One, the maternal genitalia are negated by the phallomorphic imaginary as a cultural cloaca, site of both fear and infantile desires (Gallop 1988). The internalised structure of the maternal genitalia results, for Freud and Lacan, in a crisis over a lack of visual specificity and so 'her' lips come to represent a spatialised abyss of cultural abjection where language does not hold. The canonical psychoanalytic view, then, clearly inherits from a gender-biased classicism a view that the female body is by nature lacking in the logos that characterises the male subject. Psychoanalysis, however, pins psychic and symbolic lack explicitly to the genitalia.
In psychoanalytic discourse, the trope of the maternal can be seen to displace the iconographic Madonna. However, the maternal body, unlike the Madonna icon, is subject to pervasive new technologies that developed particularly in the discourses of psychiatry and biomedicine (in which psychoanalysis has its grounding). I now turn to consider the idea of the female body as a biomedical space. I give this topic attention because, for one, the discourse of biomedicine is peculiar to the modern context and secondly, it is a pervasive and highly esteemed discourse that establishes and sediments gendered power structures and representations of the body. Moreover, biomedicine deals directly with the body and has established a theatrics that is not unrelated to 'theatre' in the traditional
sense.
patriarchal state, the biomedical practices that developed within its frameworks no longer limited the gaze to the surface of the body. In modern biomedicine, the human corpus began to be treated as a spatialised arrangement between exterior surface and the private, fleshy interiors of the body. Notably, the perceived interiority of the psyche is conceptualised in a similar manner in the discourse of psychoanalysis. These practices, biomedicine and psychoanalysis, are validated by the perverse implantation of the all- knowing intellectual observer, a figure that emerged during the Enlightenment. This decidedly masculine figure was contingent with the production of a discourse of scientific expertise, expertise that relied upon the ability to "...isolate objects or events from their contexts in time and space in order to concentrate on a specific activity or quantified functions" (Kauffman 1998:73).
In material space, those confident of the authority and the normality of their gaze and their actions (those who are 'experts') might fail to consider the partiality of looking and doing because they can, according to Boys (1999: 187) "take for granted their freedom to perform their own identities [whilst those of us located in the zone of the other] are constantly aware of the performative nature of identities and spaces". Those who are othered cannot take up the transcendental, morally superior position of the neutral observer because the other is already figured as immanent and embodied, hence morally questionable by nature. In post-feudal European societies, enlightenment discourse seized upon the female body as a natural (as opposed to cultural) phenomenon. Notably, the bodies of non-Europeans were also considered closer to 'nature' and were consequently feminised, that is, spatialised, in colonial discourses. Of course, with the development of technology, modern societies could exploit natural resources as never before, colonising and delineating property in a flurry of conquest and war. Women, like 'savages' and animals, were considered unpredictable, irrational, amoral and sexualised.
Early modern European thought held that the female sex was: "the disorderly one par excellence...where her genius for social disorder was associated with a propensity for sexual instability" (Zeglin Brand 1995:39). So, early modern European thought reproduced a discourse of nature-including women in this category, as unmediated, threatening and abounding in resources. Space was available to the mechanisms of scopic intelligence to be uncovered, demarcated and colonised, and this is where penetrative technologies emerged as the discursive norm for defining and representing the biomedical subject.
2.2.i Mapping the biomedical body
The condition of becoming one thing or another is dependent upon a transitory phase, the in-between if you will. Space, without the mark of time, is always becoming. In terms of biomedical technology, the scientific data wielded from the body-becoming, and particularly the maternal body (which is a paradigmatic example of 'bodies-becoming') has been marked by a particularly gender biased stylistics. Anatomical knowledge prior to enlightenment scientific rationalism was based upon a combination of tactile and visual experience. Cartesian dualism epitomises the active transition from pre-Enlightenment preoccupations with death, disease and mortality from the first person perspective to a discourse of the body as an abstract phenomenon. Visibility was privileged as a means to accessing the truth of the body whilst the senses were considered inferior and inaccurate.
The body-made-visible, particularly in Enlightenment dissection and medical drawings, was central to the production of scientific discourse about the body. Bleeker (1999:5) draws an analogy between the imperial project and the mapping of bodies:
Like foreign countries and remote areas, the body was explored and charted in what is called an anatomical atlas. In this process of mapping the body, science became more and more preoccupied with dead bodies of others, eventually turning the body itself into an 'other' (Bleeker 1999: 5)
Although both the bodies of men and women were opened up as public spectacle in theatres of dissection, whereby the body was mapped out as Bleeker states above, the cadaver nevertheless signifies in gendered ways: "[t]he imagery of Nature unveiled before
Science, of the body stripped of its fleshy protection and penetrated by the empirical gaze is strongly gender linked" (Shildrick 1997:31).
It was also assumed, through the Renaissance and to some extent into the era of modern science, that the female body was homologous with the male body. This 'one sex' model, inherited from Aristotle, reiterated that the female body and genitalia were an inferior version of the male. Modern science developed the idea of sexual difference, but female difference was nevertheless maintained as a mark of radical lack and inferiority.
