Mistress Judith (was Re: Butler on Spivak)

kelley oudies at flash.net
Mon Nov 22 07:10:40 PST 1999


At 09:20 AM 11/22/1999 -0800, you wrote:
>kelley wrote:
>
>> P.S. The NYT Magazine article on Nussbaum says that Mistress Martha played
>> Robespierre in her high-school drama club performance ("a five-act,
>> French-language production, no less). Judging by her photo in the article,
>> I believe she must have made a dashing & cruelly seductive Robespierre.
>>
>> <
>>
>> no doubt. however, it's unfortunate that an aging woman feels she must
>> [apparently] work out at the gym several days a week --from the looks of
>> her that is. all very interesting in terms of the regulation and social
>> constitution of the body, no? that is, while it's nice to display a little
>> lesbian eroticism it might also be nice to examine what 'we' are desiring
>> here and if it's such a good thing.
>
>Cardiovascular fitness? Reducing triglycerides in the blood? Lowering
stress?
>Improving blood vessel elasticity? Stimulating fat clearing enzymes in the
>blood? Preventing/reversing artherosclerosis? All particularly
important, it
>would seem, for an "aging woman".
>
>RO
>

and if it escaped your attention, yoshie was displaying lesbian desire --the desire for the beauty of nussbaum's body which was nicely displayed by the camera's gaze. i called her on that because i find it a bit of a problem to do so because "queer" identity itself has an idealized sexiness to it that is no less problematic or potentially damaging than the ones that are upheld for hets.

take a look again. she's holding her book very awkwardly *precisely* so you can see her body [the book is fairly large so that it would obscure her waisting which is cinched up in a belt.. clearly she was professionally photographed with an eye toward representing her in a certain way. and i've no doubt that martha gets a great deal of pleasure from it. i'm not denying that this can be good. however, as i've noted you don't have to have a scupted body as she does in order to be physically fit. it depends on what kinds of things you're doing to keep physically fit, no?

so give me a flaming break. every time we talk about representations of women's bodies on this list the men freak out with all this "oh it's all natural and individual" blah blah blah. yoshie and i are *trying* to have a discussion of the ways in which the idealized images of bodies consitute us historically. and, in that sense, it is a *very* marxist approach.

to call for some sort of "naturalness" to it all is just as problematic as the claim that the capitalist organization of the economy is *natural* because people are naturally competitive, greedy, selfish. yeah, maybe we "need" physical fitness. but the range of possibilities for what is consdiered desirable and what constitutes health is wide open and extremely * political*

kelley


>> kelley
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>> <<<
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