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Bibliography

A Feminist Perspective on Gender Justice in the Treatment of Chronic Pain, Laura Vearrir, iMedPub Journals, March 23, 2016

Chronic pain is a significant public health problem that disproportionately affects women. Gender justice in the management of chronic pain must involve gender-tailoring of treatment paradigms.

In the United States and worldwide, women have a higher prevalence of chronic pain as compared to men. Women are more likely than men to report recurrent pain, pain in multiple areas of the body, and pain that is more severe [1-4]. Many chronic pain syndromes are more prevalent in women, including fibromyalgia, migraine headaches, irritable bowel syndrome, interstitial cystitis, temporomandibular disorder, various forms of neuropathic pain, and others [5-7]. Women have also been reported in experimental studies to be more sensitive to several different modalities of pain and have a lower threshold for pain [8,9]. Chronic pain is a leading cause of disability for men and women, but has a greater negative impact on the ability to function for women [10,11]. Despite this, historically, women’s reports of pain are less likely to be taken seriously by providers and women are less likely to receive adequate treatment for their pain. The idea that women have to prove that they are like men in order to receive similar treatment by healthcare providers was described as the “Yentl Syndrome” in 1991 by B. Healy who coined this term after studies reported less aggressive initial treatment of women with angina; however, “once a woman showed that she was just like a man, by having severe coronary artery disease or a myocardial infraction then she was treated as a man would be” [12].

How ‘Bad Medicine’ Disnisses and Misdiagnoses Women’s Symptoms, Terry Gross, Fresh Air, March 27th, 2018

As she began to research her own condition, Dusenbery realized how lucky she was to have been diagnosed relatively easily. Other women with similar symptoms, she says, "experienced very long diagnostic delays and felt ... that their symptoms were not taken seriously."

Dusenbery says these experiences fit into a larger pattern of gender bias in medicine. Her new book, Doing Harm, makes the case that women's symptoms are often dismissed and misdiagnosed — in part because of what she calls the "systemic and unconscious bias that's rooted ... in what doctors, regardless of their own gender, are learning in medical schools."

There are a lot of factors that go into these recognized sex differences in drug metabolism and response. ... Percentage of body fat affects it. Hormones, different levels of enzymes — all of these things go into it. But really, probably the most straightforward [factor] is that, on average, men have a higher body weight than women. And yet, even that difference is not usually accounted for. We prescribe drugs based on this one-size-fits-all dosage, but that ends up meaning that, on average, women are being overdosed on most drugs.

One of the most common [symptoms] that really is common across ... [the autoimmune diseases] is fatigue — a really deep, deep fatigue that isn't just being sleep-deprived from staying up too late. That fatigue, comparable to pain, is this very subjective symptom that's hard to communicate to other people. And I think that women are up against this real distrust of their own reports of their symptoms.

So conditions like autoimmune diseases that really are marked by these subjective symptoms of pain and fatigue, I think, are very easy to dismiss in women. ... Even though we do know about autoimmune diseases, during that diagnostic delay, women are often told, "You're just stressed. You're tired." And [they] have a really hard time convincing doctors that this fatigue is abnormal.

I found this to be one of the most disturbing things that I found in my research: how many women reported that as they were fighting to get their symptoms taken seriously, [they] just sort of sensed that what they really needed was somebody to testify to their symptoms, to testify to their sanity, and felt that bringing a partner or a father or even a son would be helpful. And then [they] found that it was [helpful], that they were treated differently when there was that man in the room who was corroborating their reports.

Transhumanist Values, Nick Bostrom (Oxford University, Faculty of Philosophy/Director, Future of Humanity Institute), 2005

Transhumanists view human nature as a work-in-progress, a half-baked beginning that we can learn to remold in desirable ways. Current humanity need not be the endpoint of evolution. Transhumanists hope that by responsible use of science, technology, and other rational means we shall eventually manage to become posthuman, beings with vastly greater capacities than present human beings have.

Further, our human brains may cap our ability to discover philosophical and scientific truths. It is possible that failure of philosophical research to arrive at solid, generally accepted answers to many of the traditional big philosophical questions could be due to the fact that we are not smart enough to be successful in this kind of enquiry. Our cognitive limitations may be confining us in a Platonic cave, where the best we can do is theorize about “shadows”, that is, representations that are sufficiently oversimplified and dumbed-down to fit inside a human brain.

