Sujata Iyengar

Department of English
Stanford University
sujata@stanford.edu

 

“Incorporating the Antibody: Women, History and Medical Discourse,” a conference held at the University of Western Ontario, October 5-6, 1996, and the accompanying exhibition, “Speculations: Selected Works from 1983-1996,” by Barbara McGill Balfour.

 

When I told the Canadian Customs official that I was presenting a conference paper, she languidly enquired what the conference was called. “Incorporating the Antibody,” I replied unthinkingly. She perked up and scrutinized me more closely. “Are you bringing any samples?” she fired back. I looked back at her blankly. “Specimens?” she continued. She laughed at my bewildered gaze. “You’re just reading a paper, right? You’re not carrying any viruses?” I finally and belatedly awoke to my own metaphor and hastened to reassure her that I studied English, not epidemiology, and that the only infectious agents I might be harboring would be the cold viruses I’d contracted on the plane. I recount this anecdote because it illustrates some of the points that “Incorporating the Antibody: Women, History and Medical Discourse” succeeded gloriously in making: namely, that we have become so accustomed to hearing medical discourse employed in figurative contexts that we are no longer alert to its full implications, and that, conversely, practitioners of medicine just as frequently fail to examine the assumptions and consequences of the metaphorical language that they themselves borrow from imaginative writing and other disciplines. The conference title, “Incorporating the Antibody,” expressed, according to conference organizers Elizabeth Harvey and Barbara McLean (Western Ontario), a desire for interdisciplinary feminist scholarship to reclothe with flesh (to re-incorporate) the increasingly disembodied dry bones of medical discourse about women (who have been historically figured as “anti-bodies” in binary opposition to men) and to provide a kind of antidote or antibody to medical and rhetorical complacency. The conference attracted participants from three continents and several walks of life. Speakers included professors, graduate students, and independent scholars of English Literature, Anthropology, History, and American Studies; health-care workers from Australia, Canada, and the U.S. (some of whom expressed anxiety at the growing commercialization of their fields and its uneasy alliance with care-giving); professional and amateur artists; community activists; and concerned parents.

 

Plenary speaker Emily Martin (Princeton) spoke of her wish to revive or recover clichés and dead medical metaphors and follow them through to their logical conclusions. Her beautifully illustrated presentation on “The Woman in the Flexible Body” began by contrasting early twentieth-century images of the body as machine or fortress, protected from a germ-laden, disease-ridden outside world by the skin, with the “flexible,” three-dimensional, transparent body more familiar to us from images over the past decade. Early depictions of the body’s immune system figure the body as a fortress or castle, surrounded by ramparts and battlements; in this model, the working body and its parts function like a stable mechanical apparatus. More recent images, in contrast, display the body’s struggle against infection as one that takes place both inside and outside the body; they use three-dimensional imaging techniques to treat the skin as an active, permeable boundary rather than a barricade, and the healthy human body as a system working according to the rules of chaos theory–quick, subtle, and responsive to infinitesimal changes in its environment.¹ Martin found that these metaphors of flexibility and adaptability travel between popular and scholarly writing on the body’s immune system and advertising campaigns for, among other things, ink-jet printers and employment agencies, and suggested that chaos models might offer us a new way of regarding women’s health. Such a model might, for example, regard menopause as the body’s dextrous response to changing conditions rather than as the shutdown of “normal” functions. She also offered a caveat: while the flexible body might seem to offer us a new and exciting way of looking at the world, it appears in current advertising campaigns as the telos of a late capitalist neo-Darwinism. In today’s employment market, “flexibility” is the key to survival.

