Sexy Bodies by Elizabeth Grosz

Author:Elizabeth Grosz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2002-01-15T16:00:00+00:00

For Graham, with everything, and for Burton, with nothing, Taylor’s body marks its own excess equally well in the public and the private domains. Graham and Burton choose to characterize its ‘effects’ with the decorum of their respective positions as cultural commentator and erstwhile lover. While for Graham she provides an exemplification of redundancy as rhetorical display, for Burton, Elizabeth Taylor’s body stymies precisely the love of serious argument. It supplements this verbal pleasure with a masochistic physical performance which ultimately figures the contradictions implicit in ‘having’ a body, let alone ‘having it all’. Taylor has her body, but her body has her: it is simultaneously the instrument of her self expression, figured in both quotes as a rhetorical instrumentality and an instrument of containment as she becomes ‘simply’ but redundantly a body. If rhetoric may be defined as ‘an art of positionality in address’ (Bender and Wellbury 1990: 7), Taylor’s positionality is cemented in and by her body. It is stretched across the conundrum of feminine corporeality as both expanse and circumference, the demarcation of limit and the sign of excess. This puzzle (like that of the ‘mental cell’) is rhetorical marked by the logic of supplementarity which subtends both quotations. Graham’s observation turns on the ambiguity of simile: to resemble ‘a woman who has everything’ offers Taylor’s look as a vulgar excess matched materially by her dress; to have herself – her body – is already to have too much. Burton presents Taylor’s body itself as supplementary to Taylor: she ‘throws’ it, it ‘bruises’ her. Both quotations elide their potential subject, remarking instead upon this effect of supplementarity. Kitty Kelley reports that Burton responded to being cast against Taylor in Cleopatra by commenting ‘“Well, I guess I’ve got to don my breastplate once more to play opposite Miss Tits’” (Kelley 1981: 193). His quip figures bodily supplementarity through imitation and prophylaxis; a masculine prosthesis, the hard breastplate, becomes the ironic signifier of stymied engagement as well as of public performance.2

Recent representations of Taylor’s body as unattractively abundant, as perilous and physically uncontainable – as having overstepped the mark – ground themselves in her historic sex appeal, and collocate the magnitude of her physical fall from grace with the degree of her weight gain. In the 1980s, Taylor’s body was worked most exhaustively as iconic of the unconstrained female figure, a reading which coincided with a period in which her professional life was at low ebb. For so long a figure whose bodily manifestations were always read in terms of a career at full tilt, in the 1980s Taylor’s body outstripped its cinematic life, and became the star in extra-cinematic representations of its own life. Analyses of Taylor’s body, and most particularly her own, Elizabeth Takes Off, incorporate features familiar to the history of figuring the feminine–woman as animal, woman as flesh, woman as sense-object, woman as topography, woman as text. This series of figurations is particularly noticeable in Elizabeth Takes Off and Marianne Robin-Tani’s The New Elizabeth: Better

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