We can overcome many of our biological limitations. It is possible that there are some limitations that are impossible for us to transcend, not only because of technological difficulties but also on metaphysical grounds. Depending on what our views are about what constitutes personal identity, it could be that certain modes of being, while possible, are not possible for us, because any being of such a kind would be so different from us that they could not be us. Concerns of this kind are familiar from theological discussions of the afterlife. In Christian theology, some souls will be allowed by God to go to heaven after their time as corporal creatures is over. Before being admitted to heaven, the souls would undergo a purification process in which they would lose many of their previous bodily attributes. Skeptics may doubt that the resulting minds would be sufficiently similar to our current minds for it to be possible for them to be the same person. A similar predicament arises within transhumanism: if the mode of being of a posthuman being is radically different from that of a human being, then we may doubt whether a posthuman being could be the same person as a human being, even if the posthuman being originated from a human being.

Transhumanism advocates the well-being of all sentience, whether in artificial intellects, humans, and non-human animals (including extraterrestrial species, if there are any). Racism, sexism, speciesism, belligerent nationalism and religious intolerance are unacceptable. In addition to the usual grounds for deeming such practices objectionable, there is also a specifically transhumanist motivation for this. In order to prepare for a time when the human species may start branching out in various directions, we need to start now to strongly encourage the development of moral sentiments that are broad enough encompass within the sphere of moral concern sentiences that are constituted differently from ourselves.

Lilith, Lady Flying in Darkness, Rabbi Jill Hammer, My Jewish Learning/Women & Feminism

https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/lilith-lady-flying-in-darkness/

When the first man, Adam, saw that he was alone, God made for him a woman like himself, from the earth.God called her name Lilith, and brought her to Adam. They immediately began to quarrel. Adam said: “You lie beneath me.” And Lilith said: “You lie beneath me! We are both equal, for both of us are from the earth.” And they would not listen to one another.

As soon as Lilith saw this, she uttered the Divine name and flew up into the air and fled. Adam began to pray before his Creator, saying: “Master of the universe, the woman that you gave me has fled.” God sent three angels and said to them: “Go bring back Lilith. If she wants to come, she shall come, and if she does not want to come, do not bring her against her will.

The three angels went and found her in the sea at the place where the Egyptians were destined to drown. There they grabbed her and said to her: “If you will go with us,well and good, but if not, we will drown you in the sea.”

Lilith said to them:”My friends, I know God only created me to weaken infants when they are eight days old. From the day a child is born until the eighth day, I have dominion over the child, and from the eighth day onward I have no dominion over him if he is a boy, but if a girl, I rule over her twelve days.”

They said: “We won’t let you go until you accept upon yourself that each day one hundred of your children will die.” And she accepted it. That is why one hundred demons die every day. They would not leave her alone until she swore to them:”In any place that I see you or your names in an amulet, I will have no dominion over that child.” They left her. And she is Lilith, who weakens the children of men….

The Lilith of this story confronts both Adam and God: she defies patriarchy, refuses a submissive sexual posture,and in the end refuses marriage altogether, preferring to become a demon rather than live under Adam’s authority.

By Peace Quarters

https://www.peacequarters.com/invisible-red-thread-connects-meant-together/

“An invisible thread connects those who are destined to meet, regardless of time, place, and circumstance. The thread may stretch or tangle. But it will never break.”

According to the Chinese myth, the Gods tied an invisible red thread around the ankles of a man and a woman who were destined to meet and get married. The myth is Asian counterpart of the Western concept of ‘soul mates’ or ‘twin flames.’ The deity in charge of ‘The Red Thread’ is believed to be Yue Xia Lao, the lunar matchmaker God who is also in charge of marriages.

Knowing that we have been created in a pair, we go around our lives searching for the one who is our destiny. Every time we fall in love, we feel this is it, this is the one and that we have found the other half.

Symposium, Plato, 350 BCE, Translated by Benjamin Jowett

http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/symposium.html

I will try to describe his power to you, and you shall teach the rest of the world what I am teaching you. In the first place, let me treat of the nature of man and what has happened to it; for the original human nature was not like the present, but different. The sexes were not two as they are now, but originally three in number; there was man, woman, and the union of the two, having a name corresponding to this double nature, which had once a real existence, but is now lost, and the word "Androgynous" is only preserved as a term of reproach. In the second place, the primeval man was round, his back and sides forming a circle; and he had four hands and four feet, one head with two faces, looking opposite ways, set on a round neck and precisely alike; also four ears, two privy members, and the remainder to correspond. He could walk upright as men now do, backwards or forwards as he pleased, and he could also roll over and over at a great pace, turning on his four hands and four feet, eight in all, like tumblers going over and over with their legs in the air; this was when he wanted to run fast. Now the sexes were three, and such as I have described them; because the sun, moon, and earth are three;-and the man was originally the child of the sun, the woman of the earth, and the man-woman of the moon, which is made up of sun and earth, and they were all round and moved round and round: like their parents. Terrible was their might and strength, and the thoughts of their hearts were great, and they made an attack upon the gods; of them is told the tale of Otys and Ephialtes who, as Homer says, dared to scale heaven, and would have laid hands upon the gods. Doubt reigned in the celestial councils. Should they kill them and annihilate the race with thunderbolts, as they had done the giants, then there would be an end of the sacrifices and worship which men offered to them; but, on the other hand, the gods could not suffer their insolence to be unrestrained.

