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Body & Society

DOI: 10.1177/1357034X020080020042002; 8; 55Body Society

VALRIE FOURNIERFleshing out Gender: Crafting Gender Identity on Women's Bodies

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Fleshing out Gender: Crafting GenderIdentity on Womens Bodies

VALRIE FOURNIER

U nto the w oman he said, I w ill greatly multiply thy pain and thy travail; in pain thou shalt bringforth children. (G enesis 3:16)

The idea that w omens destiny is to suffer, an unfortunate fate to w hich they are

doomed by their weak bodies (and minds), has a long history in medical, Chris-

tian and popular discourses, and has been captured by various representations of

w omens bodies as sick or in pain (e.g. the image of Mary as suffering mother, the

fi gure of the hysterical woman, the translation of menopause, menstruation, P MS,

and more recently cellulite and fat, into womens pathologies). In these represen-tations, w omen emerge as w alking w ounded, [displaying their] injuries during

menstruation, [confi rming] them during childb irth (G ay, 1984: 172).

And indeed, there seems to be something [that] hurts about being woman

(Wolf, 1990: 219). The juxtaposition of women and pain in the images above has

some resonance in womens own experiences and accounts of their bodies.

Women experience more pain and non-life-threatening illnesses than men

(Finkler, 1994), a propensity which has been attributed, at various times, to their

weak biological constitution, their reproductive function, or the un-masculinityof sickness and pain. Alternatively, w omens pain can be seen as the expression of

the body making anger (Finkler, 1994) as it is caught in social and mo ral cont ra-

dictions. Finkler draws upon the phenomenological notion of embodiment to

locate the bod y w ithin netw orks of social, moral and cultural orders, and to argue

that contradictions within the social are lived in the body and are marked on

bodies as life-lesions. Although the exact nature of these contradictions depends

on social contexts, Finkler argues that women are more likely to be caught in

Body & Society 2002 SAG E Publications (London, Thousand O aks and N ew D elhi),Vol. 8(2): 5577

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these contradictions and to be scarred by life lesions.1 Swann (1997) makes a

similar point when she argues that the pain associated with PMS is the expres-

sion o f w omens fear of, and anger at, t heir hardships (material, fi nancial,

emotional). For Sw ann (1997) as for Finkler (1994), w omens pain is the embodi-ment of the contradictions and constraints under which women are placed in

patriarchal systems, the expression o f body anger.

Pain has also been used as a powerful symbolic resource in womens literature

(e.g. Simone de Beauvoir, Maria C ardinal, Alba de C espedes, Marguerite D uras,

Doris Lessing, Sylvia Plath). Pain, here expressed symbolically through nausea,

loss, or a sense of excessive and abject flesh, appears as an overwhelming burden

which comes to shatter the heroines lives and leaves them with nothing but its

debilitat ing presence.In this article, I draw upon the (symbolic) connections between woman and

pain in order to apprehend an embodied or carnal sense of womanhood. In

particular, I use the notion of pain to w eave together tw o themes in feminist litera-

ture: the constitution of woman through her effacement, and the inscription of

gender on the body. Since at least de Beauvoirs (1972) Second Sex, feminist

critiques have argued that women become women by being constituted as the

other of the male subject. Women are constituted through their negation (as

subjects) or lack. I am aware that I am taking some liberty in collapsing verydifferent theoretical traditions (from 1970s radical feminism to various brands of

post-structuralist feminism drawing on the work of Derrida e.g. Feder et al.,

1997 or L acan e.g. C ixous and C lment, 1986; I rigaray, 1985; Mitchell and

Rose, 1982). H ow ever, notw ithstanding some signifi cant theoretical dif ferences,

these feminist critiques concur in seeing the feminine as being produced through

its effacement w ithin the masculine discursive or symbolic order. In the w ords of

Derrida, there is no such thing as a woman (1979, quoted in Feder and Zakin,

1997: 46), woman seems to be the no-thing beyond the text, a nothingness thathas no place in reality (Cornell, 1991). My aim in this article is to explore what it

feels like to be no-thing, and in particular to apprehend the experience of being

effaced in terms of an embod ied sense of being gutted out or eviscerated. I draw

upon the symbolism of pain and violence to talk about effacement as an embodied

experience, in terms of t he presence of pain rather than a lack or absence (of voice

or subjectivity). Thus I w ant to suggest that effacement is done on the bod y, and

is experienced through the body.

And this is the second theme that I draw upon: the inscription of gender onthe body. This literature is largely indebted to the w ork of Foucault (1980, 1981)

in w hich the body emerges as the point w here social regulation and practices of

the self meet, where discipline is inscribed on the self. From a Foucauldian

56 Bo dy and Society Vol. 8 N o. 2

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perspective, the making of the gendered self, or gender identity, is the product of

disciplinary practices of the body that ensure the reproduction o f heterosexuality

as the norm. The body is seen as material that is enrolled in the production of

gender rather than as providing the biological foundat ion for gender differences(Butler, 1993; G rosz, 1994). Sex or gender2 are seen as historically and culturally

contingent achievements produced or made real through inscriptions on the

body. For example, for Butler, sex:

. . . not only functions as a norm, but is part of a regulatory practice that produces the bodies itgoverns, that is, who se regulatory force is made clear as a kind of productive pow er, a pow er to

produce demarcate, circulate, differentiate the bodies it controls. (1993: 1)

From this perspective, the sexed body is produced through various genderedmechanisms, or regulatory practices w hich normalize and mark bodies as male or

female. H ow ever, the body that turns up in this w ork on body inscriptions rarely

turns out to be sentient.3 It is a body that seems to act as the passive recipient or

bearer of inscriptions (Miles, 1998) but never seems to be wounded, pained,

scarred by the inscriptions. In this article, I share the post-structuralist view that

gender is performed, and is performed through inscriptions on the body, but I

want to concentrate on the pain and violence of inscription, and the role of pain

in the making up of gender, or, more particularly, the experience of womanhood.Thus I argue that gendered mechanisms do their w ork o f inscription on w omens

bodies by hurting and injuring, and more specifi cally (to return to the point on

effacement made earlier) by gutting out or emptying o ut.