 

The ways in which we figure our bodies reflect our historical notions of selfhood and identity. The postmodern subject’s constantly shifting, adaptive, and multiple subjectivities offer us the shimmering pleasures and freedoms of the play of surfaces but also the terrors and suffocations of entrapment in this purely external world (my postmodern, flexible self, for example, might hold down three or four different jobs, none of which would provide me with health insurance or a pension plan).² I recently received a catalogue for a popular book club that claimed to cater to my many different “identities” by providing me with as many different types of pulp fiction. Magazines run features on “spin” as the key to political and corporate success in the late twentieth-century; the very metaphor conjures up a speedy whirl that emphasizes constant movement over content (electrons spinning in probability clouds have replaced the stable, orbital Rutherford-Bohr atomic model that we learned in high school). Companies euphemistically call our insecurity and underemployment our “flexibility,” nimbleness, and agility; while many women hailed the advent of “flexi-time” as a way of combining an active professional life with motherhood, we have learned that it’s also a way of reducing our benefits, status, and salaries.

 

As the post-Enlightenment or essential subject dissipates into numerous identities–legal, medical, personal, and social–so the rights and privileges associated with the modern, legal subject disappear. Gayle Whittier’s (Binghampton) harrowing account of “The Politics of Metaphor in Neo-Natal Units” made it clear that the mechanistic imagery associated with drastically pre-term infants dehumanizes them and turns them into subjects for experimentation, in many cases despite the wishes of their parents. Babies in the neonatal units studied by Whittier were frequently denied anesthesia on the grounds that their nervous systems were not developed enough to allow them to feel pain, and doctors often compared the infants to animals or marvels of technological wizardry, hardly human at all. At the other extreme, more than one speaker commented on the parthenogenetic or androgenetic fantasy of the anti-abortion movement, which detaches the fetus from its mother and endows it with agency from the moment of conception (Emily Martin alluded to an extreme manifestation of this in the current immunological debate over why a pregnant woman’s immune system doesn’t expel the fetus as a “foreign body,” as if mother and child were not connected at all). Fetal or infantile subjectivity and its putative existence or absence are politically variable terms, as is “the good of the child”; Natasha Hurley (Western) commented on this paradox in her discussion of “cutting” hermaphrodites and the medical insistence that babies born with indeterminate sex organs be “corrected” to a single and definite gender, even if they will become infertile and, in some cases, experience greatly diminished sexual pleasure.

 

Historically, women have been associated with the flexible body, with softness, impressionability, permeable surfaces, with an enclosed secrecy that perversely becomes an ability to be opened up to the male medical gaze. Several speakers traced the archeology of the flexible feminine body or antibody through Early Modern texts. Plenary speaker Ludmilla Jordanova (East Anglia) analyzed “Feminine Figures in Medicine, 1750-1830” to suggest that male midwives were perceived as both effeminate and sexually threatening and that it would be misleading to see in the history of midwifery simply a narrative of female authority undermined by male control; Lianne McTavish (New Brunswick) discussed the careful self-fashioning of male and female midwives through the portraits of themselves printed in their treatises; Caroline Bicks (Stanford) noted the “darkening” of the midwife in seventeenth-century midwifery manuals and the racialized discourse of early modern gynecology. Elizabeth Harvey began with the two meanings of “glass” in the Renaissance, as a mirror in which one sees oneself and as a transparent window through which a viewer sees through an opaque surface, to connect feminine (in)visibility, ocularity, and penetration. Artist Barbara McGill Balfour’s exhibition “Speculations” provided a visual analogue to these concerns through her thoughtful and sometimes disturbing self-portraits, which explored the power of the speculative gaze when turned on women and when women look at themselves. Her Self-Portrait Series 1983-4
 

figure 1: graphite on paper, 8 x 8
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presented us with the artist’s multiple selves drawn individually and unsmilingly in pencil in pointed contrast to one of the most famous icons of postmodernism, Andy Warhol’s mass-produced and highly colored images of Marilyn Monroe.

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The video-installation Transference-Love (1996)

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and still photographs taken from it suggested that lenses–of the eye, the camera, a pair of spectacles–functioned as emblems not simply of distortion or filtering but as devices that concentrated visible light and invisible thought.

