Taking a Stand in a Postfeminist World: Toward an Engaged Cultural Criticism

10. Body as Text: Young Women’s Negotiations of Subjectivity

153 10 Body as Text: Young Women’s Negotiations of Subjectivity You sit in darkness, your mind groping blindly to interpret odd sounds coming at you from the direction of the stage: bare footsteps, a rustling crackle, metallic groans and twangs. Then there is silence. Into that black silence a strong female voice asserts itself: I can strip all clothing And I will not be naked I am eternally layered in Saran Wrap I am wrapped in my own assumptions emotions prejudices given circumstances I wear the Saran Wrap of another’s assumptions emotions prejudices given circumstances I am seen through the Saran Wrap of sexist ideology I am preserved molding in Saran Wrap Saran Wrap is manufactured Saran Wrap is the interpretation between my flesh and your eyes My body is a body is a body is a body I breathe I eat I defecate I laugh at my desire to be naked I fear the strength of Saran Wrap I cry I want to be naked1 (© Deanna Scarfe, 1988) The lights come up to reveal this young woman posed for movement like a Greek statue of a young athlete on an inverted metal garbage can. Her healthy stripped body is encased in layers and layers of plastic wrap. She moves, in awkward and jerky struggle, painfully extending in time, as her voice wrenches out versions and repeated versions of the last word of her statement: “N-n-n-n-n-aaaaaaa-ked; N-n-n-n-aaaaaaaa-ked.” In any context, this would be a powerful piece of performance art. It has a particular impact in the actual setting in which it was performed : the theater of a small college community where the audience was composed of her friends, classmates, and teachers. We, in fact, were this student’s academic advisors and professors. We were touched by this exposure by a student we know to have had trouble accepting her body, a young woman with a former eating disorder. And we were overwhelmed by the clarity and effectiveness of this statement by a student we know to have had a paralysis writing academic papers, a paralysis so crippling that it twice prevented her from passing a required freshman writing course. Deanna is one of a dozen or so extremely bright, self-critical female students in whom we have observed this conjunction of a history of eating disorders and severe problems writing academic papers and with whom we discussed their difficulties over a four-tofive -year period in the mid- to late 1980s. These are not students who did poorly on papers they did complete, but rather young women who found the pressure of the paper deadline impossible to meet. Conscientious and bright students, by and large, they were well prepared, capable of complex insights, and sensitive to language . Indeed, they seemed hypersensitive, blocked by their anticipated inability to record their multiple perceptions of a question or issue fully and accurately in academic prose. We are interested in these students’ difficulties, in part, from our perspective as feminist professors and advisors: since anorexia and bulimia occur almost exclusively in women, the conjunction of these eating disorders with disabling writing blocks suggests that we might be observing a writing problem that is particular to female students. Since we have observed that writing difficulties seriously hamper the academic progress of some of the most promising young women, we have felt compelled to interrogate the assumptions of the academy that might produce these difficulties. 154 Taking a Stand in a Postfeminist World The problem that our students present is also of interest to us because much contemporary theorizing assumes or suggests a connection between language and the body. Our knowledge of this theory— especially Foucauldian and French feminist—initially enabled us to recognize the conjunction between our students’ eating patterns and writing difficulties. While some authors (see especially Ellmann, 1993) have explored the metaphorical connections between eating and writing in Western culture, few have focused, as we do here, on the link between refusal or inability to eat and refusal or inability to write. Mark Anderson’s exploration of anorexia and modernism comes closest (1988/89). He notes a surprisingly regular and insistent reliance on images and metaphors of self-starvation in the “increasingly brief, fragmentary, self-consuming, or ‘silent’ texts” of such modernist writers as Hofmannsthal , Kafka, and Melville (Anderson, 1988/89: 29). While the equation of language and...