At last, after a good deal of reflection, Zeus discovered a way. He said: "Methinks I have a plan which will humble their pride and improve their manners; men shall continue to exist, but I will cut them in two and then they will be diminished in strength and increased in numbers; this will have the advantage of making them more profitable to us. They shall walk upright on two legs, and if they continue insolent and will not be quiet, I will split them again and they shall hop about on a single leg." He spoke and cut men in two, like a sorb-apple which is halved for pickling, or as you might divide an egg with a hair; and as he cut them one after another, he bade Apollo give the face and the half of the neck a turn in order that the man might contemplate the section of himself: he would thus learn a lesson of humility. Apollo was also bidden to heal their wounds and compose their forms. So he gave a turn to the face and pulled the skin from the sides all over that which in our language is called the belly, like the purses which draw in, and he made one mouth at the centre, which he fastened in a knot (the same which is called the navel); he also moulded the breast and took out most of the wrinkles, much as a shoemaker might smooth leather upon a last; he left a few, however, in the region of the belly and navel, as a memorial of the primeval state. After the division the two parts of man, each desiring his other half, came together, and throwing their arms about one another, entwined in mutual embraces, longing to grow into one, they were on the point of dying from hunger and self-neglect, because they did not like to do anything apart; and when one of the halves died and the other survived, the survivor sought another mate, man or woman as we call them, being the sections of entire men or women, and clung to that. They were being destroyed, when Zeus in pity of them invented a new plan: he turned the parts of generation round to the front, for this had not been always their position and they sowed the seed no longer as hitherto like grasshoppers in the ground, but in one another; and after the transposition the male generated in the female in order that by the mutual embraces of man and woman they might breed, and the race might continue; or if man came to man they might be satisfied, and rest, and go their ways to the business of life: so ancient is the desire of one another which is implanted in us, reuniting our original nature, making one of two, and healing the state of man.

Each of us when separated, having one side only, like a flat fish, is but the indenture of a man, and he is always looking for his other half.

Arturo Herrera

Interview with Josiah McElheny

https://bombmagazine.org/articles/arturo-herrera/

“...people have specific attachments to those forms. They seem to come to them with lingering references. But neither of us is really interested in the clarity of the message that they see. It is about the pliability of content, of grasping relationships.”

“There are so many images available to us now that we have to be very careful which ones we use. The image you choose dictates the meaning of the work that you build with it. You have to consider all the conceptual, the political, the sociological, the cultural and psychological aspects already inherent in the image, and then consider how to make it your own and make it interesting to the viewer.”

“The challenge is, how can an image so recognizable, like a dwarf, or a cartoon character’s foot or nose, or the red and blue specific to Snow White’s dress, have another meaning that I impose onto it? Is it possible? Can I make something so clear ambiguous? Can I uproot it? In which ways is the baggage that we bring to the new image relevant to the vivid recollections within our cultural context? I am attracted to juxtaposing invented images and readymade images without establishing explicit relations between elements.”

“...a nonlinear narrative is about the impact of uncertainty. It’s about not going from A to B but choosing somewhere in the middle. And it is precisely this middle that I’m interested in. Maybe what I am trying to do is to connect object-concepts without set boundaries. And that’s why it’s a kind of forgery. I have a very set structure. But it doesn’t have a specific result.”

Interview with Thomas Friel

http://badatsports.com/2013/residual-histories-an-interview-with-arturo-herrera/

“Using everyday printed materials which are instantly recognizable leads the viewer directly into the image and at once a connection is established. Crashing our invented, private meanings onto a newly constructed image only adds to the impact of the original source. This undoing of linearity is attractive to me.”

“My intention was not to overwhelm the audience with information but a way of exposing a personal lexicon. To put it all out there if you wish.......It dealt more with wanting to see what a disintegration of my own sources could look like. I guess it is an organic process that every artist goes through.”

