ALISON BARTLETT
Let's Talk About Lips
My mother taught me to put on lipstick before going out, outside the home that is, into the big wide world. So of course, I resisted. But like most of what mothers teach daughters it seeped back into my life, filtered now through a feminist consciousness and questioning. Now I think "painted" lips are a statement that claim attention. They say: I have lips. Look, how red they are.
I insist on your attention. With these lips I speak. And, of course, they are not the only lips I have.
The French feminist philosopher, Luce Irigaray, uses the image of women's lips and the associative word-play between genital and oral lips as a means for suggesting a feminist intervention into the iconic status built up around the phallus. Her most widely known papers operate on lips as both a metaphoric and a literal referent: "This Sex Which Is Not One" suggests the multiplicity of women's sexuality, desires and language; "When Our Lips Speak Together"
speaks of the politics of lesbian loving; and "One Does Not Move Without The Other" imagines the relationship between a mother and daughter as a site of feeding/breathing/nurturing.
While Irigaray argues that lips are a powerful image with which to challenge the phallus as symbol of patriarchy, Barbara Creed often refers to the image of vagina dentata - the toothed vagina - as it is used in horror films as a symbol of terror. This trope of the abject maternal, the threatening castrating mother, is anxiety-ridden for men in particular if not entirely, but then film traditionally operates on the assumption of a male gaze. This might suggest the relative invisibility of women's sexuality in our culture. Lips are definitely a subversive and potentially threatening symbol because of their potential - because of what women might do with them.
Lipsticked lips are often (lip)read as carrying unseemly sexual messages.
(Even lip-reading carries negative, second-rate connotations of reading lips rather than hearing what's being said through the primary medium.) Painted lips metonymically stand for painted woman. Not for nice girls. Tarts paint their lips red (red tarts) - red is read as advertising. But then why is the practice taken on by mothers? Aah - it must be a variation in the shade of red that's important (impotent?). Pink shades, brown tones, orange, even black or blue for those who like to imitate bruised lips. (Why does so much of women's make-up mimic violence to the face?) But I have red lipstick called "Ascot Red". Surely the women who frequent Ascot are not advertising their sexual
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availability? Maybe the company responsible is trying to elevate the status of the wearer of this lipstick. Why did I buy a lipstick of this name and colour?
To give lip is to be cheeky, rebellious, to give trouble, upset whatever is going on in the power relations. Like most figurative speech which uses parts of the body to represent emotional states, lips are an ambivalent discursive site in everyday speech. The things we do with lips centre on silence and sexuality:
Lick your lips a sign of desire.
Curl your lip - a sign of disgust.
Have a stiff upper lip - a term of repression.
Zip your lips - to silence.
Bite your lip - only singular here? Silence again.
Smack your lips - to relish. Violent metaphors, aren't they.
Hang on a person's lip - ouch, imagine that literally.
Lip read - what do you read when you see my (red) lips?
There are advantages to lipstick. It's great for keeping lips moist in dry climates. Saves having to apply all that greasy vaseline. But then, it melts in the heat, kids make huge messes with it, and it tastes pretty awful. Remember the lip glosses that used to make lips glisten? Just like the real thing! Their target market was teenagers. And those flavoured glosses. Now it's flavoured condoms.
But there are politics to contend with in applying lippie and wearing it in public arenas. It's not "natural" if you're after that healthy or hippie look. But for swampies it's the only reference point of colour. I'm not sure about feminists, but you can never be sure about anything about feminists. We seem to want it both ways, and I don't see why not either. I remember a story about the shoes feminists wore to a conference. This was in the early eighties as I remember and most were in their sensible comfortable flatties, not being taken in by the foot- binding, posture debilitating flashy fashion industry's coercion. Except for Hélène Cixous, one of the French feminists. She turned up in bright pink high heels. This outrageous behaviour made a point about appropriating and reinscribing the accoutrements that previously "trapped" us as trappings of
"femininity", and becoming "trapped" in other uniforms.
So I say let's give some lip. Let's proclaim these lips visibly and outrageously. Let's speak up for and with our lips. And if they're read with reference to genital lips, well, good. They are also there. There are enough phallic reminders around us to flaunt a bit of lip. What passes in through lips is dwelled on too often to the neglect of what can pass out through lips - a fluid stream of words, of desires, questions, demands, knowledge, song, wails and whispers.
Take notice: these (red) lips will speak.
52 LiNQ2O/2 (1993)