#denaturingthebody

[performingwomen2016-blog]

Bustle, New York, NY. 1,326,641 likes · 450,669 talking about this. Redefining Women's Interest

Made me think of this week’s conversation. (DaMonique)

[shiraiharris]

Denaturing the Body (Shira)

Over the past several months, I’ve been doing some pretty extensive research on the new trend of “alternative period protection.”  I have always been slightly troubled by this word “alternative.”  If using pads and/or tampons represents to us becoming the Olympic athletes they show in commercials who use tampax and can still be as feminine as they want while on their periods, is that what we want?  I have never experienced any particular urge to become any more feminine or sexy during my period, though the advertisements that go along with standard products seem to indicate that periods always prevent that.  However, when I look at menstruation and the female body from the Jewish perspective, all explanations indicate that periods are “dirty,” “impure,” and “bad.”  I’ve been wondering how these alternative menstrual products are working to combat period negativity, while also remaining highly feminine in most cases.  I’ve included below a link about the ancient Jewish laws on menstruation and purity.  I don’t know how reliable the website is in general, but it’s explanation of Niddah (menstruation) and ritual purity are accurate.

“Niddah in a Nutshell The Old Testament stipulates a woman is unclean during menstruation, but the Talmud stipulates her period of uncleanness lasts for an additional week after menstruation has ended. Niddah is the word used to denote the menstruating woman and her period of uncleanness. The niddah defiles everyone and everything she touches. She may not have sexual intercourse with her husband. If she does, he is subject to arrest and perhaps the death penalty. Some niddah laws apply to Gentile women, too.”

http://www.come-and-hear.com/editor/america_3.html

[roarleoroar-blog]

Denaturing the Body (Leo)

My thoughts on this are unorganized and under developed, so I decided to share a couple articles (about the best PMS movies) that I thought were ridiculous, funny, and relevant. However, I will try to organize my few thoughts below. And as a disclaimer, I anticipate I’ll be taking a somewhat oppositional position to a few specifics of the arguments and material this week, and that’s mostly to serve as Devil’s advocate and only minutely influenced by some tiny unformed, and uninformed perceptions I have in my head.

First: In response to Haraway’s article I was both nodding my head in agreement and rolling my eyes with a groan. My experience with the reading is as follows: I couldn’t help but feel that Donna Haraway was indirectly representational of those people on Facebook that many of my misinformed, conservative (and all together problematic) acquaintances from home would hate. Arguing that science, as it stands, can not serve as objective truth would seem ridiculous to them, and it did to me as well, when I began reading.  

However, I’ve seen (via Facebook) what a non wavering commitment to science in the face of non normative practices (particularly in race, gender, and sexuality) looks like. And it isn’t pretty. So the need and desire to move away from a reliance on science, as it stands, as a beacon and marker for irrefutable truth and objectiveness was something that I relate to tremendously. However, I’m only saying that in so much as I want that moving away from reliance on science for issues that either affect me directly or that I perceive to be more nuanced than the science pushers make them out to be. But an expectation and norm to use “radical multiplicity of local knowledge” as a substitute or supplement to the objective knowledge science currently offers is worrisome to me. In so much that “local knowledge” - to me- is dependent on environment and those around you. And if there’s anything I’ve learned by growing up in Arizona (in a predominately Mexican - Catholic immigrant community) and then spending 4 years at Columbia is that the language used to speak about things and even more simply the things spoken about are on two monumentally different planes. From the little I know about science and research, I know a big focus is the reproducibility and applicability of results to a general population. For me, that seems impossible with this move to truth because it’s  informed by an aggregate of local knowledge, which at the end of the day is local, and not global. So where does Objectivity come from now? 

Second: In response to Robyn DeLuca’s Ted talk. 

Just from the collection of my “local knowledge” and experience with female friends, I feel like a vast majority of my close female friends experience significant  PMS. So for me, the percentages that were as low as 8% of women experiencing PMS were new and surprising to me. 

But more importantly a lot of my issues with the Ted Talk (in conjunction with Haraway’s reading) is that she’s trying to refute scientific research with more scientific research. And while she did a great job of delineating the differences in older research and more current research, I just can’t help but feel that her presentation of the science and statistics was not 100% objective, because nobody can present science and statistics in a 100% objective way, it just isn’t possible. For instance, the distinction between retrospective and prospective reporting to me was sort of moot because while prospective reporting is better than retrospective, self reporting in general is still not a super reliable way to collect data. 