Theories and Document of Contemporary Art, Kristine Stiles and Peter Selz, 2012

Distortion also characterizes the “Superflat” paintings, sculptures, films, and commercial objects produced by Takashi Murakami (b. Japan, 1962), who inspired a generation of artists in the 1990s and 2000s. Fascinated with otaku culture (Japanese anime, manga, and video games), Murakami abandoned his intensive study of Nihonga and turned to popular culture forms. His work is especially associated with Japanese “cute” culture (figures like Hello Kitty) and cartoon figures derived from Poku culture. Critiquing the dominance of Western culture trends, and evoking the consequences of the atomic bomb with the nomenclature “Superflat”, Murakami declared that Japan “may be the future of the world... from social mores to art and culture, everything is super two-dimensional.” (201)

Takashi Murakami, The Super Flat Manifesto, 2000 (322-323)

...“Super flatness” is a stage to the future....

...Kawaii (cute) culture has become a living entity that pervades everything. With a population heedless of the cost of embracing immaturity, the nation is in the throes of a dilemma: a preoccupation with anti-aging may conquer not only the human heart, but also the body. It is a utopian society as fully regulated as the science fiction world George Orwell envisioned in 1984: comfortable, happy, fashionable—a world nearly devoid of discriminatory impulses. A place for people unable to comprehend the moral coordinates of right and wrong as anything other than a rebus for “I feel good.”

Keith Haring (426-428)

Often when I am drawing in the subway in New York City an observer will patiently stand by and watch until I have finished and then, quickly, as I attempt to walk away, will shout out “But what does it mean?” I usually answer: “That’s your part, I only do the drawings.”

So when I was asked to write something for Flash Art, I found myself in a similar situation. I still maintain that an artist is not the best spokesman for his work. For myself, I am continually learning more of what my work is about from other people and other sources. An actively working artist is usually (hopefully) so involved in what he is doing that there isn’t a chance to get outside of the work and look at it with any real perspective. A real artist is only a vehicle for those things that are passing through him. Sometimes the desired sources of information can be revealed and sometimes the effects can be located, but the desired state is one of total commitment and abandon that requires only confidence and not definition. The explanation is left to the observer (and supposedly the critics).

The human experience is basically irrational.

...I think the contemporary artist has a responsibility to humanity to continue celebrating humanity and opposing the dehumanization of our culture. This doesn’t mean that technology shouldn’t be utilized by the artist, only that it should be at the service of humanity and not vice versa.

The structure of the “art market” was established long before I was involved with it. It is my least favorite aspect of the role of the contemporary artist; however it cannot be ignored. The use of galleries and commercial projects has enabled me to reach millions of people whom I would not have reached by remaining an unknown artist. I assumed, after all, that the point of making art was to communicate and contribute to a culture.”

Art is not an elitist activity reserved for the appreciation of a few, but for everyone, and that is the end toward which I will continue to work.

“I am intrigued with the shapes people choose as their symbols to create a language. There is within all forms a basic structure, an indication of the entire object with a minimum of lines that becomes a symbol. This is common to all languages, all people, all times.” (Saatchiart.com)

Beautiful Losers, In the Beginning There Was the Word by James E. Walmesley, 2004

Dominant Culture, Ideology and Subcultures

...for a society to function, there must exist a ruling class which exerts its power over the masses by enforcing its ideology, in turn creating a dominant culture. The dominant culture is a collection of rules and codes that are followed, whether consciously or unconsciously, to create the illusion of an ordered and peaceful society, the “aesthetic of authority.” However, when a certain group is in opposition to this culture, they pose a threat to the leaders of this society. Once a new subculture has announced itself, it is only a short time before the ruling classes, the leaders of the dominant culture, react to try and restore harmony. By tackling these so-called problem groups, attention can be diverted away from any problems that are present in the community. Due to its very nature, graffiti is a preliminary anonymous act. Those who participate in this illegal world are operating in the strange situation of demanding to be noticed and, at the same time, hiding behind an alias. The focus of the movement is not in the people involved, but on their work. Whereas punk relied heavily on the cut-up, desolate, apocalyptic image of the individual in society, writing focuses our attention on the product of the individual, as anonymous in their art as they are in society. Each writer is only identifiable by his or her tag, on their style, and can only be identified by another writer. Indeed, whereas many subcultures operate on a superficial level—a punk walking down the street recognize another punk immediately, simply through clothes and demeanor—writing involves a series of encounters that over time lead to recognizance. Once a suspect is spotted by a writer (usually based on a hunch), he will perhaps try to get the other persons attention, and then give a signal that shows that he writes, a flash of a marker or a spray can maybe. If the other person reciprocates the gesture, then the two of them will come together and ask, “what name do you write?” and most probably sign each other’s piece books. This complex and risky, sequence of events is a bizarre thing to imagine happening between two members of such a tight-knit subculture, but it highlights the strong ties that bind the writer to not only other writers, but also to his or her work.

