My meaning obsessive tendencies seem to really slow me down
What do I need?
0. To strive to be as honest with myself and others as I am capable of.
1. Somewhere to sleep+eat+create safely and comfortably
2. Way to pay for above
3. Way to pay for that in a way that is healthy and contributing to something greater than myself with positive affects
4. To eat healthy and include body movement everyday
5. Maintaining a healthy self image supported by positive relationships.
we’re in the money
I make the stuffed animals out of 100% garbage
and he makes the music videos first thing in the morning.
We’re in business.
My Fellow Planeteers
Somedays, I feel like I can come across a bit neurotic when talking to people outside my social circle. Explaining my theory of balancing my input and output (consumption and creation), is hard to line up with my overconsumptive suburban roots. Not only does my mother look back at me with widen eyes when I explain that I actually would prefer to shop at the thrift store even if money wasn’t an issue, she actually treats me like I should be pitied. I recently was at a job interview and I was asked how I became so against consumer culture. A question that seemed so obvious to me, I had never considered exactly where I got the idea from. Was it really something I decided all on my own? Is it just a coincidence that my generation has produced a large DIY movement, whether all those participating see it as a political stance? Couldn’t be. I, nor any other individual are really that original.
I want to look you straight in the eyes and whole heartedly say to you that, I single handedly and consciously became so involved in the re-use movement because I decided to consciously construct actions in opposition to the consumer culture I was brought up in. And that, the parade of participants that join my cause are just “right” and on the same path as I. That however would be ignoring our historical context. And the DIY culture is but one reaction to that historical context. Cartoons and children’s programming hold a special place in individuals memories. How many countless parties have you attended where you pause and bond over the shows of your youth. Ninja Turtles, Captain Planet, Fern Gully, Free Willy, The Giving Tree, Where the Wild Things Are, touched our hearts. For most of us eighties babies we were surrounded by Eco-trendy and Eco-entertainment products. How did these influence how our generation is shaping today?
< A work in progress, more soon>
The body, the embarrassing noise factory. To cover the embarrassment of night time digestive noises my partner and I have named our tummies after Harold and Maude after the nineteen seventies romance between a teenage boy and a 
79 year old woman with the complete soundtrack done by Cat Stevens. When the stomach noises begin, they are now explained as a product of our alter ego, one of which is derived from a sick and simeloutaneously adorable narrative from the media. It somehow soothes the humiliations of these inevitable biological interruptions, during cuddling time. And provide some relief to the closed door topic.
My Story
Pulsing with anxiety I resort to the same response I have conditioned during the last four years of living in Chicago, I call my mom. She is always appreciative for the call, but tonight we are particularly in similar emotional states, that serve as the foundation for a new emergence in our relationship.
“Mom, can you look up online something for me.”
“Sure, what?”
“Well, um… is it normal to be itchy after sex?”
“Are you using rubbers?”
“Mom, no one says rubbers anymore. And if you are trying to say condoms… not often.”
“Rubbers, is weird to say? I’ll go on WebMD! There’s a chose the area map… (she’s beginning to laugh) so I’ll click on…… VA-gin-A. (accompanied by giggles) Is not your vulva, right?”
“What’s a vulva?”
“The thing that hangs.”
“Oh, no. Not that.” I’m embarrassed. “ I don’t even understand my own body.”
“Vaginal fungus… no not that. Um, Herpes, Chlamydia. Ew. You have warts?”
She goes through the list laughing. At points we’re both laughing, but it’s really only a symptom of how ignorant and uncomfortable we are with our bodies, with being female. I decide that the initial symptom of everything is itching, so I am going to have to go to a clinic, completely driven out of fear. Just deciding that I feel waves of panic. I’m about to be 23 and have never gone to the gynecologist. Which I find if I never tell anyone, they can’t make me feel guilty about it.
My mom and I have little to relate on anymore, but one common ground we find to ease the conversation is to direct our attention to the terror of doctor visits. She begins to talk about how nervous she is about having a hysterectomy in the next couple days. Terrified actually, and I almost forgot about it because she’ll rarely mention it. She’s hid from this surgery for a year and a half now, and as a result, her fibroid tumors have just continued to grow. I doubt she would have ever gone to the doctor in the first place, had she not been constantly bleeding from her vagina. She, a woman of nearly 50, actually tried to believe that if she ignored it, it would all go away. A belief I am familiar with trying to manifest, one that runs in the family I guess you could say. A new story emerges from our phone bounding, One of my great grandmother and gynecology.
