
The fear of the woman is never characterized by that of the body but by that of the conscience. The all encompassing megalomaniacal conscience which assigns responsibilities to everything it coopts. The woman to be the preserver of an order that actively makes her into a fetishized sex cum morals cum 'career' crazed quick mix, the men to partake (along with women) of the delicacy and even the I-pill to march over to its side as not the beneficiary of subversionists but a 'well meaning "let me set you right" whip on the back "never to do it again" gesture from the socio-smiths.
But like my body, the pill too can be many things. Just if the way it is sent out could reclaim the 'I'.
Tuesday, July 14, 2009
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