But beyond the science aspect of it (which I’m not qualified enough to comment on, to be honest). A Ted talk like this worries me in so much that it seems to be trying to sway the current to a more “dispel the myth of PMS” direction. Which, in and of itself, is productive. And I understand, as much as I can as a biological male, that a lot of this sort of argument is a push back against society’s ridiculous depictions and limitations and judgments of women based on menstruation. I can see the need to try and correct the perceived social knowledge from “all women get PMS” to very few do, or at least very few are affected in a way that aligns with representations in media. But the direction this Ted talk seems to be going is a sort of delegitimization of the experience of those women that do experience PMDD in a severe way. And while I think trying to educate the general public on a more nuanced view of PMS and menstruation is never a bad thing, I think this rhetoric - of trying to dismantle the conception and minimize the relevance of PMDD and menstruation when discussing women’s competence (while completely necessary, in most senses) - has a similar influence on young woman (and how they experience, identify, and discuss their experiences with menstruation) as the rhetoric of the irrational, moody, and emotional menstruating female. 

[baebaeron]

The TED talk that Cara posted really struck a chord with me when Robyn Stein DeLuca shared the study that found that men and women both experience mood swings just as often. Growing up with sisters and friends who had periods, I would always hear them blaming any kind of negative emotion they experienced on their periods. This really rubbed off on me.

For nearly my entire adolescence and even into college I experience terrible mood swings that I would always blame on my “man period”. My best friend (who is a cis-gender woman) and I would always joke about how our cycles are sinked whenever my ‘man’ period would match with hers. 

Looking back, I was literally appropriating an excuse that negates women's emotions/mental health to negate my own. Because I never took my mental health seriously, I never sought help until symptoms got much worse. 

The feminization of mental health disorders + society’s ideals of masculinity have such a dramatic effect on whether or not both men and women seek help when it comes to mental health.

[eviezavidow-blog]

Denaturing the Body Response (Evie)

Last class we talked about postmodernism and asked: what is the value of deconstructing norms? I have been sitting with this, thinking about the fact that without putting anything in place of the subjective categories we have made, what really are we doing? Donna Haraway reiterates this in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature when she writes that "Feminists have to insist on a better account of the world; it is not enough to show radical historical contingency and modes of construction for everything. Here, we, as feminists, find ourselves perversely conjoined with the discourse of many practicing scientists, who, when all is said and done, mostly believe they are describing and discovering thins by means of all their constructing and arguing” (187). 

This makes sense when watching the Ted Talk for this week, in which Robyn Stein Deluca makes it clear that PMS is really just a way to invalidate women and more importantly to profit off of them. I remember taking Women and Health with Professor Jordan-Young my Sophomore year. I remember because I am pretty sure it was the most disturbing course I have taken in college career. While prior WGSS courses had worked to deconstruct societal constructions such as gender, sexuality, and race, I had never (literally never in my life) come across the idea that science was constructed as well. It was extremely hard to wrap my head around and honestly slightly traumatic. If I could not trust something seemingly objective like science, what could I trust? How unstable is Trump (no I know he is the actual worst)? Are my professors lying as well? etc.. 

This sentiment, combined with Cara’s posts about the Tuskegee Syphilis experiments and vaccination science turns my own personal discomfort into outright fear. Sometimes I feel so truly scared that my convictions, understandings of the world, and consequent actions are actually extremely harmful. In other words, I often question whether or not how I live my life is actually progressive or am I actually just feeding into complete capitalist and powerful mythology? If I had lived in the past, would I be able to identify the actual horror of certain ‘objective’ practices? 

I think about this a lot especially when I acknowledge what Seyla Benhabib affirms Wendy Brown’s piece “Postmodernism Exposures, Feminist Hesitations”: "After all, the most ardent feminist poststructuralists do not claim that women's pervasive economic subordination, lack of reproductive freedoms, or vulnerability to endemic sexual violence simply evaporates because we cannot fix or circumscribe who or what 'woman' is or what it is that 'she' wants. Certainly gender can be conceived as a marker of power, a maker of subjects, an axis of subordination, without thereby converting into a 'center' of 'selves' understood as foundational” (40). In other words, I could understand that PMS was a myth, but I could not reconcile the myth with the very real fact that I did experienced a heightened sense of emotion, increasing back pain, nausea, and mood swings right before starting my period. I felt like a bad Feminist (not to invoke Roxane Gay) for “experiencing” PMS. 

I see this happen a lot among my WGSS classmates. We spend so much time deconstructing everything that sometimes our lived reality gets neglected in the process. Now that have the tools to break down what we are given, what do we do about the fact that it is, in fact, what we’ve got? That being said, I really like the phrase and idea of a “Successor Science Project” and am excited to explore this further with the class. 

[performingwomen2016-blog]

Studies have shown there is no link between autism and any vaccine or vaccine ingredient.

Denaturing the Body: Primary Curation