[Crossroads of Knowledge] Lisa Folkmarson Käll (eds.) - Bodies, Boundaries and Vulnerabilities_ Interrogating Social, Cultural and Political Aspects of Embodiment (2016, Springer International Publishing).pdf

Crossroads of Knowledge
Lisa Folkmarson Käll Editor
Bodies,
Boundaries and
Vulnerabilities
Interrogating Social, Cultural and
Political Aspects of Embodiment
More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/11893
Lisa Folkmarson Käll
Editor
Bodies, Boundaries and

Vulnerabilities
Interrogating Social, Cultural and Political
Aspects of Embodiment
Editor
Stockholm University
Stockholm, Sweden
ISSN 2197-9634 ISSN 2197-9642 (electronic)

ISBN 978-3-319-22493-0 ISBN 978-3-319-22494-7 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-22494-7
Library of Congress Control Number: 2015951621
Springer Cham Heidelberg New York Dordrecht London

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Contents
Vulnerable Bodies and Embodied Boundaries ............................................ 1

Rural Women’s Bodies and Invisible Hands: Neoliberalism
and Population Control in China ................................................................. 13
Lihua Wang and Linda M. Blum
Arrogant Perceptors, World-Travelers, and World-Backpackers:
Rethinking María Lugones’ Theoretical Framework Through
Lukas Moodysson’s Mammoth ...................................................................... 31
Jenny Björklund
Embodied Vulnerability in Large-Scale Technical Systems:
Vulnerable Dam Bodies, Water Bodies, and Human Bodies ...................... 47
May-Britt Öhman
Toxic Skin and Animal Mops: Ticks and Humanimal
Vulnerabilities................................................................................................. 81
Jacob Bull
Mothering with Neuroscience in a Neoliberal Age:
Child Disorders and Embodied Brains ........................................................ 99
Linda M. Blum and Estye R. Fenton
Sexual Arousal, Danger, and Vulnerability .................................................. 119
Fredrik Palm
The Author’s Body: Almodóvar, Film Theory, and Embodiment ............. 141
Anne Fleche
Performativity and Expression: The Case of David
Cronenberg’s M. Butterfly ............................................................................. 153
v
Vulnerable Bodies and Embodied Boundaries
A body, and especially a body considered as a whole, is a mass distinct from other
masses. It occupies space, and as a geometric figure, it is three-dimensional having
length, breadth, and thickness. Its dimensions and its weight can be measured. To be
a body is thus to have boundaries, to be singularized and exclusive of other bodies.
However, this view of the body is clearly not as simple and straightforward as it
sounds. Even though a body is a mass distinct from other bodies, it nevertheless
receives its distinct dimensions and forms only in relation to those other bodies
from which it is distinguished. Bodies are thus in their very singularity and exclu-
sivity intimately interrelated with one another. The boundaries distinguishing one
body from another are also what constitute their connection. Bodies are intercon-
nected both insofar as they share one another’s distinctive lines of demarcation and
insofar as the shared boundaries between them make them parts of one whole. Thus,
bodies are exclusive of one another only by virtue of their mutual inclusion within
each other’s boundaries and in the world. Further, even though the dimensions and
borders of a body can be measured, they are by no means fixed and unchangeable;
rather, bodies continuously materialize in new ways as their boundaries are drawn
and redrawn, reinforced, transgressed, and altered.
Bodies, Boundaries and Vulnerabilities take bodies in this doubleness as both
bounded from and bound to each other as its focus. More specifically, it targets this
double boundedness as the locus of a fundamental vulnerability intrinsic to embodi-
ment. Vulnerability is commonly understood in negative terms, as a loss or depriva-
tion to an otherwise whole individual, suggesting a weakness to be overcome in
order to reinstate an original integral and self-contained identity. In sharp contrast to
such an understanding, the essays in this volume instead recognize vulnerability in
L.F. Käll (*)

Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden
e-mail: lisa.kall@gender.su.se
© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016 1

L.F. Käll (ed.), Bodies, Boundaries and Vulnerabilities,
Crossroads of Knowledge, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-22494-7_1
2 L.F. Käll
terms of a fundamental openness toward the world and others, as “part of bodily life
itself” in the words of Judith Butler (2004, 29). In Precarious Life, Butler insists on
the body as the site of “a common human vulnerability […] that emerges with life
itself” and whose source we cannot recover as “it precedes the formation of ‘I’”
(Butler 2004, 31). This common vulnerability, she is careful to stress, “is always
articulated differently [and] cannot be properly thought of outside a differentiated
field of power and, specifically, the differential operation of norms of recognition”
(Butler 2004, 44). Much in line with Butler’s discussion, this volume seeks to put
forth and explore an understanding of vulnerability as an essential aspect of being
embodied, having boundaries and being bound to others and a surrounding world.
The essential vulnerability implied by the boundedness of the body constitutes
an ever-present horizon to bodily life and, as indicated by the Greek word for bound-
ary, horos, boundaries can be understood in terms of horizon. The horizon is the line
in the perceptual field where the earth meets the sky, the most distant point available
to perception, where earth curves out from view. It is both a point of separation and
of joining together. Depending on light and weather conditions, the line at the hori-
zon can appear more or less clearly, from a distinct separation of two planes to a
blurriness. Whether it appears as a sharp line or blurry field, however, the horizon is
always at a distance in relation to the “here” and “now” of our bodies as
zero-point.1
Understanding bodily boundaries as horizons2 is first of all a way of recognizing
that they can never be fixed, determined, or completely secured. The horizon
changes with the body and its situation as well as with other bodies and the sur-
rounding world. It is a perpetual and unpredictable not-yet, exhibiting a constitutive
openness toward that which is other. Secondly, the horizon is not only a line of
demarcation between the ownness of one’s body and the otherness of that which is
exterior to it, but also a field in which ownness and otherness blend and bleed into
one another. Insofar as my bodily boundaries are what open and expose me to the
world and insofar as they are also at the same time the boundaries of the world, open
and exposed to me, what is inside and what is outside these boundaries are in a
fundamental sense inseparable. As Maurice Merleau-Ponty puts it, “[t]he world is
wholly inside and I am wholly outside myself” (1962, 407).
Not drawing the boundaries of the body as a sharp line, enveloping the body as a
positivity distinguished from an exterior negativity which it is not, but rather con-
ceptualizing them in terms of horizon locates an unpredictable radical otherness in
the midst of one’s own identity. The constitutive openness of the body, that is, its
fundamental vulnerability, and its incorporating of otherness involve an element of
risk or possible danger that cannot be predicted, calculated, or managed and that is
essential to finite life itself. Instead of seeing this element of risk and fundamental
bodily vulnerability as a necessary evil that we should strive to overcome, the
present volume underscores Butler’s point, quoted above, that bodily vulnerability
1
See Husserl 1989, § 41a, p 165f for a description of the lived body in terms of zero-point of
orientation.
2
For a further discussion of bodily boundaries in terms of horizon, see Käll 2014.
Vulnerable Bodies and Embodied Boundaries 3
precedes the formation of the “I,” and explores ways in which bodily “I’s,” bodily
identities, and subject positions are formed, negotiated and renegotiated, regulated,
and transgressed against the background of a common bodily vulnerability. The
volume addresses how vulnerability, as a necessary horizon and openness of bodily
being, is made manifest in various ways and with different degrees of urgency
depending on social, cultural, and political situatedness. It demonstrates that while
this bodily vulnerability cannot be done away with, it must be recognized and pro-
tected in different ways since it is articulated and lived within fields of power and
privilege.
A third aspect of thinking bodily boundaries in terms of horizon, and one that is
related to the presence of otherness within the ownness of one’s bodily being, is an
understanding of the body as incorporating a perpetual distance from itself. By
embodying its own horizon that is always at a distance and in the distance, the living
bodily being is never at one with itself in any undifferentiated manner. The horizon
of possibilities for its own being and becoming is present within its actuality pre-
cisely as possibility; an indeterminate and unpredictable not-yet is always present as
a constitutive moment of the actual. This perpetual distance of lived bodily being
from itself is captured in the phenomenological notion of the lived body (Leib,
corps vécu), which takes into consideration the body as being simultaneously both
a subject for the world and an object in the world as an integrated ambiguous unity.
This self-distance is thus not a matter of a Cartesian dualism between a subject-
mind and an object-body, but instead truly a distance of self from self that is fully
incorporated within the self. Effectively rejecting dualistic thinking, the notion of
the lived body draws attention to an immediate relation to one’s own body in terms
of being instead of having. Much more than only something we have or own as a
possession, the body is something we are; in a phenomenological framework the
body is not primarily an object of knowledge but rather first and foremost the neces-
sary condition for experience, knowledge, and different forms of objectification (de
Beauvoir 2010; Heinämaa 1996, 2003, 2011; Käll 2009; Merleau-Ponty 1962;
Weiss 1999; Young 1990). Further, many feminist thinkers who have applied and
developed the phenomenological notion of the lived body have underscored rela-
tional aspects of embodiment, stressing its situatedness and interrelation with the
world and others. Here, the notion of intercorporeality in Merleau-Ponty’s later
writings has formed a productive point of departure for further elaboration and
refinement. In this volume, a phenomenological understanding of the lived body in
terms of intercorporeality forms a theoretical starting point for Jenny Björklund in
her exploration of material dimensions in relation to María Lugones’ influential
account of world-travelling. Also Lisa Folkmarson Käll’s discussion of Judith
Butler’s notion of performativity in relation to Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s writings
on the expression of subjectivity offers a phenomenological perspective on embodi-
ment and intercorporeality.
The insight that the body is something we are, central to subjective life and the
necessary condition for our relation to others and the world, runs parallel, perhaps
somewhat paradoxically, with an influential view in contemporary culture and
society of the body as something we have. In contrast to the idea of the lived body
4 L.F. Käll
as immediately present to itself, the idea that the body is something we have puts
focus on the body as an object of possible transformation and improvement through
increasingly sophisticated biotechnological intervention. In an era of “flexible”
bodies, to speak with Emily Martin (1994), bodily boundaries become more and
more plastic and changeable and we are compelled in different ways to work on our
bodies so that they will correspond to our “inner” sense of who we are and desires
of who we want to be. The 21st century body3 has become a worthy personal proj-
ect, and to make use of available technologies to perfect one’s body is framed in
terms of both personal responsibility and free choice as something we do (and
should want to do) in order to make the most of who we are and to achieve power,
success, and happiness. Body technologies and alterations are, as Gail Weiss points
out, often governed by a “rhetoric of enhancement” and framed as normalizing in
different ways (Weiss 2014; see also Savalescu and Bostrom 2009; Savalescu et al.
2011). The directive of perfecting one’s body and enhancing its qualities and poten-
tials not only pertains to the outer appearance of the visible body but also to our
inner organs and, in an age of neuroscientific authority and anxiety, to the brain. In
this volume, the centrality of the brain is brought out clearly in Linda M. Blum’s
interviews with mothers of children diagnosed with invisible brain dysfunctions,
such as ADD and ADHD, who seek ways to manage and cultivate their children’s
brains in order to prepare them for a future of social and economic competition.
Treating one’s own body as an object to be worked on and perfected creates
another sense of distance than the distance of bodily being from itself implied by the
incorporation of its own horizon. The objectifying distance is one in which the inde-
terminate and unpredictable horizon of bodily boundaries is made graspable so as to
be controlled and directed in specific ways. Making the body an object of control
can thus be seen as a way of attempting to do away with the basic vulnerability of
bodily being, conceptualized in terms of weakness and unpredictability. Such an
attempt is in fact quite opposite to an ideal of flexibility and fluidity insofar as it
implies a denial of the body’s fundamental openness to the world and others. Some
of the chapters in this volume highlight and examine efforts of eliminating bodily
vulnerability through different forms of regulation and control. For instance, Jacob
Bull’s discussion of the marketing and use of precautionary treatments for protec-
tion against the threat of ticks shows how such treatments are used not only to pro-
tect the bodies of the individual pets to which they are applied but also to serve to
protect and maintain distinct boundaries of human bodies and spaces to control
risks and do away with vulnerability. Also May-Britt Öhman’s chapter dealing with
large-scale hydropower constructions puts focus on issues of risk management and
brings out how the upholding of discourses of control functions to draw seemingly
stable, yet volatile, boundaries between human, water, and dam bodies.
3
I take the term “the 21st century body” from a symposium with the same title that took place at
the University College London on May 18, 2012. The symposium raised questions of how percep-
tions of human identity and the meaning of being human are being recast in light of new scientific
and technological developments that seem to offer endless possibilities of transformation.
While ideals of flexible and dynamic bodily boundaries in combination with

discourses accentuating individual choice may appear to offer endless possibilities
of bodily becoming, such ideals are highly normative and often perpetuate estab-
lished inequalities more efficiently than explicit reinforcement of rules and regula-
tions. Drawing on and extending Foucauldian insights of the body as a site of
disciplinary practices, feminist accounts of the disciplining of gendered bodies have
described and examined the force with which bodies are formed in different ways
and as bodies of different kinds within larger structures of regulation on institutional
as well as individual levels (Bordo 1989, 1993; Heyes 2007; McNay 1991;
McWhorter 1999; Oksala 2011a; Reed and Saukko 2010; Sawicki 1991). Feminist
scholars have brought to analysis how power works through self-surveillance of
bodies into compliance with social norms, often reiterated as natural, and how regu-
lation and modification of the body carry a multitude of complex and often conflict-
ing meanings (Bartky 1988; Bordo 1989, 1993; Reed and Saukko 2010). The
Foucauldian idea of disciplinary bodies has also formed a point of departure for new
and original conceptual development, such as Butler’s notion of performativity,
which in turn has been taken into a range of different areas and contributed to dis-
cussions of how disciplinary practices not only direct bodies in certain ways but also
construct both bodies and their directions.
The Foucauldian framework of governmentality has proved particularly useful
for approaching the conditions under which normative femininity is constituted in a
“contemporary liberal, individualist self-empowerment zeitgeist,” to speak with
Reed and Saukko (2010, 3). The increasing neoliberalization of modern society dur-
ing the past few decades has, as Johanna Oksala suggests, led to a conception (and
self-conception) of the feminine (and feminist) subject as an independent, autono-
mous, and self-interested being “making free choices based on rational economic
calculation” (2011b, 105) and “competing for the economic opportunities avail-
able” (2013, 39). Oksala notes that in Western society, normative femininity is no
longer enforced mainly with reference to the interests and desires of men and patri-
archal structures, but instead rationalized in terms of women’s own economic inter-
ests, free choices, and desires of self-fulfillment. Women, she writes, “no longer
have long, manicured nails because their male partners find this sexually attractive
and arousing, but because manicured nails have now become a sign of professional
and financial success, a sign that is likely to help them move forward in their career”
(2011b, 115). However, as Oksala argues, discourses of free choice are not in any
way neutral; choices are made within complex networks of unequal power relations
that not only restrict possibilities and available options but also construct the subjec-
tivities of individuals making those choices. Individual choices, she writes, “cannot
be presented uncritically as autonomous, natural or rational when they are under-
stood as a result of pervasive disciplinary techniques” (Oksala 2011b, 117).
Disciplinary projects of enhancing one’s capacities and modifying one’s body to
fit normative standards of normality (often deemed natural) are far from only wor-
thy personal projects but also geared toward the design of a society governed by a
consumer culture in which bodies are turned into commodities on an open market
and both subjects and objects of political power play. The idea of governmentality
6 L.F. Käll
targets precisely this connection between the micropolitics of disciplining the body
and the macropolitics of governing society and the state through institutional man-
agement of populations (Reed and Saukko 2010). In this volume, the Foucauldian
account of governmentality provides the analytical framework for Lihua Wang and
Linda M. Blum’s discussion of how specific processes of neoliberalization are
forming contemporary Chinese society and creating the illusion of Chinese wom-
en’s bodies as subject only to individual choices rather than state control. The chap-
ter by Wang and Blum, focusing on women in rural China, and that by Blum and
Fenton, focusing on mothers in the USA, both emphasize how a rhetoric of indi-
vidual choice also places responsibility for economic success or failure entirely on
individual subjects, conceived in terms of atomism and self-interest. Not only do
individual subjects, according to the logic of neoliberal governmentality, have
themselves to blame for their own individual failure to successfully navigate society
by using cost-benefit calculation, but, within this logic, they are also as a conse-
quence to be blamed for the possible economic decline of society resulting from
their failure to be productive citizens (see also Oksala 2011b, 117).
By examining the interrelations between bodily boundaries and vulnerabilities,
the volume also seeks to address what Bryan Turner has fittingly called “somatic
society,” that is, a society in which the body is “the dominant means by which the
tensions and crises […] are thematized [… and …] provides the stuff of our ideo-
logical reflections on the nature of our unpredictable time” (1992, 4). Drawing on
Foucault, Turner suggests that the history of the Western world testifies to a continu-
ous transformation of the human body under a range of more or less forceful prac-
tices, such as medicalization, secularization, and rationalization. More specifically,
he argues that the key goal of governance in somatic society is the regulation of the
interfaces between bodies. This regulation and constitution specifically of bodily
boundaries emerge as a central theme in Bodies, Boundaries and Vulnerabilities.
The volume targets the production of human bodies and of nonhuman animal bodies
as well as the constitution of larger, collective bodies of nature, culture, science,
nation, and state. The contributions furthermore underline that somatic society is
dominated by a focus not only on bodies and boundaries between bodies but also on
vulnerability and risk, thematizing how the assessment, perception, and manage-
ment of risk come to govern bodies in different ways and with different conse-
quences and to constitute their boundaries as more or less stable or volatile and
more or less resilient or vulnerable.
Including this introduction, the volume consists of nine chapters, diverse in per-
spective, conceptual understandings, methods, and materials that taken together
enrich one another and offer more than diversity, making up their own bounded
body. The way the chapters are organized and bound together is both carefully con-
sidered and at the same time contains a necessary element of arbitrariness as it could
have been done in a number of other ways. While the ordering of the chapters
invites a certain order of reading, we encourage our readers to disrupt and reinvent
the order of the chapters, thereby drawing new boundaries between them and shift-
ing points of gravity within the collection as a whole.
Following the introduction, the second chapter of the volume, “Rural Women’s
Bodies and Invisible Hands: Neoliberalism and Population Control in China” by
Lihua Wang and Linda M. Blum, addresses how individual and state bodies are
formed in close interrelation with one another through a discussion of neoliberalism
in China. Examining the intersection between governmentality in the Foucauldian
sense and rural men and women’s bodies in contemporary China, the chapter dem-
onstrates how a changing Chinese context continues to manage women’s reproduc-
tive and productive bodies for the good of the nation through the “one child policy.”
In a neoliberal climate, the one child policy is reinforced through a rhetoric of free
and rational choices rather than of state control. With the aim of unveiling the illu-
sion of neoliberalism, which allegedly brings about freedom and choice for Chinese
women, Wang and Blum examine how the contemporary Chinese state is attempt-
ing to craft the governable bodies and docile gendered citizens crucial to its mod-
ernization project. They conclude that the promotion of entrepreneurial individuals
who make more rational reproductive choices leads to women’s bodies being more
subtly disciplined than in the past and controlled in ways that are difficult to unmask
or criticize.
The issue of Western privilege is brought out also in the next chapter, “Arrogant
Perceptors, World Travelers, and World Backpackers: Rethinking María Lugones’
Theoretical Framework Through Lukas Moodysson’s Mammoth,” in which Jenny
Björklund brings out the spatial and material dimensions in María Lugones’ concep-
tual framework of world-travelling through a discussion of the narrative of Lukas
Moodysson’s film Mammoth (2009). Adding to Lugones’ framework, Björklund
introduces the concept of world-backpacking in order to capture how embodied
subjects relate to each other in an increasingly globalized world characterized by
gendered and racialized inequalities as well as ignorance and simplification of such
inequalities. She argues that the striving of the characters in the film to transgress
boundaries through physical movement and bodily bonds does not in most cases
mean that they are engaged in what Lugones calls “world-travelling” since they do
not travel to each other’s worlds in the spirit of “loving perception.” The economi-
cally and culturally privileged main characters try (in some ways) to change the
world into a better place and to bridge the global and economic divides, but instead
their bodies wind up exploiting and violating other less privileged bodies as well as
our planet and its resources. Björklund’s notion of world-backpacking is intended to
describe the processes by which privileged Westerners believe themselves to per-
ceive the non-privileged other in loving ways and to create intimacy and bonds with
her but instead fails to perceive from the perspective and specific world of the other.
The following chapter, “Embodied Vulnerability in Large-Scale Technical
Systems: Vulnerable Dam Bodies, Water Bodies, and Human Bodies” by May-Britt
Öhman, discusses relations between individual and institutional bodies. Challenging
the modern ideal of human bodies as being in control both of bodies of nature and
of the bodies of technology made to control nature, Öhman considers the vulnera-
bility of large-scale hydropower dams and the intimate interdependencies between
dam bodies, water bodies, and human bodies. She proposes a water-centered, rather
than human-centered, reading of rivers and in particular of dammed rivers through
8 L.F. Käll
an understanding of dams as vulnerable bodies. Once constructed by human beings,

hydropower dams take on a life of their own and become living organisms as they
age, interact with land and rivers, and withstand and react to changing environmen-
tal conditions. Öhman’s chapter also discusses processes of knowledge production
in which different bodies of knowledge come to be perceived as embodied or disem-
bodied and are granted status as primitive or scientific. Taking her point of departure
in her own embodied history, she seeks to retrace indigenous Sámi understandings
of human cultural interconnectedness with nature. With a focus on the specific river
Julevadno running through Sápmi in the north of Sweden, she calls attention to the
unpredictable agency of water and the porosity of human bodies, emphasizing risk
and vulnerability as essential elements of their interrelation.
Addressing the emergence of risk and risk management in a different area, Jacob
Bull draws attention to bodily boundaries between species of bacteria and the bod-
ies of ticks, pets, and humans. His chapter “Toxic Skin and Animal Mops: Ticks and
Humanimal Vulnerabilities” examines how “spot-on” treatments for protection
against ticks and fleas are used to protect human and companion animal bodies,
relationships, and spaces from the threats of parasites. Such threats, argues Bull, are
controlled on the bodies of pets through the creation of “toxic skin” that comes to
serve as a protective boundary between human bodies and spaces and the threats of
parasites. Suggesting that the parasitic relation can be used as an analytical tool for
engaging with the politics of multispecies codependencies, he addresses how para-
sitic relations challenge notions of human exceptionalism and the integrity of bodily
boundaries. He demonstrates how spot-on treatments respond to such challenges by
drawing lines through and around relations between human and nonhuman animal
bodies premised on the priority of particular bodily perspectives and ways of relat-
ing. The chapter concludes with the consideration that ticks, in spite of being an
unwelcome parasite conceptualized and experienced as a threat, may be seen as the
companion species par excellence as they bind together and are bound with a mul-
titude of other species.
The following chapter, “Mothering with Neuroscience in a Neoliberal Age:
Child Disorders and Embodied Brains,” offers a critical interrogation of neoliberal-
ism and its role in the production of bodies. Linda M. Blum and Estye R. Fenton
examine the proliferating use of neuroscientific discourse to frame child develop-
ment through qualitative data from two sources, narratives from mothers of children
with invisible social-emotional-behavioral or brain disabilities (such as ADHD) and
recent best-selling parenting advice literature, suggesting the phenomenon must be
understood in the context of neoliberal privatization. With a critical perspective on
the naturalization of invisible child disorders and the inequalities to which they tend
to give rise, Blum and Fenton suggest that the explosion of neuroscientific discourse
results from the increasing prevalence of such disorders within the neoliberal con-
text in which mothers are held accountable to take personal responsibility to prevent
or offset them. They contend that these mothers do not represent an exception but
are rather becoming the new norm for what is increasingly expected of all “good”
mothers, the task of taking personal responsibility for their children’s brains.
Further, the authors argue that anxieties are intensified by, and exclusive maternal
responsibility is used to veil, the lack of public responsibility for economic change
and the likelihood of precarious futures for children facing a shrinking middle class
and a Walmart economy. In this sense, the new discursive focus on the child’s
embodied brain and mothers’ building such brain power may evidence a reconfig-
ured ideal of the child who will build the nation’s future productivity in an innova-
tion- and information-based economy.
Turning to the topic of sexual vulnerability, Fredrik Palm also offers a critical
approach to a reductive naturalization of the functions of the human body. In the
chapter “Sexual Arousal, Danger, and Vulnerability,” Palm approaches the phenom-
enon of sexual arousal in terms of a process of sense making or cognitive and dis-
cursive accomplishment. Through a discussion of the different sexological accounts
of James Giles, Robert Stoller, and Leo Bersani, the article puts focus on the
dynamic of sexual arousal as oriented around the oppositional pair of safety and
danger. Palm suggests that raising questions of safety and danger offers a way of
articulating arousal as a relation of power in which the very boundaries of embodied
subjectivity are at stake. In opposition to the predominant naturalistic doxa accord-
ing to which sexual arousal is seen as a natural or physical phenomenon that only in
a second step is framed by different discourses of regulation, Palm argues that
arousal must be understood as always already discursive, normative, moral, and
political. Shifting focus from an interrogation of how social norms and morality
restrict sexual arousal, Palm instead contends that arousal is inherently moral inso-
far as it reflects cultural beliefs about good and bad and feeds on specific moral situ-
ations tied to particular sexual economies and structures of regulation.
In the following chapter, Anne Fleche turns attention to the porosity of bodily
boundaries in the films of Pedro Almodóvar. The chapter “The Author’s Body:
Almodóvar, Film Theory, and Embodiment” considers the trope of the body in rela-
tion to the function of authorship in film studies, taking the authorship of Almodóvar
as a case in point. Fleche addresses both the representation of bodies in Almodóvar’s
films as gendered, transformable, vulnerable, permeable, lost, and resurrected and
the formation of Almodóvar’s corpus as a vulnerable body in itself. She brings out
how Almodóvar’s invocation of bodily themes at the level of film structure effects a
splitting and doubling of each individual film that contains stories within stories,
identities within identities, and bodies within bodies. Such splitting and doubling
also brings about a blurring of filmic boundaries, between inside and outside of the
film’s narrative structure. Through her readings, Fleche calls attention to a motion
of self-differentiation within each individual film body on the level of structure,
story, and character in which inside and outside are blurred and elliptical, dividing
the work from within. This blurring and splitting, she contends, applies not just to
individual films, but also to the work as a whole, troubling its relation to the author
and the boundaries between and within individual films and the full corpus of films.
Also the final chapter of the volume “Performativity and Expression: The Case
of David Cronenberg’s M. Butterfly” deals with filmic representations of bodies and
bodily boundaries. Through a reading of David Cronenberg’s 1993 film M. Butterfly,
Lisa Folkmarson Käll brings Judith Butler’s idea of the performativity of gender
into conversation with Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s writings on the expression of
10 L.F. Käll
embodied subjectivity. The chapter brings out how the portrayal of the two protago-
nists in Cronenberg’s film, Song Liling and René Gallimard, on the one hand illus-
trates Judith Butler’s contention that gender identity is performatively constituted
through a stylized reiteration of bodily acts that produce the illusion of an inner core
on the surface of the body and, on the other hand, points to the limitations of a
strictly performative framework. The character of Song Liling is, according to Käll,
portrayed in such a way as to also provoke questions of how to account for subjec-
tivity or a felt sense of self that cannot be captured by third-person descriptions nor
reduced to a product of reiterated performative imitation. Challenging Butler’s sim-
plistic account and dismissal of expression, Käll turns instead to the account of
expression offered by Merleau-Ponty and argues that his account provides a non-
reductive way of understanding subjectivity as embodying both a first- and a third-
person perspective in interrelation and of rethinking the relation between interiority
and exteriority without reducing one to the other.
Taken together, the chapters in this volume make up their own diverse body of
texts, their own mass with distinct boundaries, open to change as the book comes
to incorporate readings and notes or extends into other bodies of thought, texts, or
practices. The volume not only makes up its own body of texts, however, but also
contributes to constituting the body and discourses of the body, bodily boundaries,
and vulnerabilities in particular ways. Processes of talking about the body are in
part constitutive of the body of which they talk and which in turn generates new and
more ways of talking. Thus, the “almost obsessive academic engagement with the
body” that Zoe Detsi-Diamanti et al. (2009, 2) identify or the “whole industry of
research and scholarship on the body” that Sarah Nettleton and Jonathan Watson
(1998, 2) speak of not only produce conferences, books, journals, and courses, but
also contribute to the constitution of bodies, to our understanding of what bodies are
and can be, as well as to different ways in which bodies are lived and envision them-
selves to live. Taking part in this process of constitution, Bodies, Boundaries and
Vulnerabilities recognizes the importance of speaking of the body in different ways
in order to contest naturalizing claims about bodies, bodily boundaries, desires, and
vulnerabilities and to enable multiple ways of becoming.
*
The work with this book was initiated and carried out as part of a collaborative
enterprise between the Body/Embodiment group at the Centre for Gender Research,
Uppsala University, Sweden, and the Body/Embodiment working group in the
Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program (WGSS), Northeastern University,
Boston, USA. The collaboration began in 2010 with shared readings during monthly
Skype meetings in which we dealt with not only theoretical challenges but also the
unpredictable failings of technologies and network connections. The two sibling
groups met face to face for the first time in April 2013 in Boston when Northeastern
University hosted a jointly organized symposium on the theme of bodily boundaries
and vulnerabilities, a theme that was sadly made urgently present 2 days before the
symposium when explosive devices were detonated near the finish line of the Boston
Marathon on April 16, 2013. The day following the symposium, we were scheduled
to meet again, but although we were geographically closer than ever before, we
were unable to meet due to the lockdown of the entire city of Boston and surround-
ing areas, in the hunt for the perpetrator following the bombing. In many different
ways, these events served as a reminder of how bodily boundaries and vulnerabili-
ties are constituted, transgressed, and reinforced, how boundaries are drawn in ways
that reinforce notions and assumptions of danger and safety, and how different bod-
ies are constituted as vulnerable or threatening and as grievable or condemnable in
relation to each other.
I would like to thank everyone who has contributed to the work with this volume.
First of all I am grateful to the contributors to the volume and to all past and present
members of the two Body/Embodiment sibling groups. I would also like to thank
the anonymous reviewers who took time to read and offer valuable comments on the
contributed chapters. Finally, I want to acknowledge the Centre for Gender Research
and the Swedish Science Council GenNa Research Program, Uppsala University,
and the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program and the Humanities
Center at Northeastern University for contributing to making the collaboration
between the two sibling groups financially possible.
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Lisa Folkmarson Käll is Associate Professor of Theoretical Philosophy and Associate Senior
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in Feminist Philosophy) (Daidalos 2010).
Rural Women’s Bodies and Invisible Hands:
Neoliberalism and Population Control
in China
Lihua Wang and Linda M. Blum
Abstract This chapter discusses neoliberalism in China and addresses how indi-
vidual and state bodies are formed in close interrelation with one another. Through
examining the intersection between governmentality in the Foucauldian sense and
rural men and women’s bodies in contemporary China, the chapter demonstrates
how a changing Chinese context continues to manage women’s reproductive and
productive bodies for the good of the nation through the “one-child policy.” In a
neoliberal climate, the one-child policy is reinforced through a rhetoric of free and
rational choices rather than of state control. With the aim of unveiling the illusion of
neoliberalism, which allegedly brings about freedom and choice for Chinese
women, the chapter examines how the contemporary Chinese state is attempting to
craft the governable bodies and docile gendered citizens crucial to its modernization
project. It concludes that the promotion of entrepreneurial individuals who make
more rational reproductive choices leads to women’s bodies being more subtly dis-
ciplined than in the past and controlled in ways that are difficult to unmask or
criticize.
Introduction
New literature on gendered embodiment instructs that processes of embodiment can

