Body & Society 2002 Fournier

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Fleshing out Gender: Crafting Gender Identity on Women's Bodies

VALRIE FOURNIER
Body & Society 2002 8: 55
DOI: 10.1177/1357034X02008002004
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Fleshing out Gender: Crafting Gender

Identity on Womens Bodies
VALRIE FOURNIER
Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy pain and thy travail; in pain thou shalt bring
forth children. (Genesis 3:16)
The idea that womens destiny is to suffer, an unfortunate fate to which they are
doomed by their weak bodies (and minds), has a long history in medical, Christian and popular discourses, and has been captured by various representations of
womens bodies as sick or in pain (e.g. the image of Mary as suffering mother, the
figure of the hysterical woman, the translation of menopause, menstruation, PMS,
and more recently cellulite and fat, into womens pathologies). In these representations, women emerge as walking wounded, [displaying their] injuries during
menstruation, [confirming] them during childbirth (Gay, 1984: 172).
And indeed, there seems to be something [that] hurts about being woman
(Wolf, 1990: 219). The juxtaposition of women and pain in the images above has
some resonance in womens own experiences and accounts of their bodies.
Women experience more pain and non-life-threatening illnesses than men
(Finkler, 1994), a propensity which has been attributed, at various times, to their
weak biological constitution, their reproductive function, or the un-masculinity
of sickness and pain. Alternatively, womens pain can be seen as the expression of
the body making anger (Finkler, 1994) as it is caught in social and moral contradictions. Finkler draws upon the phenomenological notion of embodiment to
locate the body within networks of social, moral and cultural orders, and to argue
that contradictions within the social are lived in the body and are marked on
bodies as life-lesions. Although the exact nature of these contradictions depends
on social contexts, Finkler argues that women are more likely to be caught in
Body & Society 2002 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi),
Vol. 8(2): 5577
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56 Body and Society Vol. 8 No. 2
these contradictions and to be scarred by life lesions.1 Swann (1997) makes a

