i miss gxx and LG - it's been 'torture'!
so, it's been about a week without them both! well, not really, but it feels like 3 months. before she left, gxx reminded me to update the blog. maybe it's b.c she's returning today that i feel i can write - it's like a surrogate conversation of the one that i hope to be having soon! ok, enough of my lamentation, which is really just a testament to gxx's awesomeness in sheep's clothing. :-)
so, i've been trying to think of something that i could post on. just yesterday, i remembered a conversation that i had with 3 of my flatmates over dinner. one of them mentioned something about the 'dungeon' museum (apologies if i'm getting this wrong, i've never been, and i don't know all that much about it) in york, which is, i guess, a museum of medieval? practices, including torture. well, the concept was explained to my chinese flatmate, S, who wondered when and where people engaged in these practices. so, having just completed a course on the 'body politic' in early modern england, i was keen to talk about my paper on performance and lady margaret clitherow, the sharp stone that was placed underneath her and the 800 pounds of stone on top. K, being the astute historian and world-traveler that she is, clued in S to the various chinese practices that have taken place over the years, including beheading and such. and then, abstract thinker that i am, my wheels started turning and i began thinking about torture as a discourse - about what constitutes torture, and under what parameters it becomes institutionalised. i mean, yeah, discipline and punish and foucault and everything in my back pocket, i was, clearly, equipped with a steady set of critiques and lens' in my approach to this topic. but, i started thinking about the death penalty in the states, and lethal injection and gas chambers, and how scott peterson was just offered a choice between the two. gas chambers? a composite of 2 or 3 poisons injected into a person's body, foaming at the mouth, all that? it's tough stuff, eh? but then i also thought about rape, and how the scars that my friend B had after her boyfriend raped her, to me, are the remnants of torture. and the wars waged against people's bodies in all sorts of different ways. keeping in line with the feminist track, what about episiotomy? women being slit open to 'facilitate' childbirth, then stitched back up? i guess that this phenomenon is particularly disturbing to me, b.c it's so obviously couched in heterosexual, sexist, medical institutions and practices...evidence being that women are scolded for and discouraged from opting for caesareans. why isn't it ok for women to choose where to be cut up if it's bound to happen, one way or another?
this is the second sunday i've stood on my soapbox. last weekend it was in an email to the increasingly amazing F/G. i'm attributing it to all those sunday's watching 'meet the press' with my father as a child. he'd whip up his specialty "everything that's in these is good for you," waffles, and i'd sit there watching him watching the tv, spilling batter and burning fingers, catching my mom's eye from the morning paper... brother still asleep upstairs. i think i've cultivated the bug of tradition. contemporary and feminist, grounded in a precious memory. cue the song of Tevye(?), please.
xo. shumi
so, i've been trying to think of something that i could post on. just yesterday, i remembered a conversation that i had with 3 of my flatmates over dinner. one of them mentioned something about the 'dungeon' museum (apologies if i'm getting this wrong, i've never been, and i don't know all that much about it) in york, which is, i guess, a museum of medieval? practices, including torture. well, the concept was explained to my chinese flatmate, S, who wondered when and where people engaged in these practices. so, having just completed a course on the 'body politic' in early modern england, i was keen to talk about my paper on performance and lady margaret clitherow, the sharp stone that was placed underneath her and the 800 pounds of stone on top. K, being the astute historian and world-traveler that she is, clued in S to the various chinese practices that have taken place over the years, including beheading and such. and then, abstract thinker that i am, my wheels started turning and i began thinking about torture as a discourse - about what constitutes torture, and under what parameters it becomes institutionalised. i mean, yeah, discipline and punish and foucault and everything in my back pocket, i was, clearly, equipped with a steady set of critiques and lens' in my approach to this topic. but, i started thinking about the death penalty in the states, and lethal injection and gas chambers, and how scott peterson was just offered a choice between the two. gas chambers? a composite of 2 or 3 poisons injected into a person's body, foaming at the mouth, all that? it's tough stuff, eh? but then i also thought about rape, and how the scars that my friend B had after her boyfriend raped her, to me, are the remnants of torture. and the wars waged against people's bodies in all sorts of different ways. keeping in line with the feminist track, what about episiotomy? women being slit open to 'facilitate' childbirth, then stitched back up? i guess that this phenomenon is particularly disturbing to me, b.c it's so obviously couched in heterosexual, sexist, medical institutions and practices...evidence being that women are scolded for and discouraged from opting for caesareans. why isn't it ok for women to choose where to be cut up if it's bound to happen, one way or another?
this is the second sunday i've stood on my soapbox. last weekend it was in an email to the increasingly amazing F/G. i'm attributing it to all those sunday's watching 'meet the press' with my father as a child. he'd whip up his specialty "everything that's in these is good for you," waffles, and i'd sit there watching him watching the tv, spilling batter and burning fingers, catching my mom's eye from the morning paper... brother still asleep upstairs. i think i've cultivated the bug of tradition. contemporary and feminist, grounded in a precious memory. cue the song of Tevye(?), please.
xo. shumi
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