be best understood in particular historical contexts and constellations of power
(Foucault 1991; Fox 1999). This chapter examines the changing Chinese context,
which continues to manage women’s reproductive and productive bodies for the
good of the nation through the “one-child policy.” Following Foucault, this study
demonstrates how the contemporary Chinese state is attempting to craft the govern-
able bodies and docile gendered citizens crucial to its modernization project. The
L. Wang (*)
College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, USA
e-mail: lwan@holycross.edu
L.M. Blum
Northeastern University, Boston, USA
e-mail: l.blum@neu.edu

14 L. Wang and L.M. Blum
ultimate goal is to unveil the illusion of neoliberalism which allegedly brings about
freedom and choices for Chinese women.
Criticizing this discourse of individual rights based on freedom and choice in
reproduction, Nira Yuval-Davis (1997) has importantly argued that population pol-
icy is always a national project, whether population growth is being encouraged or
discouraged. “The notion of the common genetic pool” is an essential site for
nationalist discourse, for constructing the notion of national membership. Thus
women’s bodies become sites to reproduce the nation, securing future generations
of vigorous, governable citizenry (1997, 23–26).1 While taking a similar position as
Yuval-Davis, we also employ the concept of embodiment for this examination of
Chinese population policy. That is, our analysis engages with current feminist
debates on the body which treat bodies as lived, materialized, and acting within the
real world (Freeman 2011; Rivkin-Fish 2011) and situating bodies as sites of power,
control, discipline, and/or resistance (Burkitt 1999; Fox 1999; Holmberg and Palm
2009). Thus, embodiment allows us not only to highlight Foucault’s notion of gov-
ernmentality but to link this to Chinese women’s everyday lived experience. More
importantly, such a historically situated notion of embodiment processes can be
used to illuminate the neoliberal historical moment in China.
The state intervention on population control has gone through two different strat-
egies in the implementation of “the one-child policy” since its origin in 1979. The
period from 1979 to the early 1990s was characterized by strong state measures for
the direct and harsh control of women’s bodies (Wolf 1985; Judd 1994). The
American mass media, as that of other Western nations, was filled with stories of
Communist repression brought to light by human rights and feminist groups
(Banister 1987; Aird 1990; Wang 1999; Cooney and Li 2001). Such international
condemnation, coming to a head at the International Conference on Population and
Development held in Cairo in 1994, pressured the Chinese state, along with internal
domestic concerns, to dramatically shift its official population control strategy to a
market and “family-friendly” orientation (Xie 2000; Winckler 2002; Greenhalgh
and Winckler 2005). The rhetoric of the so-called Three Integrations2 implies that
rural population control will lead to increased family prosperity and family well-
being or harmony. The rhetoric thus introduces a new “human-centered” approach
which shifts the apparent site of enforcement from the state domain to the private
sphere through economic incentives, rewards, and penalties (Tain 2000; Zhang
2000; Beijing Review, December 2000; Li 2008).
Introduction of the Three Integrations emerged under a neoliberal landscape in
China. Although neoliberalism contains multiple interpretations, in our discussion
below, it will be framed as a political philosophy that is associated with those who
1
Nira Yuval-Davis (1997: 26–38) details three nationalist discourses which represent three particu-
lar population control polices. These include “people as power” which emphasizes enlargement of
the nation’s population, the Malthusian discourses which emphasize the downsizing of the nation’s
population, and the eugenicist discourse which emphasizes “improving the quality” of the
population.
2
Susan Greenhalgh and Edwin Winckler (2005) translate San Jeihe (Three Integrations) to Three
Links for Western audiences.
Rural Women’s Bodies and Invisible Hands: Neoliberalism and Population Control… 15
believe in a free market, private property, entrepreneurship, and competition. This

philosophy is reflected in the economic arena as a set of policies assuming to lead
to economic growth and prosperity (Purdy 2004, 3–4). At the same time, this open-
ing of “free markets” and greater engagement with global capitalism intersects with
the Chinese state construction of autonomous social actors who can provide for
themselves. As Susan Greenhalgh and Edwin Winckler point out, the construction
of “neoliberal subjects” allows the Chinese government to transfer many of its pre-
vious responsibilities to communities, families, and individuals (2005, 9).
To understand the formation of Chinese neoliberal governmentality, it is also
useful to briefly revisit Foucault. In his lectures (1978), Foucault discusses the his-
tory of government and links the concept of governmentality with the emergence of
the “art of government” – how to treat populations as governable objects (1978, 87,
99). The distinction between normal and abnormal in a society is one of the exam-
ples of how authorities exercise their power to measure, supervise, and correct
(Foucault 1977). In other words, governing the population through “the conduct of
conduct” takes place not just through formal laws and institutions but also by means
of discipline, self-regulation, and self-management (Gordon 1991). The literature of
governmentality thus highlights self-constraint, a process of internalization of disci-
plines as one of the important aspects of modern governing technique (Dean 1999;
Lemke 2001; Rose 2006; Tellmann 2009; Bevir 2011).
Under neoliberalism, however, market value becomes the essential organizing
and regulative principle for the state and society (Hanmann 2009; Bevir 2011; Flew
2012). Thus, it is important to uncover mechanisms on the ground by which states
produce self-disciplining men and women. As Carla Freeman reminds us, embodi-
ment is a useful conceptual tool to uncover the relationship between neoliberalism
and its impact on everyday lives since “global capitalism is inscribed upon the body
through the disciplinary fields of labor and production as well as a dramatically
expanding array of consumption practices” (2011, 355).
While it is important to acknowledge Freeman’s highlighting of the embodiment
process through linking neoliberalism with labor, the productive body, and consum-
erism, she left out, however, Yuval-Davis’s illumination of the reproductive body in
national population control policy. Taking feminist insights from both Freeman and
Yuval-Davis, this chapter investigates the neoliberal techniques of governing that
have emerged in the discourse of the Three Integrations, the official family-friendly
project targeting the rural population. We argue that Chinese neoliberal governmen-
tality derives from multiple processes. These include redefining the meaning of
population work, recruiting male population workers, introducing cost-benefit cal-
culation, and producing rational and risk-assessing subjects. More specifically, the
Three Integrations offers privatized economic “choices”3 – including provision of
new farming technologies, fertilizers, hybrid seeds, and help to introduce cash
crops – and also directly ties the regulation of reproduction to production and of
reproductive bodies to productive bodies. This creates an illusion that rural Chinese
3
In her study of professionalism in post-Mao China, Lisa Hoffman frames individual choice as a
form of governing rather than a form of freedom. See “Post-Mao Professionalism” in Privatizing
China: Socialism from Afar, eds. Li Zhang and Aihwa Ong, Cornell University Press, 2008.
women’s bodies are no longer subject to state control but only to private, individual
choices. The first author’s interviews and ethnographic observations shed light
beyond this official discourse, revealing the relationship between women’s newly
“privatized” entrepreneurial bodies and the work of men employed by the Population
Bureau of the authoritarian state.
Methodology
The first author conducted all the fieldwork in Summer 2003 to scrutinize how
macro changes in national policy affected the lived experience of those most tar-
geted for modernization: the rural villagers. Before conducting her fieldwork, for-
mal and official procedures were often required since she holds an American
passport and has resided in the USA for several decades. As an overseas Chinese,
official procedures included preapproved research questions, approval for requests
for fieldwork sites, and government input into the makeup of possible interview
groups. Thus, population workers in the group meetings were also selected by local
authorities. In addition, a research assistant, a local population worker from the
Sichuan Province, accompanied her to every meeting at all four sites, which also
included two villages.
The first author interviewed two groups of population workers who were cadres,
managers, and technicians representing several offices in Xunhan and Yibin
Counties in the Sichuan Providence. Between 6 and 10 population workers partici-
pated in each focus group, usually with only one woman from the local Women’s
Federation. Each meeting lasted between three and four hours and took place in the
local government office. The goal of interviewing these focus groups was to under-
stand their experiences in implementing the Three Integrations at a local level.
Questions thus focused on eliciting individual stories of the everyday work in
implementing official population control policies. The open-ended questions
included both the ways the population work was performed in the 1980s and current
examples of performing the Three Integrations work in 2003. Two interrelated ana-
lytical questions framed our analysis of the narratives of these population workers:
what neoliberal techniques of governance (such as self-discipline, self-management,
and self-enterprise) have emerged in the implementation of the Three Integrations
and how these techniques shaped the experience of population workers.
Similarly, the interviews of two groups of village women were aimed at under-
standing their experiences with the population workers who were implementing the
Three Integrations. These two groups of women were participants in the Happiness
Project4 – Action to Aid Impoverished Mothers – a specific program within the
4
For details on the Happiness Project, see “Neoliberalism and the Feminization of Family Survival:
The Happiness Project in Four Chinese Villages” by Lihua Wang in AGR 16 Social Production and
Reproduction in the interface of Public and Private Spheres (2012), eds. by Marcia Segal, Vasilikie
Demos, and Esther Ngan-ling Chow.
larger Three Integrations campaign. About 15 women came from each Maoba and
Tunjie villages to attend the meeting with the first author. Again, the two previous
analytical questions were relevant for understanding the experience of village
women.
While Maoba Village is located in Xunhan County, Tunjie Village is located in
Yibin County. Although both Xunhan and Yibin Counties are situated in the Sichuan
Province in the western part of China, geographic characteristics and makeup of the
population are very different from each other. Xuanhan County is located high in a
mountainous region of southern Sichuan, with most residents being members of the
majority Han people. Lack of transportation and a high population density for the
relatively small amount of cultivated land for agriculture exacerbate existing pov-
erty. Yibin County, in contrast, is located in a flatter region in the northern part of
the Province and most villagers are identified as minority, non-Han people.
Reframing the Past to Move to the Future: Remaking

Population Workers’ Mentality and Practices
In the 1980s, the male leadership relied on simple forms of coercive power to
accomplish population control, forms which Foucault might consider “bio-politics”
to regulate individuals’ reproductive conduct. Rural women’s bodies were routinely
violated and abused at both village and county levels, including forced abortions
and insertion of IUDs. Indeed, birth control methods have been centered over-
whelmingly on female bodies in China. According to statistical data collected in
1994, over 40 % of couples relied on female sterilization, while 40 % on the intra-
uterine device (IUD) (see Edwards 2000, 73; Wei-Xiong at http://www.medizin-
ethik.ch/publik/family_planning.htm; Zhou 1996, 181–2).5 Harriet Evans, in
research on Chinese gendered discourses of sexuality (1997), has argued that, like
many forms of nationalism, the official discourse defined women biologically,
emphasizing their responsibility for the nation’s health and for producing its next
generation of vigorous, productive workers. As a consequence, Chinese women’s
bodies have become “naturalized,” the unquestioned objects of population policy
with male bodies never seen as equally responsible for reproduction (1997, 3, 156).
Despite the Chinese state’s need to sharply curtail population growth, it remains
culturally unacceptable for a woman to be child-free and non-mothers are especially
stigmatized in the rural areas in China. (We return to this stigma later in the chapter
in relation to the contemporary Three Integrations campaign.) These assumptions
about women’s reproductive bodies are continuously articulated by population pol-
5
Currently, methods used have shifted only somewhat despite the changing rhetoric used to justify
these “choices.” A 2007 national survey on birth control methods reported that 52.30 % married
women relied on IUD’s and 32.25 % used female sterilization (Shang-Chun Wu, 2010: 286). For
forced abortion, there is a lack of statistical data in China. This topic is not intended to be discussed
in this chapter.
icy makers, although normalizing and naturalizing women as mothers becomes just
one of the characteristics of neoliberal governmentality.
In contrast to Evans’ feminist critique, most Chinese scholars acknowledge only
technical limitations or mistakes in the first period of implementation of the one-
child policy (Tain 2000; Liao 2013). In this dominant view, in the 1990s, the state
simply had to redirect its approach and modernize its discourse on the ground to
generate active, reasoned consent to effectively continue national population control.
While I found officials still reluctant to openly discuss the earlier period, I was told
that the central responsibility of local cadres in the Population and Family Planning
Offices had been to disseminate official policy to the masses of peasants and “to
publicize and popularize” (xuanchuan jiaoyu) the one-child policy through study
groups and meetings. But others made clear that this “publicizing” was imposed
propaganda style, generated little consent, and often led to identifying pregnant
women outside of official births permitted in a village for probable sanctions.
One particular incident exemplified what is now said of the earlier coercive
period to frame and justify the discursive shift to the Three Integrations campaign.
Without generating public dialogue and challenge to such long-respected patriar-
chal values as the preference for sons, many women were forced by family mem-
bers to hide in order to give birth outside of the official quota (Wu and Mu 1998,
32–33). A male village head recounted,
My work had two dimensions during the 80s. The easy side of my work was that I organized
meetings to educate peasants in my village. The hard side of my work was that no one lis-
tened to me. There were so many illegal births in our village because we are located in an
isolated high mountainous area. Catching the women whose babies were ‘illegal births’6
was very difficult. Sometimes I had to hike for miles and it took days to search for them.
You know, I had no idea about where they could hide. They may have been staying with
their relatives in other villages or could be staying somewhere in the mountains.
After his story, the other cadres in our meeting reacted strongly. One with a col-
lege degree, working at a higher level of the Population Bureau, was particularly
critical of the village head even alluding to state repression. But others admitted, in
keeping with the changed official discourse, that in its first version the one-child
policy was ineffective and had reached a point of exhaustion in terms of what was
being accomplished. In other words, it had not generated the active, risk-assessing
citizenry who might actively consent and take individual responsibility for limiting
population growth. In contrast to modernized and civilized urban centers, rural
populations were often positioned as deficient subjects to the state discourse of
modernity (Chen 2011, 39). Bringing rural subjects into neoliberal discourse thus
became the best solution for the state to readdress population conduct.
A 1998 officially authorized publication, “The Current Situation and Policy in
Chinese Population Control” (Zhonggourenkou de xiangzhuang he duice), by two
esteemed Chinese demographers, also illuminates the shifting discourse and the
6
For an account of abusive stories in River Crossing village, see “Globalizing, Reproducing, and
Civilizing Rural Subject” by Junjie Chen in Reproduction, Globalization, and the State (2011) eds.
by Carole Browner and Carolyn Sargent.
reframing of the past to justify the Three Integrations campaign. “The Current
Situation” acknowledged limitations of the 1980s framework, emphasizing its inef-
fectiveness while ignoring the more egregious abuses of human and women’s rights.
At the heart of this official reframing of the past, the demographers assailed the
1980s campaign for failing to inspire reasoned discussion and critique of the tradi-
tional preference for male children expressed in the proverb, “the more sons you
have, the more prosperity the parents will encounter” (Wu and Mu 1998, 32–33).
Implementing the Three Integrations in the 1990s required a new regime of what
Foucault would likely consider governmentality as “the emergence of population as
datum, as a field of intervention and as an objective of governmental techniques,
and the process which isolates the economy as a specific sector of reality, and politi-
cal economy as the science and the technique of intervention of the government in
that field of reality” (1991, 102). To instill this sense of internally driven, more
modern sense of responsibility, the Chinese state began a long process of top-down
controlled (re)education of population workers to imbue them with the new direc-
tive to “serve the people” rather than as previously guided, to disseminate and
impose the national party goals. In contrast to the discomfort felt in criticizing the
earlier campaign, the older generation of population workers I interviewed was
eager to speak of their current uneasiness and the “hardship” they experienced try-
ing to adopt this new directive. Ironically, for such older cadres, adopting the Three
Integrations’ public service directive meant wielding an even more veiled rhetoric
to generate an internalized form of consent to the one-child policy, creating a kind
of work speedup to produce a more difficult, if effective, outcome.
The 1980s campaign had reduced the population crisis to the single demographic
imperative to end overpopulation and to bluntly impose this from above. Older pop-
ulation workers, although conceding that this had not worked, that “no one had lis-
tened to [them],” still found it difficult to disregard the simple moral condemnation
of rural women’s bodies and births of the earlier party dictates. Instead, they were
directed to become entrepreneurial themselves, devising means to convince rural
families, against long traditions to the contrary, that becoming one-child families
would lead them out of poverty to family prosperity and harmony. One worker
expressed this as follows:
I did not understand the Three Integrations in the beginning because I did not see the con-
nection between population control and the economic life of a family. You know, my work
was easy and simple during the 80s. Popularizing the one-child policy through education
and distributing flyers and pamphlets were the focus of my daily job. Now, I was asked to
“serve the people” and I did not know what my role was anymore. I was confused.
Similar comments were voiced by many other older population workers, who
made up one-third of the focus group.
Clearly the “hardship” of older population workers was not only coming from
the new discourse but also from its resulting work speedup in which they became
responsible for delivering a range of additional services to the agricultural popula-
tion. I was told that local offices of the Three Integrations were expanding their
educational programming to increase the skills of their workers; the National Office
had also made it mandatory to attend. A population worker from the Family Planning
Committee in Yibin County elaborated this point to me: “I have to attend not only
regular training relating to birth control, but also workshops on agriculture, animal
husbandry, forestry management, new forms of technology, and marketing. I have
to learn how to encourage rural entrepreneurship that will lead to economic growth.”
To adopt a new style of management, we might say that male population workers
were positioned in a subjectification process in which they had to quickly internal-
ize new work discipline through official educational programs. As governmentality
studies suggest, “governing the self” and “governing others” link to processes of
subjectification (Lemke 2001, 191). To “serve the people” now requires local offices
to comprehensively engage in reducing births by sparking economic growth.
Meeting these demands within the scope of work being done by local officials was
sometimes difficult, as other cadres addressed indirectly. Several noted that they had
not fully understood the Three Integrations strategy; some explained that it took
about a year to adapt to the guidelines of the new policy, while others confided that
it took even longer. “It is a hard task for us to implement the Three Integrations. You
know, we had to follow the rules without asking questions,” a male cadre from
Xunhan County informed me. I was also told that when their confusion was discov-
ered by colleagues, leaders in the office would have meetings advising them on the
need to adjust to the changes. In other words, population workers sensed the hypoc-
risy in neoliberal entrepreneurialism just as a Foucauldian analysis makes clear,
with responsibility laid on the individual workers, their failure to adjust, and their
being older, rather than on the more demanding basis of their work and its expected
outcome of implementing fully modern forms of citizen participation. Not surpris-
ingly, most population workers in my study had participated in at least one of a
range of official educational programs to learn how to “serve the people” through
rational, economic needs assessment of peasant households. Official educational
programs, while originating from the National Office of Population and Family
Planning, centered on the township where village cadres were actually trained. A
county-level authority sometimes issued certificates for the best performing cadres
in such training sessions, an honor for those who received them, but every office of
Population and Family Planning had its own routine weekly meetings. These were
clearly viewed as mandatory, with all in my study mentioning that there was no
excuse for not participating in such meetings.
Redefining population work with the Three Integrations also redefined its ideal
worker.7 That is, the newly expanded field now recruits more male workers because
it draws on a more masculinized, technocratic notion of worker skills and require-
ments. In the 1980s, the selection of workers in Population and Family Planning
Offices was often limited to candidates from medical fields such as women nurses,
doctors, and those educated in public health. It was also common for workers from
both the national and local levels of the Chinese Women’s Federation to be selected
for population control offices, with the perception in this era that population was
7
Sociologist Joan Acker coins this term to understand the gendered structures of work organiza-
tions (1990, 1992).
solely an issue of the female domain of reproduction, unrelated to the male domain
of work-activity. In the study of this chapter, the number of population workers with
medical backgrounds has decreased over time, paralleling the increase in the num-
ber of workers who are veterans, teachers, technicians, and veterinarians. The emer-
gence of neoliberal governmentality now extended to all government branches
working together in technocratic fashion to further the marketized nation. This
resulted in men population workers with newly incorporated management styles
and working disciplines becoming increasingly responsible for poverty reduction
and micro-surveillance. That is, population offices charged to promote “freely cho-
sen” birth control and “free” market activities were also in charge of investigations
to classify the status of household family planning and to verify those “households
of family planning” with no “extra” births. They also document each household’s
resources and report on their investigations to the next level of authority.8
I was told that official measures of “success” and pressure on men population
workers led to targeting households where income could be increased rapidly rather
than households with the greatest poverty. The nationally mandated permissible
failure rate is only twenty percent of “targeted” “households of family planning,”
and if there is a higher percentage of failure, both individual staff and the office are
subject to penalties. In fact, some tasks can be delegated – for example, to the
Agricultural Bureau, Technology Bureau, and so – but each year, the Office of the
Three Integrations allocates a strict number of target households to each ministry/
bureau, requiring the respective leaders to formulate income-generating projects for
each selected village and to determine economic assistance to each “household of
family planning.” Economic assistance can be varied. For example, the Public
Health Bureau in Panzhihua City offered medical checkups, birth control supplies,
doctors, and micro-credit for the target households, while the Agricultural Bureau
provided technicians to conduct workshops for peasants along with hybrid seeds for
rice, vegetables, and mushrooms.
But population workers in the study reported that effectively utilizing such mate-
rial incentives to demonstrate income growth was a notably “hard task.” At the end of
the year, the Office of Population and Family Planning staff also evaluates other local
population work groups. While there are honors for individuals and work units with
high success rates, if a work group did not perform well in the implementation of the
Three Integrations, their workload for the following year will be doubled. “We were
asked to donate portions of our salaries to the Three Integrations project and required
to donate clothes, quilts, and other daily necessities for their targeted households
sometimes” a population worker explained. Thus there were many reasons for older
population cadres to consider their work under the Three Integrations more difficult.
Neoliberal governmentality now induces every worker to take personal responsibility
for China’s national project of population control and economic growth.
8
In the first author’s study of the two villages, the meaning of “extra” relied on separate standards.
For minorities and Han people of higher mountainous areas, two children are permitted. Tunjie is
a Yi minority village, while Maoba is a Han village located in a higher altitude. Although classify-
ing a household of family planning differs regionally, the principle of “extra” is set strictly by
national policies.
Village Women and New Governmentality: Normalizing