The argument in the art icle unfo lds in three parts. In the fi rst section, I d evelop

an embodied or carnal account of womens effacement by drawing upon a

material understanding of the self. I propose to analyse the moral project of the

self (Foucault, 1982; R ose, 1989) as one played out in materials. H ow ever, as w ill

be illustrated within the context of work organizations, the materials that countin the making of the self are not equally distributed; in this article I concentrate

on the gendered distribution of self materials and suggest that the self-less-ness

of w omen can be read as immateriality, or as being gutted out of materials. Thus

my aim here is to flesh out the experience of effacement or self-less-ness by

apprehending it in terms of immateriality, an image that evokes both the idea of

w omen being inconsequential or not counting (effaced), and the pain of eviscer-

ation, of being gutted out of materials.4 The second part of the paper delves into

the embodied experience of pain. H ere I draw upon Scarry s (1985) poignantanalysis of the body in pain to explore the immateriality of w omanhood . I draw

connections between the experience of womanhood and Scarrys account of the

experience of pain by discussing both in terms of the annihilation of the self as it

Fleshing out G ender 57



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is engulfed in an abject mass of hurting flesh. The third section also draws upon

Scarry s (1985) w ork and her argument about the reality -conferring function o f

wounded bodies. Following Scarrys arguments, I explore the connections

between womens pain and the substantiation of gender, and suggest thatwounded womens bodies lend their flesh to the idea of gender. In the final

section, I briefly explore some of the implications of delving into the pain for

emancipatory politics.

But before launching into the argument, I would like to make some caveats.

By connecting pain and womanhood, I am not implying that the embodied

experience of pain and evisceration is the essence of womanhood, nor that

womanhood is saturated by pain, nor that women have a monopoly over pain.

As I have already suggested, I take as my po int o f departure the idea that genderidentity is performed (and thus has no essence) through inscriptions on the

body; what I am suggesting in the following discussion is that these inscriptions

do their w ork of gendering by infl icting pain.

Materializing the Subject/De-materializing Woman

If Foucauldian work has analysed the project of the self as central to modern

government, feminist critiq ues have long argued that subjectifi cation is a genderedprocess thro ugh w hich w omen tend to emerge as non-subject, other or object (e.g.

de B eauvoir, 1972; C ixous and C lment, 1986; I rigaray, 1985). After briefl y situ-

ating the self as a modern project, I draw upon Actor Network Theory (Callon,

1986; Latour, 1987) to frame the analysis of subjectivity in terms of materiality

and immateriality.

Subjectificati on: M odernism and the Project of the Self

Foucault (1977, 1982) sees the emergence of the individual self as a historicalproduct embedded within the project of modernity. For Foucault, modernity is

not about the repression of the self, but its constitution as an autonomous and

sovereign subject, free (but responsible) to invent him/herself. The individual,

through techniques of the self, is constituted as an autonomous subject, with a

responsibility, and an interest, in making up him/herself in certain ways (e.g.

healthy, happy, self-actualized). The power of subjectification works by tying

individuals to a sense, a knowledge, of their selves as sovereign agents (Foucault,

1982). D efi ned as free, autonomous and self-determining, individuals are requiredto make something of themselves (Willmott, 1994) by enrolling and appropri-

ating discursive resources that fill them up as subject, or substantiate their

subject-ivity.




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Although there are many different (overlapping and conflicting) sites for

digging out fragments of selfhood, modern organizations their corporate

culturalism, careers and challenges have become a privileged source of materi-

als in the management and constitution of subjectivity (Rose, 1989). As Willmott(1993) notes, work organizations, with their endless promises of status provide

for a sense of ontological security; they of fer ready -made material for t he making

of subjectivity, and free (or rob) the individual of the painful and angst-ridden

burden of freedom.

I will discuss the role of work organizations (and their gendered nature) in

the project of the self shortly, but before I do so, I would like to return to the

idea of making something of oneself, for this alerts us to two aspects of the

project of the self that are central to the present argument. First the somethingsignals the thing-ness or materiality of subjectivity, a point developed in the

next section. Secondly, the something suggests that it is not any thing that can

earn one a self, that some things will count and others will not, and, as I will

argue shortly, the material that counts is distributed along gendered (as well as

many other) lines.

The Materi ality of t he Subject

Actor Network Theory (ANT) (e.g. Callon, 1986; Latour, 1987) shares with thew ork of Foucault an emphasis on the contingent nature of the self. H ow ever, w ith

the not ion o f relational materiality, it also invites us to explore how the relational

becomes inscribed and stabilized in materials. ANT attends to the thing-ness or

materiality of subjectivity by suggesting that social relations and categories (such

as the self) acquire meaning, substance through their enrolment in materials:

Perhaps, then, w hen we look at the social, w e are also looking at t he production of m ateriality.And when we look at materials, we are witnessing the production of the social. (Law and Mol,

1995: 274)

Thus w e can only understand social relations and cat egories (e.g. the men/w omen

binary ) by exploring how materials and technologies get mobilized, enrolled into

the social fabric (Latour, 1991).

ANT also suggests that it is not just the bits of materials in themselves that

provide substance, meaning and durability to the social, but the relations betw een

these bits of materials (Law and Mol, 1995). Things, human or not (e.g. self,

technology), dualisms (e.g. human/technical, subject/object, male/female,

nature/culture) acquire their existence and qualities through their connectionsto other things, through their relationships and embeddedness in netw orks.

This emphasis on assemblage, connection and materials has some important

implications for our understanding of subjectivity. In ANT, the self becomes a




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relational and material phenomenon, an assemblage of materials, a thing that

emerges and acquires its substance through its connections with other things:

A subject is a heterogeneous assemblage of materials and textuality spread across diverse and

(in some parts) nonlocalizable netw orks and fl ow s. It is an ongoing pro ject in perpetual flux andcontinuous variation. (Lee and Brown, 1994: 786)

To draw upon a much used example in ANT (Latour, 1988), Pasteur becomes a

successful scientist through his enrolment in bits and pieces of texts and materials

such as bacteria, laboratory, laboratory assistants, farms and farmers; Pasteur the

scientist is an ordered network of materials, a relational effect (Law and Mol, 1995).

Thus the self is made up, or constituted through inscriptions in materials, it is not

an inherent property but an achievement, one that, in modernity, has also become

a moral project. The contingent or relational nature of the social, of the self is of

course a point which has been made long before ANT, and, as discussed earlier, is

central to the work of Foucault. However, ANT shows how these relations are

played no t o nly in the social but also in the material. Thus, from an AN T perspec-

tive, w e can redefi ne the project of the self in terms of literally making something

of oneself, a project that is achieved by enrolling oneself into materials.