Thus the opening up of interior spaces of the female body in dissection was represented in images of corporeal discontinuity. The exterior and interior of the female body was shown typically as insubstantial, so that organs, particularly the uterus, seemed to float in unsupported suspension (see Fig. 1). The interior and exterior of the body seemed to have no necessary relation. On the other hand, anatomical illustrations of the male body tended to focus on skeletal and muscular structure, so that the male body is represented as substance that takes up space.
As has been mentioned, women within this context were elided with Nature.
However, the difference was that the more positive aspects of nurturance were
"...overridden by the rationalist characterisation of nature as wild and chaotic, but nevertheless fundamentally machine-like and potentially controllable" (Shildrick 1997:26).
By the mid- nineteenth century, the process of knowing the world "[had become] largely a matter of establishing natural objects as visually accessible" (Spurr 1993:17-18): the object in space had to be assigned a teleological position in order to be known. As in psychoanalysis, there seems to be a desire in biomedical discourse to create transparency in the patient, to be able to access a psychic or physical interiority respectively.
Psychoanalysis itself has established roots in biomedicine whereby the cause of mental disease was assumed to be organic, rather than social, in origin. Thus the interior of the body, and particularly the brain and female reproductive organs, were given a clear causal link to mental disease, especially hysteria.
2.2.ii Being and becoming
Pregnancy of course presented a mystery of sorts to the early modern biomedical fraternity because, not only did it present the problem of breached boundaries, but it also frustrated the desire to see what was inside the body. Modern biomedicine solves this problem by
instituting anatomical dissection as a means to accessing the invisible workings of the body. However, representations of the previously private interior of the womb have tended to be disembodied images of a foetus, floating in a womb-space independent of a maternal body (see Fig. 2). This tendency translates into contemporary biomedical practice in the form of New Reproductive Technology (NRT). Sonograms and video technology now enable the medical expert to produce pictures of the foetus in utero. The desire for transparency is realised quite literally in this instance. However, the embodied uterus is not an explicit concern in these representations; the condition of a 'whole' maternal body is negated. At best, she is reduced to an organ (a uterine function) that carries a foetus.
Making her body transparent and displaying the developing foetus without reference to the mother's body in effect passivises the pregnant female body and reduces the female body to a maternal-function, not unlike the Platonic chora. Shildrick claims that:
There is little sense in current medical literature of the woman as intentional agent, but only of disembodied and discrete reproductive processes. What is represented is not the mother, but at best fragmentary bits of her. Even in the very early stages of pregnancy, the shadowy images of ultrasound serve to construct the foetus as an entity in its own right. The rest is space and silent (Shildrick 1997:41, emphasis mine).
In this biomedical scenario, the body-object is revisited in scientific terms and is again rendered a blank slate, chora or reproductive space that does not contribute to its (her) own interpretation. "Time" documents the progress of the pregnant body-space as science dissects the body to "see how it works", that is, the body becomes a mirror for the assumptions and machinations of 'expert' discourse.
Braidotti links the scopophilic drive of modern biomedicine to the question of origins:
The desire to know is, like all desires, related to the problem of representing one's origin, of answering the most childish and consequently fundamental of questions:
'where did I come from?' Scientific knowledge becomes, in this perspective, an extremely perverted version of that original question (Braidotti 1999: 40).
Braidotti indicates that modern scientific discourse rationalises the female body in order to obscure sexual difference and subsume knowledge production under the originating law of the Father/the One/phallus. The desire of science to know the female body in such invasive and technocratic ways is, I argue, a desire to maintain that body as a mute space, to take her apart and understand the machinations of the body in ways that concur with dominant representations of passive female subjectivity.
As has been stated, representations of space are commonplace, whilst representations of time only really occur in relation to space. The tendency towards the disproportionate representation of time and space reflects the scopic interests of scientific rationalism whereby that which is made visible is drawn into the theatre of surveillance and regulatory ideals (Foucault 1977). In the instance of a phallocratic, patriarchal society, the ways in which space, nature and women are represented is paramount to the maintenance of their subjugation on the other side of binary oppositions. Space and nature are maintained as exterior, and thus inferior, to culture. Space in this formation is something that is just 'there', natural, immanent; it does not signify without the mark of time to form it into an image, utility or tool. The fear and fascination that accompany the penetration of the space of the other in the act of temporalising that space eroticises the body of the other whilst simultaneously repressing the potential desire and agency of that body. So, it can be seen that as biomedical subject, the female body is represented as a mute territory.
Thus far, I have concentrated upon the treatment of the female body as space, that is, analogous with space. However, as is apparent from the citations of various biomedical practises above, the dominance of 'time'— perhaps I could say a 'teleological imagination', over the spatial is produced in terms of ontological as well as material relations. Thus, the division of geographical space along gendered lines and the ways in which the subject is then induced to perform gendered identity by virtue of these gendered divisions is important to the interrogation of time-space relations. Hence, I will now pursue the idea that the domestic interior is a primary social site of gendered divisions.