Bodies and Changing Mentality
Providing economic assistance to the “households of family planning” is not the

only work of cadres participating in the Three Integrations project. Population
workers are also explicitly responsible for normalizing women’s bodies, changing
the mentality of village women and building acceptance of the new official dis-
course. Normalizing rural women’s bodies, we argue, is taking place as local popu-
lation workers adhere to the creation of official “eligibility” criteria of the campaign
itself; however, in different ways both “qualified” and “disqualified” female bodies
become subjects of the normalization process. Examining which bodies qualify for
public assistance and which bodies are disqualified, made invisible, and defined as
“disabled” usefully illustrates this point. Although the research of this chapter did
not investigate all projects within the larger Three Integrations campaign, the spe-
cific investigation of the so-called Happiness Project illustrates the consequences
resulting from this sorting or distinguishing of female bodies. Many China scholars
(Wolf 1985; Johnson 1983; Stacy 1983; Bossen 2002) have recognized that the
traditional notion of womanhood is essentially associated with the capacity for giv-
ing birth to sons, to childrearing, and to the overall willingness to sacrifice self for
the welfare of the family. This cultural expectation was clearly reflected in eligibil-
ity for the Happiness Project which targets only mothers of reproductive age to
participate in income-generating projects to improve their economic conditions.
Any married woman without a child is excluded from the Three Integrations and
effectively becomes invisible.
Greenhalgh and Winckler argue that the age-old Chinese cultural image of the
good mother and virtuous wife has been reconfigured and redefined by the neolib-
eral state. The Good Mother now is not only defined as self-sacrificing but is also
acquiring modern, scientific meanings that include raising healthy children and
providing a better quality material life (2005, 217). Under China’s neoliberal econ-
omy, a good mother therefore should aspire to be a good caregiver in both produc-
tive and reproductive activities. The exclusion of “disabled” bodies – as they are
defined by local standards – has become a key part of this normalization, another
means of disciplining women’s productive and reproductive bodies under the Three
Integrations. A physical definition of “disabled” bodies was not clearly explained
by any of the population workers, but it became clear when I met two women who
had been excluded from participation in the Happiness Project. After my meetings
with village women who had successfully repaid their loans, I requested to meet
mothers of reproductive age who were not selected to participate in any of the Three
Integrations projects. Reluctantly, the village leader took me to visit a woman in
Maoba village. A woman with a straw broom appeared when I entered the courtyard
and the broom was taller than she at four feet in height. Her courtyard was very
clean and her five- or six-year-old son was busy playing there. It was hard to tell her
age. After a short greeting, we left her home. The village leader explained that she
was not selected for the Happiness Project or any other Three Integrations project
since she was regarded as incapable of participating in farming or cash-generating

activities requiring physical strength. He went on, maintaining that she was unable
to carry or lift heavy objects since her body had not fully developed. “Look,” he
continued: “you saw her body size and how she had a girl’s shape.” In this case, the
Maoban woman’s body was defined as disabled in terms of the lack of physical
strength, size, and productivity, and she was excluded from the Three Integrations
despite being the mother of a son. That is, while a good mother (and thus good
woman) in the traditional sense, she could not be recognized under the new neolib-
eral discourse.
My encounter with a second woman in Tunjie village provided another example
of a “disabled” body, one that “failed” in both productive and reproductive terms.
The home I entered gave a first impression of messiness as the courtyard was spread
with firewood and farming tools lying on the ground. After the village leader called
her name, a woman in her fifties came out. This mother-in-law understood the rea-
son I was there and quickly invited me inside to greet her daughter-in-law. The
mother-in-law dominated our conversation and answered most questions directed
toward the daughter-in-law. I learned that the daughter-in-law had given birth to a
girl. Although allowed to have a second child, the family had decided that there
should be no more children due to their impoverished living conditions. Moreover,
the daughter-in-law had had seizures before she married. Without medical treat-
ment, these had become more frequent and serious. “Look,” the mother-in-law
quickly pulled over her-daughter-in-law’s sleeve and pointed to a scar on her arm:
“She just burned herself recently when she lost consciousness. She fell next to the
stove.”
It turned out the daughter-in-law was mistreated by the family due to both her
illness and giving birth to a girl. The village leader told me that the family did not
have money to take her to the hospital. He said, “it was not worth it. She has lost her
capability to do physical work and farm independently. In contrast, someone in her
family must always keep an eye on her due to her illness. This has become a burden
for the family.” Later, I also learned that her husband had deserted her since migrat-
ing to a city several years ago. He had stopped calling or sending money to her, and
she did not even know his current whereabouts.
As this story illustrates, under a neoliberal regime, disabled bodies have become
increasing sources of “trouble” for the families in the villages. The costs of medical
care and treatment have reached new levels that often seem unreasonably high. For
population workers, such unproductive mothers also represent dysfunctional bod-
ies, bodies too costly and risky to invest in because they threaten official quotas for
allowable failure rates. For example, the overall rate of returned interest expected
from village women for micro-credit loans was 80 %. Falling short of this expecta-
tion might result in a serious penalty. In contrast to such “disabled” bodies, success-
ful qualified women and mothers in the Happiness Project became productive
entrepreneurial subjects under neoliberalism and open to new work disciplines.
Qualified mothers who received micro-credit focused on market activity but also,
the first author discovered, endured the burdens of long work hours and labor-
intensive activities to provide a better life for their children and family. Striving for
family prosperity, such women in the Project became actively invested in reducing
fertility, transforming population control into the private, rational choice of newly
governable citizens.
Paradoxically, “eligibility” and selection processes for women’s bodies under the
Three Integrations challenge yet also rely on traditional Chinese patriarchal values
favoring sons. To change such customary values, the Three Integrations employs the
slogan “Fewer Children Leads to Family Prosperity” (shaoshengzhifu), the “new
reproductive ideology.” I observed that local officials in Sichuan had painted the
slogan on the walls of buildings in many villages. No one could miss it, even from
a distance, as the characters were large with an eye-catching bright white color.
Indeed, painting slogans has historically been a common way to promote social
movements in China. In my collection of popular materials from the two villages,
“Fewer Children Leads to Family Prosperity” was also printed on posters, calen-
dars, technological and agricultural information pamphlets, popular picture books,
and reproductive health instructions. And I was told by many workers that it is their
responsibility to discuss the “new reproductive ideology” with members of their
targeted families.
Many population workers on the village level have found that (after the difficul-
ties of adapting to changes in the mid-1990s) it is currently easier to communicate
population control ideas to peasants than it was in the 1980s, especially for the
younger generation. Mr. Zhang, a man in his thirties from Maoba Township
explained to me,
When I talked to villagers about farming, I usually also asked them about their family mem-
bers. You see, it is very natural to talk about population control nowadays. This is because
I can speak about production to peasants first, and then discuss reproductive issues with
them. Nobody has rejected this way of discussing population control yet.
But the most popular format to alter the mentality of villagers is the village meet-
ing. In many rural areas of China, regular meetings of village residents are still
held – but at least in my study in the Sichuan Province, these meetings had been
transformed by the implementation of the Three Integrations project, moving away
from earlier political propaganda sessions to be more like educational gatherings. I
was informed that these meetings commonly last between two and two and a half
hours with agendas spanning a range of topics that may include farming, raising
animals, children’s safety, birth control, and other various policy issues relevant to
villagers’ lives. As Mr. Zhang (above) had described, conversations at the village
level also moved more comfortably beginning from the material needs of produc-
tion and then to the private, reproductive realm. Women in my study seemed to
agree that village meetings were more like educational gatherings rather than pro-
paganda sessions for population control. Indeed, most of them reported enjoying the
meetings. This may be because meetings are a time to be with friends and neigh-
bors – an increasingly rare pleasure when women’s work lives at home are intensi-
fying in the market-based regime. But I was also told that the information they
acquired was helpful in these intensifying daily lives. A woman from the Tuanjie
village told me,
During busy seasons, our village meetings usually presented information on how to deal
with a particular insect pest, how to use chemicals to kill them, and so on. This is very use-
ful to me because I learned new knowledge concerning farming. At the end of each meet-
ing, we also talked about birth control and what the good reasons are for us to have fewer
children.
A discussion of production first, followed by reproduction, had become the new

pattern in village meetings in both villages in my study. Introducing such topics
directly linked to rural villagers’ everyday lives has reduced the overtly political
aspect of the gatherings, with population control a less-than-fully hidden agenda.
Information on how to use standard contraceptives and emergency contraceptives
were regular topics at village meetings. In addition, the local offices of Population
and Family Planning published many copies of educational pamphlets, which they
provide free to the rural population, particularly to households of family planning.
(My conversation with workers in PanzhiHua City indicated that this is character-
ized as a form of “service” in implementing the Three Integrations.) I was informed
that village meetings also addressed other family issues, incorporating modern
forms of reasoning, biomedical information, and risk assessment. For example, the
topic of safety was brought up in regard to boys falling off trees they had climbed in
Maoba village. This was treated as a real and serious problem in the discussion.
Villagers customarily regarded this as a moral problem of parents’ failing to instill
proper discipline and obedience in children who were injured and who should have
been more strictly forbidden from climbing to the treetops. After the problem was
redefined in a village meeting as a matter of child health and safety, many mothers
felt that they had learned a new more modern approach to childrearing, to encourage
reasoning and risk assessment in their children for injury prevention rather than
simply emphasizing traditional obedience.
In a related vein, village meetings have also introduced scientific rhetoric
addressing needs for higher standards in childbearing and rearing or “a high quality
in raising a child” (youshengyouyu). Insuring healthier births, for example, requires
a newly married couple to have a physical checkup, to avoid a close blood marriage,
and to learn the best age at which to have their treasured child. High-quality parent-
ing of an infant also requires a couple to know the “correct,” scientific ways of bath-
ing their new baby, nursing them, and making certain they receive the necessary
vaccines. The new scientific rhetoric aids the effort to replace the previous repro-
ductive ideology, an ideology which emphasized the quantity of children in a fam-
ily. As Ann Anagnost (1997, 2004) also points out, China’s discourse on population
has moved its emphasis from quantity to quality.9
The push toward full acceptance of the new reproductive ideology, however, is
being linked to multiple strategies encountered by villagers in my study. As I stated
before, rewarding the “households of family planning” for conforming to popula-
tion control guidelines is one means by which the state hopes to ensure the success
of the Three Integrations. The offer of economic assistance is being broadly used as
9
This has interesting parallels to the rise of “scientific” or “medicalized” motherhood in the west
(see among many Apple 2006; Litt 2000).
an incentive in the project. As a consequence, many households have already ben-

efited and received free seeds, fertilizer, educational workshops, reading materials
conveying agricultural information, micro-credits, and free medical gynecological
checkups for women. But these materials and services provided by the project have
created a new, less explicitly coercive relationship between the state and its
citizens.
For the rural population in my study, their acceptance of the new reproductive
ideology no longer operates under the simple form of pleasing officials. For them,
official economic assistance has concretely helped to improve the quality of their
lives and many women spoke to me of the connection between the ideal of fewer
children and the reality of family prosperity. A woman from Maoba village told me,
for example,
It is good for me to have fewer children in the family. You know, children need a lot of time
to be taken care of. I came from a big family with six siblings and I knew how hard it was
for my mother to raise all of us. Now I have one child and I can use my time to work on our
family farm and raise animals for the family. If I have more children, then I would have no
time to make money for my family.
Most in my study also accepted the new reproductive ideology because they had
grown up in large families with five and or six siblings. This was typical during the
1960s and 1970s, before the implementation of the one-child policy. Village women
remembered hardships endured while growing up describing lack of daily food, the
necessity of digging up wild plants for supplements, experiencing severe stomach
problems, and residing in shabby houses.
“Would you want to have more children if the state changed the population con-
trol policy at some point in the future?” I framed a hypothetical question. To my
surprise, I was laughed at by everyone in the meetings and told firmly by the women
that they would not want to have any more children regardless of what the state
decreed. “It is good for women’s health, you know. My mother had many physical
problems because she had given birth to six children,” a woman from Maoba village
told me. “Yes,” another woman quickly agreed. She added,
My mother did not have a good life materially. She worked hard for us her whole life. Look,
she had so many children but her life was never easy. We are in a different generation and
do not share the same belief as our mothers. We want to have a better life for ourselves.
Ironically, in spite of these observations about the improved health of rural moth-
ers, the Three Integrations campaign has increased the workload for women’s pro-
ductive bodies. This unacknowledged increase in a sense represents the “invisible
hands” of the new market-based neoliberal regime because it is concealed in wom-
en’s active entrepreneurialism. I was told, for example, that the project’s introduc-
tion of hybrid seeds and fertilizers has increased rice production to the extent that
food shortages are no longer common. Some village women explained they had
even learned about the chemical ingredients and now understood the major differ-
ences among the fertilizers they used. Technicians had come from the township,
holding workshops at village meetings to introduce such products. Clearly many
women had participated in these workshops, engaging not only in the entrepreneur-
ial spirit but also with science, to participate in new market opportunities.
Unfortunately, I saw little evidence of engaging science to protect from the harmful
effects of such chemicals.
As occurred in other developing countries during the 1980s, the turn to a priva-
tized cash economy intensifies women’s labor. Project technicians require rapid per-
cent increases in targeted family incomes so market products, both nonlocal and
nontraditional, have been introduced including milk cows, goats, fish, mushrooms,
and a variety of vegetables. With the responsibility for domestic work, subsistence
farming, and the added new cash products, the work schedule shared by all the
women I interviewed involved starting the workday between four or five in the
morning, working in the home and in the fields until eight or nine in the evening,
with those raising milk cows then doing midnight milking. They did not explicitly
complain as they took pride in striving for family prosperity, but they admitted to
decreasing time for friends and relatives since becoming involved in the cash
economy.
As individual entrepreneurs engaging with the market, village women gained an
increased understanding of competition and risk and voiced concerns about increas-
ing economic uncertainty. Women worried about the increasing cost of living,
because along with increases in family income with cash products, school fees and
medical costs escalated dramatically. I was told that tuition for public school has
grown to become a heavy burden for many families during the last five years. In
terms of medical costs, one woman from Tunjie village reported that her son had
required surgery for a stomach problem since he was two; although he was six at the
time I visited, the family had been unable in the ensuing four years to raise enough
money for the procedure. Such rising medical costs,10 I was told, were also one of
the major causes of family debt and poverty in their villages.
Conclusion
This chapter has examined the intersection between governmentality and rural men
and women’s bodies in a neoliberal context. Interviews with local population work-
ers performing the Three Integrations illuminate these new means of governing the
population and population control issues in China at a crucial historical moment in
its ascendancy as a global power. In particular, governmentality derives from a pro-
cess reshaping gendered bodies and identities: the promotion of entrepreneurial,
self-directed, privatized selves who make better, more rational reproductive
“choices” and who are eager to participate in the cash economy has differing, yet
perhaps equally contradictory consequences for rural men and women. In the
10
The introduction of neoliberalism has brought about the privatization of health care in China. See
Health Policy Report by David Blumenthal and William Hsiao in the New England Journal of
Medicine, 353:1165–1170, September 15, 2005, http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/
NEJMhpr051133.
villages, the introduction of cash products calling precisely for women’s labor, with
the new regime surrounding childbearing and rearing, leaves women’s bodies more
subtly disciplined and controlled than before. Put differently, women’s bodies are
subject to a paradox: more crucial for family survival and to produce fewer but
“higher quality” offspring, they are both more “individualized” and vulnerable than
before.
At the same time, the enlarging of the male network and of masculine opportuni-
ties in technocratic population work changes men’s embodied labor. Employment in
population work carries increased strenuous demands, with rewards, but also threats
of harsh penalties and doubled workloads if failing to reach goals for “family pros-
perity.” Rising technocracy within population work has thus become a characteristic
of a neoliberal way of governance in China with contradictory affects for men as
well as women.
Neoliberalism in China also represents challenges for feminist scholars. A dis-
course of privatized citizens making voluntary choices as consumers, producers,
and “reproducers” for the nation may be more difficult to unmask or criticize as
monolithically oppressive state and family regimes become irrelevant within the
logic of the ostensibly free market. This discourse of privatized citizens fails to
address structural gender inequality. Yet, it may be important, if challenging, to
gauge whether the Three Integrations’ approach offers any actual increase in wom-
en’s autonomous control of their bodies as they are pressured to internalize the
Chinese official belief in population control.
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Lihua Wang is a Visiting Lecturer in the Sociology and Anthropology Department at the College
of the Holy Cross in Worcester, U.S. She is also an Associate in Research at the Fairbank Center
for Chinese Studies at Harvard University. Her research article “Neoliberalism and the Feminization
of Family Survival: The Happiness Project in Four Chinese Villages” received an Outstanding
Author Contribution Award from the Emerald Literati Network Awards for Excellence in 2013.
She is the Editor of Globalization and its Chinese Discontents: Feminist Critiques (Peking
University Press 2008) and Coeditor of Women, War, and Violence: Personal Perspectives and
Global Activism (Palgrave Macmillan 2010).
Linda M. Blum is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at

Northeastern University in Boston, U.S. She is the Author of Between Feminism and Labor: The
Significance of the Comparable Worth Movement (University of California Press 1991), At the
Breast: Ideologies of Breastfeeding and Motherhood in the Contemporary United States
(Beacon Press 1999), and Raising Generation Rx: Mothering Kids with Invisible Disabilities in
an Age of Inequality (New York University Press 2015). She has been a Bunting Fellow at the
Radcliffe Institute, has served as elected Chair of the American Sociological Association’s Sex and
Gender Section and as editorial board member of Gender & Society, and was most honored to visit
the Centre for Gender Research at Uppsala University in Fall 2012.
Arrogant Perceptors, World-Travelers,
and World-Backpackers: Rethinking María
Lugones’ Theoretical Framework Through
Lukas Moodysson’s Mammoth
Jenny Björklund
Abstract Addressing interrelations and boundaries between differently situated

human bodies, this chapter brings out the spatial and material dimensions in María
Lugones’ conceptual framework of world-travelling through a discussion of the nar-
rative of Lukas Moodysson’s film Mammoth (2009). Adding to Lugones’ frame-
work, the author introduces the concept of world-backpacking in order to capture
how embodied subjects relate to each other in an increasingly globalized world
characterized by gendered and racialized inequalities as well as ignorance and sim-
plification of such inequalities. The chapter demonstrates that the striving of the
characters in the film to transgress boundaries through physical movement and
bodily bonds does not in most cases mean that they are engaged in what Lugones
calls “world-travelling” since they do not travel to each other’s worlds in the spirit
of “loving perception.” The economically and culturally privileged main characters
try (in some ways) to change the world into a better place and to bridge the global
and economic divides, but instead, their bodies wind up exploiting and violating
other less privileged bodies as well as our planet and its resources. The notion of
world-backpacking, introduced in the chapter, is intended to describe the processes
by which privileged Westerners believe themselves to perceive the non-privileged
other in loving ways and to create intimacy and bonds with her, but instead fails to
perceive from the perspective and specific world of the other.
Introduction
One of my colleagues who taught María Lugones in her gender studies class told me
recently that Lugones’ classic article on world-travelling has an extraordinary
appeal to her young students. Lugones’ article was published in 1987, but as my
J. Björklund (*)
Centre for Gender Research, Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden
e-mail: jenny.bjorklund@gender.uu.se

32 J. Björklund
colleague’s example shows, her text still speaks to young people today, almost thirty
years later. The usefulness of Lugones’ concept of world-travelling has been con-
firmed by the efforts made by later scholars to discuss and develop her theoretical
framework (e.g., Bartky 1998; LeMoncheck 1997; Ortega 2001; Sullivan 2004). In
the following, I will contribute to further theorizing by showing that the process of
globalization has brought with it a need to bring out the spatial and material dimen-
sions of Lugones’ framework. I will also argue that the concepts available in
Lugones’ theory are not enough to account for people’s movements in our global-
ized world; I will introduce the concept of world-backpacking to describe a way of
relating to people and places which at first might look like world-travelling, but
which in fact is equally or even more harmful than the arrogant perception described
by Lugones.
María Lugones belongs to the so-called Latina feminist tradition that has con-
ceptualized the subversive and world-changing potential of people and phenomena
in the borderlands between two or more cultures.1 Lugones (1987) views a “world”
as a description of experience shared by a number of people. A world may be a
society with its dominant constructions of life and organizations of gender, race, (re)
production, etc. But a world may also be a construction of a part of a society, or a
particular group, such as “lesbian feminists.” One can experience being different in
different worlds, e.g., being playful in one world and not playful in another, and this
is what Lugones means by world-travelling:
The shift from being one person to being a different person is what I call “travel.” […] One
does not pose as someone else, one does not pretend to be, for example, someone of a dif-
ferent personality or character or someone who uses space or language differently than the
other person. Rather one is someone who has that personality or character or uses space and
language in that particular way. The “one” here does not refer to some underlying “I.” One
does not experience any underlying “I.” (1987, 11–12)
In this quote, Lugones mentions people’s use of space, and in another context,
she emphasizes that worlds are inhabited by “some flesh and blood people” (9).
Still, since these are the only passages where bodies and space are referred to, over-
all Lugones seems to understand worlds and world-travelling mainly as metaphori-
cal concepts rather than material relocations in space.
In this chapter, I want to point to the fact that both worlds and travelling are con-
cepts with material and spatial foundations. Michael P. Brown (2000) has made a
similar point in regard to the use of the concept of the closet in queer studies, stress-
ing that the closet is both a material space and a metaphor of power/knowledge. The
closet has been crucial to gay oppression in the twentieth century, but seeing it as a
spatial metaphor reveals how power imbalances are in fact spatial and material
(Brown 2000). Inspired by Brown’s efforts to materialize the closet, I will argue that
a similar materialization of Lugones’ concepts of arrogant perception and world-
travelling can help us understand the power imbalances in a globalized world.
Globalization and its impact on the world have been discussed widely, and it is not
1
See, for instance, Gloria Anzaldúa’s concept of the New Mestiza (Anzaldúa 2007). See also
Anzaldúa (1990) and Moraga and Anzaldúa (1983).
Arrogant Perceptors, World-Travelers, and World-Backpackers: Rethinking María… 33
my aim to give a full account of this debate here. In short, globalization refers to a
process in which the nation-states, societies, and cultures of the world are increas-
ingly interconnected and made interdependent.2 This increasing interconnectedness
of the world raises questions of how actual bodies and spaces in it are related to each
other, and the process of globalization thus calls for theoretical frameworks that
take materialization seriously. In the first part of this chapter, I will show how an
understanding of Lugones’ concepts of arrogant perception and world-travelling as
grounded in material bodies can help us understand the spatial and material dimen-
sions of oppression in a globalized world, and also how oppression can be fought.
In the second part, I will further develop Lugones’ theoretical framework by adding
the concept of world-backpacking.
My definition of the body is in line with the phenomenological understanding of
the lived body, which emphasizes the body as the necessary condition for experi-
ence, understanding, and knowledge. Feminist phenomenologists have used the
concept of the lived body as a way to challenge the mind-body dualism underlying
much of previous theories of sexed bodies and gendered identities, but also to bring
to light the body as intercorporeality. Gail Weiss defines intercorporeality as fol-
lows: “To describe embodiment as intercorporeality is to emphasize that the experi-
ence of being embodied is never a private affair, but is always already mediated by
our continual interactions with other human and nonhuman bodies” (1999, 5).
Similarly, for Simone de Beauvoir, the body is not a thing, rather “it is our grasp on
the world and the outline for our projects” (2010, 46. See also Grosz 1994; Heinämaa
2003; Käll 2009; Stoller 2000). Thus, in a phenomenological understanding, the
lived body is the very site from which we experience the world and interact with
people and objects inhabiting the world.
I will use Lukas Moodysson’s film Mammoth (2009) to explore the concepts of
arrogant perception, world-travelling, and world-backpacking. Moodysson’s film is
particularly suitable for this purpose since it is concerned with globalization and
gendered and racialized inequalities.3 I will draw on the narrative of the film to
develop Lugones’ theoretical framework: firstly to bring out its spatial and material
dimensions and secondly to argue that we need an additional concept, world-
backpacking, in order to understand how embodied subjects relate to each other in
an increasingly globalized world. The film takes place in three different locations
around the world, New York, the Philippines, and Thailand, and depicts a number
2
Some have argued that the globalization process has brought with it a different and more dis-
persed and boundaryless kind of power, which is not connected to the sovereignty of nation-states
(Hardt and Negri 2000). The term globalization has particularly been associated with economic
development, and proponents argue that globalization has led to increased economic wealth and
democracy for many people, including previously unprivileged groups. Critics are skeptical of the
radical potential and democratizing effects of globalization and emphasize the need to see global-
ization in light of previous history, the history of colonialism, in order to bring light to the inequi-
ties that still exist in the world. For a more detailed overview, see, for instance, Loomba (2005),
213–228.
3
See Nilsson (2014) for a discussion of these inequalities and Björklund et al. (forthcoming) for a
discussion of how they are situated in the lived body.
34 J. Björklund
of people with different nationalities, ethnicities/races, and ages. Ellen (Michelle

