A Write to Save Ourselves
Jennifer Ashton’s “Our Bodies, Our Poems” embodies the lyrical language that women use in order to express themselves intimately. Throughout the centuries of women’s race to gender greatness, women have used several outlets in order to make their point across, Ashton points out that literature is the ultimate escape from social poverty for women writers as well as the use of the body. Ashton illustrates that women’s writing, as well as physical art lend to the design, but she also displays the injustices that women endure to express themselves.
Specifically, in the 1970’s there was a literary explosion of anthologies and poetry which only dissipated shortly after their success (213). The anthologies were released because of the undervalued support for women’s writing. Women’s writing was not accepted as a literary genre not because of the female content, but by the fact that it was a woman telling the tale – “[t]he body in this context begins to look like a superior technology […]” (225). Ashton does not deliver a very convincing argument, it also sounds contradictory at times, however, she is not concerned with the bias of women— she is concerned with the bodies of women. Ashton mentions the opposing beliefs about women writing lyrically, but she articulates the importance of the anthology in order to give an equal voice to men and women. She touches on Muriel Ruckeyser’s poem “The Poem as Mask” and how it indicates that since women should not hide behind a mask, but express themselves through their words and seek out our own form. Ashton continues that the pressure of a “male-oriented” culture should facilitate a necessity for women to speak from the heart instead of sitting idly by and allowing men to take control of women’s writing as well (216).
It is not just our minds that should be accepted into the literary spectrum, but our bodies, which is the basis of Ashton’s argument. Ashton recalls back to Andy Warhol’s “piss painting” where he used his body to “paint” a masterpiece. According to Ashton, “[i]f ‘splatter’ is the distinctive formal characteristic of such masculine painting, the feminine equivalent is the ‘stain’” (223). Both women and men share this bodily function of urinating; men just cannot relate or appreciate the “stain”, they do not live it month after month. Warhol’s use of his body to pay respect to another pissing artist Jackson Pollack was associated with women’s use of their “stain”, which was a painting that represented the menstrual cycle. Women did not directly use their bodies to create the “stain”, they expressed vividly on canvas a replica of what the “stain” represented – Warhol and Pollack urinated on a canvas. The injustice is wickedly present.
Ashton’s argument reminded me of Helene Cixous and how she proclaimed to women in society to recapture their bodies and to not be ashamed; Cixous urged that emotional and physical feelings go hand in hand. I find that reading about someone’s personal experiences and beliefs is a lot easier to digest rather than listening to their experience of childbirth or their first menstrual cycle. By reading their experience, I do not need to see the “stain”, I create my own mental picture of the heartache, the pain, the joy and the feeling that the writer is intimately expressing. I also feel that the written word is an easier way to express gratitude, your fortitude or your attitude in a polite and definite way. Ashton simplifies the idea by just using the human body as a formative way to brand your mark into society, even though society may not always be willing to accept it.
-Tiffany Smith
April 18, 2009 at 9:15 pm
I understood “Our Bodies Our Poems” much differently than you. WHile I agree that Ashton is generally in favor of women expressing themselves poetically, and that they need to do this , her article points out how inte interpretation of form as a production of a gendered body, has produced in response, an “innovation” in form by women who are reacting to the sense that formal innovation in art was a product of the male body and therefore to change the form of art would be to produce a female form, as in producing the centered painting as opposed to the all over piss paintings of Jackson and Warhol. Seeing Jackson and Warhol’s art as expression of male body, and therefore innovative in form in the sense of the form particularly produced by a male body. Innovation then becomes a way of reinscribiing gender differences through biological sex, as in a woman produces a certain art form because of her body and vice versa. THis is also happening in poetry when it came to be see that most formal innovations in poetry concerning language use were being done by men, so even if women didint intentionally produce poems which were meant to be oppostie of those of the men, the result was form itself came to be considered gendered , as in there were female and male forms of poetry, and female forms had to be , implicitly by this logic, different from male forms if they were to truly express themselves as women. In her words she says ” the elimination of unfairness-almost immedialtely transformed the commitment to equality between women ad men inot a commitment to celebrating the differences between them-the most distinctive of whic is the body’. WHat has happened, Ashton is saying , that the “demand for formal innovation ” (as supposedly required by the fact that men were dominating the fields of formal innovation )has become a demand that “femininity in a poem (or artwork for that matter) be understood not as a function its content but as a function of its form”. Since this innovation is taking place in reaction to the idea that there is a male bodily produced form, it re inscribes sexual differences and essentialism of men and women as fundamentally different because of their sex, hardly a victory for equality. Its like say men produce this kind of art form because they can pee from their penis and women can produce this kind because they have menstrual cycles. Rather then really challenge ideas of men and women as social constructs, this kind of thinking reinforces the idea men and women are fundamentally differernt because of their bodies and that the form of their art is determined by their bodies. If feminism celebrates this, they risk pigeonholing women again into a essentialism which says a woman’s body must produce a different form than a man and thus is innovative because of this difference. Innovations in the sense of feminism, are considered “necessary” because they are designed to contest “the masculinization of poetic and artistic theory”. What is happening, according to Ashton, is that as soon as a male artists artistic form is perceived or linked to their male sex, female formal artistic choices become determined by thier bodies because that is how the men made their formal choices. To innovate, or resist the man, a woman has to express her artistic form as a function of her body, but all this does is to reinforce gender essentialisms those members of the innovative /avante garde arts movement explicilty repudiate.
May 5, 2009 at 7:24 pm
I too read Ashton’s essay a bit differently than Tiffany. As I interpreted Ashton’s essay, she is against anthologies because of its essentialist function in her opinion. Grouping writers in an anthology by gender would do a disservice for women by deducing the author’s in the anthology to a fixed identity, whether it be “woman”, lyric poet”, or “innovative poets.” If women have as much artistic merit as men, then why create an anthology strictly for women? Ashton sees harm in organizing an anthology of gendered subjects in a particular artist aesthetic because it is hypocritical to the anti-essentialist aims of poststructuralist feminism. The false binary of the sexes will never cease as long as gendered anthologies persist. The body then becomes a site that determines the artistic choices and motivations. I think Ashton would argue that the time has come for an integration of male and female artistic communities to express themselves and their craft as artist wholes. Whether this is possible is up for debate. I agree to a point with Ashton, but still see the need of anthologies, gendered or not. I think they give access to groups-women, Af.Americans, Latinos, Native Americans- that have been excluded at certain points in history and “othered” by society as unintelligible humanity. Political avenues can open up through anthologies of women for instance which is never a bad thing, but a necessary evil perhaps.
May 13, 2009 at 5:03 pm
Ashton is touching upon the different levels of marginalization allotted to women’s writings. Yes, she does concentrate on the unfairness in the use of the body in artistic expression – how a man urinating on a painting is initially shocking but then gains popularity and how it would be unthinkable (and detrimental) for a woman to use her body as a medium of expression. You took this aspect of her essay to be the central preoccupation, but I believe Ashton is merely using this imagery as a representation of how the differences between the male and female body dictate the accepted ideas and actions a person puts forth. Ashton advocates for women to break out of their socially instilled habit to compare themselves to men when they are creating something, whether it be an artwork or a piece of writing. Because we acknowledge the differences in our bodies, and because the male set of differences has been accepted and celebrated over the female’s, women have been inclined to think that we need to emulate men’s work and reach their standards. Ashton vehemently pushes against this. She doesn’t want the poem to be a mask for women; she doesn’t want the words that we use and the style in which we write in and the content/ideas of what we write about to be based on those produced by men.