Good morning!
Welcome to Digestable, your mouthful of things happening in the world.
Today’s ferments:
Content warning: discussion of sexual violence and body mutilation. Spoilers for Geek Love (Katherine Dunn, 2002) and La Piel Que Habito (Pedro Almodovar, 2011).
Bodily autonomy is on the rocks.
There are a lot of think pieces and warning briefs about the assault on rights to come, here in the United States. They are all clear that the overturning of Roe is a blow not just to those with uteruses but also to anyone who wants to make their own choices about how to have a body.
Trans people, who have already been under attack—when trying to pee, play sports, access hormones and gender affirming surgery, get recognized on official documents, and stay home with their loving, affirming parents—have so much to lose when bodily autonomy is restricted.
Before I continue, let us acknowledge this. Black, Indigenous, and other people of color have had the most restricted access to bodily autonomy in this country’s history, from forced sterilization and eugenics to being subjected to deadly medical trials to being imprisoned at disproportionate rates to not having access to safe water and healthy food. The list goes on; this outsized impact must be a part of every discussion about how to protect rights.
A friend of mine who is a doula articulated to me a while back that whenever a reproductive system needs decisions made about it, the state throws up every possible barrier. I experienced this intimately when trying to access top surgery, which would leave my reproductive system intact, but prevent me from breastfeeding. I had to clear months of hurdles and ‘prove’ that I am who I am; had I lacked strong insurance that included trans healthcare, those hurdles would have been breathtakingly higher and more expensive to navigate.
Two pieces of popular culture I’ve interacted with recently got me thinking about conceptions of body alteration. In short, the understanding is this: removing or changing the markers of secondary sex characteristics (genitals, breasts, body hair, etc) commonly thought to signify gender is seen as torture or punishment.
The first is Geek Love, a novel that follows a circus family whose children have all been bred to be freaks (via assorted drugging of consenting Mom). Then, things get weirder—one of the kids starts a cult in which members are rewarded for their devotion with amputations. Once our narrator has left the circus, she meets a wealthy woman, Miss Lick, whose passion is finding beautiful girls she deems too beautiful to focus on their minds or have happy lives, and paying for them to have surgeries that make them less attractive to men.
Manifold problems, here: blaming women for men being terrible; considering beauty and intelligence mutually exclusive; assuming women are unable to ignore attentions of men to pursue other lives than one of subservience. And, most of the surgeries described are the very same procedures trans people struggle to access in order to live full lives.
Miss Lick’s message is: mutilating the female body protects women from being forced into the worst of womanhood, and is the closest women can get to freedom amid patriarchy.
And behind this is another set of assumptions: that these women are unable or unwilling to make decisions about their bodies, and how they inhabit them, that make it possible to live a full life—the very same logic behind restricting access to reproductive healthcare.
The second is La Piel Que Habito (The Skin I Live In), in which a plastic surgeon and his daughter both believe she has been raped by a young man. We find out that the young man likely had this intention, but did not follow through. The plastic surgeon finds him, imprisons him, conducts a full sex change operation, and replaces all of the young man’s skin. When he emerges from the string of surgeries, he appears to be a beautiful young woman.
When the surgeon forces this young man to transform into (being perceived as) a woman, he sees it as retribution—taking away the things that make him a man. It is implied that surgical procedures have turned this person into a woman, complete with secondary sex characteristics (on the outside) and submissive Stockholm syndrome, in the eyes of the state, the public, the surgeon. But when we have a moment alone with the assumed rapist, it is clear he is the same person underneath all that fresh new skin.
In a recent article for the Guardian, Julia Serano writes about her experience of street harassment after going through a gender transition. Serano offers:
“I want to suggest an alternative and non-mutually exclusive framework for understanding [street harassment]: male street harassers seem to view and treat women as though we are public spectacles. The word “spectacle” implies some kind of “display” or “performance” that is put on for the benefit of others. This explains why these men (mis)perceive us as “inviting” their attention and remarks.”
What do all of these things have to do with each other? While this is by no means a scientific sampling, it is overwhelmingly clear that women—as they are perceived by the state—are handed responsibility for the patriarchy that so often forces them to make horrible choices, or worse, not have choices at all. From getting catcalled to having female sex characteristics added or taken away as a means of control, choice in a body with a uterus and breasts is restricted far beyond access to the termination of pregnancy.
Identifying that I was not only unwilling, but unable, to participate in the gender binary set me free. I was able to stop doing things women are supposed to do (and shouldn’t have to), like be ‘nice’ and accommodating and wear clothes made cheaply that fit poorly. This is but a short list; women can and do reject these standards while still being women. Nobody wants to be told they aren’t equipped enough to know and decide about their corporeal forms.
We don’t learn much about what Almodovar’s forced sex change patient wants, other than a years-delayed desire to go home to their mom. Underneath—parts regardless—the range of things we want and need simply doesn’t vary that much.
It is impossible to know what people need, the circumstances they’re navigating, the way they see themselves. This is not a realm in which we can make sweeping generalizations or policies that grossly oversimplify.
Here’s to the struggle for rights that are as broad as the needs and desires and identities we cannot see from the outside.
The Second Look
Half-baked cultural criticism from Gabriel Coleman.