Williams) and Leo (Gael García Bernal) are married and live in New York City with
their daughter Jackie (Sophie Nyweide) and Filipino nanny, Gloria (Marifa
Necesito), who is in America to be able to provide for her two sons left back home
in the Philippines. Gloria eventually leaves New York to go back to her family after
one of her sons is sexually abused and seriously injured by a white man. Part of the
narrative takes place in Thailand where Leo goes on a business trip and meets the
prostitute Cookie (Natthamonkarn (Run) Srinikornchot). The narrative ends with
Gloria leaving, Leo’s return, and a reestablishment of status quo.
In many ways, Mammoth is a textbook example of the concepts Lugones pres-
ents. She borrows the concepts of arrogant and loving perception from Marilyn
Frye, but develops Frye’s concepts further. Frye (1983) sees men as arrogant per-
ceivers and women as objects of arrogant perception. As arrogant perceivers, men
see everything in the world as organized with reference to themselves, ready for
them to use according to their interests. They do not see the Other as independent.
The loving eye is the opposite of the arrogant eye. The loving perceiver sees the
independence of the other and is able to separate one’s own interests from that of
other: “The loving eye does not make the object of perception into something edi-
ble, does not try to assimilate it, does not reduce it to the size of the seer’s desire,
fear and imagination, and hence does not have to simplify” (76).
Lugones takes Frye’s concepts further by adding identification or lack of identi-
fication to the two kinds of perception. For Lugones (1987), arrogant perception is
accompanied by a failure to identify with people one perceives arrogantly. She
argues that both men and women are taught to perceive others arrogantly, particu-
larly those others who belong to a lower class or less privileged race, ethnicity, or
nationality. Arrogant perception has an abusive dimension and is intertwined with a
failure to love the other. In order to perceive other people lovingly, one needs to
identify with the other, according to Lugones, and identification requires world-
travelling. Furthermore, Lugones argues that world-travelling should be done with
a playful attitude. She notices that playfulness can be understood in two different
ways. Agonistic playfulness is preoccupied with competence, rules, and winning,
and this attitude is incompatible with world-travelling; instead, agonistic travellers
try to conquer the other world. In the other kind of playfulness, there are no rules,
and the activity is turned into play. People are not invested in a particular way of
doing things and are guided by uncertainty and creativity. This kind of playfulness
is “an openness to being a fool, which is a combination of not worrying about com-
petence, not being self-important, not taking norms as sacred and finding ambiguity
and double edges a source of wisdom and delight” (17). This playful attitude makes
world-travelling possible. As we will see, the characters in Mammoth have different
ways of perceiving each other, and some of their perception of others can be ana-
lyzed within Lugones’ theoretical framework. However, the power asymmetries
between the characters become more visible when we bring out the material and
spatial dimensions of her framework, and the concept of intercorporeality can help
us understand how successful world-travelling works.
Spatial and Material Aspects of Arrogant Perception

and Agonistic Playfulness
Ellen is a devoted ER surgeon who saves lives while working long hours and night
shifts. However, her lifestyle requires a certain amount of arrogant perception, since
she and Leo need Gloria, the nanny, to take care of their daughter Jackie. Ellen is
grateful to Gloria for her childcare and housework skills, but she is never able to
perceive Gloria lovingly or travel to her world. While Gloria spends more time with
Jackie than Ellen does, Ellen hardly shows any interest in Gloria’s children. At one
occasion, when trying to create some intimacy with Gloria, she asks about her sons,
but she does not even remember how old they are and she never seems to question
why Gloria takes care of Ellen’s child in New York instead of being with her own
children in a different place (the Philippines) on the other side of the globe.
The concepts of space and place can be seen as significant to the cultural produc-
tion of meaning. The meaning of these concepts and their interrelationship have
been widely debated; a general understanding would be that the concepts of space
and place are partly overlapping, but that space refers to something general and
abstract, while place is more specific and connected to a physical location. Space is
the general level where actions take place, and it becomes a conceptualization of
people’s ideas of how things relate to each other physically and culturally. Space
organizes and gives meaning to society, but can also be controlled by various insti-
tutions, for example, states and governments. Place is the specific location where
people live, a kind of lived experience, or the embodiment of space (Agnew 2002,
15–16; Cresswell 2004, 8–10; Donnan and Wilson 1999, 9; Houltz et al. 2006, xii–
xiii). I will use these concepts in order to separate the physical locations in the
movie, such as cities and islands (places), from the more abstract concept of space,
which I see as a kind of materialization of a world in Lugones’ sense. This under-
standing of space as a kind of materialization of a world is not in conflict with
Lugones who—as we have seen—suggests that world-travelling coincides with
changes in a person’s use of space (11–12). However, while Lugones’ primary focus
is not on worlds as spaces, my emphasis here will be on the materiality of worlds
and the people who inhabit them.
Both Ellen’s and Gloria’s worlds are located in the same place, the New York
City apartment and its surroundings. Gloria is able to travel between the worlds—to
see from Ellen’s perspective—but Ellen never travels to Gloria’s world and thus
comes to perceive her arrogantly. Ellen and Gloria’s interactions support Lugones’
description of world-travelling as an activity that does not require movement or
physical relocation, since Ellen and Gloria inhabit the same place. That world-
travelling is not the same as material relocation becomes even clearer when we look
at the characters in the film that travel from one location to another. At first sight,
they might seem to be more capable of world-travelling, but as demonstrated in the
movie, they can exercise arrogant perception as well. On his journey to Thailand,
Leo is accompanied by Bob, who is in charge of the business meeting and takes care
of everything except for the signing of the contract, which is Leo’s job. Bob is an
36 J. Björklund
experienced business traveller and choses Bangkok for the business meeting because
of its nightlife. He is not interested in travelling to another world, in Lugones’ sense
of the word, but to an exotic location that has been adapted to his world: Hilton
hotels, nightclubs that play Western music, and prostitutes who can satisfy his sex-
ual needs. This is true also of the sex tourist who abuses Gloria’s son, Salvador, in
the Philippines. For these characters, travelling is about conquering another world.
Bob and the pedophile are playful in the agonistic sense; they set the rules for the
game and come out as winners. Another example of agonistic playfulness is a scene
depicting Thai prostitutes who discuss the pros and cons with clients from different
countries. Like Bob and the pedophile, these sex tourists have travelled to Thailand
not to learn something and engage in a game with no rules. Rather, they set the rules,
and the prostitutes have to adapt to them and learn and accept the national charac-
teristics of their customers.
As previously mentioned, Lugones sees the agonistic attitude as opposed to
world-travelling and argues that the agonistic traveller is a conqueror/imperialist.
Bringing out the spatial and material dimensions of Lugones’ conceptual frame-
work shows that world-travelling is not only about changing locations and that trav-
elling could in fact coincide with arrogant perception and an agonistic attitude.
Moving one’s body from one place to another in arrogant perception means invad-
ing other worlds and could even violate others’ bodily boundaries. Both Bob and
Salvador’s sexual abuser use other bodies through penetration—that is, by invasion.
Andrea Dworkin (2007) has defined intercourse as male dominance, as possession
and occupation of a woman’s body: “Intercourse is a particular reality for women as
an inferior class; and it has in it, as part of it, violation of boundaries, taking over,
occupation, destruction of privacy, all of which are construed to be normal and also
fundamental to continuing human existence.” (156) Dworkin’s definition of inter-
course takes materiality (bodies) as its point of departure and can be used to bring
out the violation of bodily boundaries that takes place in Mammoth. The people who
are penetrated in the movie belong to an inferior class by being women or children,
but also by being poor and from the global south, and moreover, they are raped or
bought by white men. As such, the invasion of their bodies is urgently visible in the
movie, and the oppressive and dangerous character of arrogant perception is thus
brought forward when we pay attention to its spatial and material dimensions.
However, use and abuse of bodies also occur when the characters exercising
arrogant perception do not change locations and invade other worlds. Ellen is not
interested in Gloria’s world and makes no effort to travel to it, but she still uses her
body—not for sexual pleasure, but for childcare and housework, such as toilet
cleaning. The violation of Gloria’s body is not as urgent as in the case of the Thai
prostitutes and Salvador; her body is not penetrated and its boundaries are not
invaded, but her body is incorporated as an object/tool into the world/space of Ellen.
In Ellen’s space, Gloria is not free to use her body the way she wants to, but rather
needs to adjust her embodied subjectivity to the needs of her employers. She has to
use it when cleaning and cooking but also when taking care of Jackie—her body has
to be oriented toward Jackie, to hug her and hold her hand, at the cost of not being
able to protect her sons back home in the Philippines.
Loving Perception, World-Travelling, and Playfulness

in a Globalized World
Confronting Lugones’ concepts with scenes from Mammoth that describe interact-
ing bodies thus shows how arrogant perception has material consequences, such as
violation of bodies. I will now move on to discuss how successful world-travelling
has spatial and intercorporeal dimensions. Lugones argues that world-travelling is
key to the experience of women of color in the United States; as outsiders to the
mainstream, they have to practice world-travelling more or less out of necessity
(1987, 3). This kind of (unwillful) world-travelling to a world where one is per-
ceived arrogantly as an outsider is done by Gloria. In the film, she travels between
worlds, she speaks on the phone with her sons and her mother back in the Philippines,
she goes to Filipino nights in her New York City church, and she navigates the
Anglo world of her employers. She has learned to love and care for Jackie and takes
the little girl to the planetarium where Jackie tells her about the universe. What
makes Gloria’s perception different from that of the arrogant perceivers is her abil-
ity to see from the other’s space. Spaces are inhabited by embodied subjects who
feel at ease in them. Gloria is able to travel to the space inhabited by the other, in
this case Ellen, and is thus able to see from where she stands. She lives in Ellen’s
home and takes care of it and her daughter. In living with Ellen, Gloria is located in
a space inhabited by a Western upper middle-class mother with a thriving career,
and she can witness its impacts on Ellen’s embodied subjectivity: her level of stress,
her insomnia, and her feelings of inadequacy as a mother.
While Gloria is forced to do world-travelling in a world hostile to outsiders,
Jackie is the only (privileged) person in the movie who practices world-travelling
voluntarily. She does integrate Gloria into her own world, but she also keeps travel-
ling to Gloria’s. She is eager to learn about Filipino culture and goes with Gloria to
church. She even wants to learn Tagalog, and Gloria teaches her until their efforts
are interrupted by Ellen, who feels left out when Jackie, instead of spending time
with her, prioritizes activities with Gloria. Jackie is interested in science, particu-
larly astronomy, and she tells Gloria about Big Bang. When Gloria responds that
she believes that God created the world, Jackie travels to Gloria’s world and adopts
a (non-agonistic) playful attitude by saying that God might have created Big Bang.
She does not impose her worldview on Gloria; rather, she is eager to learn new ways
of approaching knowledge and she is guided by her playful attitude. Furthermore,
when Gloria has to return to the Philippines, Jackie is the only one who shows
empathy for her and her son. In one of the last scenes, when Gloria has left the
United States, Jackie goes to the planetarium with her mother, but keeps crying
because she misses Gloria and feels so bad for her son. This attitude stands in sharp
contrast to Ellen’s statement in the final scene of the movie where she tells Leo that
they have to get a new nanny—a statement that emphasizes Ellen’s view of (less
privileged) people as exchangeable and her unwillingness to world-travel.
In Jackie’s case, like in Gloria’s, world-travelling has spatial and intercorporeal
dimensions. She walks with Gloria through New York City—experiencing the
38 J. Björklund
interactions between a woman of color who does not speak English fluently and the
New Yorkers—and to her church where she experiences different kinds of interac-
tions. Jackie moves her body next to Gloria’s and is thus able to experience
New York City from her point of view and be part of the process of intercorporeality
that constructs Gloria’s embodied subjectivity as Other. By travelling to Gloria’s
space, Jackie is also able to feel sadness and despair when her son is abused and
seriously injured. As we have seen, Ellen never tries to travel to Gloria’s world, but
she also fails to travel to the world of her own daughter. Ellen buys a telescope for
Jackie to encourage her interest in astronomy, which is something Ellen can share,
in contrast to Jackie’s interest in Tagalog and Filipino culture. Ellen does not see
from Jackie’s point of view; if she had, she would have understood that Filipino
culture and astronomy are not mutually excluding interests. Instead, she interrupts
Gloria and Jackie’s Tagalog lesson in order to take Jackie out to the telescope. Ellen
and Jackie do indeed share some quality time looking at the stars together but
Ellen’s inability to see from Jackie’s point of view is nevertheless emphasized in
this scene. Even if mother and daughter stand in the same spot, taking turns in look-
ing through the telescope, Ellen still does not see the same as Jackie; when Ellen
sees a star, Jackie sees a couple of thousand, and when Ellen tries to help Jackie to
get a better view, they accidently move the telescope out of focus. While Ellen sees
just one thing (a star), Jackie sees a bigger and more nuanced image of the sky (a
couple of thousand stars). Not even physical relocation (standing in the same spot
as Jackie) and the striving to travel to her daughter’s world can help Ellen to world-
travel. This example shows how sharing the same place (the spot from which they
look into the telescope) is not necessarily the same as sharing the same space. In the
case of Jackie and Gloria, however, place and space interfere in the site of the two
bodies moving next to each other. This is also true of Gloria’s world-travelling to
Ellen’s space.
The fact that voluntary world-travelling is represented by a child in the movie
could be read as dystopian in a sense; world-travelling would then be associated
with childhood naivety, something we give up when we are confronted with the
realities of adult life. On the other hand, it could be read as a hope that future gen-
erations will create a better world for everyone. That contemporary culture is preoc-
cupied with hopeful images of the future has been discussed by, for instance, Lee
Edelman (2004) who has argued that we are invested in the ideology of reproductive
futurism—a positive idea of progress—manifested in the figure of the child. To read
Jackie as a hopeful image of the future is supported by Jackie’s interest in science
and astronomy. At the planetarium, she watches movies that teach her that “this tiny
oasis [planet Earth] in an endless space is our heritage and our home,” and she has
a world map over her bed. Jackie seems to have a world-travelling attitude not only
to Gloria but to planet Earth itself, seeing it as yet another body with whom she has
to learn to interact. The best way of learning for Jackie is to be a world-traveller, to
embrace other bodies and their worlds/spaces with loving perception and a playful
attitude.
Planet Earth occupies a central place in the movie, but the characters relate to it
in different ways. The title of the movie is Mammoth, referring to the three-thousand-
dollar pen made of mammoth bone that Bob gives Leo for him to sign the contract.
Throughout the movie, the characters generally see the Earth as dead matter, which
is there for people to exploit and use for their purposes. Some species might become
extinct in this process, but extinction can also be turned into profit as the case of the
mammoth pen shows. As we have seen, Jackie has a different relationship to people
than most characters in the movie—she wants to travel to their worlds. But she also
has a different relationship to Earth. As a future astronomer, she wants to learn
about the universe, but at the planetarium, she has learned that Earth is a “tiny oasis”
and “our heritage.” She seems to be aware of the world as something we need to
coexist with and care about, matter in constant becoming (Barad 2003), and is pre-
pared not only to travel to people’s worlds but also to the world of the Earth. Jackie’s
interactions with the planet reveal respect and concern for it as substance in becom-
ing, and as such, a phenomenon with agency. Lukas Moodysson has said that he
wanted the movie to show the beauty of the Earth (Stenport 2010), and the movie
does indeed display beautiful pictures of nature, both landscape and animals. This
corresponds to Jackie’s empathy that goes beyond the human.
The Failed World-Traveller: Leo as World-Backpacker
Thus far, I have brought out the spatial and material dimensions of Lugones’ frame-
work in order to emphasize how the oppression that takes place in Mammoth can be
read as a violation of material bodies and worlds as spaces. I have also shown how
successful world-travelling is connected to an ability to travel to and see from the
space of the other, experiencing how the other’s embodiment takes place in interac-
tions with other bodies and the surrounding space. I will now move on to a case
where Lugones’ concepts are not enough to understand the interactions between
bodies and spaces. In this section, I will discuss the character Leo. I will continue to
confront Lugones’ framework with cinematic representations of bodies and spaces
in order to show why Leo can be defined neither as an arrogant perceptor nor a
world-traveller.4 Finally, drawing on research on backpacking, I will add a new
concept to Lugones’ theory and describe Leo as world-backpacker.
Leo travels with Bob who is in charge of the trip to Thailand, but he is not an
arrogant perceiver like Bob. Leo does not take part of the business negotiations—his
only job in Bangkok is to sign the contract—and he feels bored, uncomfortable, and
useless in his luxury suite at Millennium Hilton Bangkok. He is not interested in the
nightlife Bob tries to engage him in and tells Ellen on the phone that he wants to
come home. He is obviously not at ease in the white businessman world/space and
is relieved when Bob suggests he takes a vacation to an island while Bob takes care
of the business. Leo’s secretary books a trip to a beautiful island, but once there, Leo
4
I will discuss Leo’s relationship to Cookie, in which case new terminology is needed. The movie
does not depict his relation to Gloria, in which he might be as much of an arrogant perceiver as his
wife.
40 J. Björklund
decides not to check in to the expensive hotel she has chosen for him and instead
rents a cheap bungalow on the beach. He tries to leave the businessman world
behind in order to embody a new identity by buying new casual clothes and a cheap
copy of his expensive watch from a beach vendor. He joins a group of backpackers
and tries to travel to their world by lying about his life—he tells them he is a fire-
fighter and has travelled around the world for the last six months. However, his
world-travelling does not work—as Lugones emphasizes, pretending to be someone
else is not compatible with world-travelling—and when they go to a bar, Leo does
not want to be part of the backpackers’ world any more, since that world includes
being a sex tourist. Instead, he retreats to his privileged world and pays a prostitute,
Cookie, for going home and not taking any more clients that night.
Coming to the island changes Leo, and it is tempting to read his trip to the island
as world-travelling. He travels physically and tries to embody a new identity, and
this transformation makes him perceive life differently; when talking to Ellen on the
phone, he tells her they need to take a vacation together, the whole family. It seems
like he has learned the importance of giving relationships time by travelling to a
place where life goes on in a slower pace. He also tells her he wants to do charity
work, which suggests that he has learned to see social injustices and wants to make
a difference. However, in his interaction with Cookie, it becomes clear that world-
travelling is not what he engages in. Cookie is moved by his gesture of paying her
to go home and sleep and goes to find him the following day in order to offer her
services as tour guide. She invites him to her world and he is eager to learn. She
teaches him the names of fruits in Thai, and he asks her about reincarnation. This
could be read as an effort to world-travel, but Leo fails because he does not fully
enter Cookie’s space and does not see it with her eyes. She tells him she has been
told she was an elephant in a previous life, and the next scene shows Leo and Cookie
riding on an elephant; she offers him her world but rather than stepping into it care-
fully, he tries to master it. He asks her what she would like to become in her next
life, and she instantly responds “boy.” Had Leo really world-travelled he would have
seen the impact of patriarchal global capitalism on a Thai woman’s embodied sub-
jectivity and understood that she wants to be a boy and why, but instead he responds
“no, girl is good” and offers to get her a “real job” in Bangkok, trying to impose his
world on her.
After spending the day with Cookie, Leo has sex with her, choosing not to see
her quiet resistance. The morning after he tells Cookie he wants to come live “here”,
in Thailand, but adds: “Maybe not here. Too many tourists here. I’ll go to, I don’t
know, to India or Africa.” He wants Cookie to come with him and tells her they
could get a sailboat, sail around the world, and pretend they are the only people in
the universe. Here Leo, again, reveals his failure to world-travel. He clearly wants
to change his life and move to a place where he believes life is simpler, but cannot
see the reality of the place he dreams about. For Leo, the Thai island represents an
authentic location where he can retreat from his stressful Western life, and it could
be exchanged by any other location in the global south, like “India or Africa”. The
following scenes bring out with even more clarity that Leo has not managed to
world-travel. When Cookie is asleep, Leo gets dressed in his businessman clothes
and leaves the island. He does not say goodbye to Cookie but leaves his expensive
watch and the three-thousand-dollar pen made of mammoth bone that Bob gave
him. When Cookie tries to sell the items, she is told that the watch is a copy and that
the pen is worth nothing. In the last scenes of the movie, we also learn that Cookie
has a baby daughter that she sings to on the phone.
As we have seen, Leo is unable to see the realities of Cookie’s life. He physically
relocates to the island, changes clothes, and spends a whole day with Cookie, but his
physical relocation does not coincide with relocation to Cookie’s space, in the way
Jackie relocates to Gloria’s space as she walks with her through New York City.
Thus, Leo is not able to see from Cookie’s point of view like Jackie does with Gloria
and Gloria does with Ellen. Instead, he winds up invading/colonizing Cookie’s body
in his striving to create intimacy and bonds between them. The penetration of
Cookie’s body can be read in the light of Dworkin’s discussion of intercourse as
invasion, thus connecting Leo to Bob and Salvador’s abuser.5 But while Bob and the
pedophile are focused on their own pleasure, Leo is looking for authenticity; he is
“eating the Other”. Like the white male college students in bell hooks’ classic text
(1992), Leo desires contact with the Other. He does not want to possess the Other,
but “to be changed in some way by the encounter” (24). Cookie’s body is connected
to Leo’s idea of the authentic place, represented by any location in the global south,
unspoiled by tourists. He is not trying to invade these places/bodies, but to be trans-
formed by them. However, as we have seen, world-travelling is not primarily con-
nected to change of places, but to travelling to the space where the Other is embodied
through intercorporeality.
Still, Leo does not perceive Cookie or other people in Thailand arrogantly in
Lugones’ sense, and he does not try to conquer their world through agonistic play-
fulness. He wants to learn from them and he gets upset with the poverty and sex
tourism and tries to help people. The reason he fails is that he lacks ability to see
from the space of the Thai people. The support he offers Cookie is grounded in what
he—from the partial perspective that his own embodied subjectivity offers—thinks
is best for her, not in what she really needs. He gives her money so that she can go
home and sleep one night, but that does not change her life in a larger perspective.
He offers to get her a job in Bangkok and dreams about taking her sailing around the
world, not knowing that she has a daughter that she needs to provide for. Finally, he
gives her valuable items that are useless to her. The movie thus highlights how Leo
wants to world-travel and perceive other people lovingly, but winds up invading the
world he wants to travel to, seen as, for instance, in his invasion of Cookie’s body
and space. Leo’s actions might then define him as an arrogant perceiver, but I would
argue that his intentions are represented as different from those of, for instance, Bob
or Ellen. While Bob and Ellen are not interested in travelling to the world of the
other, Leo at least tries to.
5
See also Shannon Sullivan (2004) who has discussed the dangers of what she calls white world-
travelling—the world-travelling of white people to nonwhite worlds. Sullivan encourages white
people to world-travel, but she is wary of the risk that white people intrude on or invade the Black
or Latino world when they try to world-travel.
42 J. Björklund
If Leo is not a world-traveller who perceives lovingly and not governed by ago-
nistic playfulness and arrogant perception, then what is he? I would like to introduce
a new concept as an addition to Lugones’ theoretical framework, namely, world-
backpacking. According to Richards and Wilson (2004), who have studied back-
packing as a phenomenon, the backpacker can be seen as a global nomad. The
nomad represents a kind of travelling based on constant change and driven by a
striving to escape the alienation of modern society: “The global nomad crosses
physical and cultural barriers with apparent ease in the search for difference and
differentiation and in this way, the backpacker as nomad is placed in opposition to
the ‘tourist’, caught in the iron cage of the modern tourist industry.” (5) Backpacking
means freedom to travel, but travelling also changes the “authentic” and “unchanged”
places and cultures the backpacker visits; they become adapted to the backpackers’
needs and are tied to the global economy. This in turn affects the backpackers’ trav-
elling, which becomes more nomadic and adaptable in order to avoid other travel-
lers and find new and more authentic destinations.
Backpacking is the kind of travelling and perception Leo engages in while in
Thailand. He escapes the alienation of modern society in New York City and Bangkok
and retreats to what he believes is a more authentic place (the island) and tells Ellen he
wants to take some time off, with the entire family. He finds a group of real backpack-
ers but is disappointed in their lifestyle and moves on to something more authentic,
represented by the day he spends with Cookie. Later, he wants to go to a place with less
tourists—it does not matter to him where (Thailand, India, or Africa), as long as it is
unchanged by tourists, that is, authentic. Significantly, Leo even refers to himself as a
backpacker once in the movie, when he is about to leave Bangkok for the Thai island.
Leo might have good intentions but that does not change the fact that his world-
backpacking is harmful and abusive. It is so because he is unaware of or chooses not
to see his white privilege. Peggy McIntosh has described white privilege as “an
invisible weightless knapsack of special provisions, assurances, tools, maps, guides,
codebooks, passports, visas, clothes, compass, emergency gear, and blank checks”
(McIntosh 2010, 14). Although Leo’s last name is Vidales, referencing his Latino
appearance and slight accent, he passes as white and North-American, and in
Thailand, he embodies the idea of the rich white man. Even if he tries to embody a
different identity on the island by dressing down, he still carries with him the invis-
ible knapsack of white privilege and views everything around him from that per-
spective. McIntosh does not specifically address bodies and spaces, but implicitly
her argument still rests on a material foundation, since what determines access to
privilege is the body, or more specifically the color of the body. Leo’s body is in fact
Latino, but passes as white, and hence gives him access to white privilege in an
otherwise mainly nonwhite space (Thailand). Leo is aware of the social injustices in
Thailand and wants to change them, but he does not see his embodied white privi-
lege. His embodiment is intercorporeal and thus shaped in interaction with the sur-
roundings, where everyone treats him with respect and where he has power because
of his money and whiteness. Hence, white privilege not only saturates Leo’s body
but also the space around him, making it difficult for him to see behind it.
Accordingly, Leo lives white privilege in intercorporeality. His interactions with
Cookie can be further understood with the aid of Chandra Talpade Mohanty. She
has argued that Western feminists have colonized the lives of women in the Third
World by constructing them in their writings as a monolithic subject, “the Third-
World woman”, who is described as victimized, uneducated, poor, sexually con-
strained, tradition-bound, etc. This subject stands in contrast to the (implicit)
self-representation of Western women as modern, educated, and in control of their
bodies and their decisions (Mohanty 2003). This is precisely the attitude taken by
Leo in interacting with Cookie. By giving her money to stay away from prostitution
one night, he confirms her role as victimized, poor, and sexually constrained. He
offers to get her “a real job” in Bangkok, thereby implicating that he knows what is
best for her. Ultimately, he buys sex and affection from her and then leaves her
without saying goodbye, thereby consolidating her subordinate position in relation
to him. In some ways, Leo comes across as different from Bob since he is more
aware of the inequities of the world and refrains from buying sex in a more tradi-
tional way. He is also married to a Western woman, Ellen, who is modern, educated,
has a career of her own, and is in charge of her body and her decisions, just like
Mohanty’s Western feminist. His marriage to Ellen contributes to making Leo seem
“nicer” than Bob, but in the end, Leo does the same as Bob: he uses the Third World,
and the Third-World woman in particular, for his own happiness. Furthermore, the
way Leo relates to the Thai island is similar to Mohanty’s description of Western
feminists’ relationship to “the Third-World Woman”; by seeing the Thai island as
exchangeable, Leo turns the Third World into a monolithic subject in opposition to
himself as embodying white privilege.
The world-backpacker Leo does not perceive either lovingly or arrogantly. He is
not playful in any of Lugones’ senses; he tries to avoid setting rules and wants to learn
from the authentic culture he visits, but in the end, he fails to world-travel because his
own space of white privilege becomes a barrier between him and the other space. He
perceives the other world through his world, and that perception irrevocably changes
the world he perceives. As a backpacker, Leo is part of the globalization process:
“The presence of tourists ties more and more places into the global economy and
modern communication networks. Tourists make the places they visit increasingly
like home […]” (Richards and Wilson 2004, 4–5). Leo tries to see the other world
and learn something from it, but he perceives it as a monolithic Other in opposition
to himself. He is not able to perceive it lovingly, and in his interactions with Cookie,
he tries to integrate the other world within him—to eat the Other, to speak with bell
hooks—and in this process, his presence also contributes to changing that world.
World-backpacking thus stands in as much opposition to loving perception and
world-travelling as arrogant perception and agonistic playfulness do, and it can be
equally harmful and destructive, something that is brought out in the movie by the
soundtrack, where Ladytron’s “Destroy Everything You Touch” is played several
times. However, world-backpacking is more difficult to discover than arrogant per-
ception, since it seems to be driven by a will to learn from and help other (less privi-
leged) people. Thus, in an increasingly globalized world, we need the new concept
of world-backpacking to describe the process where privileged Westerners believe
themselves to perceive the Other lovingly and create intimacy and bonds with her,
but instead uses her and/or violates her bodily boundaries (as Leo winds up doing
when he has sex with Cookie more or less against her will).
44 J. Björklund
Conclusion
Lugones’ theoretical framework from 1987 can still be useful today. Bringing out its
material foundations can help us to see the material and spatial aspects of oppres-
sion but also how world-travelling demands relocation in order to see from the
space of the other. However, as we have seen, physical relocation does not always
coincide with world-travelling. Bob and the pedophile travel to other places as arro-
gant perceivers who invade other people’s bodies. Leo also travels physically but
fails to world-travel and winds up violating other worlds as world-backpacker. Ellen
stays in the same place, but does not travel to Gloria’s body and space and thereby
comes to perceive her arrogantly. She does not invade bodies in the same apparent
way as Bob and Leo, but her lifestyle demands Gloria’s body to work for her, which
to some extent is a violation of her body.
At first sight, Leo might come across as a generally decent person who cares
about other people; he is genuinely upset about the injustices he encounters in
Thailand. Still, his failure to world-travel makes him a world-backpacker whose
lifestyle is abusive to other people. I would argue that world-backpacking is even
more harmful than arrogant perception. Arrogant perceivers are fairly easy to spot,
while world-backpackers hide behind a facade of empathy for the other. Leo is a
world-backpacker who travels between places, but world-backpackers can be found
even among those who do not travel. For instance, Western consumption of cheap
t-shirts made in Bangladesh or toys made in the Philippines affects people’s bodies
in the global south even if we cannot see them, and most of us are aware of that. The
choice to look away from the conditions of production is a choice we make every
day. It is made by arrogant perceivers who do not care about or identify with the
other, but also by people who are aware of the injustices of the world, like Leo, and
even in cases when they do not travel but stay at home. These people might be
politically active, give money to charity, do voluntary work, and thus seem to iden-
tify with the other in loving perception. But by choosing to look away from the fact
that their lifestyle demands the abuse and violation of other people’s bodies, they
fail to world-travel and could best be described by the concept of world-backpacking.
This is why we need a new concept in addition to Lugones’ framework: to be able
to reveal the harmful and abusive behavior of people who travel, but also of those
who do not travel, in an increasingly globalized world.
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Jenny Björklund holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and is Associate Professor of Gender
Studies at Uppsala University. Her research interests include literature and cultural studies, queer
theory, and body/embodiment theory. She is the author of a book on female poets and Swedish
modernism (Symposion 2004) and co-editor of a critical anthology of essays on the Swedish writer
Agnes von Krusenstjerna (Norstedts Akademiska 2008). She has published several articles on
lesbianism in Scandinavian literature and film and Scandinavian modernism. Her most recent book
is Lesbianism in Swedish Literature: An Ambiguous Affair (Palgrave Macmillan 2014). She is also
co-editor of lambda nordica, a Nordic journal for LGBTQ studies.
Embodied Vulnerability in Large-Scale
Technical Systems: Vulnerable Dam Bodies,
Water Bodies, and Human Bodies
May-Britt Öhman
Abstract Challenging the modern ideal of human bodies as being in control both
of bodies of nature and of the bodies of technology made to control nature, this
chapter considers the vulnerability of large-scale hydropower dams and the intimate
interdependencies between dam bodies, water bodies, and human bodies. It pro-
poses a water-centered, rather than human-centered, reading of rivers and in par-
ticular of dammed rivers, through an understanding of hydropower dams as
vulnerable bodies. Once constructed by human beings, hydropower dams take on a
life of their own and become living organisms as they age, interact with land and
rivers, and withstand and react to changing environmental conditions. This chapter
also discusses processes of knowledge production in which different bodies of
knowledge come to be perceived as embodied or disembodied and are granted status
as primitive or scientific. Taking her point of departure in her own embodied history,
the author seeks to retrace indigenous Sámi understandings of human cultural inter-
connectedness with nature. With a focus on the specific river Julevädno running
through Sápmi in the north of Sweden, the chapter draws attention to the unpredict-
able agency of water and the porosity of human bodies, emphasizing risk and vul-
nerability as essential elements of their interrelation.
Prologue
The year after I was born, the rapids at the Skällarim stretch of the Little Lule River –
Unna Julevädno1– had been silenced by the creation of a dam, creating the lakelike
Letsi reservoir. The whole of this territory, lands and waters, north and south of
Unna Julevädno, had belonged to members of my family, as so-called “Lap Tax
Land,” since the seventeenth century and possibly even before that (Ullenius 1932;
Öhman 1992). The “Lap Tax Land” was a specific way for Sámi people to own
1
Unna Julevädno is the Lule Sámi name for “Little Lule River.”
M.-B. Öhman (*)
Technoscience research group, Centre for Gender Research, Uppsala University,
Uppsala, Sweden
e-mail: may-britt.ohman@gender.uu.se