similar point when she argues that the pain associated with PMS is the expression of womens fear of, and anger at, their hardships (material, financial,
emotional). For Swann (1997) as for Finkler (1994), womens pain is the embodiment of the contradictions and constraints under which women are placed in
patriarchal systems, the expression of body anger.
Pain has also been used as a powerful symbolic resource in womens literature
(e.g. Simone de Beauvoir, Maria Cardinal, Alba de Cespedes, Marguerite Duras,
Doris Lessing, Sylvia Plath). Pain, here expressed symbolically through nausea,
loss, or a sense of excessive and abject flesh, appears as an overwhelming burden
which comes to shatter the heroines lives and leaves them with nothing but its
debilitating presence.
In this article, I draw upon the (symbolic) connections between woman and
pain in order to apprehend an embodied or carnal sense of womanhood. In
particular, I use the notion of pain to weave together two themes in feminist literature: the constitution of woman through her effacement, and the inscription of
gender on the body. Since at least de Beauvoirs (1972) Second Sex, feminist
critiques have argued that women become women by being constituted as the
other of the male subject. Women are constituted through their negation (as
subjects) or lack. I am aware that I am taking some liberty in collapsing very
different theoretical traditions (from 1970s radical feminism to various brands of
post-structuralist feminism drawing on the work of Derrida e.g. Feder et al.,
1997 or Lacan e.g. Cixous and Clment, 1986; Irigaray, 1985; Mitchell and
Rose, 1982). However, notwithstanding some significant theoretical differences,
these feminist critiques concur in seeing the feminine as being produced through
its effacement within the masculine discursive or symbolic order. In the words of
Derrida, there is no such thing as a woman (1979, quoted in Feder and Zakin,
1997: 46), woman seems to be the no-thing beyond the text, a nothingness that
has no place in reality (Cornell, 1991). My aim in this article is to explore what it
feels like to be no-thing, and in particular to apprehend the experience of being
effaced in terms of an embodied sense of being gutted out or eviscerated. I draw
upon the symbolism of pain and violence to talk about effacement as an embodied
experience, in terms of the presence of pain rather than a lack or absence (of voice
or subjectivity). Thus I want to suggest that effacement is done on the body, and
is experienced through the body.
And this is the second theme that I draw upon: the inscription of gender on
the body. This literature is largely indebted to the work of Foucault (1980, 1981)
in which the body emerges as the point where social regulation and practices of
the self meet, where discipline is inscribed on the self. From a Foucauldian
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Fleshing out Gender 57
perspective, the making of the gendered self, or gender identity, is the product of
disciplinary practices of the body that ensure the reproduction of heterosexuality
as the norm. The body is seen as material that is enrolled in the production of
gender rather than as providing the biological foundation for gender differences
(Butler, 1993; Grosz, 1994). Sex or gender2 are seen as historically and culturally
contingent achievements produced or made real through inscriptions on the
body. For example, for Butler, sex:
. . . not only functions as a norm, but is part of a regulatory practice that produces the bodies it
governs, that is, whose regulatory force is made clear as a kind of productive power, a power to
produce demarcate, circulate, differentiate the bodies it controls. (1993: 1)
From this perspective, the sexed body is produced through various gendered
mechanisms, or regulatory practices which normalize and mark bodies as male or
female. However, the body that turns up in this work on body inscriptions rarely
turns out to be sentient.3 It is a body that seems to act as the passive recipient or
bearer of inscriptions (Miles, 1998) but never seems to be wounded, pained,
scarred by the inscriptions. In this article, I share the post-structuralist view that
gender is performed, and is performed through inscriptions on the body, but I
want to concentrate on the pain and violence of inscription, and the role of pain
in the making up of gender, or, more particularly, the experience of womanhood.
Thus I argue that gendered mechanisms do their work of inscription on womens
bodies by hurting and injuring, and more specifically (to return to the point on
effacement made earlier) by gutting out or emptying out.
The argument in the article unfolds in three parts. In the first section, I develop
an embodied or carnal account of womens effacement by drawing upon a
material understanding of the self. I propose to analyse the moral project of the
self (Foucault, 1982; Rose, 1989) as one played out in materials. However, as will
be illustrated within the context of work organizations, the materials that count
in the making of the self are not equally distributed; in this article I concentrate
on the gendered distribution of self materials and suggest that the self-less-ness
of women can be read as immateriality, or as being gutted out of materials. Thus
my aim here is to flesh out the experience of effacement or self-less-ness by
apprehending it in terms of immateriality, an image that evokes both the idea of
women being inconsequential or not counting (effaced), and the pain of evisceration, of being gutted out of materials.4 The second part of the paper delves into
the embodied experience of pain. Here I draw upon Scarrys (1985) poignant
analysis of the body in pain to explore the immateriality of womanhood. I draw
connections between the experience of womanhood and Scarrys account of the
experience of pain by discussing both in terms of the annihilation of the self as it
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is engulfed in an abject mass of hurting flesh. The third section also draws upon
Scarrys (1985) work and her argument about the reality-conferring function of
wounded bodies. Following Scarrys arguments, I explore the connections
between womens pain and the substantiation of gender, and suggest that
wounded womens bodies lend their flesh to the idea of gender. In the final
section, I briefly explore some of the implications of delving into the pain for
emancipatory politics.
But before launching into the argument, I would like to make some caveats.
By connecting pain and womanhood, I am not implying that the embodied
experience of pain and evisceration is the essence of womanhood, nor that
womanhood is saturated by pain, nor that women have a monopoly over pain.
As I have already suggested, I take as my point of departure the idea that gender
identity is performed (and thus has no essence) through inscriptions on the
body; what I am suggesting in the following discussion is that these inscriptions
do their work of gendering by inflicting pain.
Materializing the Subject/De-materializing Woman
If Foucauldian work has analysed the project of the self as central to modern
government, feminist critiques have long argued that subjectification is a gendered
process through which women tend to emerge as non-subject, other or object (e.g.
de Beauvoir, 1972; Cixous and Clment, 1986; Irigaray, 1985). After briefly situating the self as a modern project, I draw upon Actor Network Theory (Callon,
1986; Latour, 1987) to frame the analysis of subjectivity in terms of materiality
and immateriality.
Subjectification: Modernism and the Project of the Self
Foucault (1977, 1982) sees the emergence of the individual self as a historical
product embedded within the project of modernity. For Foucault, modernity is
not about the repression of the self, but its constitution as an autonomous and
sovereign subject, free (but responsible) to invent him/herself. The individual,
through techniques of the self, is constituted as an autonomous subject, with a
responsibility, and an interest, in making up him/herself in certain ways (e.g.
healthy, happy, self-actualized). The power of subjectification works by tying
individuals to a sense, a knowledge, of their selves as sovereign agents (Foucault,
1982). Defined as free, autonomous and self-determining, individuals are required
to make something of themselves (Willmott, 1994) by enrolling and appropriating discursive resources that fill them up as subject, or substantiate their
subject-ivity.
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Although there are many different (overlapping and conflicting) sites for
digging out fragments of selfhood, modern organizations their corporate
culturalism, careers and challenges have become a privileged source of materials in the management and constitution of subjectivity (Rose, 1989). As Willmott
(1993) notes, work organizations, with their endless promises of status provide
for a sense of ontological security; they offer ready-made material for the making
of subjectivity, and free (or rob) the individual of the painful and angst-ridden
burden of freedom.
I will discuss the role of work organizations (and their gendered nature) in
the project of the self shortly, but before I do so, I would like to return to the
idea of making something of oneself, for this alerts us to two aspects of the
project of the self that are central to the present argument. First the something
signals the thing-ness or materiality of subjectivity, a point developed in the
next section. Secondly, the something suggests that it is not any thing that can
earn one a self, that some things will count and others will not, and, as I will
argue shortly, the material that counts is distributed along gendered (as well as
many other) lines.
The Materiality of the Subject
Actor Network Theory (ANT) (e.g. Callon, 1986; Latour, 1987) shares with the
work of Foucault an emphasis on the contingent nature of the self. However, with
the notion of relational materiality, it also invites us to explore how the relational
becomes inscribed and stabilized in materials. ANT attends to the thing-ness or
materiality of subjectivity by suggesting that social relations and categories (such
as the self) acquire meaning, substance through their enrolment in materials:
Perhaps, then, when we look at the social, we are also looking at the production of materiality.
And when we look at materials, we are witnessing the production of the social. (Law and Mol,
1995: 274)
Thus we can only understand social relations and categories (e.g. the men/women
binary) by exploring how materials and technologies get mobilized, enrolled into
the social fabric (Latour, 1991).
ANT also suggests that it is not just the bits of materials in themselves that
provide substance, meaning and durability to the social, but the relations between
these bits of materials (Law and Mol, 1995). Things, human or not (e.g. self,
technology), dualisms (e.g. human/technical, subject/object, male/female,
nature/culture) acquire their existence and qualities through their connections
to other things, through their relationships and embeddedness in networks.
This emphasis on assemblage, connection and materials has some important
implications for our understanding of subjectivity. In ANT, the self becomes a
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relational and material phenomenon, an assemblage of materials, a thing that

