CUNT is not a dirty word
Sep. 6th, 2006 05:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
featherxquillI've just had a very interesting week in 'Theories of Writing' class. This week's 'ism' was feminism, a movement/ideology I've always identified myself with. Today's discussion was particularly interesting. The reading was a chapter on Helene Cixous from 'Sexual/Textual Politics' by Toril Moi, among other things. In class we looked at the last two pages of 'The Taming of the Shrew' and then a passage from Erica Jong's 'Fear of Flying'.
Cixous' main argument is about the patriarchal construction of a language based on binary opposites - where one word is only able to be understood in relation to another, and one is always constructed as being dominant to or better than the other. Male/female, mind/body, good/evil, culture/nature, reason/emotion etc. Cixous believes that binaries are always patriarchal - that male is associated with mind, reason, culture etc while woman is associated with the opposite side of the binary: body, emotion, nature, etc, and through the very use of the hierarchy of binary, constructed as the bad or lesser half of the pair. She thinks, then - if language is humanities access to understanding, with everything having to pass through language in order to be understood, that it is impossible for women to ever truly escape patriarchal systems of meaning, except through 'imaginary utopias' in which patriarchal language plays no part.
It's the last part I fundamentally disagree with.
To sort of 'test' out her ideas we looked at The Taming of the Shrew to find binary oppositions. As expected, it was full of them - with the tamed shrew preaching about the duty of woman to her husband - 'Why are our bodies soft, and weak, and smooth/ Unapt to toil and trouble in the world/ But that our soft conditions and out hearts/ Should well agree with our external parts?' - and other, similarly nauseating passages.
Following, we looked at a passage from 'Fear of Flying', with a view to assessing it's success as a feminist piece of writing about female sexuality. Many discussions ensued, the most interesting of which I think was people's opinions on Jong's use of the word 'cunt'. Several people seem to think cunt is an 'aggressive' or 'male' way of describing a woman's sex, and thought Jong was trying to 'write like a man' with flippancy about her sexual acts. I actually don't see anything wrong with that at all - I think the blurring of traditional gendered views about how people participate in and enjoy sex is exactly what she was going for (I don't think she entirely succeeded; later on in the piece she returned to the traditional feminine sex=emotion idea, which sort of undermined the blunt flippancy of the earlier part).
While someone in the class was declaring (of the word cunt) that women 'don't talk about themselves that way', I was thinking about myself as a part of fandom, and as a writer who has absolutely no problem at all with writing cunt as part of a sexually explicit text. I didn't address it in the tutorial (because we were running out of time and because trying to tell a bunch of random people in a class that you love to use the word cunt while writing Harry Potter porn would be rather like getting undressed in front of them), but I did have a quick chat with my tutor about it afterward. I mentioned some of the 'girly bits' polls I've seen over the years, and the fact that 'cock' seems to be universally accepted as a 'manword' but there are all kinds of different responses to the question of 'what do we call girly bits (in porn)?' He said that sometimes the lecturer likes to just throw 'cunt' out into the air and see how the audience responds. After all, he said, it's just a word.
But is it? In the next breath he said that there's no equal word to cunt, no male equivalent with quite the same power. I disagree with Cixous' opinion that it is impossible to escape from patriarchal constructions of language, because I think language is given meaning through its use. Semiotics would suggest that signs are arbitrary, that words are given meaning by our shared consent on what they mean. New words or meanings for words are being coined all the time; post-colonial writers are subverting the language of the oppressor and using it to write their own stories. Gay people have reclaimed 'queer' and computer nerds and fandom whores alike are calling themselves 'geeks' without any apologies.
Perhaps this word cunt makes people uncomfortable because it IS so powerful. 'The foulest word in the English language', some would say. However it is seen, it is quite obvious that is is a powerful word. Perhaps people are afraid to use it BECAUSE it has no male opposite, no binary. This word has perhaps been constructed as something dirty and foul, but why? Why can it not be reclaimed by women as a symbol of power? This word has no equal. It has no stronger opposite. Why should we be afraid of that?