First Glance
Last week I watched The Mummy (1999) because I was bored and needed something to do. It’s supposed to be a little spooky, a little funny, and has a Universal Studios ride themed after it so I figured that was reason enough. On the whole I enjoyed the experience; the pacing is nice and the mix of practical effects and CGI still hold up today. But for a movie that stars a rotting undead corpse, the aspects of the film that turned my stomach weren’t what you would expect.
Double Take
The thing that surprises me about The Mummy is that the plot clearly wants to do one thing but the filmmakers want it to say another. And the way they change that is with some classic ham-fisted racial stereotypes. To recap the barebones plot: a high priest in ancient Egypt is in love with the emperor’s lover/plaything and the two are having a steamy affair. The emperor, upon discovering them, has them both mummified and places a fucked up curse on the priest that would make him into a spooky zombie that needs to absorb the flesh of the people that freed him in order to regain his form. Then we fast forward to the 90s where a bunch of people are going on a quest to raid the tomb where the mummy is buried for various reasons (money, knowledge, love, glory, etc). The tomb raiders release the undead priest and he kills most of them and gets pretty close to sacrificing the sexy lady tomb raider in order to resurrect his star-crossed lover before the raiders undo his curse and kill him.
It seems clear here that the titular Mummy should be our protagonist. Sure, having to sacrifice and absorb a bunch of people is a bit grisly, but I think if you played it for laughs it could be fun. Also, what’s more dramatic than star-crossed cursed lovers trying to get back together after thousands of years? But The Mummy wants to tell another story centering two of the tomb-raiders. Our main characters are Evelyn Carnahan, an Egyptian-born Brit whose undying love of learning is supposed to redeem her obvious colonial heritage, and Rick O’Connell, an *Irish* American who ended up in Egyptian jail after helping the French Foreign Legion dig up buried treasure for some reason and is recruited as Evelyn’s guide. Rick’s immigrant heritage is supposed to read as working class and sets him apart from the *other* Americans who die very grisly deaths. His redeeming quality is simply that he didn’t choose to be on the tomb raid, and also of course because he loves Evelyn. There’s really not much to these characters but we’re supposed to root for them because they’re the default hetero couple we’re presented with.
More interesting are all the characters that are killed and their justifications. O’Connell’s Egyptian prison guard, Gad Hasssan, tags along at the promise of getting rich, and is mostly used for racist gags. There’s a scene where Evelyn is complaining about their camels, how they spit and smell bad, and Hassan spits on the ground and smells his armpits as she says each thing, implying that he, and other Egyptians, are more camel than human. Hassan then runs off and finds some jeweled scarabs that he stuffs into his bag and one of them comes to life, crawls under his skin and eats him alive. The other Egyptians are similarly rendered subhuman by one of the Mummy’s curses, a plague of boils which only seems to affect the Egyptian locals, turns them all into zombie slaves.
In addition to O’Connell, there are four other Americans attempting a competing tomb raid to Evelyn’s, but where Evelyn is motivated by a search for knowledge, theirs is motivated by greed. Their last names are things like “Daniels” and “Henderson” so I think they’re supposed to be of a wealthier class identity to O’Connell’s immigrant background. These Americans end up being the object of The Mummy’s curse and are one by one absorbed into his body, making him gradually more human and less zombie. This is an interesting fate because, unlike all the racialized characters who are just mutilated and tossed aside, the power of their whiteness makes them worthy, in the eyes of the camera, to be incorporated into the powerful body of the Mummy, similarly to how Evelyn’s white beauty makes her the ideal sacrifice to resurrect the Mummy’s girlfriend.
Then there is Beni Gabor. Oh Beni, what a fucking can of worms. Gabor knew O’Connell when they were on the French Foreign Legion mission, and ends up helping the American tomb raid. But unlike O’Connell’s noble working-class drudgery, Gabor is a greedy, cowardly betrayer; in other words, every anti-Semitic trope rolled into one. Beni’s relationship to Jewish identity is an interesting one. Other than his sorta-Hungarian-Jewish last name, he is identified as a Jew when he is threatened by the Mummy. Gabor does this bit where he prays to an assortment of religions, first Christianity in English, then Islam in Arabic, then Buddhism in Chinese (ugh), and finally speaking Hebrew and holding up a Star of David. When he does this, using Jewish faith as his final fallback, the Mummy literally goes “Ah! The language of the slaves!” and offers him an opportunity to sell out his friends and join him instead, which of course Beni immediately jumps at. He then just skulks around with the Big Bad until he finds an opportunity to betray him to save his skin, grabbing a bunch of treasure from the tomb in the process. Gabor’s greed ultimately gets the best of him and his treasure-grabbing ends up delaying him enough that he ends up in the tomb’s treasure room while it seals shut around him and is then eaten alive by a swarm of scarabs. It's literally the most horrifying fate of the whole film and the audience is supposed to accept simply because of the racialized tropes Beni is surrounded by.
Hindsight
Gabor and O’Connell are essentially in the same position: plopped in Egypt by the French Legion and working for whoever will hire them. Gabor sides with the ancient Egyptian after being given the choice between slavery and death, and O’Connell works for a sexy colonizer after being promised money and then “love.” To me, Beni’s position is the more interesting and complicated one, as is the Mummy’s and the Egyptian people, but they are all dismissed by racialized tropes so that the audience focuses their attention and affection on the plucky brainy British lady and her working-class Irish-American lover. I know that’s the story we’re supposed to be interested in, but ultimately these gestures at race and heterosexual coupling are just excuses for lazy storytelling.