emerges and acquires its substance through its connections with other things:
A subject is a heterogeneous assemblage of materials and textuality spread across diverse and
(in some parts) nonlocalizable networks and flows. It is an ongoing project in perpetual flux and
continuous variation. (Lee and Brown, 1994: 786)
To draw upon a much used example in ANT (Latour, 1988), Pasteur becomes a
successful scientist through his enrolment in bits and pieces of texts and materials
such as bacteria, laboratory, laboratory assistants, farms and farmers; Pasteur the
scientist is an ordered network of materials, a relational effect (Law and Mol, 1995).
Thus the self is made up, or constituted through inscriptions in materials, it is not
an inherent property but an achievement, one that, in modernity, has also become
a moral project. The contingent or relational nature of the social, of the self is of
course a point which has been made long before ANT, and, as discussed earlier, is
central to the work of Foucault. However, ANT shows how these relations are
played not only in the social but also in the material. Thus, from an ANT perspective, we can redefine the project of the self in terms of literally making something
of oneself, a project that is achieved by enrolling oneself into materials.
However, not all materials make for equal durability or substantiation of the
self. Some materials may provide more substance, more filling in the project of
self-fulfilment than others. For example, although Pasteur was a father, among
other things, as well as a successful scientist, the materials of his fatherhood do
not carry as much weight as the materials of Pasteur the scientist. Although
Pasteur the father may still be remembered by some of his descendants, Pasteur
the scientist is remembered by many more. The materials that went into the
making of Pasteur the scientist seem more enduring, they have more strength and
durability so that Pasteur the scientist travels further (in space and time) than
Pasteur the father. So the point here is that not all material counts, at least to the
same extent, in the making up of the self. Not all material provides as much
substance, visibility and mobility to the self. This issue about the relative value of
materials in the making up of the self raises questions about access to, and distribution of, materials. Thus not all of us have equal access to the materials that
count, to the resources that can be enrolled in heterogeneous engineering (Law,
1991). While I acknowledge that the materials that count in the making of subjectivity are distributed according to many lines of social divisions, I concentrate on
the gendered distribution of these resources.
The Gendered Distribution of Materials
The gendered distribution of materials that count in the making of the self can be
poignantly illustrated within the context of work organizations. As suggested
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earlier, work organizations provide a useful focus for they constitute an increasingly privileged site for making something of oneself (du Gay, 1996; Fournier,
1998; Miller and Rose, 1995; Willmott, 1994).
Multiple materials come into the making of the self at work; for example, time
(working long hours), toughness (the ability to take and inflict violence), visibility, business skills, etc. And the gendered distribution of these resources (as
well as the ability to appropriate them as ones own) is a phenomenon that has
been well documented. For example, feminist critiques have long argued that
bureaucratic and professional modes of organizing make their privileged
resources rationality and expert knowledge the preserve of men (Ferguson,
1984; Savage and Witz, 1992; Witz, 1992). Furthermore, there is a vast body of
research on the gendering of skills which suggests that the qualities that women
are seen or made to bring to work (such as dexterity, caring, attractiveness) are
not constructed as skills or performance but simply as the manifestation of
women behaving as women (Adkins, 1995; Thomas, 1996). Thus womens contribution in organizations is often seen as not counting. For example, as Thomas
(1996) illustrates in the context of academic work, the activities that women are
more likely to perform are made not to count in the making of the successful
academic:
It was accepted that women undertook most of the pastoral work and that this work went
largely unrecognised and unrewarded. (Thomas, 1996: 151)
The possession of time (and the ability to devote it to an organization) has also
become a central resource in the making up of the self at work. The ability to
work long hours has become not only necessary in order to make up for the
increased workload brought about by de-layering, but has also become a test of
commitment to the organization (Collinson and Collinson, 1997). In addition,
Grint and Case (1998) suggest that toughness and the ability to take violence have
become privileged resources in the making up of work subjectivity in contemporary management discourses. However, both time and toughness are resources
that seem to be in shorter supply among those marked as women. Men can only
be seen to have time for organizations by using and appropriating womens time
at home and at work (Buswell and Jenkins, 1994). Although the ability to take or
inflict violence is not inherently male it is an attribute that is less likely to be
attributed to women.5 As Grint and Case (1998) argue, the emphasis on toughness and the ability to take violence is already marked as masculine and can be
read as an attempt to return to the times when men were men. This imagery of
violence and toughness is also perpetuated through the language of organizational
fitness portraying organizations as having to be lean and mean to survive.
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Organizational fitness is symbolized by employees bodies that are also supposed

