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Credits: Riikka Hyvönen

Bruises: a gendered and age-specific body injury

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When it comes to bruises on a woman’s body, almost a unanimous assumption is quickly made and it usually involves domestic violence. Why does the conclusion of a woman being abused suddenly prevail, when an adult woman has a bruise on her body?

The western understanding of a woman’s body is – alongside with its reproductive power – also built around its aesthetic (decorative) and mobile (inactive) nature. It is expected for a girl to be pretty and a woman to be attractive, so to stay pretty/beautiful, a girl/woman should not engage in activities (sports mostly) that could ‘ruin’ her appearances. Bruises ruin skin to a degree of transforming skin colour from natural to ‘unnatural’ – blue, green, violet, yellowish. But most of all, they bluntly expose the fragility and mortality of the human body.

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Credits: Miniature of witches being burnt and tortured [France, 13th century]

Medieval witches and the contemporary reluctance for their rehabilitation

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Not so long ago, I came across an information about a monument in Norway, dedicated to women, who were executed as witches. This is a novel idea and a historic game changer for understanding witch-hunts and trials as a massive pogrom of women.

Some sources say that there were more than five (!) millions women sentenced to death by hanging, burning at stakes or drowning.

Why these numbers are vague and why there hasn’t been a worldwide rehabilitation of women killed, the answer is obvious – it is the gender of victims. Witch-hunts and trails were gender-related and gender-based, but most important is the fact that it was a case of an intentional gendered violence against women, accused by fabricated allegations of being ”witches” and prosecuted as such.

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Foto credit: Miramax Films
Credits: Miramax Films

Clara, Ferula and Pancha: the Othered femininities in The House of the Spirits

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Recently, I rewatched the film The House of the Spirits (1993, d.: Bille August), not all the way through, but long enough to spot three types of Othered femininities in it.

Femininity is something that I, women or persons, who identify as women, do every day by embodying the cultural script of gender(ed) expectations and norms; how to look, behave, feel, think, what to expect from a society and what society expects from us. The cultural script of what femininity is, modifies historically (i.e. through time in the society) and biographically (i.e. through time in an individual life), producing an array of femininities, differing themselves on the basis of intersecting gender expression, sexual identity, skin colour, ethnicity, class (social, economic, cultural capital), religious background, age, body ability etc. An individual femininity is therefore a cumulation of different social positions, for example: androgynous, bisexual second generation Asian woman, living in Germany, originating from lower middle class with M.A. degree.

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Credits: Warner Bros

Magic Mike XXL: the non-Othering of sex work, fluid masculinities and women’s pleasures

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Positive representations are of great importance when mainstream media portrayals about sex work, gender transgression or pleasures are encoded as ‘bad’, not ‘normal’, Othered and hence ridiculed or sidelined in the film narrative.

However, this is not how the story goes in Magic Mike XXL (MM XXL). MM XXL (2015, d.: Gregory Jacobs) is build around male sex work (i.e. stripping), masculinity as a fluid concept and women as central guilt- and shame-free pleasure seekers with spending power.

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Credits: Julia Randall

Abjection – feeling appalled and appealed at the same time

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Julia Kristeva‘s concept of abjection includes everything that is identified as Other in a dominant western cultural context: unrepresentable, archaic, primary, pre-linguistic, semiotic, unclean, ambiguous, maternal. What is defined as abject, does not respect borders, positions, rules and by this, it disturbs system or order by making it unstable.

The abject can be experienced in three different ways: (1) as dirt (i.e. corporeal changes and their climax – death, (2) in sexual difference (i.e. the female/feminine body and incest) and (3) by food taboos or repulsion. All those pillars of abjection represent the border or ritualised beginning of culture (i.e. order, civilisation, system, logic, masculinity) from nature (i.e. chaos, darkness, devouring, maternal, emotions).

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Credits: Jeff Thompson (rt)

The Other that matters

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Other = somebody who is not Me/Us and do not belong to the dominant or privileged group and is being oppressed discursively, materially and symbolically.

Somebody is Othered by not belonging to a certain gender (hegemonic masculinity), gender identity (cisgender), sex (cissexual), sexual orientation (heterosexual), skin colour (white), class or social+economic+cultural capital (educated, middle to upper class), age (young for women, middle age for men), citizenship (by birth), physical, sensory, intellectual, mental, emotional and developmental ability (fully functioning body-mind), religion (Christian), geopolitical position (postmodern western society), eating habits (omnivore), lifestyle (capitalistic-consumerist), clothing (age and gender appropriate), family arrangement (heterosexual nuclear family unit), love arrangement (monogamy), marital status (married/in a relationship), emotional standard (discipline, moderation), sex activity (missionary position), body standard (male body), body size (thin for women, muscular for men), speech (without impediment), language (clear, formal), voice (moderate volume, appropriate to the social occasion, sounding adult), physiological preference (sight), dwelling (private home), anthropocentric worldview (man as the epistemological centre) …

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