Instead of exhibiting a general style in the individual’s image, graffiti art has developed its rules and codes way beyond other subcultures. The “...internal structure of any particular subculture is characterized by an extreme orderliness,” but this is even more prevalent in writing. I therefore propose that, where we might look to punk clothing and music to define that subculture, we look at the overall style of graffiti are itself to identify the writing subculture. To locate the signs within the subculture, we look at the overall style of graffiti art itself to identify the writing subculture. To locate the signs within the subculture, we examine the recurring elements within the art itself, not in the dress or accouterments of the writers themselves. First and foremost, we can see that the tag is the most obvious sign available to a writer. By taking the humble signature and repositioning it, it becomes the sign of power, something that would “...hold its own against them; by its mere presence it would be able to exasperate all the police in the world; it would draw down upon itself contempt, hatred, white and dumb rages.” Although the desire to exasperate is not at the forefront of the writing subculture, the attention garnered through such reaction is an attractive proposition. The tag is a sign of the writer’s existence. It says, “Here I am!” in a culture where individuality is distrusted, even discouraged. In a world steeped in advertising, youths see a chance to advertise themselves, and, in so doing, they can “represent the symbolic re-occupation of an estranged environment.” (pgs 197-199)

Benjamin, Walter, Michael William. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith. Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings. Vol 2 part 1. Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2005.

“imitation...is at home in the playing, not in the plaything” mimesis not in the object but in the subject. The behavior Benjamin associates with the child playing with the “genuinely simple” toy, which he describes in anthropological terms as “nothing but a rudiment of the once powerful compulsion to become similar and to behave mimetically”... ...(74)

...the assumption that the imaginative content of a child’s toy is what determines his playing; whereas in reality the opposite if true.... “the more authentic, the less they meant to adults.” Because the more appealing toys are, in the ordinary sense of the term, the further they are from genuine playthings; the more they are based on imitation, the farther they lead us away from real, living play....Imitation (we may conclude) is at home in the playing, not in the plaything. (115)

Ngai, Sianne. Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015.

The genuinely simple toy, by contrast, bears witness to its process of making in an overt or transparent way... (74)

Revolving around the desire for an ever more intimate, ever more sensuous relation to objects already regarded as familiar and unthreatening, cuteness is not just an aestheticization but an eroticization of powerlessness, evoking tenderness for “small things” but also, sometimes, a desire to belittle or diminish them further. (3)

...cuteness prompts an inadvertent mushing or “cutification” of the language of the judging subject, turning her speech into murmers and coos that recall the “oo- intensive names” of the cute snack cakes in David Foster Wallace’s story, “Mister Squishy.” This verbal mimesis of the object on the part of the subject reflects how cuteness always “entails a structure of identification, wanting to be like the cute—or more exactly, wanting the cute to by just like the self.” (pg 8)

...there is no judgment or experience of an object as cute that does not call up one’s sense of power over it as something less powerful. But the fact that the cute object seems capable of making demands on us regardless, as Lori Merish underscores—a demand for care that women in particular often feel addressed or interpellated by—suggests that “cute” designates not just the site of a static power differential, but also the site of a surprisingly complex power struggle. (11)

The affective response to weakness or powerlessness that is cuteness, for example, is frequently overpowered by a second feeling—a sense of manipulation or exploitation—that immediately checks or challenges the first. “The rapidity and promiscuity of the cute response makes the impulse suspect, readily overridden by the angry sense that one is being exploited or deceived,” as science writer Natalie Angier notes about biological cuteness; indeed, this susceptibility to being taken over seems paradoxically internal to the affective experience of cuteness. The implicit reason is that we judge things cute all too easily, as if there were a deficit of discrimination in the subject’s judgment corresponding to or even caused by the cute object’s oft-noted lack of articulated features. As Angier observes, the “human cuteness detector is set at such a low bar...that it sweeps in and deems cute practically anything remotely resembling a human baby or part thereof,” from the “young of virtually every mammalian species” to “wooly bear caterpillars, a bobbing balloon, a big round rock stacked on a smaller rock, a colon, a hyphen and a close parenthesis typed in succession.” This atavistically regressive series of forms underscores that cuteness involves not only a certain softening or weakening of formal differentiation on the side of the object (the more boblike it is, the cuter it will seem), but also of a discrimination on the side of the subject. To be sure, cuteness can be a powerful and even demanding response to our perception of vulnerability in an object; according to the scientists Angier interviews, the pleasure that images of puppies or babies arouse can be intense as those “aroused by sex, a good meal, or psychoactive drugs like cocaine,” acts or substances shown to stimulate the same regions of the brain. Yet because the aesthetic experience of cuteness is a pleasure routinely overridden by secondary feelings of suspicion, there is arguably something weak about it anyway. (25)