to evoke leanness and strength through the display of well-shaped muscles, a
body tissue which, through the equation of sporting prowess with masculinity, is
more likely to be associated with men (Turner, 1996). What all these examples
point to is that the materials that count in making something of oneself at work
are more readily available to those marked as men than those marked as
women.6
The Immateriality of Womanhood
I have argued so far that the project of the self is achieved through enrolling
materials that count, and that the distribution of the materials that count in the
making up of the self is gendered. The masculine subject, the person assigned
the male gender, will have easier access to materials that count in the making up
of the self at work (e.g. muscles, skills, toughness, time) than the feminine subject.
Thus the masculine subject will be more material, more filled or saturated in
materials that count than the feminine subject. The experience of womanhood
is unfulfilling, in that it leaves the self empty of materials that count. If women
do not have what it takes to make something of themselves, are they then immaterial?
Unfortunately, ANT is of little help in analysing immateriality, that which does
not count. While ANT talks about the power of materials, the durability and
materiality of the powerful, it has little to say about the wretched, the suffering
(Law, 1991; Star, 1991) or what I have called the immaterial. So here I leave ANT
to explore the immateriality of (some of) those who do not count. In order to do
so, I turn to the work of Scarry (1985) to explore the pain of immateriality. Scarry
proposes a similar understanding of the self as ANT; she talks about the making
of the self and of the world as involving a process of extension into material
objects which lift us from the mute facts of sentience of the body into the shareable, social world. We project our body power into the making of material artefacts (e.g. glove, telephone), which in turn transform the body (the glove
transforms the power of the hand, the telephone the power of the ear). We create
and transform the self and the world through acts of extension or projection (of
the body into the making of objects) and reciprocation (the objects transform the
self and the world). As in ANT, it is these attachments to materials that extend
the body into the world and give meaning or substance to the self.
However, if Scarrys understanding of the making of the self is similar to
ANTs in stressing attachment to materials, she also attends to the severing of
these material attachments, to what I have called the immaterial, in her analysis
of the body in pain. She reads in the body in pain the unmaking of the self and
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of the world; pain is the inversion of making. In the next section, I draw upon
Scarrys (1985) work to explore the immateriality of womanhood.
The Pain and Violence of Womanhood
My point in talking about effacement in terms of immateriality, of the gutting out
of materials, in the previous section was to flesh out or embody the experience of
womanhood, to suggest that to be effaced is not just about being robbed of visibility or of a voice, but also entails being gutted out. This image of gutting out
evokes the pain involved in the making of womanhood; and it is to this pain that
I now turn. In order to explore pain, I draw upon Scarrys (1985) work, and use
it as a symbolic framework to apprehend the immateriality of womanhood.
Woman: Emptiness, Excess and the Abject
For Scarry (1985) the totality, immediacy and presence of pain in the injured body
enacts a double movement: first, it dissolves the self and the world, and, second,
it magnifies the sentience of the body. In pain, the body becomes a colossal mass
of flesh that ensnares the self and the world; one becomes at once empty (of a self,
of meaning) and an excess (of flesh), nothing but a mass of hurting flesh. This
contrasting imagery of emptiness and excess is reminiscent of two images often
encountered in representations of women: one as ideational shadow, the other as
embodied excess (Feder and Zakin, 1997: 30). In these representations, woman
is, on the one hand, a tempting ghost that seduces but can only be seen at a
distance, and, on the other, an excess of flesh and body fluids that disgusts and
repels. As feminist critiques drawing on the work of Derrida (e.g. Feder et al.,
1997) or Lacan (e.g. Mitchell and Rose, 1982) suggest, woman emerges as both
lack and excess. In the following discussion I read Scarrys (1985) analysis of pain
as involving three intertwining elements: the experience of emptiness, of excess
and of the abject. I use these three elements as a symbolic framework to explore
the immateriality of womanhood.
Scarry (1985) reads in the body in pain the un-making or emptying of the self.
Pain ruptures attachment to the world for pain has no external referent; it is
unshareable and makes us retreat to the self-isolation, the mute facts, of the
body. While other states of consciousness (feelings, emotions, self) are for something, or about something that makes us extend outside the boundaries of the
body, pain makes us shrink into the body. Pain is characterized by its overwhelming presence and totality, it destroys everything (the world, the self):
Pain begins by being not oneself and ends by having eliminated all that is not itself. At first
occurring only as an appalling but limited internal fact, it eventually occupies the entire body
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and spills out into the realm beyond the body, takes over all that is inside and outside, makes
the two obscenely indistinguishable, and systematically destroys anything like language or
world extension that is alien to itself and threatening to its claims. Terrifying for its narrowness,
it nevertheless exhausts and displaces all else until it seems to become the single broad and
omnipresent fact of existence. From no matter what perspective pain is approached, its totality
is again and again faced. (Scarry, 1985: 545)
If the self is made through connections with materials that lift us from the
sentience of the body, the unshareability of pain ruptures these attachments to the
world; to have pain is to lose (materials for) ones self, to be emptied of a self.
This sense of emptiness brought about by pain has some vivid resonances with
experiences and representations of womanhood. The association between
womanhood and emptiness is illustrated by Derridas (1979) images of woman as
seducing ghost, or undecidability (Caputo, 1997). Woman is not undecidable
because of some essential feminine trait, but because the very constitution of
womanhood works through fracturing the connections that make us into something, that give us ontological security.7 The gutting out of materials that count
in the making of the self, like pain, serves to detach womanhood from connections to networks, attachments to materials that would fill and give substance to,
the self.
This connection between a sense of emptiness and the experience of womanhood has been vividly captured in womens art. For example, Sue Charlesworths
image of an empty dress, hanging from nowhere, suggests a line of contour, a
surface embodying nothing and connected to nothing. Shermans series of black
and white photographs in the 1970s (Untitled Film Stills) depicts herself in
various disguises, scenes, pauses and dresses, all reminiscent of American movies
from the 1950s, and all presenting us with an abundance of stereotypical images
of womans passivity (she does a lot of waiting), glamour and fear. These pictures
represent the emptiness of femininity; the movement from one image only leads
to another image, each endlessly displacing and deferring an elusive real core
or substance (Betterton, 1996). In the series, Sherman and femininity emerge as
a set of images, surface-ness, a masquerade hiding nothing (Krauss, 1993;
Williamson, 1983):
The image suggests that there is a particular kind of femininity in the woman we see, whereas
in fact femininity is in the image itself, it is the image. (Williamson, 1983: 102)
The masquerade which is conjured up in the series emerges as the condition of

existence of femininity, rather than masking some true essence of femininity, so
that as far as femininity goes, there is nothing but costume (Krauss, 1993: 44).8
However, if pain brings about a sense of emptiness, the annihilation of the self,
gutted out of material that would give it substance, it is also accompanied by the
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overwhelming burden of the body in pain, by a sense of excess of hurting flesh,

the second element in my reading of Scarrys account of pain. In the immediacy
of pain, the world and the self disintegrate into nothingness, all one is left with is
the presence of a body that hurts. One becomes trapped in a colossal mass of
hurting flesh falling endlessly down a dark abyss, in which everything one tries
to hold on to, to reach to, to prevent the fall dissolves.
Again, there are clear connections between the sense of excess of flesh
brought about by pain, and representations of womanhood. The image of
womens bodies as monstrous has a long history in Christian and medical
discourses representing women as excess of flesh to be controlled and confined
within the domestic space (Turner, 1996). This sense of excess can also be traced
in womens own experiences of their body, and is epitomized in anorexic women
trying to cut out their excess flesh (Bordo, 1990; Malson, 1997). The experience
of womanhood as an excess of abject flesh inspiring horror and self-disgust has
been a prominent theme in womens literature (e.g. Plath, 1971), feminist theory
(e.g. Kristeva, 1982) and art (Betterton, 1996; Mulvey, 1991). Again the work of
Cindy Sherman provides a powerful illustration; in Untitled # 175 (1987), the
fetishized surfaces of the female body represented in the 1970s Untitled Film Stills
give way to horror and disgust invoked by hurting flesh and abject fragments of
bodily matter. In these photographs, the interior of the female body is projected
as a kind of lining of bodily disgust (Krauss, 1993: 192).
In a series of large colour photographs, Untitled, 19871991, Sherman reconstructs her own
body in a monstrous anatomy, made up of the prosthetic parts or else fragments it in a waste of
bodily fluids, decaying food, vomit and slime. . . . Shermans device of using a mirror image of
her face, a fragment of self-identity reflected in a pair of sunglasses, reinforces the horror at
seeing a disintegration of the self. (Betterton, 1996: 135)
Here symbolic strategies of fragmentation, evisceration and dismemberment are

