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six Touching Problems One human being sucking on another’s breast, or one snuggled up to another inbed,areactscontainingmultipleandsignificantmeanings.Likeotherforms of adult–child touch, beliefs about breastfeeding and sharing sleep (or not) have been and continue to be deeply contested in the mainstream United States. In this book I have sought to reveal the ideological and dualistic structure of ideas about adult–child physical contact. Unlike Bernice Hausman, I do not advocate any position on touch; rather, I examine the power-laden context of the various positions. I depend on thinkers like Susan Bordo, who captures the structure of dualistic thinking in the Western tradition. Because touching involves bodies, the mind–body split plays a central role in ideologies of touch. Like Bordo, I don’t consider the body a fundamentally stable, acultural constant against which one might contrast other culturally relative forms. The body, like everything in culture, is always in the grip of cultural practices, as Michel Foucault argues. Indeed, the problem is not cultural repression of the natural instinctual body; there is no “natural” body. Our bodies, and all that is human, are largely made by our culture. Bordo reminds us of the importance of this split, and, implicitly, how ideologies of touch can reinforce more general dualistic patterns. Women are associated with the body, understood to be “instinctual,” spontaneous, wild, and in danger of flying out of control. By contrast, the male as mind or spirit is identified with control and rationality: “Dualism here appears as the 1 • boundaries of touch offspring, the by-product, of the identification of the self with control, an identification . . . lying at the center of Christianity’s ethic of anti-sexuality. The attempt to subdue the spontaneities of the body in the interests of control only succeeds in constituting them as more alien and more powerful, and thus more in need of control.”1 There are multiple meanings to these gendered mind–body associations. Bordo proposes that one is abhorrence for traditional female roles and cultural limitations, and that another springs from a deep fear of “‘the Female,’ with all its more nightmarish archetypal associations of voracious hungers and sexual insatiability.”2 Adolescent anorectics often express a fear of growing up to be mature, sexually developed women. “‘I have a deep fear,’ says one, ‘of having a womanly body, round and fully developed. I want to be tight and muscular and thin.’” Another anorectic believes that if she could only stay thin, she would “‘never have to deal with having a woman’s body.’” She claims, “‘[L]ike Peter Pan I could stay a child forever.’” Bordo writes, “The choice of Peter Pan is telling here—what she means is, stay a boy forever.”3 Inmind–bodydualisticthinking,thebodyisnotmerelyevil.Asourculture has romanticized the so-called primitive person-as-body in stories of the “noble savage,” we have also romanticized the female-as-body. In the mind–body dualism, on the one hand, the “bad” female body is understood to be out-ofcontrol animalistic sexuality, while the “good” (but still animalistic) female body is the instinctual mother. Feminist scholars have dubbed this opposition within the mind–body dualism “madonna–whore.” Women may be good, mothering, nurturing bodies or bad, excessively sexual, out-of-control bodies. In this projection, there is no room to be fully complex human beings. Indeed, women are understood to be all that men are not: Good women are virtuous, nurturing mother figures. Bad women are out-of-control, sexual “sluts.”4 There are many ironies in binary thought. One surrounds women’s labor. Women are belittled for putting their children in day care, yet there is almost no social assistance to help women (or men) stay home with their children. If nonaffluent women stay home with their children and use the very limited —at this point, almost nonexistent—resources of welfare, they are called lazy welfare mothers. If they go to work, chances are very good that one job will not cover their living expenses and, further, they are considered selfish for leaving their children in someone else’s care. In fact, the very work women often do as home workers—service work, including sex work, cleaning, child care, and cooking and serving food—is considered good and a “labor of love” unless they get paid for it. When women get paid for such labor, they are often looked down upon for doing something “dirty” or “lowly.” [3.144.212.145] Project MUSE (2024-04-23 07:36 GMT...

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