H ow ever, not all materials make for equal durability or substant iation of the

self. Some materials may provide more substance, more fi lling in the project of

self-fulfi lment than ot hers. For example, although Pasteur w as a father, among

other things, as well as a successful scientist, the materials of his fatherhood do

not carry as much weight as the materials of Pasteur the scientist. Although

Pasteur the father may still be remembered by some of his descendants, Pasteur

the scientist is remembered by many more. The materials that went into the

making of P asteur the scientist seem more enduring, they have more strength and

durability so that Pasteur the scientist travels further (in space and time) than

Pasteur the father. So the point here is that no t all material counts, at least t o t he

same extent, in the making up of the self. Not all material provides as much

substance, visibility and mob ility to the self. This issue abo ut the relative value of

materials in the making up of the self raises questions about access to, and distri-

bution of, materials. Thus not all of us have equal access to the materials that

count, to the resources that can be enrolled in heterogeneous engineering (Law,

1991). While I acknow ledge that the materials that count in the making of subjec-

tivity are distributed according to many lines of social divisions, I concentrate on

the gendered distribution of these resources.The Gendered D istr ibuti on of M aterials

The gendered distribution of materials that count in the making of the self can be

poignantly illustrated within the context of work organizations. As suggested




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earlier, w ork o rganizat ions provide a useful fo cus for they constitute an increas-

ingly privileged site fo r making something of oneself (du G ay, 1996; Fournier,

1998; Miller and Rose, 1995; Willmott, 1994).

Multiple materials come into the making of the self at w ork; for example, time(working long hours), toughness (the ability to take and inflict violence), visi-

bility, business skills, etc. And the gendered distribution of these resources (as

well as the ability to appropriate them as ones own) is a phenomenon that has

been well documented. For example, feminist critiques have long argued that

bureaucratic and professional modes of organizing make their privileged

resources rationality and expert knowledge the preserve of men (Ferguson,

1984; Savage and Witz, 1992; Witz, 1992). Furthermore, there is a vast body of

research on the gendering of skills which suggests that the qualities that womenare seen or made to bring to work (such as dexterity, caring, attractiveness) are

not constructed as skills or performance but simply as the manifestation of

w omen behaving as w omen (Adkins, 1995; Thomas, 1996). Thus w omens cont ri-

bution in organizations is often seen as not counting. For example, as Thomas

(1996) illustrates in the context of academic work, the activities that women are

more likely to perform are made not to count in the making of the successful

academic:

It was accepted that women undertook most of the pastoral work and that this work went

largely unrecognised and unrew arded. (Thomas, 1996: 151)

The possession o f t ime (and the ability to devote it to an organizat ion) has also

become a central resource in the making up of the self at work. The ability to

work long hours has become not only necessary in order to make up for the

increased workload brought about by de-layering, but has also become a test of

commitment to the organization (Collinson and Collinson, 1997). In addition,

G rint and C ase (1998) suggest that t oughness and the ability to take violence havebecome privileged resources in the making up of work subjectivity in contem-

porary management discourses. H ow ever, bo th time and toughness are resources

that seem to be in shorter supply amo ng those marked as w omen. Men can only

be seen to have time for organiz ations by using and appropriating w omens time

at ho me and at w ork (Buswell and Jenkins, 1994). Although the ability to take or

inflict violence is not inherently male it is an attribute that is less likely to be

attributed to women.5 As G rint and C ase (1998) argue, the emphasis on tough-

ness and the ability to take violence is already marked as masculine and can beread as an attempt to return to the times w hen men w ere men. This imagery of

violence and to ughness is also perpetuated through t he language of organizational

fi tness portray ing organizat ions as having to be lean and mean to survive.




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O rganizat ional fi tness is symbolized by employ ees bo dies that are also supposed

to evoke leanness and strength through the display of well-shaped muscles, a

bod y tissue w hich, through the equation of sporting prow ess w ith masculinity, is

more likely to be associated with men (Turner, 1996). What all these examplespoint to is that the materials that count in making something o f oneself at w ork

are more readily available to those marked as men than those marked as

women.6

The I mmaterialit y of Womanhood

I have argued so far that the project of the self is achieved through enrolling

materials that count, and that the distribution of the materials that count in the

making up of the self is gendered. The masculine subject, the person assignedthe male gender, will have easier access to materials that count in the making up

of the self at w ork (e.g. muscles, skills, toughness, time) than the feminine subject.

Thus the masculine subject will be more material, more filled or saturated in

materials that count than the feminine subject. The experience of womanhood

is unfulfi lling, in that it leaves the self empty of materials that count. I f w omen

do not have what it takes to make something of themselves, are they then imma-

terial?

U nfort unately, AN T is of little help in analysing immateriality, that w hich doesnot count. While ANT talks about the power of materials, the durability and

materiality of the powerful, it has little to say about the wretched, the suffering

(Law, 1991; Star, 1991) or w hat I have called the immat erial. So here I leave AN T

to explore the immateriality of (some of) those w ho do not count. In o rder to do

so, I turn to the w ork o f Scarry (1985) to explore the pain of immateriality. Scarry

proposes a similar understanding of the self as ANT; she talks about the making

of the self and of the world as involving a process of extension into material

objects w hich lift us from the mute facts of sentience of the body into t he share-able, social world. We project our body power into the making of material arte-

facts (e.g. glove, telephone), which in turn transform the body (the glove

transforms the power of the hand, the telephone the power of the ear). We create

and transform the self and the world through acts of extension or projection (of

the body into the making of objects) and reciprocation (the objects transform the

self and the world). As in ANT, it is these attachments to materials that extend

the body into the world and give meaning or substance to the self.

H ow ever, if Scarrys understanding of the making of the self is similar toANTs in stressing attachment to materials, she also attends to the severing of

these material attachments, to what I have called the immaterial, in her analysis

of the body in pain. She reads in the body in pain the unmaking of the self and




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of the world; pain is the inversion of making. In the next section, I draw upon

Scarry s (1985) w ork t o explore the immateriality of w omanhood.

