We are warm in our hidden room down here

Water massages as a treatment for hysteria c. 1860.

Kate: I wrote this partially in response to this blogpost you wrote back in mid-June.

No one worth their salt should be suggesting that to be female means being 'effeminate' or, strictly speaking, 'unreasonable.' But I am not sure in your post you go far enough. I think that any necessary association between 'femininity' as it identifies a class of people and any property, whether it be good or bad, is already misguided -- and I even go as far here as to problematize the equation between bodily anatomy and, not just gender, but physical sex.

And while I agree that no one should force the equation "femininity = unreason" on anyone, I also don't think that the correct response to that is to enforce the claim that "femininity = reason." I guess what I'm saying is that you don't seem to question the normative assertion that unreason is a bad thing. And I actually think that the extent to which our society accords respect to mechanical rationality at the neglect of 'barely-clothed embodiment,' as you call it, is a pervasive tendency which I think is at root of most, if not all, of the worst things about Western society. This is important for feminism because it is important to remember that, while we need to cast off demeaning aspects of feminine stereotypes, we also need to be able to re-evaluate potentially liberatory aspects of those same old categories of femininity.

Example -- my grandmother is dying. She is, in each admittance to the hospital, informed that there is only one specific reason for her maladies -- first it was dangerously low blood pressure, and currently it is a fracture of the third and fourth vertebrae of her neck. They give her surgery, steroids, and Dilaudid. They assess whether she has what her living will calls "a reasonable expectation of recovery," based on the outcome of these treatments. And yet.

My grandmother received a pacemaker two weeks before her neck spontaneously fractured due to osteoporosis. Osteoporosis is a degenerative disease affecting one's entire bone structure. Her living will says that unless there is a reasonable expectation of recovery, she does not want measures employed to rescussitate her, and "artificially prolong the process of her dying." But because it does not specify whether there needs to be reasonable expectation of her recovery generally or from one specific ailment, she continues "living" -- on steroids, in a neck brace, on intravenous Dilaudid, not walking, eating through a tube, for two weeks. She weighs 90 pounds. Her neck brace is gruesome. Her skull has had holes drilled into it and screws inserted because she cannot hold her own head up without her neck fracturing. She has a spine built out of metal, an artificial heart. She is making the hospital huge amounts of money. She is on so many drugs for Parkinson's, anxiety, pain, that she can barely give consent and when she is home and sober she says she wants to die. My grandmother worked as a R.N. in a retirement home for 30 years. She knew then what the elderly go through and was adamant enough about avoiding that scenario that she went to a lawyer and wrote a living will.

That she is still alive is to the immense benefit of her hospital, her rheumatologist, her cardiologist, her neurologist, her multiple surgeons, her pharmacist. It is to the immense benefit of the standing Christian norm of the 'sanctity of life.' The more cattle are alive and calving, the more prosperous the farmer.

That she is still alive is to the detriment of her dignity and, more to the point, her capacity to die a free death. Strict logical analysis of the situation gives us a medical reason to expect her recovery from any one specific ailment, but says nothing of her quality of life generally. Economically it is easy to see why keeping her alive in this state is "the right thing to do." Legally, medically, we have reason explaining how this is true, why this is true, but offering little by way of a justification for whether it is right or wrong. How do we rationally answer the question of whether she would be happier if she were allowed to die? Or the question of whether the hospital wants her to stay alive for the same reasons that we do? It is difficult to use symbolic logic to explain why it is not enough that the material end -- in this case my grandmother's continued existence -- is the same.

April Flakne used to suggest that ethics happens in a sphere where we do not say "A light switch is turned on because of electrical currents," but "A light switch is turned on because I want to see your beautiful face." She did not say it exactly like that, but the highlight of that wanting, what Nietzsche called the will to power, is distinctly bodily. It is important to be able to recover the primeval and creative aspect --the physical aspect -- of thought, and language, to be capable of undoing the damage wrought on this planet when language is capable of calcifying, like steel screws, slowly replacing organic bone, a bone which heaves and disintegrates not because of a malfunction or a failure but because it must disintegrate, it loves disintegration, it craves renewal, not rescussitation. Language can recover the creative and physical potency which I am tracking here, but not if we cling to an idea that persists residually in the assumption that, say, all efforts that seem unreasonable, or all traits that valorize sexuality or the body are inherently going to be oppressive to women. The problem is not solved by making women 'rational.' Reason, whether of God or man, is the guiding force behind white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.

To assert that to aspire to become a beautiful body is necessarily to become oppressed is another essentialism redoubling over the original, problematic one. It cancels out the exact same thing that Sex and the City does. In both cases, language is enforcing only one interpretation and only one. One type of beautiful clothing, as much as one type of death -- is the only type that is beautiful, or the only type of illness from which she may die. The problem is one of hermeneutics. My grandmother's death is not a single fact, but multiple events, each with possible interpretations but no necessary interpretations. Health then incorporates an ethos where the rational individual is not liberated, but submissive -- originally a trait 'enforced' in women, except in this case what is submissive is submissive to that which is greater, if indemonstrable -- to the primeval self-becoming which rational science covers with the mask of Being. That is to say, the mask is submissive to the actor.