48 M.-B. Öhman
Fig. 1 Standing at my stretch of the silenced regulated Unna Julevädno/Little Lule River. At the
far end, the Letsi dam can be discerned (Photo: M-B Öhman, July 2012)
landscapes and waterscapes created after the establishment of the Swedish nation
state in the sixteenth century, in the Stockholm region followed by the colonization
of the northern territories – Sápmi, the land of the Sámi. We, the Sámi people, were
in this colonization process requested to pay taxes to the Swedish state for the land-
and waterscapes that we were using. Each Sámi or Sámi family who owned reindeer
had their own territory consisting of lakes and land. Within this territory the tax
payer had exclusive rights to hunting, fishing, and reindeer herding. The territories
were inherited and could be sold. This system was in practice until 1928, when this
system was dismantled and Forest Sámi – like my family – were forced by different
methods to become Swedes (Lundmark 2006; Korpijaakko 1992).
The particular river stretch at Skällarim had been sold, or rather transferred by
force to a relatively small compensation, to the State Power Board by my grandfa-
ther’s eldest brother, Alfred Nilsson, who as an eldest son had inherited parts of the
“Lap Tax Land.”2 However, Alfred kept part of the landscapes and waterscapes,
which, as he had no children, I – together with other relatives – came, by inheri-
tance, to own. Thus, after the passing away of one of my uncles, in 2009 I found
myself owning a stretch of land inundated by the Letsi reservoir, by the dammed
and quieted waters of the Unna Julevädno (Fig. 1).
When I grew up in the 1960s and 1970s and became aware of this particular
water body, there were no more white waters at this stretch of the river. My only
consciousness of these rapids is a childhood memory of two bleached photos on the
wall in my grandparents’ living room. No one ever talked about these photos as far
as I can recall. No one talked about the river. In my mind, this stretch of the river
2
BN and SN personal conversation with the author February 3, 2014.
Embodied Vulnerability in Large-Scale Technical Systems: Vulnerable Dam Bodies,… 49
was but a big, calm, and safe lake. The salmon, which earlier had been so plentiful
that household helpers were reported to have had contracts that stipulated they
would not have to eat salmon on Sundays, could no longer migrate here because of
the many reservoirs further down the river. Although I had never been told about it,
now as an adult I read Ullenius’ (1932) notes about the Sámi life in this region and
I learned that this particular stretch of the river was the most salmon rich of the
whole of the Unna Julevädno. Nothing of this knowledge was transferred to me; no
one talked to me about the silenced river. My own perception of the river became
something totally different from that of Sámi peoples like Erik Olsson Rim. To me,
the river was a still life, a big silent lake, where no fish could be caught any more.
In school, as everywhere else in my surroundings, I was taught to understand the
river as being “under control.” In truth, I never thought of it as a river, as flowing
water. Whatever it was, it was just there for us, subsumed for the production of
electricity, for the progress and modernization of Sweden. In Luleå in the 1970s,
my father, a trained electrical engineer, made use of the river in terms of electrons
to provide control programs for the steel factory. My father dreamt of an ever big-
ger factory that would give us wealth and a prosperous future. The forceful river
was no part of this dream; it was just there. It was nicely behaving and “under
control.”
Erik Olsson Rim, the State Power Company,

and the Julevädno at Bårjås
Humans cannot control the big river. The dams won’t resist the waters. Just you wait until
the spring flood comes…. (Forsgren 1982, 21)
These were the words of Erik Olsson Rim, a Sámi and ancestral cousin of mine,
uttered about half a century before I came into this world and learned to perceive
Julevädno as nothing to fear. In 1911 he had been forced to sell a part of his “Lap
Tax Land” to the Swedish State Power company Vattenfall for the construction of
the first large-scale hydropower plant in Sweden at Porjus/Bårjås. Rim declared the
attempt at taking over the river to be “ungodly” (Forsgren 1982, 21). This was the
start of the twentieth century hydropower colonization of Sápmi, the land- and
waterscapes of the Sámi, which left us all wired through electric transmission lines
to the capital Stockholm, the water levels and courses falling under the control by
the Swedish state.
A decade later, at celebrations honoring the tenth anniversary of Vattenfall (the
State Power Board), which had been responsible for the construction of the first dam
at Porjus/Bårjås, a play was performed, portraying the hydropower exploitation of
the Lule River – in Sámi, the Julevädno – as the “taming” of a blonde giantess
through the agency of alcohol, rather than force. In the production available as man-
uscript by Skjöld (1919), Erik Olsson Rim was characterized as a cranky “Old Lap
Man” (Skjöld 1919, 21) motivated by greed, whose sale of his blonde giantess into
50 M.-B. Öhman
slavery, he later regrets. There are many interpretations that can be made in regard
to the depiction of the river as a “blonde giantess,” a woman to tame, and also
Swedish racist policies at this time in regard to the Sámi. The “blonde giantess” was
the depiction of the Julevädno found in the production, made by engineers to per-
form in the Swedish capital, Stockholm. I have discussed this perceived taming of
rivers as a taming of exotic women by engineers in my doctoral dissertation and will
not engage in the same discussion here (see Öhman 2007). The racist stereotype of
Sámi physical traits was according to Södergren (1910), and to a certain extent still
is (Ledman 2012, 94, 175; Åhrén 2008, 134), that Sámi are dark haired, dark eyed,
and short – thus quite the opposite of a “blonde giantess.” As there is nothing writ-
ten left from Erik Olsson Rim himself, there is no way to find out what he thought.
However, I find it highly unlikely that he would ever have used a “blonde giantess”
as a metaphor to describe Julevädno or even thought of the river as a woman to be
owned or much less be tamed.
In these alternate perceptions, conflicting views of the relations between human
bodies and water bodies in characterizations of the river can be traced: on the one
hand, a prediction – or perhaps it was a curse? – by Erik Olsson Rim, in anticipation
of the spring flood, declaring that the dam would not hold, and on the other hand,
the State Power company’s play celebrating their “control” of the Julevädno in the
“taming” of the giantess. In this, an apparent dichotomy seems to be established
between on the one hand, a celebration of the advancements consequent on human
engineering’s victory over nature, as opposed to a Sámi man’s Indigenous perspec-
tive of a water body as a force of nature beyond the human body’s control.
It may appear as a case where a legacy of Indigenous and local understanding of
the Julevädno as “untamable” is opposed by a modern disembodied understanding,
where bodies of water are available to control through science and engineering, as
displayed in the Fig. 2 postcard text: “The dam construction is particularly built to
be able to withstand the pressure of the river’s ice cover in winter.”
Yet, despite seemingly contradictory views of the river, it is interesting that, upon
closer examination, the deeds and doings of engineers and operators – in practice
and in human perception – are not opposed to the local/Indigenous Sámi under-
standing. Instead, what is evident is that engineers, in service to those dependent on
the river, have labored meticulously and continuously to keep the river’s body in
control within a never-ending porous exchange among human bodies, water bodies,
and dam bodies. Engineers working with dams know very well how powerful the
waters are, and what a failed attempt would cause, although they usually express it
differently than Erik Olsson Rim.
While in the past “Indigenous knowledge” has been rejected as primitive and
nonscientific, today it is often argued that that same “Indigenous knowledge” could
provide important insight into the understanding of ecological sustainability sus-
tainability (Berkes and Kislalioglu Berkes 2008). However, in my view, along with
those of Linda Tuhivai Smith (1999), Sandra Harding (2010), Karen Martin (2003),
Akhil Gupta (1998), Marie Battiste (1984), and Rauna Kuokkanen (2008), among
others, “Indigenous knowledge,” instead of being dismissed as mythical, exotic, or
primitive, should be afforded equal consideration and importance to what is referred
Fig. 2 An early postcard by the Swedish Tourist Association, with a photo of the Porjus/Bårjås
dam, finalized in 1915. The text reads: Porjus power plant, the dam crest over the Great Lule River.
The electric power for the Luleå-Riksgränsens railway line is received from the magnificent power
station in Porjus which provides 82 000 hp. The dam construction is particularly built to in be able
to withstand the pressure of the river’s ice cover in winter. Translation from Swedish by M-B
Öhman
to as modern western technoscience. My thesis will also argue that this modern
western technoscience is, itself, far from detached, far from “objective” or
disembodied. Rather, bodies – whether human, water, or dams (water mixed with
stones, gravel, sand, and soil to become concrete) – are involved and accounted for
in both perspectives. The differences are a function of how knowledge has been
perceived, identified, and represented, and the status accorded to different knowl-
edge ideals, as well as those responsible for their transmission. Furthermore, of
importance to me is that, as I am reclaiming and reconnecting ancestral knowledge
and understanding, I do so as a means to deconstruct my own understanding of the
river – of Julevädno – researching myself and reattaching myself to my own ances-
tral ecology and to the lands and waters I inherited and of which I am part.
The Giant/Giantess Julevädno and Me
This article starts, follows, and ends with my own river, Julevädno. Julevädno is the
largest and today the most hydropower exploited river in Sweden. The name “Lule”
River possibly derives from Lulij-jokko, a Sámi term meaning the river of the Forest
52 M.-B. Öhman
Sámi or the river of the Easterners. In this article I use the Lule Sámi name
“Julevädno,” which is the Sámi name of the river on signs and maps accompanying
the Swedish name “Lule älv” since 2007 (Språktidningen 2008). The Julevädno has
its origins in the mountain areas on the border between Norway and Sweden. The
river once continuously flowed through the Swedish side of Sápmi into the Gulf of
Bothnia. For many centuries, it was a central highway and an important economic
link between the Gulf of Bothnia and the Atlantic Ocean and between eastern and
western societies (Fjällström 1996). The importance for Sámi and other humans of
the waterway is underscored by the name of the place Porjus, where the first large-
scale hydroelectric plant on the Julevädno (in 1915) was established. “Porjus” is a
Swedification of the Sámi term “Bårjås”, meaning “a sail” (Porjus Bya-och
Intresseförening undated; Sametinget 2014). Construction of the first stage of the
regulation reservoir at Suorva, upstream from Bårjås, took place between 1919 and
1923. Since then the Suorva reservoir and dam have been enlarged three times, to its
present level with a court order allowing difference of water levels of 30 m up and
down. Throughout the twentieth century, the Julevädno was converted from a free-
flowing river into an energy-producing factory. It is now a staircase of 15 regulation
reservoirs with attached power plants, a total installed capacity of 4350 MW, and an
annual output of around 15 TWh. The system produces more than 10 % of the total-
ity of Swedish produced electricity (Nilsson 1972; Hansson 1994; Svensk Energi
2013).3 Or, as the State Power company Vattenfall boasts, the Julevädno is “produc-
ing enough electricity to bring light to the whole of Sweden, 24 h a day, 365 days
per year” (Vattenfall 2008, 2). The waters of the Lule river which used to be a matter
only for the riverine human and nonhuman residents have become intertwined with
the lives of most Swedes and Sámi living within the Swedish borders as it provides
for up to a third of all hydropower produced electricity in Sweden. But then, not
only is Julevädno the single biggest producer of electricity within the country, but
being a power river – effektälv in Swedish – Julevädno is the river that the Swedish
national grid ultimately depends upon to make the production of electricity bal-
anced and stable, providing us consumers all with an even flow of nicely behaving
electrons and ensuring that our electricity-demanding devices do not suddenly break
down and die.4
The fettering of Julevädno – commonly referred to as “harnessing” – is often
referred to as a symbol of progress and modernity for Swedish engineering arts. At
its upper end, where earlier seven small mountain source lakes served as the sum-
mer homes of Sámi reindeer herders, the Suorva dam is now responsible for the
largest artificial reservoir in the north of Europe. My body, life, and family history
are intertwined with Julevädno in many ways. For instance, Erik Olsson Rim, on
whose property – his inherited “Lap Tax Land” – the first large-scale hydropower
3
Electricity production in Sweden is to 90 percent based on equal parts of hydropower and nuclear
power, with the nuclear power functioning as a stable base and the hydropower being easier to
regulate corresponding to the different needs over the season.
4
Participatory observations combined with interviews by author with HS, TW August 2–3, 2011.
Records available in M-B Öhman log book.
plant and dam on the river were constructed, was, as previously mentioned, an
ancestral cousin of mine (Öhman and Silversparf 2011). I myself grew up further
downstream of the Bårjås, sharing my time between the city of Luleå at the river’s
mouth to the Baltic Sea – the Gulf of Bothnia – and an upper stretch just before the
confluence of the big/Stuor Lule and the Unna Julevädno, at Skällarim. In the 1950s,
my father, a native from Luleå, as a young man went by boat, walking on floating
timber on the lower river stretches collecting water samples to measure the soil
transportations through the dam walls.5 These are only a few examples, but all of my
family has had a relation to Julevädno, for different reasons.
Through my efforts of understanding the Julevädno and in particular through my
research projects dealing with both situated knowledges of the hydropower exploi-
tation, followed by a research project on what is today referred to in terms of “dam
safety,”6 I have become aware that this stillness and calmness of the river is but an
illusion shaped into images and language. I now perceive it as an erasure of mem-
ory, where the floods and other behaviors that do not fit the modern parameters
disappear beneath a technical jargon measured in figures stating sedimentation
transports, cusecs, terawatt, and rain or snowfall. The Julevädno, as Erik Olsson
Rim knew the giant/giantess, has been silenced and maybe to a certain extent tamed.
But, every now and then, the river decides to step out of its nice behavior to manifest
its gigantic powers. It has happened several times and it will happen again. Dams do
not last forever. Eventually they get sick and cave in to the immense pressure of
water. It is just a matter of time. The question is not if they break, but when. One to
two large dams fail every year; smaller dams fail all the time.7 Thus, given the sta-
tistics of dam failures, the question is not if the Julevädno will escape its restraints
and take back its freedom, but rather a question of when this will happen. To rewrite
the narrative of the dammed Julevädno, in language that would make accommoda-
tion for the river’s majesty and its capacity to resist, would be to rewrite the under-
standing of the dammed river. This goes for Julevädno as well as for other regulated
rivers, thus, affording humanity the opportunity to draw into its own consciousness,
and embodiment, its profound interrelationship – intimate and boundless – with the
river(s) and all bodies of waters (Fig. 3).
I understand my own human body as part of the Lule River/Julevädno not only
because of my family histories in terms of losses of salmon fishing, the dead rapids,
and ugly dry river beds, as well as the benefits in terms of electricity for my daily life.
My body is also integrated with the Julevädno down to its very cell level. This is
5
SÖ, personal interview with author, May 25, 2012.
6
In my doctoral thesis, Öhman 2007, there is a chapter on the Julevädno. My PostDoc project
funded by The Swedish Research Council (VR) 2009–2010, “Situated perspectives on hydro-
power exploitation in Sápmi: Swedish technological expansion in the twentieth century and its
impacts on indigenous peoples,” focused entirely on Julevädno and was followed by a research
project funded by VR 2010–2012 “DAMMED: Security, Risk and Resilience around the Dams of
Sub-Arctica,” where Julevädno again was the main focus, along with another river.
7
There is no official statistics on dam failures available. What is available is the ICOLD website,
page on “dam safety” as well as a Wikipedia page mentioning major dam failures (participatory
observation by author at ICOLD meeting, Dam Safety Technical Committee, June 4, 2012, Kyoto).
54 M.-B. Öhman
Fig. 3 At Harsprånget, Lule River/Julevädno, waterfall 10 km south of Porjus/Bårjås. Constructed

in the 1950s, it is the hydropower plant with the largest installed capacity in Sweden, 977 MW
(Vattenfall 2010). In this postcard photo produced by the Swedish Tourist Association, STF, the
waters were still untouched. The text reads: “Harsprånget on the Great Lule River. About 10 km
south of Porjus the river forms the renowned Harsprånget, the mightiest waterfall in Europe. The
drop is 74 m, or 2 1/3 times the drop of the Trollhätte falls” (Photo: Ludvig Wästfelt (1883–1957)
Translation from Swedish by M-B Öhman)
because as the river is not only producing electricity or providing fish; it also provides
the drinking water for all households within its catchment area. It provides both for
private wells and for the municipalities’ common water provisions. Having a family
history by the Julevädno means as my parents bodies were fed by the Julevädno, the
very egg from my mother joining with the sperm from my father that became me as
a fetus were constituted in part by the waters of the Julevädno. Social science –
including historical work on rivers, waters, and dams – tends to assume a humanist
point of departure. It is mainly an account describing how humans have built differ-
ent structures aimed at control of the waters. But by focusing entirely on the narra-
tives of human beings laboring to control the waters and rivers, something is lost.
What is lost is the agency of water and its relation to the porosity of human bodies:
the inundation of soils and forest, the drawing out of heavy metals from the soils, 50
years of bombshell testing within the catchment area, the prospect of mining, and,
further downstream, oil spills from the power plants and their greased machines
(Åstrand 2008) – what has been done to the water bodies of the Julevädno has been
done to me, to my human body. In regard to oil spills, there are several known inci-
dents on the Lule River. Among others, in 2005, 2000 litres of turbine oil was spilled
out from the Laxede Power Station on the Lule River (Åstrand 2008). In regard to
mining, which causes toxic releases to water, there is currently a mining project
within the Unna Julevädno river itself – at the riverine island Kallak/Gallok, where
permissions were granted for test mining in the fall of 2012 and took place in the
summer of 2013. Military bomb tests have been carried out since the 1950s within
the catchment area of Unna Julevädno (Sommarström 1991; Thunqvist 2014).8
Asking the seemingly simple question “which river are you?” provides a point of
departure. Each of us humans is inherently part of a river or a stream, or, as traveling
subjects and consumers of world migrating food resources, is tributary of many dif-
ferent rivers and streams. The waters we take into our bodies, liquid or in the shape
of food, derive from a specific stream or river. When the water leaves our bodies, it
returns to a stream or river. I, like all those who reside along the river, have been
inexorably tied, through my cells and since conception to the legacy of these waters
that provided for and sustained my growth and survival to the catchment and free
flowing of this particular river.
Maybe Erik Olsson Rim, as he spoke his prediction, was reflecting on his own
intimate relationship and dependency on the waters. But if he did not reflect on his
own cell-level intimacy with the water bodies of the Julevädno, he was not different
than most of the so-called modern human beings, who, despite having learned in
school and through daily life about the intimate relationships between our bodies
and the water bodies, do not consider them.
As I explore the human, including my own, perceptions of rivers and waters, i.e.,
the human experience as it is and has been informed by water/human bodily interac-
tions, one main focus is on the perception of human bodies seeing themselves as
being in control or being out of control of the dam bodies and the water bodies. I
start from the understanding that the ideal of control presented and represented
within our modern society should be read as an illusion, a trick masked in a manipu-
lation of vocabulary (Haraway 1988; Pretty 2011), which serves to dismiss Sámi
traditional knowledge and local understanding. As I have tried to understand my
own position in this game, I have had to examine how I perceive the river and why.
Have my own perceptions changed over time; and, if so, in what direction? And
could these changes of perception represent a process of decolonization with regard
to my own mind and body?
Doing this exercise, I have sought to decolonize my own colonized body from a
century of Swedish state hydropower colonization of my river through retracing
Sámi understanding on human cultural interconnectedness with nature as suggested
by Martin (2003) and Wyld (2011). Through water, through this river with which I
personally feel a proprietary connection, we are all intimately connected and related.
As Debra McGregor (2009, 38) states: “Indigenous knowledge tells us that water is
the blood of Mother Earth and that water itself is considered a living entity with just
as much right to live as we have.” The machines constructed by humans to assert
control are part of the game. There are several feminist technoscience concepts used
to describe these relationships, such as “material-semiotic” (Haraway 1992),
“material-discursive” (Barad 2003), and “socio-material” (Suchman 2007). In short,
8
ELT, personal conversation with author, Aug. 1, 2011.
56 M.-B. Öhman
the natural and the cultural, the material and the discursive, are inextricably
intertwined.
I have found comfort in my attempts to bridge the understanding in the work of
hydrologist Malin Falkenmark who, during a lifetime of work, has drawn public
attention to the importance and vulnerability of bodies of water, arguing, among
other things, for a view of water as the “bloodstream of the biosphere” (Falkenmark
1993, 53). Falkenmark has identified a fragmentation of knowledge with regard to
water, a “water blindness” (Falkenmark 2001, 17) as a severe threat to biodiversity,
of which human life is one part. I am not alone, and work from all sides seeks to
understand and conceptualize these relationships.
My work blends engineering/scientific, feminist technoscience, post-humanist,
and local/Indigenous understanding and stories about waters – in this case rivers –
and how they are their own agency and that it is but a matter of time, until the human
bodies, who may think they are in control of the waters and rivers, perhaps, become
painfully aware of this boundless relationship in both unanticipated and unfortunate
ways. Whereas this boundless and porous relationship has been identified in numer-
ous accounts by both engineers and natural scientists, it is often referred to in con-
temporary technico-political language in terms of “environmental pollution” or,
when a water body’s agencies become overwhelming to our human bodies, as
“disasters,” (O’Keefe et al. 1976), in ways that question whether boundaries and
control are an actual possibility.
The term “technoscience” in the feminist vocabulary not only denies the exis-
tence of boundaries between “science” and “technology” but also questions the mul-
titude of actors – human and nonhuman – involved as well as cultural, societal, and
political implications (Haraway 1997). From this point of departure, this article
builds on a co-constitution of auto-ethnography, writing the history of my own per-
sonal experience and applying the methodology of oral history through the study of
existing archival documents, websites, postcards, images, fiction, and scientific
monographs. The article draws, in particular, on 4 years of concentrated participa-
tory observations,9 interviews, and personal communications with local inhabitants
(Sámi and Swedes), mainly along the Julevädno, though it also involves experiences
drawn from other rivers in Sápmi, Sweden, researched within the DAMMED:
Security, Risk and Resilience around the Dams of Sub-Arctica research project.10
The presentation also involves stories from professionals within the dam sector, at
the Julevädno and also at SwedCOLD (Swedish Commission for Large Dams) sym-
posiums held in the fall and spring each year in Stockholm. I personally attended two
9
The participatory observations I have made are at a hydropower company control station. These
were in the form that I was allowed to be at the control station observing the work and asking ques-
tions to the persons working. I was not involved in any way in the work and would sit quietly when
any situation arose that demanded attention by the staff. Each such occasion lasted during around
2–4 h for up to 4 days in a row. I have tried to come during different times of the year, and those
occasions have been in February, April, August, and October. Other participatory observations have
been more of actually involving; this has been at the ICOLD and SwedCOLD meetings
mentioned.
10
Financed by the Swedish Research Council, 2010–2012.
meetings of the ICOLD (the International Commission for Large Dams) and I have
studied the literature and proceedings from ICOLD annual meetings and congresses
as well as ICOLD’s website. Since June 2008 I have kept a personal log in which I
have entered both discussions with informants and my reflections on these encoun-
ters as well as my encounters with the environments that I move around and within.
Often, when writing and speaking about hydropower and large dams and regu-
lated waters, I tend to be challenged and questioned within a framework of being for
or against hydropower, for or against modernity, and for or against electricity. It is a
highly contentious arena for political conflict between human bodies living in dif-
ferent places upstream or downstream of a river and humans of different origins,
pursuing their livelihood from different sources, drawing benefits, or paying the
costs in terms of sometimes fatal impacts (Wittfogel 1957; Öhman 2007, 2010;
Summitt 2011). Although these conflicts of interests are often painfully relevant to
those who suffer from their consequences, in my work the primary aim has been to
break away from these presumed dichotomies and focus on the conflicts and inter-
actions between human bodies, water bodies, and dam bodies.
Thus, the intent is an attempt to extract humans from the center of the equation,
challenging the illusions of control and boundaries, to produce a water-centered
reading of rivers, waters in general and dammed rivers in particular. I do this by
reading the dams as vulnerable bodies, as living organisms, to a certain extent con-
structed by humans but that then take on a life of their own. Like Frankenstein’s
monster, revived by the electricity from the thunderstorm, the dams turn into life as
the waters flow into them, through them and out from them, bringing soils, oils, and
toxins and sometimes succumbing to the continuous pressures of ultimately untam-
able waters. Water bodies, dam bodies, and human bodies dancing together.
Julevädno Dancing with the Humans
Six decades after the flow of the Julevädno was entirely blocked for the first time,
the river had been subdued by a total of 15 hydropower stations and as many reser-
voirs regulating its flows and turning its powers into electricity. Yet, over time, the
prediction of Erik Olsson Rim has nearly become reality on several occasions. For
instance, holes threatening to dam life and human life, in engineering terms referred
to as sinkholes, appeared at the dam crest of the Messaure dam just after construc-
tions had been finalized and the dam was almost completely filled with water in
1963 (Bartsch 1999) (Fig. 4).
Twenty years later, another sinkhole appeared at the largest dam Suorva, upstream
of Messaure and upstream of Porjus/Bårjås. This was in October 1983 after the
occurrence of an extra strong spring flood. Thanks to a Sámi man, John Tomma,
who had his summer residence below the dam wall, the waters seeping through
were discovered at an early stage. I am told it was sheer luck that the necessary
machines and engineers were on site, due to other work being carried out and the
sinkhole that had appeared could be quickly investigated and taken care of (Bronner
58 M.-B. Öhman
Fig. 4 Sinkhole at Messaure, Stuor Julevädno, in 1963 (Photo: Vattenfall)
et al. 1988; Nilsson, Å and Norstedt 2004).11 The river did not breach the wall this
time either and the entire river valley was spared from an enormous tsunami from
the full Suorva dam containing around the equivalent of 40,000 million bathtubs of
water, dragging along with it masses of soil, houses, cars, trees, industrial pollu-
tions, toxic wastes, and human and animal corpses.12
In 1985, after several large rivers in Sweden – not only the Julevädno – were
behaving badly and showing themselves more forceful than expected by their
human tamers, a specific committee of experts was established – the so-called flow
committee (Svensk Energi, Svenska Kraftnät and SveMin 2007; Svenska Kraftnät
2007).13 The ultimate purpose was to understand how to keep the water bodies sta-
ble and well behaving for the production of electricity.14
11
LJN, personal interview, Aug. 2, 2010.
12
The so-called maximum storage capacity of the Suorva dam/reservoir is 5.9 · 109 m3 water. See
Viklander 1997.
13
In English the committee has been named “The Swedish Committee for Design Flood
Determination” – but a direct translation from Swedish (Flödeskommittén) is simply “the Flow
Committee.”
14
In regard to the unruliness of rivers, water bodies, and human attempts to take control, as well as
losing control, there is a massive body of both academic and nonacademic literature; see, for
instance, Wittfogel 1957; White 1995; Öhman 2007; Hoag and Öhman 2008; Summitt 2011; Stoor
2011; Niemi 2012; Hoag 2013.
Today, as I continue my work on the Julevädno, I examine how the river is man-
aged and watched by descendants of riverine Sámis and migrant settlers from other
Sámi territories as well as from further south. These operators and engineers – a
majority of them are men, but there are also women involved in this work – put their
honor and lives into maintaining the river as calm and stable, to deliver Julevädno’s
force in electrons only. Some of these humans travel around to watch over the
shackles, measuring water seepages, looking at the instruments, smelling the interi-
ors of the power plants, and feeling the vibrations in the turbines with their human
bodies. Other humans do their work shifts at the control station, at Vuollerim, where
until 1967, the two arms of the giant/giantess met – the confluence of the little/Unna
and the big/Stuor Lule River/Julevädno, or the northern and the southern river.
There they send out signals to release more or less force, as demanded from
Stockholm through Internet cables and phone lines.15 The focus is on producing
electricity out of Julevädno’s force and making sure that Julevädno, the once tamed
giant/giantess river, does not break its shackles as predicted by Erik Olsson Rim.
The human bodies are in a continuous fight and exchange with both dam bodies and
bodies of waters. It is a sort of dance, sometimes a smooth and easy dance; at other
times it turns into a wild polska.16 In the fall of 2011 Unna Julevädno just would not
stop flowing. I was not even allowed to visit the control station for my participatory
observations, as the operators were supposed to have full control over the water
levels at all times. No distractions were allowed. Instead I went around to the dams
and watched the water’s fierce flow. Unna Julevädno was coming to life again, fill-
ing up the dead riverbeds for 3 weeks (Fig. 5).17
Disillusion of River Control
“Large dams” as a concept is a matter of volume, heights, lengths, and storage