The Pain and Violence of Womanhood

My point in t alking about effacement in terms of immateriality, of the gutting out

of materials, in the previous section w as to fl esh out or embod y the experience of

w omanhood, to suggest that to be effaced is not just about being robbed of visi-

bility or of a voice, but also entails being gutted out. This image of gutting out

evokes the pain involved in the making of w omanhood ; and it is to this pain that

I now turn. In order to explore pain, I draw upon Scarrys (1985) work, and use

it as a symbolic framew ork to apprehend the immateriality of w omanhood .

Woman: Emptiness, Excess and the Abj ect

For Scarry (1985) the totality, immediacy and presence of pain in the injured body

enacts a do uble movement: fi rst, it dissolves the self and the w orld, and, second,

it magnifi es the sentience of the body. In pain, the bod y becomes a colossal mass

of fl esh that ensnares the self and the w orld; one becomes at once empty (of a self,

of meaning) and an excess (of flesh), nothing but a mass of hurting flesh. This

contrasting imagery of emptiness and excess is reminiscent of two images oftenencountered in representations of w omen: one as ideational shadow, the other as

embodied excess (Feder and Zakin, 1997: 30). In these representations, woman

is, on the one hand, a tempting ghost that seduces but can only be seen at a

distance, and, on the other, an excess of flesh and body fluids that disgusts and

repels. As feminist critiques drawing on the work of Derrida (e.g. Feder et al.,

1997) or Lacan (e.g. Mitchell and Rose, 1982) suggest, woman emerges as both

lack and excess. In the follow ing discussion I read Scarry s (1985) analysis of pain

as involving three intertwining elements: the experience of emptiness, of excessand of the abject. I use these three elements as a symbolic framework to explore

the immateriality of w omanhood.

Scarry (1985) reads in the body in pain the un-making or empty ing of the self.

Pain ruptures attachment to the world for pain has no external referent; it is

unshareable and makes us retreat to the self-isolation, the mute facts, of the

body. While other stat es of consciousness (feelings, emotions, self) are for some-

thing, or about something that makes us extend outside the boundaries of the

body, pain makes us shrink into the body. Pain is characterized by its over-w helming presence and to tality, it destroys every thing (the w orld, the self):

Pain begins by being not oneself and ends by having eliminated all that is not itself. At first

occurring only as an appalling but limited internal fact, it eventually occupies the entire body




11/24

and spills out into the realm beyond the body, takes over all that is inside and outside, makes

the two obscenely indistinguishable, and systematically destroys anything like language orw orld extension t hat is alien to itself and threatening to its claims. Terrifying for it s narrow ness,

it nevertheless exhausts and displaces all else until it seems to become the single broad and

omnipresent fact o f existence. From no matter w hat perspective pain is approached, its totalityis again and again faced. (Scarry, 1985: 545)

If the self is made through connections with materials that lift us from the

sentience of the body, the unshareability of pain ruptures these attachments to the

world; to have pain is to lose (materials for) ones self, to be emptied of a self.

This sense of emptiness brought about by pain has some vivid resonances w ith

experiences and representations of womanhood. The association between

w omanhood and emptiness is illustrated by D erridas (1979) images of w oman as

seducing ghost, or undecidability (Caputo, 1997). Woman is not undecidablebecause of some essential feminine trait, but because the very constitution of

w omanhood w orks through fracturing the connections that make us into some-

thing, that give us onto logical security .7 The gutting out of materials that count

in the making of the self, like pain, serves to detach womanhood from connec-

tions to networks, attachments to materials that would fill and give substance to,

the self.

This connection between a sense of emptiness and the experience of woman-

hoo d has been vividly captured in w omens art. Fo r example, Sue C harlesw orths

image of an empty dress, hanging from nowhere, suggests a line of contour, a

surface embody ing nothing and connected to no thing. Shermans series of black

and white photographs in the 1970s (U ntitl ed Film Stil l s) depicts herself in

various disguises, scenes, pauses and dresses, all reminiscent of American movies

from the 1950s, and a ll presenting us w ith an abundance of stereoty pical images

of w omans passivity (she does a lot o f w aiting), glamour and fear. These pictures

represent t he emptiness of femininity ; the movement f rom one image only leads

to another image, each endlessly displacing and deferring an elusive real core

or substance (Betterton, 1996). In the series, Sherman and femininity emerge as

a set of images, surface-ness, a masquerade hiding nothing (Krauss, 1993;

Williamson, 1983):

The image suggests that there is a particular kind of femininity in the w oman w e see, w hereas

in fact f emininity is in the image itself, it is the image. (Williamson, 1983: 102)

The masquerade which is conjured up in the series emerges as the condition of

existence of femininity, rather than masking some true essence of femininity, sothat as far as femininity goes, there is nothing but costume (Krauss, 1993: 44).8

H ow ever, if pain brings about a sense of emptiness, the annihilat ion of the self,

gutted out of material that would give it substance, it is also accompanied by the




12/24

overwhelming burden of the body in pain, by a sense of excess of hurting flesh,

the second element in my reading o f Scarry s account o f pain. I n the immediacy

of pain, the w orld and t he self disintegrate into no thingness, all one is left w ith is

the presence of a body that hurts. One becomes trapped in a colossal mass ofhurting flesh falling endlessly down a dark abyss, in which everything one tries

to hold on to, to reach to, t o prevent the fall dissolves.

Again, there are clear connections between the sense of excess of flesh

brought about by pain, and representations of womanhood. The image of

womens bodies as monstrous has a long history in Christian and medical

discourses representing women as excess of flesh to be controlled and confined

within the domestic space (Turner, 1996). This sense of excess can also be traced

in w omens ow n experiences of their body, and is epitomized in anorexic w omentry ing to cut out their excess fl esh (Bord o, 1990; Malson, 1997). The experience

of womanhood as an excess of abject flesh inspiring horror and self-disgust has

been a prominent theme in womens literature (e.g. Plath, 1971), feminist theory

(e.g. Kristeva, 1982) and art (Betterton, 1996; Mulvey, 1991). Again the work of

Cindy Sherman provides a powerful illustration; in U ntit led # 175(1987), the

fetishized surfaces of the female body represented in the 1970s U ntit led Film Stil ls

give way to horror and disgust invoked by hurting flesh and abject fragments of

bodily matter. In these photo graphs, the interior o f the female bod y is projectedas a kind of lining of bodily disgust (Krauss, 1993: 192).