...nor does the judgment of cute have any of the links to morality—indirect or direct—repeatedly ascribed to the judgment of the beautiful. Indeed, in vivid contrast to beauty’s continuing associations with fairness, symmetry, or proportion, the experience of cute depends entirely on the subject’s affective response to an imbalance of power between herself and the object.... beauty is precisely an affective response to powerlessness, to what we complacently “love” rather than “admire” (showing “love” to be an emotion not incompatible with contempt), and is aligned with “the idea of weakness and imperfection” brought out foremost by “the beauty of the female sex”: Women are very sensible of this; for which reason they learn to lisp, to totter in their walk, to counterfeit weakness and even sickness.” Just as objects seem most cute when they seem sleepy, infirm or disabled, “Beauty in distress is much the most affecting beauty” and is associated with an “inward sense” of “melting and languor” mirrored by a physical relaxation of the body. The beautiful as the weak, feminine, submissive and sleepy seems infected with a certain “languor” of its own. (54)

...cuteness solicits a regard of the commodity as an anthropomorphic being lass powerful than the aesthetic subject, appealing specifically to us for protection and care. (54)

...cuteness seems to be a disavowal—at once a repression and an acknowledgement—of otherness. (60)

...once children were no longer imagined as miniature adults, as they were in the eighteenth century, or as naturally moral or virtuous creatures, as the were for a good part of the nineteenth, that manufacturers found the impetus to produce indestructible toys that could survive the violence with which children were increasingly associated. (75)

underscoring the judging subject’s empathetic desire to reduce the distance between herself and the object. (87)

Cuteness is thus the name of an encounter with difference—a perceived difference in the power of the subject and object, in particular—that does something to everyday communicative speech: weakening or even dissolving syntax and reducing lexicon to onomatopoeia. (87)

...the act of endowing a dumb object with expressive capabilities can become a dominating gesture... (91)

As Stephen Siperstien notes, the same principle informs roboticist Mashiro Mori’s “uncanny-valley” theory, which argues that as stylistically simplified robots begin to look and behave more like actual humans, our affection toward them also grow up to a certain point, after which the resemblance produces a feeling of aversion. (91)

Gordon, Terri J. "Girls, Girls, Girls: Re-Membering the Body." In Rhine Crossings: France and Germany in Love and War, 87-108. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2005.

The representation of the femme-machine in avant-garde and cinema provides an important counterpoint to the troupes of girls that stormed the stages of Paris and Berlin in the interwar period. The visual emphasis on fragmentation, montage, dysfunction, and shattering in much of the art of the period gives expression to a fractured body rather than a restored one. (97)

The robotization of the female form marks a curious reversal of the conventional pairing of the masculine with the technological and the feminine with the “biological” and “natural” Taking on a role which is at the same time divine and maternal, the male creator replaces biological reproduction with technological production, creating a de-naturalized, non reproducing woman-machine. (98)

The creation of a woman-machine thus points to a psychosocial process of projection and displacement, which reflects this shift in our perception of technology. “The fears and perceptual anxieties emanating from ever more powerful machines are recast and reconstructed in terms of the male fear of female sexuality, reflecting, in the Freudian account, the males castration anxiety.” (98)

This parallel process, by which Maria uses her libidinal power to provoke the laborers to revolt below and the industrialists to wild abandon above underscores the link between technology and sexuality, both of which contain dangerous libidinal potential ready to break loose at any moment. In his reading of Metropolis, Huyessen argues that Robot Maria represents female sexuality as “technology out of control” reflecting male fears of female sexuality, technology and the gendered urban masses. (99)

Surrealist art exhibits following World War I also revealed an obsessive fascination with dolls, mannequins, wax figures, and automata... (99)

Dada photomontage, particularly the objects exhibited at the First International Dada Far in the summer of 1920, constitutes a materialization of trauma. According to Doherty, Dada photo collage, which conveys trauma both in its discordant form and its politically and sexually volatile content, expresses in artistic form the hysterical manifestations of psychic shock arising on the body of the shell-shocked soldier. (99)

“This damaged body is magically restored in some classicisms, aggressively prostheticized in others—i.e. surrealism—this repressed damaged male body seems to return as an uncanny dismembered female body.” (100)