used to evoke the violence, disgust and body saturation of womanhood (Betterton, 1996). Womanhood is constituted through the sense of excess of flesh, or
corporeal engulfment, a sense that comes from a body that hurts and makes one
shrink or reduce to the flesh. Here femininity is not some unrepresented, invisible
otherness but the all too present sense of excess of corporeality (Betterton,
1996), of a body that sticks.
This contrasting imagery of womanhood as, on the one hand, empty of a self
(immaterial) and, on the other, burdened by an excess of flesh, also suggests that
the sentience of the flesh and the making of the self exist in inverse relationship;
as Scarry (1985) suggests, pain reduces one to the sentience of the flesh and unmakes the self. Making something of oneself involves extending into materials
that lift us from the sentience (pain) of the body; or, as vividly expressed by an
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anorexic woman, to get an identity means to strip the flesh: If I didnt have it
[anorexia], if I wasnt thin I wouldnt have an identity. Id just be this big bad
blob (quoted in Malson, 1997: 240).
What is also evoked in these images of excess of flesh, and what forms the third
element of pain, is the abject. In pain, the body becomes an enormous vermin
(Scarry, 1985), an abject and enslaving mass which binds to pain and nothing but
pain. It is through the body that one hurts, it is the body that hurts. The body
becomes a loathsome weight. Pain brings self-hatred, the hatred for a self that has
been engulfed by and reduced to an abject body (Scarry, 1985). The experience of
the body as a repulsive mass is another theme that comes up again and again in
feminist theory and womens writing (e.g. Plath, 1971; Kristeva, 1982). In The Bell
Jar, Sylvia Plath (1963) paints images of the mother figure as cow-like, fat and
unattractive, reduced to breeding and feeding children. But it is maybe in the
anorexic figure that the repulsion and horror of the (female) flesh is most vividly
expressed (Malson, 1997):
Who, given the choice, would really opt to menstruate, invite the monthly haemorrhage a
reminder that the body is nothing but a bag of blood, liable to seep or spatter at any moment. . . .
One day I will be thin enough. Just the bones, no disfiguring flesh, just the pure, clear shape of
me. Bones. That is what we are, after all, what were made of, and everything else is storage,
deposit, waste. Strip it away. (Shute, 1992; quoted in Malson, 1997: 239)
In the examples above, the female body, as the body in pain, is experienced as a
vile and leaking bag of blood, a mass of flesh that has to be stripped away.
The foregoing discussion suggests that we could think of gendering as something involving the distribution of pain and embodiment. The constitution of
woman through her effacement or immateriality (as illustrated earlier with the
discussion of the gendered distribution of the self materials at work) involves a
stripping of materials that count in the making of the self, a process of evisceration that is done and experienced in the body, and that hurts. By drawing on the
symbolism of pain, I have suggested that becoming woman involves a sense of
being emptied out and reduced to a mass of abject and seeping flesh. Of course,
the reduction of woman to bodies has long been recognized and denounced in
feminist theory; images of women as the (sex) objects of the male gaze (e.g.
Zoonen, 1994), or uncontrollable bodies unfit for the rationality of the public
domain (Acker, 1990; Martin, 1989) have been well documented. However, these
images of women as bodies are often used to explore how women (already
assumed to be turned into bodies or sex objects) are subjected to exclusion or
subordination, a focus that ignores the pain and embodied experience of being
reduced to a mass of flesh. It is as if, by a sleight of hand, the pain and the
embodied experience of immateriality the sense of emptiness and body excess
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were made to disappear, or didnt deserve our attention. This process of making
the pain disappear is what I explore in the next section.
The Appropriation of Pain: The Translation of Pain into Absence
Scarry argues that pain not only destroys the world and the self, but also the
word; pain is unshareable, inexpressible. This then raises questions about the
politics involved in the representation of pain. Scarry draws our attention to the
political consequences of pains inexpressibility by establishing connections
between pain and power: the problem of pain is bound up with the problem of
power (1985: 12). The resistance of pain to verbal objectification or representation not only means that pain will never get as much political visibility as
problems that can be articulated,9 but also that attempts to represent pain often
draw upon the language of analogy and agency: the agency of the weapon that
serves, or is imagined, to inflict the pain. People often describe pain in terms of
the agency of weapons; the pain is as if a hammer was coming down on the spine
(Scarry, 1985: 5). The experience of pain becomes translated into the action of the
weapon; the pain of the spine is represented in terms of the action of the hammer.
As Scarry notes, this language of agency is a double-edged sword for, on the one
hand, it serves to bring forth the pain, to make it visible and hence (possibly) to
elicit support and attention. However, it also serves to displace the pain and
transfer its power, presence and immediacy to the weapon. It is no longer the
spine that hurts but the hammer that bangs. Thus embodied physical pain
dissolves as its attributes are used to express power. The process of making pain
visible, of re-presenting pain, lifts the pain away from the human body and
attaches its totality, certainty and incontestable reality to something else, to the
weapon that inflicts the pain. Verbal representation serves to translate pain into
the insignia of power, and to deny the suffering body a claim to pain.
To me there is a clear parallel between Scarrys (1985) analysis of the political
effects of representing pain through the language of weapon and agency, and the
representation of womens discrimination or oppression in terms of gender
mechanisms, the power of patriarchal institutions and ideology. On the one hand,
talking about gender mechanisms has made womens oppression visible, and has
raised it on the public agenda as a phenomenon calling for attention and action.
On the other hand, these representations of womens suffering in terms of
gendered structures and mechanisms (such as, for example, glass ceiling, sexual
harassment, the gendered construction of skills, of organizational cultures and
structures) have eclipsed the embodied experience of suffering, of pain, and lent
the attributes of pain to the power of gender machines or men. Thus suffering has
become disembodied and abstracted, unless one imagines a face repeatedly
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smashing into a glass ceiling, or a body shred to pieces as it goes through

