Ethics of The Body by Margrit Shildrick & Roxanne Mykitiuk

Author:Margrit Shildrick & Roxanne Mykitiuk [Shildrick, Margrit & Mykitiuk, Roxanne]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Ethics
Published: 2011-02-17T05:00:00+00:00

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Lisa Diedrich

In The Body in Pain, Scarry is interested in both the making and unmaking of the world, and the ways in which analyzing the processes and structures of unmaking might give us insight into the processes and structures of making. Similarly, in Love’s Work, Rose moves from a chapter on love to a chapter on illness. In her text, then, love and illness are juxtaposed, not as opposites, but as two scenes of loss (of self, of certainty, of control) in which the embodied self is always already vulnerable. The work doesn’t heroically disregard this vulnerability but rather acknowledges it and negotiates with it. She opens herself up to her readers, but this opening reveals not just life in its medical sense as incom-mensurate with death, but life in its “meaningful sense . . . as inclusive of death” (1995: 79). The literal and figurative opening that Rose reveals is the opening of a colostomy, a procedure she must undergo because her cancer has spread to her colon. Of this decidedly uncanny treatment, Rose notes:

Nowhere in the endless romance of world literature (my experience is, needless to say, limited) have I come across an account of living with a colostomy. Since the first colostomy was performed in this country in 1797, the first paper on the subject published in 1805, and colostomies have been routine medical practice since the second half of the nineteenth century, this is more than enough time for lyric and lament. (1995: 93)

In fact, it is antilyric and antilament that Rose practices: “Let me make myself clear,” she writes, “the colostomy— stoma meaning “opening”—

is a surrogate rectum and anus” (1995: 93). Linking what she calls

“colostomy ethnography” with Holocaust ethnography,7 Rose intends to speak of shit, to re-site bodily function, to exchange “discretion for an anterior cloaca and incontinence” (1995: 95).

Stacey also speaks of shit, as well as vomit, urine, blood, saliva, sweat, and tears, because these “abject bodily wastes . . . become the currency of everyday life” for the person with cancer (1997: 82). Thus, in her chapter entitled “Monsters,” she utilizes Julia Kristeva’s theories of abjection to help her describe the “crossing of the border between I/other and between inside and outside that truly disgusts” (1997: 82); such cross-ings are a crucial aspect not only of the experience of cancer but also of the experience of its conventional treatments. For Stacey and other people with cancer, chemotherapy turns the body inside out, and “the body’s 04447_Ch07.qxd 3/2/05 10:14 AM Page 145

A Bioethics of Failure

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flows are set in reverse: where food should enter, vomit exits; where waste should exit, suppositories enter” (1997: 84). Moreover, it is not only the inside of the body that becomes strange and is unable to perform the functions that the healthy body takes for granted, such as eating and eliminating, the outside of the body becomes strange as well. The skin that forms the boundary between the body and world is hairless, “over-burdened” with

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