capacities of the dam, as defined by the dam constructing sector itself. The simplest
definition, as provided by the International Commission for Large Dams, ICOLD,
is that a large dam is one with a crest of at least 15 m height (ICOLD/Flögl undated;
Öhman 2007). What is of importance with large dams is that there are very many
around the world, and if they fail, the rivers that they exist to control become very
intimidating to human bodies. Dams and levees have one thing in common: they
were constructed by human bodies to keep water bodies, rivers, under control. Yet
this perceived control is but an illusion. The feminist philosopher Nancy Tuana
writes how she herself witnessed the consequences of the breaching of the levees of
15
Vuollerim Vattenfall control station for hydropower, participatory observations by author at sev-
eral occasions 2010–2012.
16
Polska is a traditional dance among the Nordic countries, often man-woman partner dance, but
with variations. See, for instance, the dance video “Polska från Nås, Gagnsföra” available at http://
www.acla.se/kultisdans/dansvideo.htm (latest access, May 5, 2014).
17
Unna Julevädno – participatory observations in September 2011.
60 M.-B. Öhman
Fig. 5 During normal

operation Unna Julevädno
disappears through
underground tubes at the
Letsi dam crest in the
ground leaving a dry river
bed. During the three week
extraordinary flow
situation in 2011, the gates
had to be opened to let the
river back into its usual
river bed. During these 3
weeks the river kept the
humans at the control
station in a state of alert to
keep all humans
downstream safe. (Photos:
May-Britt Öhman)
the Mississippi river and from this experience came to realize that it should be a
feminist endeavor to consider the materiality of water:
The events of August 29, 2005, have left a lasting impact on the citizens of the US. Seeing
through the eye of a category four hurricane has resulted in multiple destabilizations.
Levees have been breached, a historic city devastated, climate change rendered not simply
believable, but palpable, and the face of suffering given a complexion that revealed to a
shocked nation the plight of the poor and the racism that is woven into our economic struc-
tures. As I considered the news reports of the various impacts of Katrina and thought about
the city of New Orleans, I knew that I was witnessing afresh the reasons I have for the last
two decades been advocating that those concerned with doing science, including science
studies responsibly embrace an interactionist ontology. The events unfolding in the wake of
Katrina provided a trenchant illustration of the importance of embracing such an ontology
and its concomitant epistemology. Witnessing Katrina renders apparent the urgency of
embracing an ontology that rematerializes the social and takes seriously the agency of the
natural. As the phenomena of Katrina’s devastation has taught us all too well, the knowl-
edge that is too often missing and is often desperately needed is at the intersection between
things and people, between feats of engineering and social structures, between experiences
and bodies. (Tuana 2006, 1)
Like hydropower dams, levees are human constructions intended to make rivers
behave according to human needs and desires. Hurricane Katrina in the USA, which
caused the Mississippi river to go wild and destroy the carefully designed levees,
made many people, including Tuana, well aware of the materiality of water. Water –
rivers – do not always behave as they are instructed to by human designs. And as
soon as they escape that control, our human bodies become painfully aware of our
porous relationship. Reading Tuana’s account and reaction to the breaching of the
levees of New Orleans, it seems as if this would be something new to human society.
Yet, engineers active within the water construction sector are aware that these break-
downs happen at least once per year on a global level.18 Every year dam engineers
come together at local, regional, national, and international conferences and sympo-
sia to discuss how the waters should be maintained under control. In 1928 the
International Commission for Large Dams (ICOLD) was established. Once per
year, representatives from 90 hydropower nations of today meet somewhere in the
world to exchange news and understandings of river and water bodies.19 At the start,
the major focus of ICOLD was to discuss technical solutions for the construction of
large dams, as well as to promote further constructions, a sort of spreading the dams
over the world forum (ICOLD undated –History/Mission). Today, the agenda is
very much the same. The ICOLD annual meeting is an arena for exchange of knowl-
edge of how to construct the best dams, to ensure that the dams stay in place, and to
spread a sort of development by constructing dams.20 At these annual meetings, the
persons involved discuss materials, construction methods, as well as recent failures
and how to promote future dam safety. In Sweden, every fall and spring, around a
hundred representatives of the Swedish hydropower dam sector gather to listen and
share news and developments at a symposium in Stockholm. Stories of incidents
and failures are told and discussed.21 They, as well as the people maintaining the
Julevädno under control, know that bad things can happen at any time in their very
own river.22 When something happens, which it does quite often – one or two major
dams suffer serious problems and failure each year on a global level – information
is quickly sent around through the wires of the Internet.23 However, ICOLD still
does not have a current statistical list of failures to present to the public or even to
18
MB, personal communication with author at the SwedCOLD symposium April 17, 2012; DH,
personal communication author at the ICOLD meeting in Kyoto, June 3, 2012.
19
Participatory observations by the author at ICOLD meeting, Hanoi, May 23–26, 2010; see also
ICOLD undated – history.
20
Participatory observations by the author at the ICOLD meeting Hanoi May 23–26, 2010, and at
the ICOLD congress, Kyoto, June 2012.
21
Participatory observation by the author at the SwedCOLD symposiums: Nov. 6, 2008; Apr. 2 and
Oct. 20, 2009, Apr. 13 and Oct. 19, 2010; Oct. 2011; Apr. 17, 2012.
22
Participatory observations at SwedCOLD symposiums. Participatory observations at Vattenfall
Vuollerim control station 2010–2012.
23
YH, Personal communication with author, at ICOLD meeting Hanoi, May 25, 2010. A major
dam is much bigger than a large dam. For the status of a large dam, the height of 15 m of the dam
crest is required. For the status of a major dam, the height of 150 m is required. Sweden has no
major dam, the highest dam being only 125 m. (Trängslet) (ICOLD undated, dam safety).
62 M.-B. Öhman
themselves. The last assembly of statistics was made in 1996, and today the only
way to find out about dam failures around the world is by attending the conferences
and by reading entries on Wikipedia.24
Furthermore, large (and some small) dams are represented within a massive body
of scientific literature in the natural sciences, engineering sciences, as well as social
sciences, where a significant focus is dedicated to incidents, failures, collapses,
overtoppings, and overdammings: i.e., failures, mistakes, accidents, and human
error (Idenfors 2012). What is hidden in the use of language is the normality of
unruly rivers, water bodies that do not wish to follow the rules made by human bod-
ies: dam bodies growing old and tired – dying. They are indeed vulnerable bodies.
Also, there are an immense number of persons who are currently involved and
who have earlier been involved in constructing, maintaining, and living next to
dams and other man-made water constructions and have their own close encounters
with such failures of the dams. In total, around the globe, ICOLD’s “World Register
of Large Dams” contains 37 641 large dams (ICOLD undated – register of dams).
The five nation states topping the list in the World Register are the USA with 9 265,
China with 5 191, India with 5 101, Japan with 3 076, and Canada with 1 114 large
dams. The dams smaller than this size are unaccounted for. In Sweden, there are
about 200 large dams, but in total Sweden has over 10 000 dams (Riksrevisionen
2007). So, on a worldwide scale, the total number of dams, for hydropower, for
water distribution, and for mining waste, is gigantic. Within Sweden, only three
major rivers are untouched by hydropowerdams.
The scientific and media languages and imageries around the dams and their
failures, in dealing with these unruly rivers, mask reality. Many persons, like myself,
for instance, hardly even notice that they live next to a regulated river, whereas most
people who live next to a nuclear power plant seem to be well aware of this. On a
worldwide scale as well on a Swedish scale, the nuclear power plants are com-
pletely outnumbered by dams and large dams.
The dams become visible, by necessity, to the human bodies of non-civil engi-
neers and operators only in times of distress, only when the dam bodies are short of
waters, or when they threaten to fail, or when they have failed us. When the waters
once quietly contained in the dam bodies invade us, when the relationship of human
bodies and these bodies of waters come into conflict, the porous relationship
becomes disturbing and distressing. That is when the dams and the water bodies are
finally visible for some time, maybe six months to a year or two, soon again to be
forgotten. Our living memory is sometimes very short. Disasters are overcome and
then shelved, horror stories of the past (Le Blanc 2012).
The remaining question is still: why were these violent water bodies not dis-
cussed before they invaded human bodies? Or, in those cases they were discussed,
why were these river bodies portrayed as having been tamed, as nonviolent? Why
does it take a national disaster to invoke the vulnerability of dams, the potential
aggressive violence of water? Why is the memory so short? What does it take to
24
Participatory observations by the author at ICOLD meeting, Dam Safety Technical Committee,
June 4, 2012, Kyoto; Wikipedia undated.
make human bodies understand the unruliness of water bodies, to understand that
rivers cannot be tamed? What memory was Erik Olsson Rim referring to when he
warned against the powers of the Julevädno?
Human Bodies, Dam Bodies and Water Bodies: A Long-Time

Relationship of Vulnerability
The invasion of water bodies into human bodies in New Orleans, USA, in 2005 was
followed by similar events in Brisbane, Australia, in 2011 and also in Japan, after
the earthquake in March 2011. These events are but very recently created memories
inscribed onto and into the consciousness of human bodies by water bodies. Human
bodies have lived with vulnerable dam bodies for millennia. The oldest of the large
dams known to us today dates back to 3000 years before Christ (Schnitter 1994).
The oldest still operational dam referred to and mentioned by the International
Commission of Large Dams is the Roman-constructed Proserpina dam, where the
dam wall measures at its tallest 21.6 m in height (Arenillas and Castillo 2003). The
dam was constructed on the river Las Pardillas, in present-day Spain, in the region
of Badojoz, and its purpose was to feed water to the Roman city of Augusta Emerita.
The Proserpina has managed to stay alive for two millennia, whereas other dams
constructed by the Romans seem to have collapsed at earlier stages. Of the dam
Alcanterilla, which was constructed in a similar design as the Proserpina, only the
ruins remain. It was probably breeched very early, not long after its construction
(Arenillas and Castillo 2003). In other parts of the world, there are also very old
dams that are still part of modern life. Japan, for instance, has a long and continuous
history of human dam constructions, and there are several more than 1000-year-old
still existing dams. One of the notable is the Kaerumataike on the Yodo River, near
the one-time capital city of Nara, dating back to the second century after Christ,
measuring 17 m high (Jansen 1980). Of other dam bodies, physical remains –
ruins – are left for human bodies to visit today. Sometimes though, these dam bodies
are discovered only through historical written records. For instance, as Jansen
(1980) writes, the Sabaen civilization (the people of Sheba) was concentrated
around Marib which was the center for an important network of water supply. The
thriving civilization was made possible by the construction of dams impounding the
runoff from the hills, providing soil conservation and irrigation. The largest of these
dams, the Marib dam, also called Sudd Al-Arim, is commonly ranked as the largest
of the ancient dams in southern Arabia (Jansen 1980). The exact location, construc-
tion time, and lifetime of the dam vary in different accounts, an approximation stat-
ing that it was constructed sometime between 1700 and 700 before Christ. There are
also different accounts as to the size and material of the dam. One account states that
it was 37 m high, 152 m wide, and 3.2 km long and made of rock. Another account
tells of a much smaller embankment, composed of earth (Jansen 1980). The mate-
rial might not seem to matter to human bodies not trained in understanding the dam
64 M.-B. Öhman
bodies, but for any human body trained to interact with these dams, the materials
make a great difference.25
While human dam construction has been going on as long as there has been
human societies, and dams have been intimately linked to both the rise and decline
of human civilizations – more so to cultures dependent on irrigation for food produc-
tion – modern historians, political scientists, ecologists, and others often refer to a
“big dam era” which started in the twentieth century. What is new to this big dam era
is that these dams are at work and continue to be built, to a large extent for the pro-
duction of electricity but also for what is considered to be “flood control” – reassur-
ing that human bodies will not be in conflict with the water bodies. The old tradition
of irrigation is continued, making sure that those human bodies can feed from the
water bodies – just as they have throughout the history of human construction of dam
bodies. Also what is new are the new nation states constructed throughout the nine-
teenth and twentieth centuries and along with them their view of the land- and water-
scapes as belonging to the nation state. A common feature of decision makers is to
describe the land- and waterscapes as empty of human bodies, often the indigenous
populations, and the animal bodies with which these human bodies interact (Berger
1977, 1985; Dyck 1985; Lins Ribeiro 1994; Aronsson 2002; Öhman 2007). The
political reasons for the construction of large dams are commonly articulated as the
argument of a benefit for the nation state, for progress, for modernity (Öhman 2007).
In nation states where water has been considered by the dominant political power
to be too scarce, dams have been constructed for irrigation solely or in combination
with the production of electricity. In countries such as Sweden, where the dominant
view has been that there is an abundance of free-flowing waters, the dams have
often been constructed solely for the production of electricity (Jakobsson 1996;
Öhman 2007).
A common denominator, throughout this long-term relationship, is the sickness
and death of dams. Obviously, dams or levees do not stand forever. They get sick,
they die, and when they do, the water bodies contained in the dam bodies tend to
literally invade human bodies. The dams are an intimate part of our societies; they
are among the oldest of human constructions. Human bodies ought to be familiar
with the stories and lives of dam bodies and water bodies. Yet, when these things
happen, it is referred to in terms of “disaster.” The word “disaster” – or “failure” – in
itself frames the understanding of the possibility of total human control of waters –
of rivers – and the understanding of dams as forever there. “Disaster” is the concept
conveying that something went terribly wrong. Sometimes, although not always, it
is even referred to as a “natural disaster,” indicating that the disaster was caused by
nature itself and not by human failed attempts to take over control.
But if we instead consider a dam as a living organism, the imagery of our bodily
interactions changes. Erik Olsson Rim’s imagery of the dam bodies – and river bod-
ies – seems to have been set; he did not believe that they would withstand the forces
of these bodies. And his belief is far from ungrounded.
25
Participatory observation by the author at SwedCOLD symposiums 2008–2012 and at ICOLD
annual meeting Hanoi May 23–26, 2010, and ICOLD congress Kyoto, 2012.
Dam Bodies as Vulnerable Unprotected Bodies Depending

on Friendly Human Bodies
His heartbeat increased as the radio broad cast continued:

Since the Porjus dam collapsed at 5.30 this morning the power plants at Harsprånget,
Ligga, Messaure, Porsi and Laxede have been torn away by the massive waters. The flood
wave is expected to reach Boden and Luleå within 30 minutes. The police have reported
that the situation in the two cities is chaotic. The roads are blocked by cars and trailers.
Persons owning snowmobiles are fleeing north and south. Police and rescue service people
are stuck inside the two cities. As the first flood wave reaches Boden, thousands of persons
will be dragged along with the waters. This is the largest disaster that has hit Sweden in
modern times. The police urgently request those who cannot save themselves in any other
way to go to the nearest high building. The hope is that these buildings will be able to stand
up to the forces from the massive waters. The weather in the area has changed for the better,
and the police have reported that they will go up to Suorva as soon as it is possible. North
of the Lule river is without electricity, and all five high-tension lines have been destroyed.
The provision of electricity to the mines, the railroad and the industries north of the river
has ceased. The situation of the northern parts of Sweden is dramatic. Swedish Energy has
reported that the rest of the country will be affected as well, as the Lule River corresponds
to an important part of electricity provisioning for Sweden. The Emergency Rescue Services
calls on inhabitants outside of the risk area to take care of the people who have fled from the
valley of the Lule river. (Svonni 2005, 75)26
The quotation above comes from the novel Trespassing Limits (Fig. 6). The
Swedish title Överskrida gränser has multiple meanings and can be interpreted in
many ways. The word överskrida may also be translated as transcending or exceed-
ing, and limits can be exchanged with borders or frontiers in accordance with the
Swedish gränser. The novel is written by Lars Wilhelm Svonni, a Sámi, author and
activist as well as member of the Sámi parliament in Sweden. The quotation
describes the consequences of a failure of the Suorva dam. In the novel the cause of
the dam body failing is an act of human bodies performing self-defense, through
reclaiming the river. It is a group of Sámi reindeer herders, having lost family mem-
bers on the treacherous ices of the Suorva dam caused by human bodies regulating
the water bodies for the production of electricity and money profit sent southward
to other human bodies. One of them is a former operator, having taken part in the
continuous efforts of constraining the river in shackles and fetters. Now he partici-
pates in the Julevädno’s release. Whereas the scenario is not unlikely, in any regu-
lated river where the operators are often local peoples whose lives are intertwined
with the river, so far similar events seem to not be considered as an actual risk by the
Swedish state power company or anyone else within the sector. Vattenfall, along
with the other power companies in Sweden, has been criticized for not having taken
precautions against the risk of acts of terrorism and sabotage by employees (Höeg
et al 2007). As I research all documents available online, I find no reference to this
specific criticism, and the 2007 document itself is no longer available online.27 In
26
Translated from Swedish by M-B Öhman.
27
Multiple online database searches by the author, January to June, 2012. The document by Höeg
et al. 2007 was available online in 2008.
66 M.-B. Öhman
Fig. 6 A small part of the Suorva reservoir (also referred to as Akkajaure), at the top of the Lule
River/Julevädno. The largest artificial hydropower reservoir in the north of Europe and in Sweden,
storing at its most about 6 km3 of waters and is 60 km long. Lake Vänern, with a volume of 9.4 km3
and regulation amplitude of 1.7 m, is often considered as the largest artificial reservoir in Sweden,
although Vänern is also a natural lake (Jakobsson 2010). Before regulation the river formed seven
small source lakes here. The Sámi residents lived by these lakes during the summer, and they still
live here (Photo: May-Britt Öhman, July 2006)
the summary of the peer review of the Suorva dam and four other dams, the criti-
cism is made less potent: “There is a need to evaluate the risk and carry out mea-
sures related to antagonistic threats against dams (dam security) and public safety”
(Bartsch et al 2007, 16). However, the issue has not disappeared. In June 2012, the
Swedish state inquiry on dams and dam safety in Sweden was published (SOU
2012:46). A whole chapter deals with issues of terrorism and sabotage. The inquiry
calls for safety measures, scanning of the human bodies involved and strengthening
of the protection through legislation, by turning the riskiest dams into “protected
objects” (SOU 2012:46, 395) with particularly limited access for unauthorized per-
sons. But the inquiry also points at the difficulties with protecting the dam bodies
against malevolent human bodies. It costs money and it is difficult. As I interpret the
inquiry when reading between the lines, it is perhaps not even possible to achieve
the necessary safety against terror and sabotage via legislation and training.
Something more is required.
My discussions with operators and dam engineers both in Sweden and at ICOLD
meetings point to the difficulty of protecting the dam bodies from human terrorist
attacks.28 In the USA, after the attack on the World Trade Center in September 2001,
the road that used to go over the Hoover Dam crest was replaced by a new road,
constructed, and inaugurated in 2010.29 It takes time and much money to protect
ourselves against unfriendly human bodies interacting with dam bodies. My inter-
pretation from discussions, interviews, and going through documents is that people
within the power-producing sector, as well as the decision makers in power, at least
in Sweden, prefer to avoid to even think about the possibility of someone commit-
ting such an act of sabotage (Öhman and Thunqvist 2012). It seems as if it is too
painful to imagine another human body doing this to a dam body, releasing the
enormous powers of the water bodies. I ask, “but what if someone goes crazy, angry,
mad, and does something to a big dam?” So far the answer I get, from the very same
discussions, interviews, and lack of discussion in documents, is that “it is a non-
issue.” Well, actually, not really. Staff at the hydropower plants go through security
checks before they are employed, I am told. But once they are employed, nothing
can be done. Because it is impossible to deal with, it is a non-issue. Or maybe it is
because operators are by definition considered to be in control of their own human
bodies. They are not allowed to go crazy, mad, or become upset.
As I travel up and down the Julevädno, visiting the different dams, something I
have been doing for the last decade, I notice how vulnerable these dam bodies are.
They stand there unprotected. Signs tell me to keep away. Cameras are pointing in
my way. I go in. I stand there, waving to the cameras. Waiting. Listening. Nothing
happens. No one comes to force me away. No helicopters in the air. I ponder, what
would it take a human body to commit a hostile act to these dam bodies, to be so
unfriendly to the dam and to the human bodies that depend on the dam for and with
their lives? Maybe the idea is that people are supposed to love these dam bodies and
water bodies, to protect them with their own bodies (Figs. 7 and 8).
I return to Svonni’s novel to reflect. What does it take for a human body to get so
mad, upset, as to attack the dam body, to release the water bodies? Svonni answers:
Ola Viekas life had been crushed into tatters by the end of April five years earlier. By then
he had been so incredibly happy. As the only child he had taken over the reindeer herding
from his father. He had fallen in love with the only daughter of Nilas Latte more than ten
years ago. They had gotten married the year after, and had a child the next. Their second
child was only two months old when the terrible accident happened that spring day. Nilas
had his summer residence east of the outflow of the Vuojat River. Ola had finished moving
the reindeer to the mountains. They had decided to go by snow mobile from Ritsem to the
cabin of the in-laws. The distance being around ten kilometers over the great Suorva reser-
voir, Nilas had been driving ahead with fuel wood and provisions. Ola had a sledge behind
his snowmobile, with the mother in-law, his young wife and their two small children.
Suddenly the ice broke under the sledge pulling also the snow mobile into the hole. He
panicked, yelling straight out. He saw how his wife and mother in-law each took a child and
fought their way to the edge of the hole. They threw the children up onto the ice, but when
he crawled towards them he too fell into the freezing cold water. He tried to find the children
in the snow slush without succeeding. Using his two knives he finally managed to make his
28
Dam engineers and operators, personal conversations by the author at ICOLD and SwedCOLD
meetings and at Vattenfall Vuollerim control station, 2010–2012.
29
Personal visit by the author to the Hoover dam, November 8 and 9, 2010.
68 M.-B. Öhman
Fig. 7 Trespassing at a high-risk dam on the Lule River/Julevädno, downstream of the confluence
of the Great and the Little Lule Rivers. The sign says, “Access denied for unauthorized” (Photo:
M-B Öhman, August 2011)
Fig. 8 The Hoover dam, between on the Colorado River, and the new road constructed to protect
the dam against terrorist attacks (Photo: M-B Öhman, November 2010)
way up on to solid ice. Turning around he no longer could see his two small children, his
loved wife nor his mother in-law. People who had witnessed the accident came to his help,
taking him to the warmth of the nearest cabin in Ritsem. (Svonni 2005, 47)30
Svonni tells the story of Sámi reindeer herders, losing their lives in the regulated
waters of the river. Now, Sámi are Sámi, the Indigenous people of the Scandinavian
north and often not considered to be modern enough to be in control of or have any
relationship of importance with dam bodies. A prominent personality within the
Canadian dam power sector tells me that Sámi should not even have snowmobiles,
as they should use their traditional transport methods – skiing – being indigenous
and all.31 A representative for the Swedish state power company Vattenfall tells me
that locals do not have any business fooling around on the dams. The dams are regu-
lated to be used for hydropower production and that is it.32 The website of Vattenfall
indicates the same idea. The Vattenfall web brochure, “A journey along one of
Sweden’s magnificent rivers” (Vattenfall Undated) provides an image of a “soft”
and environmentally sustainable nature of the hydropower system, where no humans
are involved:
Waterpower is a sensible way of using a natural eco-cycle. Water vapour, which forms when
the sun warms the lakes and oceans, rises to the higher, colder layers of air, where it con-
denses and forms clouds. When the clouds move in over the land, they release their burden
in the form of rain or snow. That rain and snow is what keeps our rivers flowing. On its
journey to the coast, we take advantage of the water’s potential energy. Still within the eco-
cycle, the water returns to the lakes and the sea, and the process begins again. Hydropower
comes from a renewable source and makes use of Nature on Nature’s terms. (Vattenfall
Undated, 4)
Nowhere on the company’s website or other promotional material are the trou-
bles and dangers that resident Sámi face mentioned. Yet, as Svonni’s novel tells, and
as the story of the first leakage on the Suorva reservoir was witnessed – when the
first report came from Mr. John Tomma – Sámi persons are intimately related to the
Julevädno, both living on it, and working with controlling it from the inside and
from the outside. The dam bodies depend for their lives on the friendliness of the
Sámi and the other local human bodies living and moving around here. And this
goes not only for the Julevädno but also for any regulated river. The dam bodies
depend with their lives on the human bodies that control them, as much as the very
same human bodies depend with their lives on the dam bodies staying in place and
behaving well. The sharp division in between is nothing but an illusion.
Hearing what these prominent persons say about Sámi people, about locals liv-
ing and dying here, witnessing how the forced colonization goes on and on – and
rereading the prediction by Erik Olsson Rim, I start seeing it as a curse. A necessary
curse. I fantasize about releasing the powers of the water bodies of the Julevädno
and about reclaiming my fettered river, to show them all how strong we are –
together. I read Svonni’s novel as our fictional revenge. But I still want to keep the
30
Translated from Swedish by M-B Öhman.
31
TB, personal communication with author at the ICOLD congress, Kyoto, June 5, 2012.
32
LH, personal conversation, Stockholm, August 24, 2010.
70 M.-B. Öhman
Julevädno, my river, calm because all my personal memories, my relations, my

family depend on the Julevädno’s calm and good behavior.
Water Bodies and Dam Bodies: A Relationship of Watery