gendered mechanisms.
As Scarry (1985) argues in the context of torture, verbal representations of pain
operate a series of translations and inversions. Thus what at the physical level is
the presence of pain for the tortured and an absence of pain for the torturer
becomes translated into a verbal system of differences which inverts presence and
absence: the absence of pain becomes the presence of world, self and power; while
the presence of pain becomes an absence of world and self. The pain can no longer
be claimed as the sufferers for its translation into power has made it disappear:
Pain is denied as pain and read as power (Scarry, 1985: 45). Kappeler (1997)
makes a similar point when she argues that the translation/representation of
womens oppression in terms of absence involves a violent reframing of the
other in terms of lack. Thus the problem of the embodied presence of pain
becomes translated into a problem of absence, of lack (e.g. of voice, self, skills),
a problem that can seemingly be rectified through inclusionary practices such
as issuing invitations to join or giving voice. However, these inclusionary practices assume that the problem of oppression is one of exclusion (or absence),
when it may be as appropriately seen as one of inclusion (or painful presence),
inclusion as something small and insignificant, not counting (Kappeler, 1997).
I will return to the problems attached to in-clusionary practices and reaching
out to the other in the final section of the article, but first I discuss how the
pain of womanhood analysed in this section serves to substantiate, or flesh out
gender.
Womens Hurting Flesh and the Substantiation of Gender
The position from which I started this article is one anchored in post-structuralist feminism according to which gender is performed (rather than given), and is
performed through inscriptions on the body (e.g. Butler, 1993). What I have
argued in the article is that this work of inscription hurts. Being constituted as
woman involves being gutted out of materials, and being immaterial is painful;
following Scarry (1985), I have proposed to apprehend this pain in terms of a
sense of being reduced to nothing but the body, the sentience of the flesh. In this
final section, I want to argue that not only does gendering work through pain,
but that pain also serves to substantiate the idea of gender. Here again, I draw
upon Scarrys (1985) work, and in particular, on her argument concerning the
reality-conferring function of the hurting flesh.
Saying that gender is performative is not to say that it is not real; for gender
is made real, is substantiated through material violence and brutality (Feder and
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Zakin, 1997), through, I will argue, the wounding of womens bodies whose flesh
can be drafted into making real the idea of gender.
Although the (sexed) body is not natural (or biologically given), it cannot be
reduced to a blueprint of cultural encodings and artefacts, for the body has the
potentiality for sentience, for pain and death, even if the ways in which pain and
death are experienced and represented are culturally mediated. As Eve/Evelyn,
the main character in Angela Carters (1982: 50) The Passion of New Eve, exclaims
after her/his forced sex-change operation: I am not natural, you know even
though, if you cut me I will bleed.
And it is the ability of the body to bleed and to hurt when it bleeds that makes
for its reality conferring function (Scarry, 1985). The body, its mass of flesh, its
sentience, pain, bleeding, provides a source of reality. The flesh of the wounded
body has a vivid and compelling reality (the presence, certainty, immediacy and
totality of pain) that can be drafted into the substantiation of ideas. However, the
hurting flesh can only lend its reality or materiality to ideas because of its referential instability (Scarry, 1985); pain has no external referent. Unlike other states
of consciousness, it is not for or about something. The referential instability of
pain, its lack of attachment to anything, means that its reality and totality can be
re-appropriated to give substance to ideas:
Injured bodies are emptied of their meanings and appropriated as containers of other verbal
constructs, in the process the pain is also appropriated. (Scarry, 1985: 139)
Injuring provides, by its massive opening of human bodies, a way of connecting disembodied beliefs or ideas with the force and power of the material world
(the flesh). Substantiation or making real involves the disassemblage and reassemblage of bodies and ideas; injured bodies are emptied of meaning (severed
of connections to materials that would fill in the self with meaning) and juxtaposed to beliefs or ideas to lend them materiality. Juxtaposing a wounded body
with an idea bestows the force of the material world on the ideational:
The body tends to be brought forward in its most extreme and absolute form only on behalf of
a cultural artefact or symbolic fragment . . . that is without any other basis in material reality:
that is, it is only brought forward when there is a crisis in substantiation. (1985: 127)
Similarly, the cultural construction of gender needs to be grounded or sedimented in material reality, and I suggest that it is substantiated by being crafted
on womens hurting flesh. So gender is inscribed on womens bodies but it can
only be crafted onto womens bodies through injuring, through pain, through
emptying these bodies of meanings. As Scarrys quote above suggests, it is empty
bodies that act as containers of ideas, bodies that have been eviscerated, or severed
from connections or attachments to materials that give meanings to the self. It is
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through its prior injuring (and pain) that the womans body can act as the
container of the idea of gender. So not only does womanhood hurt, but womens
pain and hurting flesh also gets enrolled in the (re)production of gender. Maybe
we could think about gendering as a process of mass production (Cooper, 1995),
a production of mass of flesh that lends its weight to the idea of gender. Gendering, like mass production, involves a process of disassembling (emptying or
gutting out the body of material that counts in the project of the self; detaching
the pain from the body) and re-assembling materials (attaching the flesh of the
hurting body to the idea of gender).
By talking about the making up of gender out of womens scarred bodies and
hurting flesh, I am not suggesting that pain forms the essence of womanhood, for,
as I suggested earlier, pain has no external referent (and thus cannot form the
essence of anything), and woman has no essence. Pain and injured bodies are fluid
in terms of their referentiality and have no inherent connection to the ideas they
serve to substantiate (Scarry, 1985). Womens hurting flesh does not in itself mark
womanhood; but precisely because of its referential instability, it can be drafted
into the substantiation of the idea of gender.
Epilogue: Why Delve into the Pain?
My aim in this article has been to delve into the pain and violence of gender, not
as an exercise in masochism, but to suggest that pain and violence are central to
making real or fleshing out gender. My concern has been to bring forth the
hurting flesh by drawing attention to the fact that gender mechanisms cannot
exercise their power, cannot do their work of gendering and inscription without
some bodies going through the machinery, and being shredded into pieces of
abject flesh as they do so. I wanted to apprehend a fleshed and sentient body,
rather than an abstract and passive body, reduced to text or bearer of inscriptions;
bodies get enrolled in the production of gender not simply as materials to be
written upon but also as mass of hurting flesh. In this final section, I would like,