In a series of large colour photographs, Untit led, 19871991, Sherman reconstructs her ownbod y in a monstrous anatomy, made up of the prosthetic parts or else fragments it in a waste of

bodily fl uids, decaying foo d, vomit and slime. . . . Shermans device of using a mirror image of

her face, a fragment of self-identity reflected in a pair of sunglasses, reinforces the horror atseeing a disintegration of the self. (Betterton, 1996: 135)

H ere symbolic strategies of fragmentation, evisceration and dismemberment are

used to evoke the violence, disgust and body saturation of womanhood (Better-ton, 1996). Womanhood is constituted through the sense of excess of flesh, or

corporeal engulfment, a sense that comes from a body that hurts and makes one

shrink or reduce to the fl esh. H ere femininity is not some unrepresented, invisible

otherness but the all too present sense of excess of corporeality (Betterton,

1996), of a body that sticks.

This contrasting imagery of womanhood as, on the one hand, empty of a self

(immaterial) and, on the other, burdened by an excess of flesh, also suggests that

the sentience of the flesh and the making of the self exist in inverse relationship;as Scarry (1985) suggests, pain reduces one to the sentience of the flesh and un-

makes the self. Making something of oneself involves extending into materials

that lift us from the sentience (pain) of the body; or, as vividly expressed by an




13/24

anorexic woman, to get an identity means to strip the flesh: If I didnt have it

[anorexia], if I wasnt thin I wouldnt have an identity. Id just be this big bad

blob (quoted in Malson, 1997: 240).

What is also evoked in these images of excess of fl esh, and w hat forms the thirdelement of pain, is the abject. In pain, the body becomes an enormous vermin

(Scarry, 1985), an abject and enslaving mass which binds to pain and nothing but

pain. It is through the body that one hurts, it is the body that hurts. The body

becomes a loathsome w eight. P ain brings self-hatred, the hatred f or a self tha t has

been engulfed by and reduced to an abject body (Scarry, 1985). The experience of

the body as a repulsive mass is another theme that comes up again and again in

feminist theory and w omens writing (e.g. Plath, 1971; K risteva, 1982). In The Bell

Jar, Sylvia Plath (1963) paints images of the mother figure as cow-like, fat andunattractive, reduced to breeding and feeding children. But it is maybe in the

anorexic fi gure that the repulsion and horror of the (female) fl esh is most vividly

expressed (Malson, 1997):

Who, given the choice, would really opt to menstruate, invite the monthly haemorrhage a

reminder that the body is nothing but a bag of blood, liable to seep or spatter at any moment. . . .O ne day I w ill be thin enough. Just the bones, no disfi guring fl esh, just the pure, clear shape of

me. Bones. That is what we are, after all, what were made of, and everything else is storage,deposit, waste. Strip it away. (Shute, 1992; quoted in Malson, 1997: 239)

In the examples above, the female body, as the body in pain, is experienced as a

vile and leaking bag of blood, a mass of flesh that has to be stripped away.

The foregoing discussion suggests that we could think of gendering as some-

thing involving the distribution of pain and embodiment. The constitution of

woman through her effacement or immateriality (as illustrated earlier with the

discussion of the gendered distribution of the self materials at work) involves a

stripping of materials that count in the making of the self, a process of eviscera-

tion that is done and experienced in the body, and that hurts. By drawing on thesymbolism of pain, I have suggested that becoming woman involves a sense of

being emptied o ut and reduced to a mass of ab ject and seeping fl esh. O f course,

the reduction of woman to bodies has long been recognized and denounced in

feminist theory; images of women as the (sex) objects of the male gaze (e.g.

Zoonen, 1994), or uncont rollable bodies unfi t fo r the rationality of the public

domain (Acker, 1990; Martin , 1989) have been w ell documented. H ow ever, these

images of women as bodies are often used to explore how women (already

assumed to be turned into bodies or sex objects) are subjected to exclusion orsubordination, a focus that ignores the pain and embodied experience of being

reduced to a mass of flesh. It is as if, by a sleight of hand, the pain and the

embodied experience of immateriality the sense of emptiness and body excess




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were made to disappear, or d idnt deserve our at tention. This process of making

the pain disappear is what I explore in the next section.

The Appropriat ion of Pain: The Translati on of Pain i nto AbsenceScarry argues that pain not only destroys the world and the self, but also the

word; pain is unshareable, inexpressible. This then raises questions about the

politics involved in the representation of pain. Scarry draws our attention to the

political consequences of pains inexpressibility by establishing connections

between pain and power: the problem of pain is bound up with the problem of

pow er (1985: 12). The resistance of pain to verbal objectifi cation or represen-

tation not only means that pain will never get as much political visibility as

problems that can be articulated,9 but also that attempts to represent pain oftendraw upon the language of analogy and agency: the agency of the weapon that

serves, or is imagined, to inflict the pain. People often describe pain in terms of

the agency of w eapons; the pain is as if a hammer w as coming dow n on the spine

(Scarry, 1985: 5). The experience of pain becomes translated int o the act ion of the

w eapon; the pain of the spine is represented in terms of the action o f the hammer.

As Scarry notes, this language of agency is a double-edged sw ord for, on the one

hand, it serves to bring forth the pain, to make it visible and hence (possibly) to

elicit support and attention. H ow ever, it also serves to displace the pain andtransfer its power, presence and immediacy to the weapon. It is no longer the

spine that hurts but the hammer that bangs. Thus embodied physical pain

dissolves as its attributes are used to express power. The process of making pain

visible, of re-presenting pain, lifts the pain away from the human body and

attaches its totality, certainty and incontestable reality to something else, to the

weapon that inflicts the pain. Verbal representation serves to translate pain into

the insignia of power, and to deny the suffering body a claim to pain.

To me there is a clear parallel between Scarrys (1985) analysis of the politicaleffects of representing pain thro ugh the language of w eapon and agency, and t he

representation of womens discrimination or oppression in terms of gender

mechanisms, the pow er of patriarchal institutions and ideology. O n the one hand,

talking about gender mechanisms has made womens oppression visible, and has

raised it on the public agenda as a phenomenon calling for attention and action.

O n the other hand, these representations of w omens suffering in terms of

gendered structures and mechanisms (such as, for example, glass ceiling, sexual

harassment, the gendered construction of skills, of organizational cultures andstructures) have eclipsed the embodied experience of suffering, of pain, and lent

the attributes of pain to the pow er of gender machines or men. Thus suffering has

become disembodied and abstracted, unless one imagines a face repeatedly




15/24

smashing into a glass ceiling, or a body shred to pieces as it goes through

gendered mechanisms.