Invasions
Whereas the issue of the possibility of human bodies committing atrocities against
the dam bodies is not discussed within ICOLD – neither ICOLD’s website nor in the
congress proceedings of 2012, it is the intrusion of water bodies into the dams that
is the constant focus of worries. A dam body is all but a stable body. Dam bodies are
porous by design and constructed with the designers’ knowledge that water will
intrude into them. Whether it is an embankment dam or a concrete dam, the water
will find its way. The water continuously enters to the very core of the dam crest; it
takes particles of the earth or the dam’s rock fill embankment along with it, on its
course downstream. It will create the dreaded “sinkholes” which ultimately threaten
the entire existence of the dam body, even when carefully supervised and dealt with
by friendly human bodies. To the concrete dam, the waters enter in terms of conden-
sation and engage with the steel skeleton of the dam body. Eventually those con-
crete dam bodies, which appear as stable and strong to our human eyes, will give in.
In cold climates, like at the Julevädno, the continuous change between warmth and
extreme cold collaborates with the intrusive waters to weaken the dam body and eat
it away, piece-by-piece. Stated in engineering language it goes like this: “Cyclic
freezing and thawing influences the structure of soil; studies of fine-grained soils
exposed to freezing reported changes in volume and structure, as well as significant
increases in permeability” (Jantzer 2006, 1).
When the dam body of Suorva had its first sinkhole in 1983, as discussed in the
Bronner et al., paper to ICOLD in 1988, the very first alert to the State Power
Company Vattenfall was made by the Sámi man John Tomma, who had his summer
residence below the dam wall. When I did my interviews along the river, Mr. Tomma
had passed on, but a friend of his tells the story:
It would have gone to hell if John Tomma hadn’t had the urge to go to his toilet. He had his
residence below Suorva, and he had his toilet a bit away from the house and then the water
showed up between the house and the toilet and so it began. He discovered what had hap-
pened and called, and some men came. It was about to sail away all of it. It was a big fuss.
Later they gave him a reward of 2000 crowns.33
A research colleague who during this fall of 1983 had just begun her first year of
school in Luleå – my hometown which would become totally destroyed if the
Suorva dam fails – remembered the big deal about it, how scared she was.34 The
33
LJN, personal interview with author, August 2, 2010, Porjus.
34
KL, personal communication with author, April 3, 2014. I too lived in Luleå this fall; it was my
first year of secondary school, but in my own memory, there is no trace of these events.
Fig. 9 Water pouring out of the reservoir of the Teton Dam, Idaho, following its collapse on June
5, 1976 (Photo: Bureau of Reclamation. Source: ID-L-0011, WaterArchives.org)
engineering account of the event presented was completely stripped of this tumultu-
ous event and the fears and emotions involved. The invasiveness of waters through
the dam body and possibly into human bodies is not part of the story told, at least
not acknowledged. But the ensuing studies of the Suorva Dam and other earth
embankment dams in Sweden, as well as the work, time, and money spent among
engineers to study the intrusive waters, bear witness to the complex relationships
between the bodies involved, telling another story (Nilsson and Norstedt 2004).
On a global scale however, Suorva was far from the first case. Only 7 years ear-
lier, an earth embankment dam in the USA, the Teton Dam in Idaho, had suffered
the same watery intrusion, leading to its collapse and death, resulting in the death of
11 human bodies and 20 000 cattle bodies (Hatch 2010). The Teton dam collapse
seemed to have been a prominent dam body collapse within the engineering sector.
At the ICOLD Dam Safety Technical Committee, in 2012, one participant claimed
that the Teton Dam collapse changed everything in regard to dam safety criteria
around the world (Figs. 9 and 10).35
The engineers are busy discussing methods to discover “seepage” – the waters
making their way through the dam body, invading it. Engineers at ICOLD and
SwedCOLD (the Swedish Commission of Large Dams) gather people from the
hydropower dam sector and power companies within Sweden who labor to
35
Participatory observation by the author at ICOLD meeting, Dam Safety Technical Committee,
June 4, 2012, Kyoto.
72 M.-B. Öhman
Fig. 10 Rushing to the rescue – at the Teton dam failure, Rexburg, 1976 (Photo: Roundy. Source:
ID-L-0024, WaterArchives.org)
understand, to explain, to measure, and to make sure we protect the dam bodies
from the watery invasions that eat the earth away or rust the steel skeletons. At the
ICOLD meeting in Kyoto 2012, representatives of an engineering consultant com-
pany talked about instruments to be installed into the very body of the dam itself.
Fiber optics is a new method to be built into the dam body. They argued that this is
the new technology that will improve safety (Sjödahl 2012).36 Knowing the techni-
cal artifacts from my daily life, I hesitate. It sounds very good. Like me, other par-
ticipants at the ICOLD meeting, engineers themselves, are doubtful about the
replacement of human bodies. We are not convinced that fiber optics can replace
humans. The lifetime of a fiber optic cable may never correspond to the expected
lifetime of a dam body. A dam is expected to last at least for a century while the fiber
optic cable might last up to 50–70 years. The guarantee from the supplier, however,
is a matter of legal contracts.37 Still another engineer speaks of the importance of
motivating the operators, the human bodies working at the dam, to take good care of
36
Participatory observation by the author at ICOLD congress, June 8, 2012, Kyoto: Pontu Sjödahl
(2012) presented the paper “Experience from two embankment dams equipped with on-line seep-
age monitoring system based on distributed temperature sensing using optical fibres”, and after-
ward a discussion took place.
37
Participatory observation by the author: Sam Johansson at discussion ensuing Sjödahl, 2012
presentation at ICOLD congress.
the dam and the instruments (Fleitz 2012).38 Ultimately, the dam body depends on
friendly human bodies, doing their utmost to keep it safe from the water bodily
pressures.
Our modern dams are of the big dam era, only a few decades old. The oldest ones
date back to the early twentieth century. The engineers discuss what to do with the
old dams. They talk in terms of rehabilitation, reinforcements, but sometimes they
even propose a dam to be decommissioned – taken out of commission.39 Killed. In
comparison with dams such as the 2000-year-old Proserpina, our modern dams are
newborns. Arenillas and Castillo (2003) suggest that it was the human bodily
efforts – the engineers’ design – in combination with the kind water bodies that
made the dam body withstand all these years. Their answer to why the Proserpina
dam has outlived the Alcanterilla for almost 2000 years is that the inflow to the
Proserpina main reservoir was possible to moderate during extreme flows. The
Alcanterilla was subdued to more extreme flows, receiving more waters which
could not be taken care of as no extra weirs were constructed within the design. The
human bodies and the water bodies collaborated for the Proserpina, but were not
caring enough for the Alcanterilla.
Returning again to the Julevädno, and Erik Olsson Rim’s prediction – or curse –
“Just you wait until the spring flood comes,” I reconsider his words. I think he was
right indeed. Just they – we and those coming after us – wait until the spring flood
comes. We will never know which spring flood will do the work of unfettering the
Julevädno. But one day sooner or later it will come. The spring flood indeed arrives
every year, eating the dam bodies away, forcing engineers and hydrologists to work
to create scenarios of their “design floods,” i.e., the greatest floods that can be
expected to come within a specific interval. Such scenarios of design floods are
created to understand how big a river can occur once in 100 years, once in 1000
years, and even for once in 10,000 years (Bergström et al. 2008). A century has
passed; the dam bodies fettering the Julevädno might have survived, so far, the
100-year flood. But it is due to sheer luck, and ever-ongoing meticulous work to
keep Julevädno calm and the river behaving well, being nice to us. Now the engi-
neers hydrologists and experts are waiting for the 1000 year flood, as climate
change is expected to increase the flows (Bergström et al 2008) – more snow, more
strong winds, all combining their forces to make Erik Olsson Rim’s prediction or
curse come true.
38
Participatory observation by the author: Jürgen Fleitz (2012) presented the paper “A proposal to
optimize maintenance of dam monitoring systems seepage. Terroba’s Dam”, presentation and
ensuing discussion at the ICOLD congress, June 8th, 2012, Kyoto, Japan, after Sjödahl.
39
Participatory observation by the author at the, ICOLD congress, Kyoto June 6–8, 2012.
74 M.-B. Öhman
Pleading with the Julevädno to Remain Kind and Gentle
Human bodies, water bodies, and dam bodies are all intimately related and interde-
pendent. This article challenges the modern ideal of science and technology as the
human body being in control, by putting water bodies at the forefront and discuss-
ing the relations with dam bodies. In this article I explored human perceptions of
rivers and waters, the human self-experience informed by water/human bodily
interactions – including my own perceptions and understandings. I argue that there
is a modern ideal of human beings, human bodies being in control, which is nothing
but an illusion. It is a trick of language production within modern science and tech-
nology production. Assuming a position, within which Indigenous and local under-
standings are placed at the same status level as modern science and technology
produced within the arena of universities and power companies, and thereby analyz-
ing the fragmented and scattered knowledge production of a wide array of disci-
plines within science and engineering – I argue that there is actually a common
understanding that at the end of the day, the human body is not at all in control.
Instead, it seems as the ultimate objective of science and technology language in
terms of assuming human control as possible is put in place to keep us all calm in
the face of the forces of nature. The way river bodies, dam bodies, and water bodies
are described in engineering reports is all about soothing us, making us feel good. It
can also be a read as an ongoing plea and prayer to the river – to the water bodies –
to stay calm and nice, to behave well, to do as the human bodies tell Julevädno, and,
to keep it to a dance, albeit sometimes a bit wild, but never worse than a fierce pol-
ska. All in all, it reminds much of the words spoken by Erik Olsson Rim, saying that
fettering Julevädno is ungodly. Putting the water bodies into shackles is to challenge
god, nature, and nature forces. Changing the language regarding how it is described
will not help. The Julevädno is already constantly getting back at the human bodies
fettering the river’s body. And all that the human bodies can do is to continue to
perform their prayers through scientific writing, measurements, and constructions,
reinforcing the dams, operating the gates and power plants. The dance continues.
The Julevädno was never really tamed; the Julevädno is merely being gentle for the
time being. I hold my breath and plead with the Julevädno to remain nice for some
decades more. I plead with the dam walls to remain safe. I urge the operators and
decision makers to behave well – to continue their meticulous work of keeping us
safe. I write to the Swedish government stating: “No! You may not put more pres-
sure on the Julevädno, or the river will get back at us all.”40
Acknowledgments The author would like to thank the editor for taking on the work with this
exciting and inspiring volume, which made me reconsider how to think and discuss hydropower
dams and rivers; Peter Viklander for checking the technical details; all informants; Agneta
Silversparf and my mother for valuable details on our family history; the Body/Embodiment group
40
As new mining projects are now allowed just next to the Julevädno dams, putting more pressure
on the dams in Julevädno, I actually write to the Swedish government, to regional authorities, and
to the power company, urging them to be careful. But this is another story.
at the Centre for Gender Research, Uppsala University, and the sibling group at Women’s, Gender
and Sexuality Studies Program at Northeastern University, USA; Ann Grenell for proofreading
and valuable suggestions; peer reviewers for comments, suggestions, and encouragement; and
financers of my research project making this possible – Swedish Research Council (2008–2010;
2010–2012) and FORMAS (2012–2015).
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May-Britt Öhman is Lule/Forest Sámi of the Jokkmokk–Lule River/Julevädno region. She is

member of the board of the Sámi association Silbonah Sámesijdda and was member of the board
of the National Association of Swedish Sami (SSR) 2011–2015. She is also a deputy member of
the Swedish Sámi Parliament since 2013 and member of the editorial board of NAIS, Native
American and Indigenous Studies Journal as well as chair of Uppsam, the association/network for
Sámi related research in Uppsala. Öhman holds a PhD in History of Science and Technology,
2007. Öhman has been affiliated with the Centre for Gender Research, Uppsala University, since
2009, leading the research projects: “Situated perspectives on the hydropower exploitation in
Sápmi” (The Swedish Research Council 2009–10); “DAMMED: Security, Risk and Resilience
around the Dams of Sub-Arctica”; and “Rivers, Resistance, Resilience: Sustainable futures in
Sápmi and in other Indigenous Peoples’ territories” (FORMAS 2012–2015).
Toxic Skin and Animal Mops: Ticks
and Humanimal Vulnerabilities
Jacob Bull
Abstract This chapter draws attention to bodily boundaries between species of

bacteria and the bodies of ticks, pets and humans, examining how ‘spot-on’ treat-
ments for protection against ticks and fleas are used to protect human and compan-
ion animal bodies, relationships, and spaces from the threats of parasites. Such
threats, it is argued, are controlled on the bodies of pets through the creation of
‘toxic skin’ that comes to serve as a protective boundary between human bodies and
spaces and the threats of parasites. Suggesting that the parasitic relation can be used
as an analytical tool for engaging with the politics of multispecies codependencies,
the chapter addresses how parasitic relations challenge notions of human exception-
alism and the integrity of bodily boundaries. It demonstrates how spot-on treat-
ments respond to such challenges by drawing lines through and around relations
between human and non-human-animal bodies premised on the priority of particu-
lar bodily perspectives and ways of relating. The chapter concludes with the consid-
eration that ticks, in spite of being an unwelcome parasite conceptualised and
experienced as a threat, may be seen as the companion species par excellence as
they bind together and are bound with a multitude of other species.
Introduction
Ticks are small, blood-sucking arachnids. They are easily overlooked and uncharis-
matic. Indeed their presence is rarely perceived until after they have begun to bur-
row into one’s skin in search of the nourishment mammalian blood provides. Their
discovery raises emotional responses such as disgust and repulsion, often leading to
physical violence as they are plucked from the skin and killed in a variety of
mechanical and chemical ways. This might seem to be the limit of the tick/human
interaction, but ticks can also carry diseases, such as TBE (tick-borne encephalitis)
and Lyme disease (Borrelia), that can ‘infect’ human bodies in serious and even
fatal ways. At an individual level, violence is often met with violence, but ticks also
cause wider anxieties, both personal concern and national immunisation
J. Bull (*)
Centre for Gender Research, Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden
e-mail: jacob.bull@gender.uu.se

82 J. Bull
programmes. This chapter looks at how different ‘threats’ are played out in the
meeting between viruses and bacteria, people, ticks and pets. In particular, it exam-
ines how ‘spot-on’ treatments for protection against ticks and fleas are used to pro-
tect human and companion animal bodies, relationships and spaces from the ‘threats’
of parasites. The aim is not to assess how ‘real’ the chemical, biological and cultural
threats are, but how risks emerge and are responded to. By so doing, the chapter
looks to examine how these risks and responses contest or cement wider human-
animal relations. The chapter begins with a discussion of the construction of the
threats ticks pose. It goes on to question how these arachnids fit into wider defini-
tions of ‘the parasite’. Turning to the products and processes involved in ‘spot-on’
treatments for pets, the chapter examines how threats are controlled on the bodies of
companion animals through the creation of ‘toxic skin’ and how animal bodies are
used to protect people and domestic space from the material and imaginary threats
of parasites. The final sections question who and what are created through these
processes of care taking.
To illustrate the narratives around pet care in relation to external parasites, the
chapter draws on material used to advertise Frontline and Frontline Plus, two lead-
ing ‘spot-on’ treatments for the protection of pets from fleas and ticks. This material
is used for illustrative purposes. It does not seek to be representative of the plethora
of products and complex attitudes to parasites, but by focusing on the leading brand
in this area, it does represent prominent elements in the discourse and an introduc-
tion to the issues. Focusing on TV adverts from the USA, UK and Sweden (all of
which are available on the respective websites or from the author),1 different narra-
tives emerge around a common theme of protection and domesticity. The first advert
(from the USA) begins with an animated view of the hair of a pet, passing through
the strands of hair, the viewer encounters two fleas. We are asked ‘ever wonder what
is behind two fleas?’ the answer we are given is the next generation and then ‘count-
less more’. The animation pans across an uncountable number of fleas, ticks and
flea eggs. Then three green warriors, who on the one hand are indistinct, but clearly
draw on representations of ninjas, appear. These three warriors then proceed to
‘annihilate’ all the fleas, ticks and eggs using a variety of weapons. Once the killing
is done, the view pans out to a male vet reassuring a female dog owner, who then
leaves through the clinic where we see several other people (predominantly white)
and their companion animals waiting to see the vet. We are told that Frontline is the
number one choice of vets for their animals. Throughout this advert, there are very
clear gendered, classed and raced narratives of what makes expert knowledge and
understandings of pet care and welfare. Further, the militarised discourse is highly
emphasised. While the product is called Frontline, it draws on ideas about warfare
that are highly ‘postmodern’ where there is no clearly defined front. Instead, the
‘enemy’ is generally hidden within the terrain of the pet’s skin and, therefore, the
1
www.Frontline.com/ (USA) http://uk.Frontline.com/Pages/default.aspx (UK) http://Frontline.
se.merial.com/html/play/index.asp (SWEDEN). The adverts described have or will probably be
replaced. Unfortunately, due to copyright restrictions, the images cannot be reproduced here; how-
ever, screen grabs are available for illustrative purposes from the author.
Toxic Skin and Animal Mops: Ticks and Humanimal Vulnerabilities 83
domestic space. In this, it reflects the changing narratives and realities of contempo-
rary warfare, which has seen a shift from cartographically determinable sites of
conflict that were predominantly ‘rural’ or at least removed from areas densely
populated with civilians to more vague conflict zones often in urban contexts where
the ‘enemy combatant’ is less easily defined.
The Swedish film is less spectacular. It begins by listing (with illustrations) the
situations where pets ‘protect’ (skydda) people – when you are scared (young girl in
a thunderstorm), sad (woman crying on the sofa), from bad habits (dog eats man’s
cake) or stressed (man stressed at his computer). The film continues and the viewer
is told that with ticks and fleas, it is you who protect them. The film while drawing
on clear gender stereotypes – women are emotional, while men are stressed or a
danger to themselves – emphasises a reciprocal relationship drawing on ideas of
social responsibility. The British campaign has neither the military overtones of the
US commercial nor the social responsibility model of the Swedish film. It does
however call people to ‘protect the pet and home you love’ and then supports an
additional website called ‘hug your pet’ where people are encouraged to upload
pictures of their companion animals, get training tips and recommendations on
products. The subtext – to love your companion animal, to make them huggable,
you must treat them with Frontline.
The final clip (USA) shows an interview with a late middle-aged woman, sitting
in an armchair with her white dog who we later discover is called Pickles. The floral
wallpaper, the heavy bouquet of flowers and the standard lamp are all indicative of
a ‘prim and proper’ domestic space. The woman then explains how if she is not
completely satisfied with the Frontline product, the company will send an expert to
her home to treat the problem. This gives her ‘great peace of mind’, because [in an
aggressive tone] ‘no flea messes with my Pickles’ [she addresses the dog in a high
pitched voice] ‘do they honey?’ Aiming to be amusing, the advert is playing on
ideas of the eccentric single old lady whose closest and most successful relationship
is with her companion animal(s). The brunt of the joke being the woman who fails
to fit into norms of ‘family’.
All of these examples have the clear message – protect your loved ones and your
home from the lurking threat of fleas and ticks. What then are the threats that ticks
carry?
Threats and Species Boundaries
Ticks are possible carriers of various diseases such as TBE and borreliosis (Lyme
disease). Lyme disease, a result of an infection with the Borrelia burgdorferi bacte-
ria, is widespread. Lyme disease is relatively common in America, Europe and Asia
and is often (though not exclusively) spread by ticks. It is not transmitted by all
species of ticks or by all ticks of the vector species. Outbreaks are often localised
(Armstrong et al. 2001) with threats being played out in a dynamic geography,
which brings people and ticks in contact with other host species and individuals
84 J. Bull
operating as ‘reservoirs’ within a locality (Steere 1994). Symptoms are varied and
complex, often misdiagnosed (Steere 1994) and overdiagnosed (Shapiro and Gerber
2000). People with early onset Borrelia may experience influenza-like symptoms,
fever, fatigue headaches and muscle pain (Rizzoli et al. 2011), often accompanied
by a spreading ‘bull’s eye’ rash. Later consequences for people not diagnosed ear-
lier include meningitis and arthritis (Rizzoli et al. 2011). However, Borreliosis, and
especially early onset Borreliosis, can be treated by a course of antibiotics, and
while serious, perception of risks associated with Lyme disease can be exaggerated
in areas of high tick populations (Armstrong et al. 2001) leading to what Shapiro
and Gerber (2000) described as ‘Lyme anxiety’. But exact figures for incidence are
difficult to assess due to the wide distribution of the disease and difficulties in
diagnosis.
According to the World Health Organization,2 TBE is ‘a serious acute central
nervous system infection which may result in death or long-term neurological
sequelae in 35–58 % of patients. The fatality rate associated with clinical infection
is 0.5–20 %’. Symptoms include headaches, fever, nausea and vomiting and aver-
sion to bright lights. There is no cure. It is a serious issue in Europe with between 5
and 10 thousand confirmed cases each year (Fritz et al. 2012). Indeed, it is consid-
ered one of the most significant viral-pathogenic threats to humans (Barret et al.
2003). A widespread immunisation programme (not always State funded) has been
established in countries such as Austria, Germany and Sweden and countries where
it is considered endemic (Kunz and Heinz 2003). This vaccination is developed
from mice brains and chicken embryos, tested on mice, grown on egg protein and
stabilised with human albumin, the primary component in blood plasma (Barret
et al. 2003). The vaccine demonstrates how ‘human’ responses to threats are often
a multispecies meshing bringing together bodies from several different species (see
Haraway 2012, for a discussion of the role of horses in the hormonal treatments of
people and dogs).
It is not only through vaccination that other animals are involved in this relation-
ship. It has been suggested that the tick-borne encephalitis virus (TBEv) flows not
only between hosts through ticks, but as it flows through the bodies of host animals,
it passes across membranes to circulate in milk (Balogh et al. 2012). Indeed,
Holzmann et al. (2009) and Caini et al. (2012) highlight how human infection can
occur through the consumption of unpasteurised milk. Thus, a single tick bite on a
dairy animal could have significant implications for human (and animal) health and
wellbeing, as TBEv flows through bodies, across boundaries and into systems of
production and consumption. The issue of pasteurisation reducing the risk of TBE
infection could pose further challenges for industries producing dairy products
(such as cheese) using ‘traditional’ practices or regionally specific techniques.
What both the milk and vaccine demonstrate is how the tick ties humans together
with other species. It links together people with other mammals, some of which are
infected with TBEv. At the same time, ticks run through milk and into systems of
production and consumption. Moreover, ticks instigate the meeting of mice,
2
http://www.who.int/immunization/topics/tick_encephalitis/en/, accessed 3/5/11.
chickens and people in attempts to resist the ‘threats’ they pose. This tying together
of different species is not limited to ticks; many vaccinations and medical products
draw humans together with other animals, but with ticks, there is another dimension
in the way that it connects to the companion species also called pets.
Many of the diseases ticks are vectors for also threaten pets.3 Indeed, the skin of
pets is a common meeting space for people and ticks. Pfeffer and Dobler (2011)
observe that dogs are more likely to contract TBE than their human counterparts
and how dog walking can increase encounters with ticks and therefore TBE. Thus,
pets influence the frequency of human encounters with ticks and bring in a further
aspect of care in the human-tick dynamic. The issue of multispecies care is dealt
with in the later sections of this chapter, but first, it is important to question how
ticks fit into wider understandings of parasites.
Like Borrelia, and all vector-borne diseases, the tick-borne encephalitis virus
(TBEv) flows in a triangle of infection between infected and uninfected ticks and
hosts. Ticks feeding on an infected host become infected and may then pass the
virus on to the next host. However, unlike Borrelia and indeed most, if not all, bacte-
rial or viral infections, it is not named after a specific virus or bacteria, nor is it
named after a particular person involved in initial diagnosis (e.g. CJD), neither a
place (e.g. Lyme disease) nor a social group (e.g. Legionnaires). Further, as TBEv
does not only affect ticks and so does not fit into the raft of diseases that are named
after the species or group that are most affected by the disease (e.g. bovine TB).
Instead of any of these naming systems, the TBE virus is named after the vector that
passes it between different hosts – the tick. The tick, therefore, is doing something
here in the construction of risk. The connection to the way that ticks feed on blood,
and not exclusively human blood, wakens a whole raft of anxieties about blood
intimacies, human exceptionalism and the integrity of bodily boundaries. These
anxieties reflect the way that ‘[p]arasites affirm the openness of bodies, they under-
mine the integrity of all beings’ (Van Loon 2000), that is, the parasite emphasises
the co-constitution and commonality of bodies rather than the bounded differences.
For these ticks, species differences do not undermine the nutritional qualities of
blood. Blood from a variety of animals fulfils the tick’s requirements; in this,
humans are not unique. Further, the fluids that were destined to nourish human flesh
and processes are redirected into tick bodies. Thus, ticks pose challenges in terms of
bacterial and virus infections, but they also disrupt ideas about ‘the human’ and all
of the ideological assumptions on which it is based. The ‘threats’ of ticks therefore
are neither natural nor social (Beck 1989), imagined nor material and human nor
animal; they are always ‘hybrid’ (after Whatmore 2002). The ‘natural’ threat of
TBEv and Borrelia is tied up with wider emotional responses to parasites.
3
Although I recognise that the term pet is a problematic term, it is used here to avoid confusion
between companion animal and companion species, which is dealt with towards the end of the
chapter.
86 J. Bull
Parasitic Definitions
The origins of the word parasite lie in the Greek, referring to an uninvited guest (or
more literally, someone who eats from your table) who is relatively nonthreatening,
a drain on resources rather than a threat to life. This, coupled with early scientific
understandings of parasites that suggested they were degenerating into lesser organ-
isms and moving down the Scalae Naturae, could be described as a human contempt
for parasites (Zimmer 2000, 115). From this contemptuous view, the fear has grown
and is exemplified by the emergence of chemical protection such as Frontline or
indeed the development of vaccination programmes. Zimmer suggests that under-
standings about how parasites operate, and what they can do to human and animal
bodies and lives, have developed so the fear has grown (2000, 117). But rather than
superseding the contempt, I would suggest that it adds layers of complexity, and the
contempt remains. As van Loon Notes, the way that the term ‘parasite is directed
against groups within (human) society is demonstrative of the way that fear and
contempt combine in powerful ways. Jewish people during the holocaust’ (van
Loon 2000), immigrants, those on social security payments, and more recently,
bankers, have all been described as parasites. What then is a parasite – on what is
our human fear and contempt based?
Zimmer notes that:
the word [parasite] is slippery. Even in scientific circles, its definition can slide around. It
can mean anything that lives on or in another organism at the expense of that organism.
[…] Scientists themselves, for peculiar reasons of history, tend to use the word for every-
thing that lives parasitically except bacteria and viruses [emphasis original]. (Zimmer
2000, xi)
On first reading, ticks seem to fit neatly into this definition. They live parasiti-
cally. They live on another organism at the expense of that organism. But what
organisms do not live at the expense of other organisms – even autotrophs that pro-
duce their own nourishment do so by consuming resources that could have nour-
ished others. Yet there remains something troubling about ticks, parasites. On one
level, it may be about proximity – living in or on another organism – ticks are clearly
in an intimate proximity to the host animal. However, while ticks spend between
30 min and 15 days (according to species, life stage and sex) feeding on a host
(Kaufman 2008, 171), the life cycle of a tick may last several months, years or
decades and yet only involve three blood meals. Such sporadic feeding questions
the physical proximity of ticks as definitive of a parasitic relationship (as opposed
to a predator).
Drisdelle (2010) also emphasises the difficulty of defining parasites, but in con-
trast to the emphasis of proximity offered by Zimmer, Drisdelle focuses on the mode
of relating between parasites and other animals stating that: ‘parasites are an odd
and exceedingly diverse assortment of life forms that defy generalisation: essen-
tially their actions define them’ (Drisdelle 2010, 1). These actions are harmful – and
become the way that parasitisms are defined in relation to mutualisms or commen-
salisms.4 The mechanism of feeding – sucking blood from a host – is clearly active
in defining ticks as a parasite. It is fair to say that ticks like parasites have ‘a different
way of feeding’ (Serres 2007). A major thrust in Serres book, however, identifies
how this mode of eating, i.e. consuming that which others have made, or ‘something
for nothing’, is present throughout human relations from the territorial processes of
declaring ownership to the processes of exchange which underpin economic rela-
tions. These ‘actions that define’ parasites are therefore ubiquitous in many if not all
species and social settings. However, this action-based definition opens up possibili-
ties that are less bounded. The definition offered by Zimmer foregrounds organisms
and proximity. Extending this slightly, Drisdelle’s focus is less about a species,
group or individual defined by its life in proximity, but rather about actions; parasit-
ism is a condition of emergence rather than a condition of origin.
The third definition of parasites on which I focus suggests ‘parasitology is the
study of symbionts’ (Roberts and Janovy 2009, 2). This symbiotic gesture does not
imply a problem-free, or mutually beneficial relationship, rather it emphasises the
complex ways of relating that constitute parasitic meetings. We could, following the
post-human tradition, suggest that this symbiotic relating is also indicative of all
life – as Haraway (2008) observes we are all multispecies ‘knots of coshaping’.
Thus, parasitic relations should not be considered as only detrimental or problem-
atic. The close symbiosis involved in host-parasite relations can be hugely creative;
indeed, they can be considered fundamentals to life.
Through the late twentieth and into the present century, a quiet revolution chal-
lenged the dominant, neo-Darwinian paradigm in evolutionary theory. Rather than
a theory reliant on mutations within individuals, these alternate perspectives high-
light how evolution occurs through close associations, defined as ‘symbiotic,’
between pre-existing ‘species’ (Sapp 1994). Parasitisms, mutualisms and commen-
salisms emerged as central foundations in speciation and evolution (Margulis 1981).
For example, free-floating microbes were incorporated into other cells to form the
life-sustaining organelle chloroplasts (for plants) and mitochondria (for animals).
Beyond the cellular level, the relation between the Hawaiian Bobtail Squid
(Euprymna scolopes) and the luminescent bacteria Vibrio fischeri allows the squid
to be camouflaged against the stars of the night sky. These intimate associations are
not only ‘out there’ in the marvels of ‘nature’, but are intimately ‘inside’ human
bodies. Symbiotic relationships are in our cells, in the microbes that allow the diges-
tion of food and for us to physically and immunologically develop, and embedded
in the genetic couplings that have shaped our evolutionary lineages. Thus, parasitic
relations do not fit into neat distinctions; they force us to question ideas of proxim-
ity, agency and power in Humanimal relations.
4
Mutualism refers to two or more organisms in close association where both organisms benefit
directly – a prime example is the union between nitrogen-fixing bacteria and root nodules in legu-
minous plants. Commensalism is used to refer to organisms in close association where one organ-
ism benefits with no direct cost to the other. The mutualism, commensalism, parasitism distinction
becomes less significant when considered in relation to longer time frames, and given the more
dynamic understandings of parasitism described in this chapter, this distinction becomes less
significant.
88 J. Bull
Through this section, I have outlined the various constructions of parasites. The
first is embodied by particular organisms, characterised by proximity and a clear
notion of the ‘threat’. The second is more relational – about the actions and relation-
ship between individuals and groups – but the threat remains. The last is the broadest,
most generous and, I would suggest, the most productive way of thinking about para-
sites because it turns the parasitic relationship into a critical tool, an analytical refrain
for engaging with the politics of multispecies codependencies. This symbiotic focus
engages the creative elements of parasitism by recognising the role that parasitisms
have played in the evolution of life and, unlike the first two definitions, does not hold
narrow, externalised, understandings of ‘threats’. At the same time, and like Drisdelle’s
definition, it holds parasitism as a condition of emergence – that it allows particular
beings to develop in particular ways through particular relationships – rather than
predetermined by geography or species. These three formulations of parasitism are
useful when considering the different responses to ticks in Frontline. The following
two sections discuss how the actions of ticks are resisted on the skin of pets, through
toxic skin, and how the multispecies proximities within the domestic space is regu-
lated by animal mops. The chapter will then return to the symbiotic notions of parasit-
ism to examine who and what is created/excluded through these responses to ticks.
The Frontline of Defence: Creating Toxic Skin