My great grandmother couldn’t have been more traditionally feminine. She was the secretary at the Sears Tower for 35 years here in Chicago, keeping the phones and files in order for “the big hot shots”, she would call them. She also was the coordinator of the private sphere. My mom becomes deeply invested in romanticizing the descriptions of the order and perfection my great grandmother maintained in the home. In support of the American myth of sexual division, my great grandfather tended to all the “masculine work” of fixing cars and keeping up with the yard work, as my great grandmother mastered the feminine housework and cooking. My mom tells no stories of negativity towards Faye. She is idealized in our family narrative, because as the last surviving member of her family, my mom chooses to tell the story in this fashion.
Faye was born in the early 20th century and somewhere around her 30th birthday she was “forced” to have a hysterectomy. I insert the word forced as an assumption from how the story follows. My mom can only recall her grandmother’s hysterectomy being mentioned all but twice. These are the only two instances my mother can recall, in retrospect of her trying to conjure an understanding of the procedure she is about to undergo. Otherwise, these details of our family narrative will remain silenced. On one occasion, my great grandfather Jack would kid around to the family about how terrible Faye’s breath smelled after surgery. “Bad breath Faye” became a joke of the family. Apparently the anesthesia that was used in the 1930’s was some form of gas that left the patient with a very foul odor. Faye would not return to the medical institution, not even for a physical, until she had an almost fatal stroke in the late 1970’s. That’s when the doctors discovered in her vagina, a metal ring deeply embedded in her silent flesh.
A foreign body inserted in the vagina is common in young children, but this event in adults, being talked about is rare, if not unheard of. For a period of time, procedures were performed on female patients that left them with a metal ring in the vagina, but the ring was to be removed, like stitches. This metal ring is referred to in medical texts as the pessary. It is an ancient surgical device used to support or position the displaced uterus. Pessaries were used in the Victorian period, but not discussed being used into the 20th century. Mainly because they have increased vaginal infections, including toxic shock syndrome and because they damage and destroy the functions of the bladder.
Out of the stubbornness of her actions, you could almost assume that Faye decided if she was going to be forced again under the medical gaze that she would also make sure to check herself out mentally. The doctors tried to persuade the family to allow them to remove it, but the family, tired, saw no point. She was incapable of forming answers to why she hadn’t told anyone about the pain she was enduring from the ring in her shortened, infected and mutilated vagina. All the details of my great grandmother’s story are long lost now. We have no family alive to ask.
This story of the metal, the silence and the female shame of their bodies is all too telling of the gendered disease of woman. The vagina, something my mom always has giggled about, where I came from, what I still lack any education about, what my great grandmother held a secret in for forty years, is a narrative of the female disease of my family. Haunted by this story, and dissatisfied with dominant reasoning, I channel my fear into a research project to understand the female body and its relationship to the scientific institution. This fear is not just mine, but reaches to every woman who will undergo a hysterectomy or the discomfort of the gynecologist appointment. A story I am passionate about piecing together, as a reaction to how silent my family tradition has been. What I want to do is connect the gaps of my family narrative to the bigger picture. To demonstrate how economic strategy is interconnected to the medical ideologies, which influence social organization. I am seeking to articulate the political meaning of the hysterectomy.
Today, it is estimated that half of the population of women in the US will have their uteruses surgically removed. Nearly half of those procedures are performed unnecessarily. So why are so many hysterectomies occurring? The answer to this question requires some historical context to frame hysterectomies as a product of the Enlightenment period.
The Enlightenment Project
The Enlightenment was a time of dramatic shifts that occurred in the production and access of ideas. How accessible information would become to a larger audience became a big business and was carried out by enlightenment elites, along with the emerging rhetoric of professionalization. Questions of the control and the spread of knowledge became an uneasy relationship in regard to defining of the elite. Notions of femininity was not invented from the enlightenment period, but rather very specific forms of knowledge about femininity arose from this time period within the authority of science. This form of knowledge was a consequence of the overall pattern of Enlightenment thinking.
Enlightenment sought to avoid approaching contradictions and differences, which conflicted with enlightenment universalism. The emerging enlightened women posed a problem for the male intellectual class. Therefore the public debate of woman erupted and produced a stigma of irrationality as a symptom of biological inferiority explained to be intrinsic to the female character. The enlightenment period sought to continue the marginalization of women with the shifting of the veil from religious authority to scientific authority. This tradition was followed by Rousseau’s tract to Emile “that the woman was a creature whose physical make up ensured she was ruled by emotion, rather than rationality, fitted by her biology to be only the mate and helper of man. “ (Moranatz-Sanchez) And thus much energy and attention was devoted to creating new ideologies of the gendered disease of woman. The belief that a woman’s genitals were merely the inversion of the man’s genitals was replaced with their biological inferiority.