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The text of Transference-Love reads in part: “I don’t know where to begin because I’m not sure why I’m here and what I want out of this. It’s not that I’m trying to figure out everything in advance. I’m just not sure what my motivation is–it’s as if I need stage directions….Sometimes I just don’t listen to myself.” While Barbara Balfour’s images evoked sadness and a sense of mortality or fatefulness, they also represented some of the ways in which female observation or “speculation” can function as therapy or cure, or at least as a way of redressing the balance of gendered power. Beth Dolan Kautz (North Carolina) found a therapeutic theory of aesthetics in Mary Shelley’s Rambles in Germany and Italy and Susan Craddock (Arizona) treated us to some truly terrible poetry from tubercular women in early twentieth-century San Francisco sanatoriums. “Incorporating the antibody,” for Shelley and for the infected women of San Francisco, involved negotiating a balance between accepting the rules of the establishment that would cure them (the sanatorium, for the San Franciscans; the spa, for Shelley) and finding their own therapeutic discourse.

 

The conference itself performed as academic “antibody”: the program made no reference to participants’ rank or discipline, and some of the conference presentations acted as formal antibodies to preconceived notions of academic discourse. Sometimes this transgression was a matter of content or tone, reminding us that the personal is still the political; sometimes a startling generic switch forced us to look afresh at disciplinary boundaries within the academy. As Erin Soros (British Columbia) noted, patients “present” symptoms to physicians much as speakers “present” papers: in her circular narrative, a schoolgirl presented a term paper on anorexia only to “present” with the disease shortly afterwards and, years later, to return and “present” her story in an academic setting once more. A costumed Theresa Smalec (Western) unexpectedly disrobed along with the protagonist of the performance-art piece she was simultaneously analyzing and performing. Judy Segal (British Columbia) wove the deeply-personal and moving history of her mother’s mortal illness into a sharp critique of the euphemistic North American way of death and the secret code-words that, had she known them, could have given her mother an earlier respite from her suffering. And, at a conference that was so concerned with generation, it was entirely appropriate that Dino Felluga (Stanford) should dedicate his analysis of Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s feminized pathology of popular taste to his parents, who were for the first time hearing him give a paper (we have become so accustomed to hearing the language of parenthood applied to literary or academic mentors that it was refreshing to hear it used in its literal sense).

 

Antibodies accept the body’s infection and then turn the virus’s own weapons back on itself. The first wave of feminists desired legal and political equality but did not question the institutions they sought to join. For the so-called “second-wave” of feminists, a woman’s absorption into the world of logos, the world of the Lacanian symbolic, entailed a sort of passing, a lifetime spent in drag. A third-wave feminist “antibody,” however, recognizes our necessary implication in the “powers-that-be” and then uses those powers to help her fight them from within. Antibodies aren’t necessarily anti-viral; that is to say, they don’t insist on the utter destruction of the virus but on its reconfiguration in a gentler form (a good example of this is the recent discovery that the genetic predisposition to contract a mild case of malaria in infancy can protect adults from succumbing to the illness in its raging extremity). The performance artist Laurie Anderson functions as a kind of antibody to the misogyny of William S. Burroughs when she quotes his well-known aphorism, “Language is a virus from outer space” as part of her own carnivalesque encounter with technology, language, her body, and the late twentieth century. Antibodies also leave behind traces of the virus for which they function as antidote. We test for the presence, not of a virus, but of its antibody. In this way the antibody elaborates the Foucauldian dynamic of power relations: the hidden workings of power become not merely visible but also negotiable through our resistance to it.

 

Notes

 

1. On the imaginative shift from battlefield to network in metaphors of the immune system, see also Donna Haraway, “The Promises of Monsters: A Regenerative Politics for Inappropriate/d Others,” in Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson and Paula Treichler, ed., Cultural Studies (London and New York: Routledge, 1992) 295-337.

 

2. I am obviously indebted in this analysis to Fredric Jameson’s Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1991).

 

A volume that will include several essays from the conference is currently under preparation.