first, to put the pain into perspective and, second, to outline some of the possibilities for emancipatory politics that are opened up by exploring womanhood
through the symbolism of pain.
First, by attempting to connect pain and womanhood, I am not suggesting that
there is some relation of equivalence between them so that one saturates the other.
The pain of immateriality, and the related sense of excess (of flesh) and emptiness
(of self), are better seen as forming some of the conditions of experience of
womanhood than as determining or saturating it. Pain does not saturate womanhood and womanhood does not saturate the self. Womanhood (or manhood)
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is a transient and fleeting experience, sometimes (maybe most of the time) effaced
by the immediacy of other divisions (e.g. racial, sexual, class, occupations) or of
the moment; or, as Riley (1988) suggests, being woman is only ever a part-time
occupation. One is not just ones gender, even if gender filters the resources for
selfhood. The self is inscribed and negotiated across different discourses and practices, or networks, leading to multiple (and sometimes conflicting) identities
(Charles and Davies, 1997; Star, 1991). By talking about womanhood I have only
attended to one (maybe important, maybe not, but difficult to escape) among a
multiplicity of possibilities for identity; furthermore, by talking about the pain
of womanhood, I have only explored one (sometimes overwhelming, maybe at
other times obliterated) of many ways in which womanhood may be experienced. Thus, by suggesting that the pain of womens bodies serves to substantiate the idea of gender, I am not claiming that being woman is reduced to being
in pain.
Second, if my main concern throughout the article was to expose pain, in this
final section, I want briefly to explore the implications of fleshing out gender for
emancipatory politics. If femininity is not some repressed, un-represented otherness but the all too present sense of excess of hurting flesh and corporeality, then
the idea of re-appropriating and celebrating the womans body (as advocated by
some radical feminists e.g. Daly, 1984) does not appear to be particularly liberating, for it assumes that there is an authentic womans body, unmarked by the
regulatory practices of gender, that we can seek to unveil. But, as I have suggested
in this article, there can be no authentic womans body that is not already marked
by the violence and pain of gender. The womans body, if already constituted as
woman, is already marked and injured. Celebrating the feminine body does little
to challenge or subvert the symbolic order that posits a (hierarchical) dualism
between (female) body and (male) self, and that constitutes and reproduces gender
identity through injuring womens bodies. If we are to remain within this
gendered dualism, it would seem more empowering (in a limited sense) to escape
from the body, to strip the enslaving and hurting excess of (female) flesh that
engulfs the self, and to get an identity (as the anorexic women we encountered
earlier suggested)10 than to embrace the female body.
Furthermore, apprehending womanhood in terms of an excess of hurting flesh,
rather than in terms of otherness, lack or absence, highlights the problems
attached to inclusionary strategies of giving voice. As I suggested earlier, the
problem of womens oppression is often represented in terms of effacement,
absence, lack of voice or silence (e.g. Harlow et al., 1995), a problem that presumably could be solved by giving voice or issuing an invitation to join. However,
such representations of the other as excluded or absent ignore the embodied
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presence of pain. The problems associated with the strategy of giving voice to the
other characteristic of liberal democracy have been well documented (Lee and
Brown, 1994; Kappeler, 1997; Wilkinson and Kitzinger, 1996). The discourses of
inclusion and giving voice suggest that someone is in possession of voice (or of
a place from which to issue invitations) and in a position to offer it to the other
as a gift, a gift for which the other should be grateful (Kappeler, 1997); it also
assumes that the other wants voice. Moreover, the liberal discourse of love of
the other, togetherness and reaching out to the other in the gift of voice, implies
a colonization of the other and a universalization of the dominant discourse in
the name of democracy, freedom and equality, all adding weight to the justice
and morality of such a project (Kappeler, 1997; Lee and Brown, 1994). Talking
about the pain and violence of otherness highlights a further problem with the
inclusionary strategy of giving voice: if pain is resistant to verbalization it is
unlikely to gush forth or be alleviated through voice; pain is more likely to be
eclipsed than exposed by voice. What is the point of giving a voice to a mass of
hurting flesh that cannot speak?
Thus both liberal strategies based on the principles of equality and inclusion,
and radical strategies based on the celebration of womens embodied difference,
seem to be ineffective in that they reproduce the gender dualism that sustains, and
is sustained through, womens pain. As other feminist writers have noted (Sargisson, 1996), the liberal discourse of equality, the radical discourse of difference,
and the debate between the two reduce the possibilities for emancipation to a
question of womens positioning within a masculinist discursive order as both
equality and difference are articulated in terms of a gendered dualism between
(male) self and (female) body. Not only does this make for a limited number of
avenues for emancipation, but it also fails to address the embodied pain of
womanhood, the crafting of gender identity on womens bodies.
If gender is reproduced through womens pain and womens pain is reproduced
through gender (the constitution of woman as the opposite of man), then it seems
that, to address the pain, we need to break away from the dualism of gender, to
dissolve gender into multiple sexual possibilities, or redefine it beyond the two
categories of man and woman so that woman can be something other than noman (Braidotti, 1989), and difference, identity and bodies can be re-imagined
away from the gender binary. This escape from the gender order has often been
symbolized by the lesbian body as occupying a space that is elsewhere. For
many feminist writers of different theoretical traditions (e.g. Irigaray, Kristeva,
Wittig), the lesbian identity constitutes a utopic space that is situated outside the
gendered cultural order and, by virtue of its exteriority, is potentially emancipatory (Jagose, 1994). For example, for Wittig (1973) the lesbian body constitutes a
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third term beyond gender binarism; it marks a utopic space that is essentially
transgressive of the gender order, for the lesbian is not a woman. However, Jagose
pertinently exposes the problematic nature of lesbian utopics, or of the search for
a space outside gender. By drawing upon Foucaults conceptualization of power
as both repressive and productive of identity, Jagose argues that the figure of the
lesbian is not outside and independent of (but repressed by) the gender order;
rather its exteriority depends on its relations to the gender binarism and is
constituted by it. Thus celebrating the emancipatory potential of lesbianism is
ambivalent, for it serves both to disrupt and to reproduce the gender order.
Furthermore, foregrounding lesbian identity as emancipatory reproduces the
problematic essentialism involved in foregrounding the category of woman as a
rallying ground for emancipatory politics. It essentializes the figure of the lesbian
as a natural, authentic and pre-cultural space existing independently of gendered