“Victorians were increasingly concerned with reputation in a commercializing world where wealth and gentility were increasingly bifurcated.” (Morantz-Sanchez) The commercialized world developed with the increasing debate about the conduct of the public woman. It was also a world in which women became more responsible for their own health and the health of their families. “Their role as consumers of health care is an essential part of the rise of promincience in the gynecologist.” And the assumptions about female virtue, which generally had to do with sexuality, came to govern dominant presuppositions about women. The constructions of female desire were indispensable to a model of male capitalist social identity. Tightly linking woman to her function of procreation and perpetuating the myth that “A woman’s ovaries belong to the commonwealth, she is simply the custodian.” (Morantz-Sanchez)
The development of American gynecology was a direct reaction to the French enlightenment. American practioners sought to keep up with the emerging approach of specialization into science and medical practices. The development of the field of gynecology remained haphazard well into the 20th century as gynecologists separated themselves off from traditional general practioner. “Unlike the traditional approach to care that often breached the wall between doctor and patient and depended on a body of shared accessible knowledge, the new scientific model mystified medical knowledge and furnished objectivity as agreed upon criteria for setting standards in behavior, diagnosis, and treatment.” (Morantz-Sanchez)
In 1860’s hysterectomies came into the picture, but most doctors thought it was too risky due to the high morality rate. The word hysterectomy is rooted in the notion of the hysterical woman. Much of the developing discourses of gynogocloy were produced to treat female hysteria. Practioners who supported the myth that biologically female virtue was immune to self-interest actually treated sexually misbehaving women. (Morantz-Sanchez) Those who were perceived as deviant became metaphors of social disorder. Female purity was defined opposed to the deviant and diseased. Cliterectomies were performed of frequent masturbators, or nymphomaniacs. “Such procedures are proof of the profound misogyny embedded in Victorian culture.” (Morantz-Sanchez) 1888 saw the performance of the first total hysterectomy, for fibroid tumors in the United States. This was a monumental moment for the gynecological field and established normal and abnormal standards. Many in the medical field complained that colleagues were being driven by motives of professional ambition and outright greed.
Most doctors would not practice on white women. For J. Marion Sims the Female slaves were the ready made experimenting subjects and he justified this with the belief that Black women had lesser sensitivity to pain. Out of his total eleven performed hysterectomies on his slave experiment only three survived. This also was supported by the claim that surgeries were part of scientific advancement and in this light the doctors saw himself as a pioneer. This is really telling of how detrimental the ideologies produced through the enlightenment could be enacted by those who believed them.
Instead of sickness being a condition of the entire organism the new science dictated another approach. “Researchers were beginning to isolate the pathogenic bacteria of epidemic diseases.” (Morantz-Sanchez) Their successes promoted a new ideology of a science consisting of the acceptance of the germ theory. Which aided the focus on specific diseases and body parts that promoted specialization and cellular pathology. Patients and environmental differences were gradually stripped of their significance, while reductionist and universalistic criteria for treatment took place. This development of science that is still prevalent today requires that we stop and ask ourselves some questions. Is basic science research to explain why things happen in the body in particular ways? And clinical decisions to be made as a result of direct observations of patients, where therapy would be specific to individuals. How have Enlightenment quests for laws, certainty and systems invaded our current beliefs and cultural myths? Where now patients become alienated from doctors.
The enlightenment had a large impact in the interaction between structural developments, social ideology, scientific and technological change. But the craze for surgectcal solutions that continued was not driven entirely by practioners. Pressure from the patient was also necessary. And time would construct their sense of what was acceptable treatment. The accounts of women complaining of severe painful menstruation, painful intercourse, anemia and displaying hysterical symptoms were occurring. Women did seek to the medical professionals eventually as these surgical innovations became known, but medical professions often stepped beyond their medical roles. “They participated in the construction of a dominant cultural image of the female body as fragile and full of difficult incomprehensible working parts, and they deployed a powerfully effective conception of femininity that constrained women in a variety of way and sanctioned their confinement within the separate private sphere of family life.” (Morantz-Sanchez) The reach of medical ideologies functioned and resonated outside health care system to the point where women’s voices were not heard equally as either patients or practitioners. Masculine professional rhetoric was so integral to medicine, only they claimed to have the authority to discuss female illness.
Scientific progress when unbounded by social responsibility was easily destructive. Rationality and objectivity, the thought process of modern scientific endeavor, increasingly represented the masculine. While emotion, passion and intuitive thinking now a contaminant to proper scientific endeavor became identified with the feminine.
