CUNT is not a dirty word

[featherxquill]

I'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?

Comments

[snapelike.livejournal.com]

I think you are right about Rita. I love that woman, not because she's a bad journalist, but because she's a strong woman. But then again one of the demonised women of the HP universe. There are either mothers (good) or independent women (bad). Even Tonks and Minerva are depending on men, and let their strength depend on male approval/support. Rita rules.