"She (the other woman) is making a spectacle out of herself." - a specifically female danger.
The danger?- that of an exposure. In contrast to men whom can expose themselves as a deliberate and circumscribed act (in a similar way to the mating rituals of exotic birds)
Whereas female exposure is associated with inadvertency and loss of boundaries.
Two distinct models for spectacle of the female:
radical negation, silence, withdrawal and invisibility. V . femine performance, imposture and masquerade (purity and danger).
(also see Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger (1996) http://http://www.bytrent.demon.co.uk/douglas00.html
It is these models which have suggested varying cultural politics for women, though they are also models which are not mutually exclusive. The bringing together of these strategies of female invisibilty . V. female exposure can help tackle questions of difference and the reconstruction or counterproduction of knowledge.
eg. The work of Bakhtin has translocated the following issues to the field of the social,constituted as a symbolic system:
bodily exposure / containment
disguise / gender masquerade
abjection/ marginality
parody / excess.
'The reintroduction of the body and categories of the body ( in the case of carnival, the grotesque body) into the realm of what is called the 'political' has been a central concern of feminism.' The relation between the symbolc and cultural constructs of femininity and womaness, and the experience of women, might be brought together towards a dynamic model of a new social subjectivity.' The early work of Julia Kristeva on semiotics andsubjectivity are a crucial aspect of this project.
http://http://www.cddc.vt.edu/feminism/Kristeva.html
http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0078-7469(197710)12%3C41%3AJKSAW%3E2.0.CO%3B2-C
Why is it that taboos around the female body as grotesque (the pregnant body, the aging body, the irrecgular body) are seen as unruly when set loose in the public sphere?
Much of the early work on the "carnival" dates from the late 60s, 'when enactments of popular protest, experimental theatre and multimedia art were suggestive of the enerigies and possibilities of unlimited cultural and social transformation. ( ref to Cockfighting and Deep Game Play, Clifford Geertz)
" Temporary loss of boundaries tends to redefine social frames."
' The image of the disorderly woman did not always function to keep women in their place. On the contrary, it was a multivalent image that could operate, first, to widen behavioral options for women with and even outside of marriage,and second, to sanction riot and political disobedience for both men and women in a society that allowed the lower orders few formal means of protest. Play with an unruly woman is partly a chance for temporary release from the traditional and stable hierachy; but it is also part of the conflict over efforts to change the basic distribution of power within society.' - Natalie Davis
The image of the unruly woman can actually incite and embody popular uprisings. An example being the Wiltshire enclosure riots of 1641 when rioting men were led by male cross dressers who called themselves' Lady Skimmington'. Lady Skimmington embodies the dispised aspects of strong femininity and her subordinate position in society in highlighted, through the enactment of power reversal. From this there remain questions of enactment and gender layering-Are women who have taken on this role ( as opposed to men cross dressing) as effective as male cross dressers?- Or is it a clear case of sanctioned play for men?
Does this comic female style (eg, of Lady Skimmington) work to free women from a more confining aesthetic? Or are women again so identified with style itself thattheyare as estranged from its liberatory and transgressive effects, as they are from their own bodies as signs in culture generally?
In what sense can women really produce or make spectacles of themselves?
'In the everyday indicative world, women and their bodies, certain bodies, in certain public framings, in certain public spaces, are always already transgressive- dangerous, and in danger.'
The grotesque body, as according to Bakhtin, upon his reading of Rubelais, 'is the open, protruding, extending, secreting body, the body of becoming, process and change. The grotesque body is opposed to the Classical body which is monumental, static, closed and sleek, corresponding to the aspiration of bourgeois individualism - the grotesque body is connected to the rest of the world.
- consideration of the grotesque body as continuous process - "the body without beginning and without end", Helene Cixous