20th century and Today
Looking at my mother’s fear of the hysterectomy in the 21st century, I still see the common thread of using professionalized rhetoric to separate the relationship between the doctor and patient. The hysterectomy, now presented completely decontextualized, to the patient is now a widely performed surgery to treat some life-threatening cancers of the uterus, cervix, uncontrollable infection and hemorrhages. Yet most of the hysterectomies performed today are for non-life threatening reasons. Such as endometriosis (lining of uterus migrates outside uterus) and bleeding of fibroid tumors (non-cancerous lumps located the muscle tissue of the uterine wall). The Hers Foundation seeks to inform women about the facts of hysterectomies that their gynecologist won’t tell them, like the effects of such a surgery include loss of sexual sensation. Gynecologist and drug companies are making 8 billion dollars a year from performed hysterectomies and castration, which is the medical term for the removal of ovaries. (Hers)
Some women have reported they have reversed the growth of their fibroid tumors by changing their diet, eliminating bleached flours, rice, sugar, caffeine and alcohol and red meat which may contain synthetic estrogen in the form of DES which is used to fatten animals. (Eson) Doctors have throughout the 20th century encountered women suffering from huge ovarian cysts, which they reported were due to too much estrogen. Looking at this fact in parallel to the wider public health concern of the vast amounts of hormones fed to and excreted by livestock in the US reveal the diagnosis should be directed not just to the cysts but to a larger sickness of American society and the production of food. DES and other synthetic hormones have since World War II been excreted in massive amounts to pigs, sheep and cattle. Feed stores sell the synthetic estrogen by the truckload, as they scramble to meet demand. There is a great need to reframe what gynocologists refer to as “the simplest of surgical procedures” into complex cultural phenomena. When we begin to place heath in the context of competition and consumerism the practice begins to look very different than the market may want us to perceive. Directly, the language of the market has come to dominate ideas of heath provision as the scope for appealing to individuals to take charge of their own health is ever widening.
Hysterectomies are used as a teaching aid for medical students. The number of hysterectomies performed rises with incoming classes of medical students and fall after they reach their quota at the end of the year. Revealing the still strong financial incentive. Women proclaiming to “prevent cancer” make decisions based on medical history, probability and personal fears about cancer to remove uterus before a doctor recommends it. Ironically the death rate is ten times from hysterectomies than from uterine or cervical cancer. “Which reveal the cultural attitudes that women are more vulnerable to surgery that the death rate from cervical prostate cancer is almost 3 times cervical cancer but men are rarely urged to have their prostate glands removed, to avoid cancer.” (Eson) American mythology directs women to believe that the problem is the uterus and where the doctor is the hero. However it is unclear how much choice women actually have since they are seldom privy to accurate information regarding these surgeries and alternatives.
My mother was given documents after her surgery to prove the validity of the procedure. The lists of big words were meaningless to her and the pictures of white bumps on pink and grey flesh were even more foreign. It was as if they relied on the circulating discomfort with the female body, and her discomfort with having her vagina presented to her kept her from asking how the pink abstracted pictures were parts of her body. The same way she never deeply questioned what any of the words meant that accompanied them. Once she gave me the file, a brief Internet search for the medical jargon revealed this equation. Lower bmi, not depressed ,non-smokers, exercised = no fibroids. It revealed a deep connection with my mother’s poor relationship to consumption, smoking and no exercise. This explanation was never posed to her by her doctor. It was left at simply her estrogen levels were too high. It was left completely decontextualized.
In my mother’s situation, I found it really interesting how the surgery prompted her to consider the meaning of her uterus and ovaries. My mother’s identity rests upon her deep belief that femininity and having female organs are innate. She began to openly talk to me about “feeling empty on the inside” and feeling “like less of a woman or some kind of it” in a haunted tone. I had never given too much consideration to the uterus as a sex organ before; at least I understood it wasn’t a sexy organ.
I will never know exactly what it was about my great grandmother’s experience of the hysterectomy that led her to inflict such pain on herself. But the fear that she harbored for the medical institution was not completely irrational or isolated. The fact that she left the foreign body in her vagina could not have just been that she had forgotten. Especially when accounts conclude that such a dilemma produces foul order and bloody discharge.