Cixous' main argument is about the patriarchal construction of a language based on binary opposites - where one word is only able to be understood in relation to another, and one is always constructed as being dominant to or better than the other. Male/female, mind/body, good/evil, culture/nature, reason/emotion etc. Cixous believes that binaries are always patriarchal - that male is associated with mind, reason, culture etc while woman is associated with the opposite side of the binary: body, emotion, nature, etc, and through the very use of the hierarchy of binary, constructed as the bad or lesser half of the pair. She thinks, then - if language is humanities access to understanding, with everything having to pass through language in order to be understood, that it is impossible for women to ever truly escape patriarchal systems of meaning, except through 'imaginary utopias' in which patriarchal language plays no part.
It's the last part I fundamentally disagree with.
To sort of 'test' out her ideas we looked at The Taming of the Shrew to find binary oppositions. As expected, it was full of them - with the tamed shrew preaching about the duty of woman to her husband - 'Why are our bodies soft, and weak, and smooth/ Unapt to toil and trouble in the world/ But that our soft conditions and out hearts/ Should well agree with our external parts?' - and other, similarly nauseating passages.
Following, we looked at a passage from 'Fear of Flying', with a view to assessing it's success as a feminist piece of writing about female sexuality. Many discussions ensued, the most interesting of which I think was people's opinions on Jong's use of the word 'cunt'. Several people seem to think cunt is an 'aggressive' or 'male' way of describing a woman's sex, and thought Jong was trying to 'write like a man' with flippancy about her sexual acts. I actually don't see anything wrong with that at all - I think the blurring of traditional gendered views about how people participate in and enjoy sex is exactly what she was going for (I don't think she entirely succeeded; later on in the piece she returned to the traditional feminine sex=emotion idea, which sort of undermined the blunt flippancy of the earlier part).
While someone in the class was declaring (of the word cunt) that women 'don't talk about themselves that way', I was thinking about myself as a part of fandom, and as a writer who has absolutely no problem at all with writing cunt as part of a sexually explicit text. I didn't address it in the tutorial (because we were running out of time and because trying to tell a bunch of random people in a class that you love to use the word cunt while writing Harry Potter porn would be rather like getting undressed in front of them), but I did have a quick chat with my tutor about it afterward. I mentioned some of the 'girly bits' polls I've seen over the years, and the fact that 'cock' seems to be universally accepted as a 'manword' but there are all kinds of different responses to the question of 'what do we call girly bits (in porn)?' He said that sometimes the lecturer likes to just throw 'cunt' out into the air and see how the audience responds. After all, he said, it's just a word.
But is it? In the next breath he said that there's no equal word to cunt, no male equivalent with quite the same power. I disagree with Cixous' opinion that it is impossible to escape from patriarchal constructions of language, because I think language is given meaning through its use. Semiotics would suggest that signs are arbitrary, that words are given meaning by our shared consent on what they mean. New words or meanings for words are being coined all the time; post-colonial writers are subverting the language of the oppressor and using it to write their own stories. Gay people have reclaimed 'queer' and computer nerds and fandom whores alike are calling themselves 'geeks' without any apologies.
Perhaps this word cunt makes people uncomfortable because it IS so powerful. 'The foulest word in the English language', some would say. However it is seen, it is quite obvious that is is a powerful word. Perhaps people are afraid to use it BECAUSE it has no male opposite, no binary. This word has perhaps been constructed as something dirty and foul, but why? Why can it not be reclaimed by women as a symbol of power? This word has no equal. It has no stronger opposite. Why should we be afraid of that?
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no subject
Date: 2006-09-06 08:27 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-09-06 08:32 am (UTC)I should probably read some of what Germaine Greer said. Spending one week on feminism after a week on Marxism and moving onto Psychoanalysis next week is hardly long enough to really get deeply into anything.
no subject
Date: 2006-09-06 08:40 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-09-06 09:02 am (UTC)To be fair, everything in this course is relegated to one week of the year. It's a general 'writing theory' course and we cover one 'ism' each week, pretty much. Which is a bit whirlwind and doesn't give you much depth on anything, but does, I suppose, give you the basics.
