Reinterpreting Menopause by Paul Komesaroff Philipa Rothfield Jeanne Daly

Author:Paul Komesaroff, Philipa Rothfield, Jeanne Daly [Paul Komesaroff, Philipa Rothfield, Jeanne Daly]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction, Social & Cultural Studies, Social Science, Gender Studies, Feminism & Feminist Theory, Women's Studies, Sociology
ISBN: 9781136049026
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2013-05-13T04:00:00+00:00

Difficult Texts and Clear Pictures

If one accepts that human thinking is always analogistic, synthetic, and ratiocinative, then it is hardly surprising that the dark places of the human psyche, the “primitive” past of human history, and the so-called savage places of the earth should become confused or mutually informing. Practices generate metaphors, and the metaphors “engender” other practices. Age-old oppositions of light and dark, of good and evil, became implicated in ideas of reason and unreason, purity and impurity, evolution and devolution. The development of increasingly sophisticated technologies of microscopy, magnification, radiography in conjuncton with photography meant that the “dark places” of bodies were poetically, as well as literally, opened to the light of reason. Michel Foucault argues in The Order of Things that a “vitalized” science of the body did not exist before the nineteenth century, that eighteenth-century discourses of the body primarily presented mechanized models and static categories. There is an Enlightenment preoccupation with genera, phyla, and taxonomical definitions rather than with fluid and vital articulations. The invention of the X-ray not only allowed a literal image of inner recesses but also brought with it more complicating “negative” associations, with Doppelgängern and older figures of inversion given new rhetorical investments. The “vitality” and various incandescences of Percy Bysshe Shelley's poetry, for instance, had more than a little to do with his fascination with the new technology of electricity—with his passion for “galvanizing” himself with a homemade apparatus, and his interest in the possibility of “revivifying” inanimate bodies. One need not wait upon the heirophant of discourse theory for an awareness of such epistemological shifts. It is almost a disciplinary cliché for historians of science to think of a “galvanization” of the static body of the “Elizabethan world picture.” As some critics of the cleanness of Foucault's “epistemological breaks” have argued, the edges are more messy—both between “eras” and in the writings of particular writers.32

Whatever the quibbles about periodization, it seems entirely valid to conjure a period of time in which technical developments in the biological sciences determined a new “fluidity” and “vitality.” Metaphors of cathexis (expression and repression) abounded, and studies of the permeability of tissues and of circulatory mechanisms enriched a tropology of infiltration and dissemination, as well as provided new resonances in an existent poetics of illumination and penetration. Electrical models were giving way to even more dynamic and complex visions of “invisible” secretions, and such models were subtly imbricated with images of racial and genetic contamination. For instance, in an early essay on the psychical mechanism of hysteria (1892), Freud suggested that “the psychical trauma—or more precisely the memory of the trauma—acts like a foreign body which long after its entry must continue to be regarded as an agent that is still at work.”33 Some recent commentaries emphasize this point as “the birthplace” of psychoanalysis. Here Freud wrests his thinking away from his teacher Charcot and from a model of electrical excitation then dominant in mental pathology. His inseminating “alien” metaphor (common in an age

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