The retrospective view of the hysterectomy behind my great grandmother experience helps me gain perspective of the patient’s subjectivity and the importance of the location of disease. A location in my family narrative that is embedded with a powerful cultural narrative of medical misogyny and social control which grounded the history of women’s perceived inability to control their own bodies. This is ever still clear in the disconnection between bodily fear and language. Language has produced the meaning of bodies in our historical framework, not merely reflected it. Medical narratives have succeeded in accomplishing several goals. One prival was to displace issues of order and disorder onto bodies. I believe the space to begin resistance to the dominant medical narrative is in creating space for the interconnection of our stories, along with attention to the holes. My story’s gaps and silences reveal an untold story of power relations and serve to form an understanding of how gender ideology has been produced and sustained. Where we not just as women, but also as patients need to ask ourselves why we aren’t authorized to speak of our own bodies?
Works Cited
Eson, Jean. “Hormonal Hierarchy: Hysterectomy and Stratified Stigma.” Oct. 2003. Jstor. Columbia College, Chicago. 14 May 2009 <jstor.org/stable/3554708>.
“Hysterectomy Alternatives.” Hysterectomy Educational Resources and Services. Feb. 2009. Hers Foundation.
Morantz-Sanchez, Regina Markell. Conduct unbecoming a woman medicine on trial in turn-of-the-century Brooklyn. New York: Oxford UP, 1999.
Outram, Dorinda. “Coffee Houses and Consumers: The Social Context of the Enlightenment.” Cambridge University.
biology is real, but context is all.
Gender is the fundamental category of western humanity. Which has led me to place feminism versus conservative science, perpetuating yet another dualism, a line of logic that I have been conditioned to, which seeks to sweep away any contradictions. This logic is just as stagnant as the nostalgic glofiying the hunter-gatherer times that they wish to return to, which I fall back to as well.
I’ve recently been led me to the author of the Cyborg Manifesto, Donna Haraway, where she blurs the lines of mind, body and tool. Her objective seems to be of a sort of “resetting” of materialist logic. Which is the aim of post-modern philosophy, as I understand it, it is a project to try tangle the threads of logic built by materialism, to allow people to take different directions that are complex and full of contradictions, to see the multi-layers.
Haraway is very interested in steering so called socialist feminist, like myself who resist science and technology, towards the cyborg as a post modern view of science. The cyborg navigates away from dualist construction, by decentering the universal positionality of humanism. “Historical material account of human nature departs from relativism and universialism.”
please read on: http://www.stanford.edu/dept/HPS/Haraway/CyborgManifesto.html
O
We today are lavishing in our ignorance.
Everything steers us to that path, you don’t even have to endure the strain of the drive
just rest you head back feet propped on the dashboard
and enjoy the breeze.
axis of eros
Being here amounts to so much
Because all this here And now
Is so fleeting.
Yet it seems to require us
Yet somehow strangely concerns us,
Us the most fleeting of all.
It is the contradictions within the west
Which is the only world I know
That I must come to understand
Myself infused with self
The un-lost paradise
Once sought, derived and regained
from Inner dignity and ultimate honesty.
And so it was, I entered the broken world,
To trace the company of love.
It’s voice.
Love, the unfamiliar name behind hands that wove us
Into a curious conjuction.
happiness is only the premature profit of imminent loss.
Still we only live now,
so forget your underwear. We are free.
And in my dreams I watch you walk back
Dripping from a sea-journey to exchange sandpaper kisses.
eeggggs
in the begining <biblical reference> is the egg.
(here the egg in the material reality is being presented for consumption)
hard-boiled.
At least we will not get fat on that diet, believe me, so spread wide.
[is the "I" what this eye sees -or- is the 'I" what I see?]
Nevermind, just spread wide your mouth. For Their delight.
For They, the bureaucrats, who will never nourish either of us.
Eggstentialism and Eggistence.
[is the egg more than the Chicken -or-
the chicken the importance for which the egg exists?]
does memory bring it all into the present? is my thinking
only the present? there is only now. i am not recalling.
i am stating the now only the NOW, the IS. is that
how you feel? Profit the moment.
-i am a mess of memories, feelings, anxieties
but remembering refuses to touch the forgotten.
it is not our memory that continues to grow,
but the forgotten.
to say that nothing is visible is untrue
i can see nothing, is not true,
but -> saying nothing, as in a dream, rings true for too
many voices spread my lips apart
and blackness would come
all over your hard-boiled egg.
{Conciousness cuts camera-like. a sound instant. from here to here
to here to here. Conciousness in multiple places at once. In the
crowd of no people.
Egg: a round oval body laid by the omnipresent feminine. The egg consists of several layers, which act to nourish or protect a developing center. Eggs in modern capitalist patriarchy, are mass produced chicken eggs for human consumption regardless of the proven malnutrition that results from the consumption
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