discourse. As post-structuralist feminists have argued (e.g. Butler, 1990), celebrating the figure of woman or lesbian serves to exclude or colonize difference
by assuming homogeneity among these categories. Thus even attempts to pluralize woman by including difference serve to increase the strength and hold of this
category rather than destabilize and disrupt it (Jagose, 1994).
Following Butler (1990) and post-structuralist feminism more generally, Jagose
(1994) argues that instead of searching for the holy grail of an elusive and problematic utopic space beyond gender (e.g. escaping the gender order by reclaiming
an authentic and pre-discursive womans body, or foregrounding the lesbian
identity), it may be more productive to attend to the construction of gender as an
effect. Gender identity can only be destabilized by attending to its constitution,
by establishing as political the very terms through which it is constituted (Butler,
1990). Understanding how the body is enrolled in the work of gendering is in
itself a political act, for it serves to disrupt and destabilize the taken-for-grantedness of gender identity. In this respect, the current article is clearly inscribed
within the post-structuralist project of denaturalizing gender by attending to its
constitution and inscription on the body. Where it departs from the work of poststructuralist feminists such as Butler is by suggesting that the body is enrolled in
the making up of gender not just as text but also as flesh and sentience. By
fleshing out gender the aim was not to naturalize it but rather to further unsettle
the gendered body, and to point out that even pain and flesh are political effects
open to destabilization.
Notes
I am grateful to the two anonymous reviewers, as well as to Martin Parker, Simon Lilley and Mihaela
Kelemen for their thoughtful comments on an earlier version of this paper.
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1. In her book on Women in Pain, Finkler (1994) illustrates her arguments with the examples of
Mexico, where women are caught between the ideal of romantic love and the reality of living with a
husband who keeps several wives.
2. I follow Butler (1990) in refusing to go along with the distinction between gender as socially
or culturally constructed, and sex as biologically given body differences. I see both gender and sex as
produced through regulatory practices or inscriptions on the body and will thus not distinguish
between the two terms.
3. As Turner (1996) notes, this is a critique which could be more generally applied to radical deconstructionist feminism (e.g. Butler, 1993) for such an approach is not concerned with the lived in body,
or the phenomenology of embodied experiences, but the positioning of bodies in discursive structures.
By insisting that sex or gender are normative practices (rather than biological products), these
approaches have left behind the lived experience of embodiment (Matisons, 1998; Ussher, 1997) and, in
particular, of pain and suffering (Csordas, 1994). Here I agree with Turner that this focus on positioning makes the lived body disappear. Although I do not see bodies as being naturally sexed, or as mere
biological products, I want to hold on to the idea of a body which, if not naturally marked as anything,
does have the potentiality or capacity for sentience and, in particular, pain.
4. Images of evisceration and disembowelment are commonly used symbolic strategies in feminist
art (Betterton, 1996). Cindy Shermans Untitled # 175 (1987) discussed later in the article depicting
body fragments scattered on a surface of body wastes, and Kiki Smiths skinned body in Virgin Mary
(1992) are poignant illustrations.
5. And as Swanns (1997) work on PMS suggests, even when women feel violent, this violence is
translated into womens disorders by the medical discourse of PMS. Thus women cannot appropriate
violence for their violence is read as a manifestation of their pathological bodies, a reading that serves
to trivialize and depoliticize womens violence.
6. Here I talk about those marked as men and those marked as women for if we follow the point
on relational materiality made by ANT, we cannot assume that gender is already naturally given and
somehow regulates the distribution of materials. Gender needs to be seen as being itself a relational
effect, the product of the assemblage of materials (Singleton, 1996). There is no space here to develop
this but I would like to point to Tierneys (1995) study for an excellent example of the making up of
the lads around beer, football and pubs. What studies such as Tierneys (1995) or Morgans (1992)
suggest is that masculinity and femininity (the assignment and performance of man/woman) do not
necessarily equate with man or woman body, but are discursively constituted modes of being
(Kerfoot and Knights, 1998: 8), relational effects performed through textual and material practices.
Thus not all men are men, some are lesser men than others; and some women may qualify as one of
the boys or honorary men by participating in mens social activities or demonstrating their ability
to take it (Collinson and Collinson, 1997; Thomas, 1996). Man becomes man, and woman becomes
woman only by being performed or marked as such. In the remainder of the article, I will use the term
man and woman as a shorthand for those marked as man and those marked as woman.
7. Of course all subject positions are ultimately precarious and undecidable; however, some are
made of more stable and solid materials than others.
8. Thus it should be clear that by talking about womanhood in terms of immateriality and gutting
out, I am not implying that some feminine core or essence is crushed or suppressed, but rather that
nothingness the denial of possibility for making something of oneself is one of the conditions of
existence/experience of womanhood.
9. Here Scarry (1985) notes that in accounts of war or torture, the pain of the injured, mutilated or
dead bodies is often made to disappear through the use of a language of tactics, strategy or motives.
10. The stripping of the flesh, or disembodiment, could maybe take less destructive forms than
anorexia. For example, some feminist writers have discussed the emancipatory possibilities opened up
by virtual reality (Balsamo, 1997).
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Valrie Fournier is Senior Lecturer in Organization Studies at Keele University. Her current research
interests centre around critical perspectives on management and organizations, and in particular on
(gendered) subjectivity at work. She has written about the making and disciplinary effects of the
professions, new career discourse in organizations, and identity work in family businesses. Her recent
writing includes work on the experience and construction of gender in organizations, and more
recently she has developed an interest in alternative forms of organizations.

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Fleshing out Gender: Crafting Gender Identity on Women's Bodies

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Fleshing out Gender: Crafting Gender

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these contradictions and to be scarred by life lesions.1 Swann (1997) makes a

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relational and material phenomenon, an assemblage of materials, a thing that

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Organizational fitness is symbolized by employees bodies that are also supposed

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The masquerade which is conjured up in the series emerges as the condition of

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overwhelming burden of the body in pain, by a sense of excess of hurting flesh,

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smashing into a glass ceiling, or a body shred to pieces as it goes through

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