...female sexuality and technology are collapsed in the figure of a mechanical woman. While the works function differently, they both provide instances of a figuration of trauma in a displaced form. (101)

Bellmer’s fascination with the inner life of adolescent girls, the work explores the insatiable desires of the little girl, who steals her companions mask in order to be closer to her and devours the lips in a blind and senseless rage. The narcissistic doubling of the doll-girl is reflected both in a photograph by Bellmer entitled “Composition” an assemblage of two sets of doll’s legs in a cotton-candy setting of children’s trappings.... (101)

From 1933 to 1937 (around the time of the European fascination with children’s toys, essays by Walter Benjamin) Hans Bellmer created two series of articulated dolls that were subject to a continual dismantling and remantling. “Plastic anagrams” in the words of the author, the dolls were photographed in a variety of disturbing poses and unlikely settings. (102)

According to Bellmer’s biographer Peter Webb, the Doll was the “ideal surrealist object,” effecting, in the words of surrealist artist Jean Brun, “the conjunction of the every day and the imaginary, the animate and the inanimate, the natural and the artificial.” (103)

In Bellmer’s fetishistic and ritualistic dismemberment of the dolls is expressed a deep anxiety concerning the integrity of the body. Castration in Bellmer’s work becomes a sign that figures mechanical destruction and biological reproduction; a 1937 sculpture entitled MachineGunneress in a State of Grace makes the connection between technology and sexuality explicit. The “machine gunneress” in the wood and metal sculpture appears in the form of a praying mantis composed of disjointed parts of the female anatomy (breasts, two vulvas, buttocks and genitalia). The mantis stands in a predatory position... (104)

The pervasive character of the mechanical woman in art and mass culture indicates the existence of a sociopolitical dimension in Girlkulter, one which is informed both by the mass production of arms and the mass production of goods. The disjunction between many of the images of the femme-machine in avant-garde art and entertainment suggests that the revue effects an operation beyond that of traumatic expression or allegorical reflection. The most widely accepter explanation for the popularity of the revues in the interwar period is a desire for distraction. Called by one critic a “grand bazar de distraction pour tous”, the revue was seen as an opiate for the masses, an escape both from industrial work processes and the recent experience of war. ...We throw ourselves into multicolored ephemera in order to forget the years of mud and death. (106)

According to Freud, repetition compulsion, or the “daemonic compulsion to repeat,” constitutes a formative moment in the “working out” of trauma. The subject, fixated on the incident of shock, repeatedly returns to and replays the moment of trauma. For Freud, the repetitive nightmares suffered by shell-shocked soldiers constituted the most remarkable symptom of neurasthenia in the content of their dreams was not subject to conscious recall. The event in essence returned against the will of the subject. (106)

The little boy’s attempt to make himself master of a traumatic event through the active staging of it, the revue marks an attempt to gain control over the processes of industrialization through the repetitive staging of these processes. It’s endless generation of symbols of mass production in the safe and controlled environment of the music hall (or the television set?), the revue (and by extension the spectator) serves both to control and contain these images. The threatening power both of female sexuality and modern technology is harnessed in the figure of female automata. In the trivialization and aestheticization of modern technological forces, the revue renders them pleasurable and innocuous. (107)

Taylor, Sue. "Hans Bellmer in The Art Institute of Chicago: The Wandering Libido and the Hysterical Body." The Art Institute of Chicago: May Louise Reynolds Collection. 2001. http://www.artic.edu/reynolds/essays/taylor.php.

The Surrealist fascination with automata, especially the uncanny dread produced by their dubious animate/inanimate status, prepared the way for the enthusiastic reception in France of Bellmer's doll. His stated preoccupation with little girls as subjects for his art, moreover, coincided with the Surrealist idealization of the femme-enfant, a muse whose association with dual realms of alterity, femininity and childhood, inspired male artists in their self-styled revolt against the forces of the rational. (1)

This image of male sexual curiosity and domination is in a sense emblematic of Bellmer's entire oeuvre: the hapless female body, deprived of head and limbs, is scrutinized and manipulated, and its inner workings exposed in a cut-away view. "Lay bare suppressed girlish thoughts," the artist instructed himself, "ideally through the navel, visible as a colorful panorama electrically illuminated deep in the stomach." (1)

While the brutality implicit in such images is often elided in the literature, Bellmer's biographer, Peter Webb, detected "intimations of rape" in another, singularly bizarre photograph of the doll, partly lying, partly seated, on a rumpled bed, and half dressed in a man's trousers with the belt and fly provocatively open. (2)

This capacity for displacement and the acceptance of surrogates, Freud stated, enables individuals to maintain health in the face of frustration. As a creator of surrogates himself, inventor of virtual girls, Bellmer comprehended this capacity but located his own wandering libido in a female other. (3)

Levy, Ariel. "Girls Get Naked for T-Shirts and Trucker Hats." Slate Magazine. March 22, 2004. http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/dispatches/features/2004/dispatches_from_girls_gone_wild/girls_get_naked_for_tshirts_and_trucker_hats.html.