As Scarry (1985) argues in the context of t orture, verbal representations of pain

operate a series of translations and inversions. Thus what at the physical level isthe presence of pain for the tortured and an absence of pain for the torturer

becomes translated into a verbal system of dif ferences which inverts presence and

absence: the absence of pain becomes the presence of w orld , self and pow er; while

the presence of pain becomes an absence of w orld and self. The pain can no longer

be claimed as the sufferers for its translation into power has made it disappear:

Pain is denied as pain and read as power (Scarry, 1985: 45). Kappeler (1997)

makes a similar point when she argues that the translation/representation of

womens oppression in terms of absence involves a violent reframing of theother in terms of lack. Thus the problem of the embodied presence of pain

becomes translated into a problem of absence, of lack (e.g. o f vo ice, self, skills),

a problem that can seemingly be rectified through inclusionary practices such

as issuing invitations to join or giving voice. H ow ever, these inclusionary prac-

tices assume that the problem of oppression is one of exclusion (or absence),

when it may be as appropriately seen as one of inclusion (or painful presence),

inclusion as something small and insignificant, no t co unting (Kappeler, 1997).

I w ill return t o t he problems attached to in-clusionary practices and reachingout to the other in the final section of the article, but first I discuss how the

pain of w omanho od analysed in t his section serves to substantiate, or f lesh out

gender.

Womens Hurting Flesh and the Substantiation of Gender

The position from w hich I started this article is one anchored in post-structural-

ist feminism according to which gender is performed (rather than given), and isperformed through inscriptions on the body (e.g. Butler, 1993). What I have

argued in the article is that this work of inscription hurts. Being constituted as

w oman involves being gutted out of materials, and being immaterial is painful;

following Scarry (1985), I have proposed to apprehend this pain in terms of a

sense of being reduced to nothing but t he body, the sentience of the fl esh. In this

final section, I want to argue that not only does gendering work through pain,

but that pain also serves to substant iate the idea of gender. H ere again, I draw

upon Scarrys (1985) work, and in particular, on her argument concerning thereality-conferring function of the hurting flesh.

Saying that gender is performative is not to say that it is not real; for gender

is made real, is substantiated through material violence and brutality (Feder and




16/24

Zakin, 1997), through, I w ill argue, the w ounding of w omens bodies w hose fl esh

can be drafted into making real the idea of gender.

Although t he (sexed) bod y is not nat ural (or biologically given), it cannot be

reduced to a blueprint of cultural encodings and artefacts, for the body has thepotentiality for sentience, for pain and d eath, even if the ways in which pain and

death are experienced and represented are culturally mediated. As Eve/Evelyn,

the main character in Angela C arters (1982: 50)The Passion of N ew Eve, exclaims

after her/his forced sex-change operation: I am not natural, you know even

though, if you cut me I will bleed.

And it is the ability of the bod y to b leed and to hurt w hen it bleeds that makes

for its reality conferring function (Scarry, 1985). The body, its mass of flesh, its

sentience, pain, bleeding, provides a source of reality. The flesh of the woundedbody has a vivid and compelling reality (the presence, certainty, immediacy and

totality of pain) that can be drafted into the substantiation of ideas. H ow ever, the

hurting fl esh can only lend its reality or materiality to ideas because of its refer-

ential instability (Scarry, 1985); pain has no external referent. U nlike other states

of consciousness, it is not for or about something. The referential instability of

pain, its lack of attachment to anything, means that its reality and totality can be

re-appropriated to give substance to ideas:

Injured bodies are emptied of their meanings and appropriated as containers of other verbal

constructs, in t he process the pain is also appropria ted. (Scarry, 1985: 139)

Injuring provides, by its massive opening of human bod ies, a w ay of connect-

ing disembodied beliefs or ideas with the force and power of the material world

(the flesh). Substantiation or making real involves the disassemblage and re-

assemblage of bodies and ideas; injured bodies are emptied of meaning (severed

of connections to materials that would fill in the self with meaning) and juxta-

posed to beliefs or ideas to lend them materiality. Juxtaposing a wounded bodywith an idea bestows the force of the material world on the ideational:

The body tends to be brought fo rw ard in its most extreme and absolute form only on behalf ofa cultural artefact or symbo lic fragment . . . that is w ithout any other basis in material reality:

that is, it is only brought forward when there is a crisis in substantiation. (1985: 127)

Similarly, the cultural construction of gender needs to be grounded or sedi-

mented in material reality, and I suggest that it is substantiated by being crafted

on womens hurting flesh. So gender is inscribed on womens bodies but it can

only be crafted onto womens bodies through injuring, through pain, throughemptying these bodies of meanings. As Scarrys quote above suggests, it is empty

bodies that act as containers of ideas, bod ies that have been eviscerated, or severed

from connections or att achments to materials that give meanings to the self. I t is




17/24

through its prior injuring (and pain) that the womans body can act as the

container of the idea of gender. So not only does womanhood hurt, but womens

pain and hurting fl esh also gets enrolled in the (re)production of gender. May be

we could think about gendering as a process of mass production (Cooper, 1995),a production of mass of fl esh that lends its weight to the idea of gender. G ender-

ing, like mass production, involves a process of disassembling (emptying or

gutting out the body of material that counts in the project of the self; detaching

the pain from the body) and re-assembling materials (attaching the flesh of the

hurting body to the idea of gender).

By talking about the making up of gender out of w omens scarred bodies and

hurting fl esh, I am not suggesting that pain forms the essence of w omanhood, for,

as I suggested earlier, pain has no external referent (and thus cannot form theessence of any thing), and w oman has no essence. P ain and injured bodies are fluid

in terms of their referentiality and have no inherent connection to the ideas they

serve to substant iate (Scarry, 1985). Womens hurting fl esh does not in itself mark

w omanhood; but precisely because of its referential instability, it can be draf ted

into the substantiation of the idea o f gender.

Epilogue: Why Delve into the Pain?My aim in this article has been to delve into the pain and violence of gender, not

as an exercise in masochism, but to suggest that pain and violence are central to

making real or fleshing out gender. My concern has been to bring forth the

hurting flesh by drawing attention to the fact that gender mechanisms cannot

exercise their pow er, cannot d o their w ork of gendering and inscription w ithout

some bodies going through the machinery, and being shredded into pieces of

abject flesh as they do so. I wanted to apprehend a fleshed and sentient body,

rather than an ab stract and passive bod y, reduced to text o r bearer of inscriptions;bodies get enrolled in the production of gender not simply as materials to be

written upon but also as mass of hurting flesh. In this final section, I would like,

first, to put the pain into perspective and, second, to outline some of the possi-

bilities for emancipatory politics that are opened up by exploring womanhood

through the symbolism of pain.