I suppose any radical idea is bound to have backlash (though, you know, I don't really see how the idea that women have brains is overly radical). I suppose third-wave feminism is still trying to find it's footing after the second-wave and the backlash.
I've always called myself a feminist, but I at least one person who doesn't think I am because my views and hers are quite different. That's possibly accounted for by age and culture, and the fact that I've grown up with a certain sort of feminism, rather than seen it happen as a movement. I think it's probably more like 'feminisms' now than there being one simple way to define it.
no subject
Date: 2006-09-06 09:07 am (UTC)Well yes, but Marxism = male-dominated, Utilitarianism = male-dominated, etc.etc. Whereas I bet ALL female philosophy has been lumped under "feminism". Well, unless MUCH has changed since my degree, anyway.
I've always called myself a feminist, but I at least one person who doesn't think I am because my views and hers are quite different.
But a lot of women these days think it's somehow BACKWARDS to call yourself a feminist at all. I agree that there's as many versions of femism as there are women, but it makes me sad that a lot of women deny that we even need feminism
no subject
Date: 2006-09-06 08:28 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-09-06 08:36 am (UTC)Germaine Greer mighr have said this, but since language seems not to have changed much since, nor has the power of binary contrasts, I think it has to be said repeatedly, until female values are not seen as inferior to male.
I don't think that 'cunt' has no male opposite. I think what makes it powerful is that it states than women are not virgins - or worse; whores. They are women, with a normal, healthy sexuality, not pretty little girls, at least not when it comes to desires and lust.
no subject
Date: 2006-09-06 09:08 am (UTC)That's a good point. Cunt is definitely a word associated with women who are comfortable with their sexuality, or sexually confident, and I suppose (for some) perhaps that's an intimidating thing.
I suppose that's one of the reasons (in a fandom conext) that I'm so perfectly comfortable using the word cunt in Rita fic. Because she's certainly a sexually confident woman as I see her.
no subject
Date: 2006-09-06 10:55 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-09-06 04:06 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-09-06 12:26 pm (UTC)This post makes me miss Literature and all the seminars we had. *sobz*
no subject
Date: 2006-09-06 02:03 pm (UTC)I love the last paragraph, about cunt having no binary and that perhaps being the source of its power/foulness. I also heartily disagree with it being a "male" word, that women don't talk about themselves like that. I see cunt quite often in my porn - the porn that's just about the sex at least, I rarely see it in more "emotional" stories. Huh, which I suppose might actually lend some credibility to the masculinity arguement. The stories are almost universally written by women, but the word appears when the sex is aggressive and masculine, even if both parties are women. Interesting thoughts you've dredged up here.
Oh, and telling everyone you write HP porn isn't that bad. Just stare at the professor to avoid the strange looks you're sure you're getting, and then try not to fall out of your chair when you're asked for links to your porn after class (it happened to me. Seriously weird).
no subject
Date: 2006-09-06 02:52 pm (UTC)OMG! You're going to make me die with laughter, I swear! *falls off chair*
On the issue on hand I'm just going to repeat what I said in Denmark - A cunt is a cunt and I don't have a bloody cat between my legs so stop talking about my pussy. As long as I can escape that word, I think I'll be fine :D
no subject
Date: 2006-09-06 08:25 pm (UTC)I have a cunt, but I am not a cunt.
I didn't address it in the tutorial (because we were running out of time and because trying to tell a bunch of random people in a class that you love to use the word cunt while writing Harry Potter porn would be rather like getting undressed in front of them)
Yeah, I snorted at that. Wasn't Theorys of Writing your boring class? :]
no subject
Date: 2006-09-06 08:26 pm (UTC)What am I, two?