Horn won't tell me how much GGW is worth (he doesn't have to; it's privately owned), but a few years ago founder Joe Francis told Variety that he pulled in $4.5 million in 2001. (Slate.com)

Gronnvoll, Marita. Media Representations of Gender and Torture Post-9/11. New York, NY: Routledge, 2012.

After 9/11, argues cultural critic Tony Nadler, “Whether as the conscious strategy of producers or the coincidence of circumstance, fictional TV shows involving Middle East relations, terrorism, counterterrorism and war took on a more obviously political salience.” The New Yorker adds: “Since September 11th, depictions of torture have become much more common in American Television.” (Gronnovoli, no page numbers!)

As Bonnie Dow notes, entertainment television can work “rhetorically to negotiate social issues: to define them, to represent them, and, ultimately, to offer visions of their meanings and implications.” The popularity of torture can tell us, as one television critic suggests, “that pain and suffering, as entertainment, unite us all in a way that humor and romance fail to.” (Gronnovoli, no page numbers!)

...For instance, many times women who engage in torture in these programs are portrayed as excessively deviant either sexually or in pursuit of their career ambitions, often both. (Gronnovoli, no page numbers!)

Cochrane, Kira. “Floggin Misogynt at the Multiplex.” The Irish Times (Dublin), June 2, 2007.

Hostel is just another part of a new subgenre of horror films that are so dehumanizing, nasty and misogynist that they are collectively known either as “gorno” (a conflation of “gory” and “porno”), or, more commonly, as “torture porn”...with each new film promising higher levels of violence — guaranteeing not just a considerable body count, but ling, lingering scenes of terror, torture and pain. In most of these films, both men and women end up being sliced... In that sense they offer audiences equal-opportunity gore. But it’s the violence against women that’s the most troubling, because it is here that sex and extreme violence collide. The publicity campaigns for most of these films flag up the prospect of watching a nubile young woman being tortured as a genuinely pleasurable experience.

Wetmore, Kevin J. Post-9/11 Horror in American Cinema. New York, NY: Continuum, 2012.

In 2006 in New York Magazine, David Edelstein coined the term ‘torture porn’ to describe a trend he saw in recent films such as Saw, Hostel, Wolf Creek, The Devil’s Rejects, and even Passion of the Christ. (96)

The hope behind such films is that while we are disturbed by the torture, and fear is generated by its depiction, we are not the complacent, accepting audience that Edelstein fears. We do not find ‘such practices acceptable’, but we go to the cinema to come to terms with the fact that this [torture] is being done by Americans, in our name, to keep us safe. As such, the films disturb the audience but give us an out: the torture is necessary, vital and will make a difference. Torture porn is disturbing, not only for its depiction of torture, but because it frequently justifies ‘our’ use of it. The saving grace is that even in the face of regressive messages, it is still impossible to make actual depictions palatable. (115)

JohnathanBarkan. “Snip, Slice, and Carve Into the 10th Anniversary of ‘Hostel’.” BloodyDisgusting! January 6, 2016. http://bloody-disgusting.com/editorials/3375521/snip-slice-and-carve-into-the-10th-anniversary-of-hostel/.

“Now, above I mentioned that Hostel came out at an interesting time and I want to explain that. You see, just a few years prior, the 9/11 attacks occurred and there was this running doubt as to what Hollywood should do with their films. The American people witnessed a horror and tragedy the likes of which hadn’t been seen since Pearl Harbor and this was broadcast nonstop for weeks. With so much horror shown on the television, could Hollywood afford to offer anything like that? As it turns out, yes they could.

Rather than shy away from being traumatic and visceral, horror embraced it and went off the deep end. People witnessed tragedy so horror was going to go even further to act, in a strange way, as a kind of outlet, a place where people could take their shock and funnel it into something they knew was fake, thereby releasing it from their shoulders.

And Hostel was no different. In a strange way, Paxton represents the United States pre, during, and post 9/11. He was relatively innocent and excited about the future while traveling through Europe. Then he was attacked and maimed in the factory. And in the end he managed to emerge victorious, defeating the man responsible for his suffering. Yet he still couldn’t go back to how he was before. Too much had changed for him.

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