First, by attempting to connect pain and w omanhood , I am not suggesting that

there is some relation of equivalence betw een them so that one saturates the other.

The pain of immateriality, and the related sense of excess (of fl esh) and emptiness(of self), are better seen as forming some of the conditions of experience of

w omanhood than as determining or saturating it. P ain does not saturate woman-

hood and w omanhood does not saturate the self. Womanhood (or manhood )




18/24

is a transient and fl eeting experience, sometimes (maybe most o f the time) effaced

by the immediacy of other divisions (e.g. racial, sexual, class, occupations) or of

the moment; or, as Riley (1988) suggests, being woman is only ever a part-time

occupation. One is not just ones gender, even if gender filters the resources forselfhood . The self is inscribed and negotiated across diff erent d iscourses and prac-

tices, or networks, leading to multiple (and sometimes conflicting) identities

(C harles and D avies, 1997; Star, 1991). B y talking about w omanhood I have only

attended to one (maybe important, maybe not, but difficult to escape) among a

multiplicity of possibilities for identity; furthermore, by talking about the pain

of womanhood, I have only explored one (sometimes overwhelming, maybe at

other times obliterated) of many ways in which womanhood may be experi-

enced. Thus, by suggesting that the pain of womens bodies serves to substanti-ate the idea of gender, I am not claiming that being w oman is reduced to being

in pain.

Second, if my main concern throughout the article was to expose pain, in this

final section, I want briefly to explore the implications of fleshing out gender for

emancipatory polit ics. I f femininity is not some repressed, un-represented o ther-

ness but the all too present sense of excess of hurt ing fl esh and corpo reality, then

the idea of re-appropriating and celebrating the womans body (as advocated by

some radical feminists e.g. D aly, 1984) does not appear to be particularly liber-ating, for it assumes that there is an authentic womans body, unmarked by the

regulatory practices of gender, that w e can seek to unveil. But, as I have suggested

in this article, there can be no authentic w omans body that is not already marked

by the violence and pain of gender. The womans body, if already constituted as

w oman, is already marked and injured. C elebrating the feminine body do es little

to challenge or subvert the symbolic order that posits a (hierarchical) dualism

betw een (female) body and (male) self, and that constitutes and reproduces gender

identity through injuring womens bodies. If we are to remain within thisgendered dualism, it w ould seem more empow ering (in a limited sense) to escape

from the body, to strip the enslaving and hurting excess of (female) flesh that

engulfs the self, and to get an identity (as the anorexic w omen w e encountered

earlier suggested)10 than t o embrace the female body.

Furthermore, apprehending w omanhood in terms of an excess of hurting fl esh,

rather than in terms of otherness, lack or absence, highlights the problems

attached to inclusionary strategies of giving voice. As I suggested earlier, the

problem of womens oppression is often represented in terms of effacement,absence, lack of voice or silence (e.g. H arlow et al., 1995), a problem that presum-

ably could be solved by giving voice or issuing an invitation to join. H ow ever,

such representations of the other as excluded or absent ignore the embodied




19/24

presence of pa in. The prob lems associated w ith the strategy of giving voice to the

other characteristic of liberal democracy have been well documented (Lee and

Brown, 1994; Kappeler, 1997; Wilkinson and Kitzinger, 1996). The discourses of

inclusion and giving voice suggest that someone is in possession of voice (or ofa place from which to issue invitations) and in a position to offer it to the other

as a gift, a gift for which the other should be grateful (Kappeler, 1997); it also

assumes that the other wants voice. Moreover, the liberal discourse of love of

the other, to getherness and reaching out to the other in the gift o f vo ice, implies

a colonization of the other and a universalization of the dominant discourse in

the name of democracy, freedom and equality, all adding weight to the justice

and morality of such a project (Kappeler, 1997; Lee and Brown, 1994). Talking

about the pain and violence of otherness highlights a further problem with theinclusionary strategy of giving voice: if pain is resistant to verbalization it is

unlikely to gush forth or be alleviated through voice; pain is more likely to be

eclipsed than exposed by voice. What is the point of giving a voice to a mass of

hurting flesh that cannot speak?

Thus both liberal strategies based on the principles of equality and inclusion,

and radical strategies based on the celebration of womens embodied difference,

seem to be ineffective in that they reproduce the gender dualism that sustains, and

is sustained through, womens pain. As other feminist writers have noted (Sargis-son, 1996), the liberal discourse of equality, the radical discourse of difference,

and the debate between the two reduce the possibilities for emancipation to a

question of womens positioning within a masculinist discursive order as both

equality and difference are articulated in terms of a gendered dualism between

(male) self and (female) body. Not only does this make for a limited number of

avenues for emancipation, but it also fails to address the embodied pain of

womanhood, the crafting of gender identity on womens bodies.

If gender is reproduced through w omens pain and w omens pain is reproducedthrough gender (the constitution of w oman as the opposite of man), then it seems

that, to address the pain, we need to break away from the dualism of gender, to

dissolve gender into mult iple sexual possibilities, or redefi ne it beyond the tw o

categories of man and woman so that woman can be something other than no-

man (Braidotti, 1989), and difference, identity and bodies can be re-imagined

away from the gender binary. This escape from the gender order has often been

symbolized by the lesbian body as occupying a space that is elsewhere. For

many feminist writers of different theoretical traditions (e.g. Irigaray, Kristeva,Wittig), the lesbian identity constitutes a utopic space that is situated outside the

gendered cultural order and , by virtue of its exteriority, is potentially emancipa-

tory (Jagose, 1994). For example, for Witt ig (1973) the lesbian body constitutes a




20/24

third term beyond gender binarism; it marks a utopic space that is essentially

transgressive of the gender order, fo r the lesbian is not a w oman. H ow ever, Jagose

pertinently exposes the problematic nature of lesbian utopics, or o f the search fo r

a space outside gender. By drawing upon Foucaults conceptualization of poweras both repressive and productive of identity, Jagose argues that the fi gure of the

lesbian is not outside and independent of (but repressed by) the gender order;

rather its exteriority depends on its relations to the gender binarism and is

constituted by it. Thus celebrating the emancipatory potential of lesbianism is

ambivalent, for it serves both to disrupt and to reproduce the gender order.

Furthermore, foregrounding lesbian identity as emancipatory reproduces the

problematic essentialism involved in fo regrounding the category of w oman as a

rallying ground for emancipatory politics. I t essentializes the fi gure of the lesbianas a natural, authentic and pre-cultural space existing independently of gendered

discourse. As post-structuralist feminists have argued (e.g. Butler, 1990), cele-

brating the fi gure of w oman or lesbian serves to exclude or coloniz e difference

by assuming homogeneity among these categories. Thus even attempts to plural-

ize w oman by including difference serve to increase the strength and hold of this

category rather than destabilize and disrupt it (Jagose, 1994).

Follow ing B utler (1990) and post-structuralist feminism more generally, Jagose

(1994) argues that instead of searching for the holy grail of an elusive and prob-lematic utopic space beyond gender (e.g. escaping the gender order by reclaiming

an authentic and pre-discursive womans body, or foregrounding the lesbian

identity), it may be more productive to att end to the construction of gender as an

effect. G ender identity can only be destabilized by attending to its constitution,

by establishing as political the very terms through w hich it is constituted (But ler,

1990). U nderstanding how the body is enrolled in the work of gendering is in

itself a political act, for it serves to disrupt and destabilize the taken-for-granted-

ness of gender identity. In this respect, the current article is clearly inscribedwithin the post-structuralist project of denaturalizing gender by attending to its

constitution and inscription on the bod y. Where it departs from the wo rk of post-

structuralist feminists such as Butler is by suggesting that the body is enrolled in

the making up of gender not just as text but also as flesh and sentience. By

fl eshing out gender the aim w as not to naturalize it but rather to further unsettle

the gendered body, and to point out that even pain and flesh are political effects

open to destabilization.

Notes

I am grateful to the two anonymous reviewers, as well as to Martin Parker, Simon Lilley and Mihaela

Kelemen for their thoughtful comments on an earlier version of this paper.




21/24

1. In her book on Women in Pain, Finkler (1994) illustrates her arguments with the examples of

Mexico, w here w omen are caught betw een the ideal of ro mantic love and the reality of living w ith ahusband who keeps several wives.

2. I fo llow But ler (1990) in refusing to go along w ith the distinction betw een gender as socially

or culturally constructed, and sex as biologically given body differences. I see both gender and sex asproduced through regulatory practices or inscriptions on the body and will thus not distinguish

between the two terms.3. As Turner (1996) notes, this is a critique w hich could be mo re generally applied to radical decon-

structionist feminism (e.g. Butler, 1993) for such an approach is not concerned with the lived in body,

or the phenomenology of embodied experiences, but the positioning o f b odies in discursive structures.By insisting that sex or gender are normative practices (rather than biological products), these

approaches have left behind the lived experience of embod iment (Mat isons, 1998; U ssher, 1997) and, in

particular, of pain and suffering (Csordas, 1994). H ere I agree w ith Turner that this focus on position-

ing makes the lived body disappear. Although I do not see bodies as being nat urally sexed, o r as mere

biological products, I w ant to ho ld on to the idea of a bo dy w hich, if not naturally marked as anything,does have the potentiality or capacity for sentience and, in particular, pain.

4. Images of evisceration and d isembow elment are commonly used symb olic strategies in feministart (Betterton, 1996). Cindy Shermans U nti tled # 175(1987) discussed later in the article depicting

body fragments scattered on a surface of body wastes, and Kiki Smiths skinned body in Virgin Mary(1992) are poignant illustrations.

5. And as Sw anns (1997) w ork o n P MS suggests, even when w omen feel violent, t his violence is

translated into w omens disorders by t he medical discourse of P MS. Thus wo men cannot appropriateviolence for their violence is read as a manifestation of their pathological bo dies, a reading t hat serves

to trivialize and d epoliticize w omens violence.

6. H ere I talk about those marked as men and those marked as w omen for if we follow the pointon relational materiality made by ANT, we cannot assume that gender is already naturally given and

somehow regulates the distribution o f mat erials. G ender needs to be seen as being itself a relationaleffect, the product of the assemblage of materials (Singleton, 1996). There is no space here to develop

this but I would like to point to Tierneys (1995) study for an excellent example of the making up of

the lads around beer, football and pubs. What studies such as Tierneys (1995) or Morgans (1992)suggest is that masculinity and femininity (the assignment and performance of man/woman) do not

necessarily equate with man or woman body, but are discursively constituted modes of being(Kerfoot and Knights, 1998: 8), relational effects performed through textual and material practices.

Thus not all men are men, some are lesser men than others; and some women may qualify as one of

the boys or honorary men by participating in mens social activities or demonstrating their abilityto take it (C ollinson and C ollinson, 1997; Thomas, 1996). Man becomes man, and w oman becomes

w oman only b y being performed or marked as such. In the remainder of the article, I w ill use the term

man and woman as a shorthand for those marked as man and those marked as woman.7. O f course all subject positions are ultimately precarious and undecidable; how ever, some are

made of m ore stable and solid materials than o thers.8. Thus it should be clear that by talking about w omanhood in terms of immateriality and gutting

out, I am not implying that some feminine core or essence is crushed or suppressed, but rather that

nothingness the denial of possibility for making something of oneself is one of the conditions ofexistence/experience of womanhood.

9. H ere Scarry (1985) notes that in accounts of w ar or to rture, the pain of the injured, mutilated ordead bodies is often made to disappear through the use of a language of tactics, strategy o r mot ives.10. The stripping of the fl esh, or disembodiment, could may be take less destructive forms than

anorexia. For example, some feminist writers have discussed the emancipatory possibilities opened upby virtual reality (Balsamo, 1997).




22/24

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Valrie Fournier is Senior L ecturer in O rganizat ion Studies at K eele U niversity. H er current research

interests centre around critical perspectives on management and organizations, and in particular on(gendered) subjectivity at work. She has written about the making and disciplinary effects of the

professions, new career discourse in organiz ations, and identity w ork in f amily businesses. H er recentwriting includes work on the experience and construction of gender in organizations, and more

recently she has developed an interest in alternative forms of organiz ations.


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