and Animal Mops
As mentioned earlier, the threats posed by ticks are not limited to humans. Spot-on
treatments are a broad response to all of these threats (rather than targeting specific
diseases such as through vaccination). While spot-on treatments are a general
response to significant but loosely defined threats, the advertising material and the
mechanisms by which the products operate draw on particular ideas about parasites
and the threats they pose. The metanarrative of these products, as exemplified by
Frontline and Frontline Plus, revolves around narratives of safety – protecting the
pet (and therefore the owner) and allowing them to occupy a variety of spaces inside
and outside of the home without the risks of tick bites. To achieve this safety,
Frontline creates what I have termed Toxic Skin and Animal Mops. The former
engages with the parasite as relational and defined by actions, the latter with the
spatial dynamics (proximity) of parasite bodies.
Toxic Skin
The US Frontline website describes Frontline as ‘the #1 choice of veterinarians

when it comes to combating both fleas and ticks.’5 The same page claims it is suit-
able for puppies and kittens from 8 weeks of age, breeding, pregnant and lactating
5
http://Frontline.us.merial.com/prd.asp, accessed 11-11-11.
animals. It is non-systemic (meaning it is not distributed through the bloodstream);

rather it forms a layer that kills parasites through contact. But the product is located
at one specific point on the pet from where it is spread over the body. ‘It concen-
trates into the sebaceous glands of the skin and is constantly replenished over the
pet’s skin and coat. This “store” gives the product its prolonged efficacy – even after
bathing, swimming and grooming.’6
What Frontline does is create a layer of toxicity across the pet’s skin. This con-
trasts with vaccination programmes as it is an attempt to deny the porosity of the
body creating a barrier to infection rather than a resilience to infection. This chemi-
cal barrier approach is not limited to Frontline nor only pets – mosquito repellents
work on a similar principle forming a chemical layer (often DEET based) over the
skin to prevent insect bites – but in contrast to insect repellents, Frontline is some-
thing which is lived with for long periods of time. Unlike insect repellents, it uses
the mechanisms of the skin (the flows of oils from sebaceous glands across skin and
hairs) to distribute and replenish itself over a long period. Frontline creates more
than a barrier. Frontline is about creating toxic skin.
Toxic skin at its most basic is the dynamic relation between the biochemical and
mechanical aspects of the skin (such as oils and glands) and the poisons of the
chemical product. It should be noted that this is not contra to the ‘natural’ operations
of the skin. The skin is already a hostile site. The thickening of dead cells, hairs,
feathers, nails and claws all offers mechanical and chemical protection. Equally, the
oils, chemicals and microbes that proliferate the skin perform similar roles as they
create a hostile potion. In this regard, the skin is already a conflict zone between
‘inside’ and ‘out’. Thus spot-on treatments can be considered as a prosthesis,
extending the capabilities of the skin to respond to the world in ways which it could
not previously. However, this is a conscious, if not necessarily, reflective decision to
add poison to the skin of another being. This toxicity is not embodied by the human
caretakers in this pairings but by the pet. It is toxic in that it is a poison directed at a
small group of organisms (ticks and lice), but it has implications for other species,
as well as affecting different dogs differently.
The main active agent in Frontline is fipronil, but spot-on treatments also include
cyphenothrin, phenothrin, permethrin and other pesticides. While fipronil is not a
particularly threatening chemical in comparison to treatments based on organophos-
phates, Cox (2005) does highlight the diverse dangers to pets, people and wider
ecologies. Initial tests suggested that there were few dangers associated with
fipronil. The USEPA Memorandum in 1998 suggested that deaths7 associated with
the use of Fiprinol were, in the majority of reported cases, a consequence of misuse
or compounding factors (USEPA 1998, 4). Equally, a Pesticide Action Network UK
paper (Tingle et al. 2000) also reports relatively low threat to both dogs and cats and
humans from using fipronil-based products. The report does however highlight the
risks to aquatic organisms (2000, 14) and pollinating insects, (2000, 16) and another
6
http://uk.Frontline.com/products/spot-on/Pages/How-FRONTLINE-Spot-On-Works.aspx ,
accessed 11-11-11.
7
9.9 % of reported cases in cats and 3.3 % in dogs with a total reported cases = 316.
90 J. Bull
USEPA (2000) Memorandum highlights the potentially fatal risks to other pet spe-
cies (e.g. rabbits), though none of these risks should emerge through use as directed.
Controversy still surrounds the use of spot-on treatments such as Frontline. A
general report on spot-on pesticides highlighted the risks for dogs, which included
dermal, gastrointestinal and nervous system damage (USEPA 2010a, b). Most cases
were mild (symptoms which resolved rapidly, usually skin, eye or respiratory irrita-
tion), but deaths were also recorded with all products. What is also evident in the
report is that the specificity of testing on particular breeds (e.g. beagle) fails to rec-
ognise different breed resilience to chemicals. Equally, the greater incidence in dogs
weighing 10–20 lbs8 suggests dosing levels are more critical in smaller breeds. This
is further compounded by the greatest number of reports being associated with
mixed breed dogs. In the report, it is suggested that this is a consequence of the
numbers of mixed species breed dogs. However, the report also notes that in inci-
dents with cyphenothrin products, the top 5 most popular dogs in the USA only
accounted for 8 % of the reported incidents (USEPA 2010c). An alternative reason-
ing, therefore, could also suggest that the cultures of dog breeding which shape
particular dogs’ bodies create categories dominated by the statistics of the five most
popular breeds. Less common dogs and mixed breed dogs that deviate most signifi-
cantly from categorical norms and ‘test breeds’ are at higher risk. This further
underlines how risks are not merely ‘abstract’ or purely ‘social’ risks but material
and embodied, as risk emerges from the ‘nature’ of bodies and the cultures of
breeding.
Toxic skin then is not only a toxic gesture to particular parasites, it also affects
other species and different breeds and bodies of cats and dogs. It draws on ideas of
parasites as defined by their actions (feeding on blood) and responds to this ‘vio-
lence’ with chemical ‘warfare’ (following the advertising). But this toxicity brings
with it a different set of problems for different bodies. In this way, spot-on treat-
ments and their toxicities are pharmakons, both cure and poison, reducing certain
threats and creating others. What these reports suggest is that fipronil, cyphenothrin
and the other chemicals used in spot-on treatments do pose threats. These threats
like the diseases ticks carry can be serious, even fatal, but equally, incidence is rela-
tively infrequent. The risk for individuals is shaped by the deviation from guidelines
for use, misuse, ‘compounding factors’ and how the bodies of pets fit into the cultur-
ally defined notions of ‘dog’ and ‘cat’. But this is not the only way that spot-on
treatments shape human-animal relations.
Animal Mops
One of the espoused benefits of using Frontline is that it is persistent – it does not
just kill fleas and ticks on the pet at the time of treatment but any that land on the pet
in the following weeks will also be killed. Indeed, treated pets can be used to treat
8
4.5–9 kg.
infested areas. It is recommended that pets are constantly given access to infested
areas so that parasites that hatch after initial treatment find their way onto the pet
and are then killed. In this regard, the body of the pet is used as an animate mop,
which, like the sebaceous glands in the skin, continues to mobilise the chemicals
within the infected area.
This mop control is not a response to encounters with specific ticks but an attempt
to deal with the lurking presence of parasites. Indeed, all of the adverts described
above use this idea of lurking threat. The first uses the image of generations of para-
sites massing in an unruly hoard. The second and the hug your pet website obliquely
implies that ticks are everywhere and so companion animals require this protection.
The third draws on the persistence of fleas within the home. These images of the
hoard, the invisible necessity and the persistence justify protection that goes beyond
the specific encounter with ticks and encourages the mop approach. The fact that the
adverts are reminiscent of many detergent, or antibacterial product, adds greater
emphasis to the idea of the mop approach and ties Frontline more closely to ideas of
cleanliness both in terms of bodies and in the domestic space. This spatial aspect,
the lurking presence in the domestic space, connects to the idea of parasites in terms
of physical proximity, and really brings out the understanding of parasites as unde-
sirable bodies – creatures with whom we do not want to share our lives and spaces.
It should be noted at this point that this is not a call for ticks not to be killed,
removed or otherwise discouraged or a suggestion that spot-on treatments are fun-
damentally ‘wrong’. It is clear that humans govern ecologies based on concepts of
care. Agriculture requires animal caretakers to defend particular species against the
threats of others, be they predators, competitors or diseases (Theodossopoulos
2005). Indeed, the presence of ectoparasites is an indicator of neglect when welfare
is assessed. Thus, caring for animals, for pets, includes the removal (or prevention)
of parasites. The social responsibility within this is twofold – first, to ensure those
animals in our care are free from disease and suffering. Second, there is a wider
social responsibility to protect others – by protecting the individual, you are indi-
rectly protecting others by reducing the incidence of parasites, and consequentially,
the health and welfare of society at large is protected. In this regard, it echoes vac-
cination programmes as it is through the collective effort of all individuals that the
welfare of both individuals (particularly human) and the (multispecies) community
as a whole is ensured.
Extending this issue of welfare and parasites, Hatley (2011) observes entire con-
servation agendas can be based on the ‘management’ of ‘pest’, ‘competitor’ or
‘predator’ species – for example, and to focus on ticks, the removal of these ecto-
parasites has been a component of the conservation policy for the black rhino
(Miller et al. 2007). Thus, it is clear that care for one species, group or individual
means ‘taking care of’ – by which I mean reducing, removing or destroying – oth-
ers. Practices of care therefore are practices of ordering – prioritising species and
emphasising particular (anthropocentric) needs over others.
I would suggest, however, that the ‘mop approach’ goes beyond welfare of the
companion animals concerned, to imply a need to regulate the domestic space. The
website ‘hug your pet’ mentioned above and the third advert make this clear. Not
92 J. Bull
only does Frontline allow the welfare issues of parasites on companion animals to
be avoided, it implies that in order for a companion animal to be a legitimate part of
the domestic space, to be huggable, it has to be free from not only the presence of
parasites but the possibility of parasites. The unruly possibilities of cohabiting with
other species and the unwelcome guests who might wander in with a dog or cat
should be eradicated or at least minimised. This point fits neatly with Belk’s (1996)
idea about how animals are ‘civilised’ in an effort to make them more suitable to
cohabit with humans in human spaces. But it also implies a certain prioritising
about who gets to be included in the home and occupy the position of ‘pet’. There
are several common companion animals that are not commonly considered as ‘hug-
gable’. Animals such as birds, fish and reptiles all commonly find themselves in the
position of ‘pets’ but would not be considered ‘huggable’. This is not to suggest that
such creatures cannot or do not show affection nor that their corporal presence is not
important but that modes of relating with these species are not captured within the
huggability of the Frontline campaign. Thus, spot-on treatments draw lines through
and around human-animal relations that are premised on particular ways of relating
and involve particular bodies.
Toxicity, Boundaries and ‘Good Life’
Hinchliffe et al. (2012) demonstrate how much biosecurity policy is premised on

policing a boundary around particular communities or ecologies. This policing
comes in the form of technologies, regulations and processes that attempt to create
and maintain a border between ‘good life’ on the inside and ‘threats’ on the outside.
This closing in of ‘good life’ resonates with the spot-on treatments as response to
the threat of the parasite in terms of action. Toxic skin, by bringing together phar-
maceutical technologies, the oils and glands of the skin, and the poison itself, cre-
ates a boundary that closes in the body of the dog (and all the accompanying
microbes and less-threatening parasites) as good life and excludes ticks, other ecto-
parasites and various other organisms. This can also be scaled up to understand the
processes of animal mops – i.e. creating a space where the ‘good life’ of pets and
people can exist and parasites are excluded.
This boundary making has implications for life. Hinchliffe et al. (2012) go on to
show how boundaries conceptualise the ‘inside’ as the norm that is under threat
from all that is ‘outside’. Following Garret (1994), they highlight the embedded
power in this boundary making where the threat ‘even if aided and abetted by a
globalised network remains an arrival at ‘our’ door, from an elsewhere. The
elsewhere is then the target object for new borderlines, reproducing logics of colo-
nial and economic power’ (Hinchliffe et al. 2012, 7). The border control against
parasitic acts and parasitic proximities embedded in the spot-on treatment approach
reflects this ever-widening circle of human control as new borders are created to
push back the threat and exert further power over bodies and spaces. This expansion
is further emphasised by policies that attempt to target other host species within an
ecosystem (e.g. lowering deer populations Dagens Nyheter, 30 July 2011; Uppsala
Nya Tidning, 13 August 2011). Similarly, the widening circles of power and control
are clearly evident in the warfare approach of the advertising for Frontline. The
Frontline name asserts both the boundary and the consequential need for policing,
but the postmodern feel to the material takes us beyond the front into the unruly
spaces that must be controlled in order for safety to be ensured. The representations
of the clinic in the US advert and the Swedish material highlight the gendered and
raced elements of exactly who and what are being saved. And if we were in any
doubt, the UK website emphasises the species-specific nature of these protective
boundaries.
Attending to and extending these species and gendered elements of this bound-
ary making, Susan McHugh has shown how gender and sexuality are tied up in
representations of animals but that the sexuality of animals is rarely engaged. Where
issues of sexuality are engaged, the ‘linkages of wild animal and heterosexual
human sex edge out queer configurations of domestic relations within and across
species’ (2011, 119). This is part of a discussion about how discourses on both sides
of castration and neutering of pets within US culture implicitly draw on heteronor-
mative, monogamous couplings between humans and thereby avoid the complex
interspecies intimacies that constitute sharing domestic space with other animals.9
By acknowledging these intimacies in conjunction with the Frontline advertising
material, we must recognise that the boundaries drawn around the norm do not only
reproduce logics of economic and colonial power, they also make statements about
reproduction.
As McHugh notes within the ‘spay, neuter save’ campaigns, the mutilation of
companion animals is an attempt to control, if not remove entirely, the seemingly
(from certain human eyes) promiscuous sexuality of cats and dogs even if they are
saved from the ‘ultimate punishment administered to their unwanted brethren’
(2011, 117). The deaths in shelters that ‘promiscuous sexualities’ would inevitably
lead, resonate with deaths that occur as a consequence spot-on treatments, in at least
two ways. First, if we return to the discussion of chemical toxicity, it shows how one
burden of toxicity is borne by some individuals (pets), to the detriment of others
(such as bees, fish, rabbits and ‘non-conformist breeds’) and to the benefits of oth-
ers, particularly humans. Second, given that blood meals are necessary for the
reproduction, indeed length of blood meal can affect fecundity, there is a clear pri-
oritising of mammalian reproduction and life over that of invertebrate life. The
narratives of the ‘hoard’ in the US advert demonstrate the fear of the rapid reproduc-
tive capacities of ticks and fleas, a fear that, if we follow McHugh, reflects and chal-
lenges entrenched ideas about sexual difference (2011, 119). Further, it demonstrates
how the processes of othering play out along lines of kin and kind (see Hernstein
Smith 2004).
9
This is not to attend to the transgressive and usually illegal acts of beastiality, but acknowledge
the social-, economic-, personal- and care-filled intimacies of choosing to live with other species
(see Rudy 2011 for a discussion of this point).
94 J. Bull
While companion animals are not always ‘family’ in terms of surrogates for
human children or partners, they are companions. I do not want to reduce the diver-
sity of relationships between people and pets; what I do want to point out is that as
issues of huggability highlight, in care taking practices, we do secure spaces and
species that reproduce in human terms. In this, I want to extend McHugh’s (2011)
argument to suggest that in comparison to insects or arachnids, for example, dog
sexuality is relatively tame. Indeed, the stages of sexual reproduction, from cou-
pling, through to live birth following an internal gestation, with offspring nourished
by milk followed by a period of dependency during infancy, are a normative expec-
tation for animals in both species in the setting of contemporary society. What this
all demonstrates is how normative assumptions about sexuality and species, and
race and gender, and economic and colonial power, are woven into responses to
parasites.
Parasitic Topologies
To this point, I have focused on how, through toxic skin and animal mops, spot-on
treatments attempt to close in ‘good life’ and how such mechanisms and approaches
are reliant on understanding parasites in terms of proximity and action. But as men-
tioned earlier, such ideas offer poor ways of understanding parasites. Similarly,
Hinchliffe et al. (2012) continue their critique of biosecurity policy to show how the
complexities involved undermine the spatial assumptions of boundary policies. The
dominant boundary approach relies on a simplistic, apolitical, fixed and completely
flat understanding of space. The premise being that geometric space can be divided
up and kept separate. Using several examples from the agricultural industries, they
show how boundaries are practically impossible and rarely ‘secure’ all of the time.
Indeed, boundaries rather than separating the inside and outside operate as conduits
and contact points (Hinchliffe et al. 2012, 5). Moreover, through the examples, they
demonstrate how vulnerabilities come about through the system as, for example,
changes in farming practices and the closing in of animals create the conditions for
certain threats to emerge (e.g. Campylobacter, relatively unknown in the 1970s,
emerged as intensive chicken production creates the perfect niche for its develop-
ment). Consequentially, they call for a more nuanced understanding of the geogra-
phies involved in biosecurity, away from a geometrical space to a topology approach
that does not consider proximity only as a linear measurement but as an ever-
changing knot of relations that bring organisms and technologies in to contact in
different spaces, ways and temporal settings.
The topological approach offered by Hinchliffe et al. (2012) resonates with the
symbiotic understanding of parasitism highlighted above. The topological approach
emphasises the relational elements of infection, how capacities for ‘infection’
emerge from within the system and the bringing together of spaces and threats that
at one moment seem distant and the next are folded into the here and now. Similarly,
the symbiotic definition of parasites is inherently relational, emerging through
actions and histories and bringing together bodies and species in ways that cut
across lines of species and taxonomic associations – mammalian blood nourishes
both humans, dogs and ticks.
Turning all this to ticks, dogs and people, we share long social histories. As
Haraway (2003, 2008) shows, humans and dogs have shaped bodies, societies, land-
scapes and probably even genomes together. Given these long histories, it is not
remarkable that we are susceptible to some of the same diseases. We are both mam-
mals after all. The shared evolutionary, social spaces, locales and heritages create
the conditions for this ‘threat’ to emerge. Equally, the toxic response, to bound the
human-dog relationship in layers of chemicals to protect spaces and bodies, stems
from the same kinship ties. That is to say, the networks of care and welfare are
structured to protect those animals with whom we have closest ties, act in ways that
we comprehend most easily, share histories and proximities – closing in good life
and excluding others.
In contrast, the parasite forces us to challenge these histories and proximities, to
look for alternative topologies. Where the previous sections highlighted the species
and other specificities of boundary making through spot-on treatments, this section
looks towards a topological approach. Parasitic topologies are a reconceptualisation
of issues of proximity and relations to parasites that, following the symbiotic defini-
tion of parasites, force us to emphasise the creative (for better or worse) elements of
parasite relations specifically and human-animal relations more generally. What
then are ticks creating in their quest for mammalian blood?
Conclusions: Knotting Species Parasitically
Nourishment is an important theme in understandings of Humanimal relations.

Haraway points out in her discussion of companion species (2003, 2008) the nour-
ishing etymological origins of companions in the Latin cum panis (with bread)
(2008, 17). The concept ‘messmates’ that she offers has a similar heritage. ‘Mate’,
through the Dutch Nordic and Germanic languages, links to the old English gemetta
meaning guest at table (OED). It is a small step to the ‘uninvited guest’ of the ety-
mological roots of the word ‘parasite’. Indeed, as human blood, which was directing
nutrition to the cells of the human body, is redirected into bodies of ticks, the shar-
ing of food between human and tick, host and parasite, is literal. As ticks, pets and
people are tied together through blood intimacies and nourishment, ticks can be
considered as companion species par excellence; they bind (and are bound up with)
many species. This chapter has documented how ticks in the context of infection
and disease herd different individuals into relationships that they might not other-
wise have chosen. The vaccinations link people, mice and chickens. The potential
presence of TBE in milk becomes an argument for increased pasteurisation. And
TBE and Lyme disease connects people and dogs with other mammals in particular
locales. But ticks also are instrumental in the boundings and bindings of people and
pets through spot-on treatments.
96 J. Bull
Ticks are a source if not the cause of the responses that create toxic skin and
animal mops. This bounding binds people and pets in ways that have species- and
breed-specific toxicities. The variable toxicities operate as a way of domesticating
and civilising the bodies of dogs so that they may occupy human spaces. This is a
shaping of animal bodies to make ‘good citizens’ that fit within the neo-liberal
model with all its colonial, raced, gendered, sexuality and species norms. While
critical perspectives lead us to challenge such structures, with parasites, things can
be a little more hazy. As Haraway notes, training and disciplining dogs, give them
the freedom to coexist in urban areas where unfettered freedom would likely result
in accidental or legally imposed deaths (2003, 46–7). Thus, the dog created through
spot-on treatments might similarly be considered as creating bodies and beings that
can safely exist in society. But dogs are already on the inside, already ‘good life’.
Thus, though never welcome, ticks are tying dogs and people in ever-tighter knots,
reproducing particular bodies and Humanimal relations. Consequentially, ticks
raise questions about bodies and vulnerabilities on material and imaginary levels
but within this is also a question about how we theorise Humanimal relations and
draw boundaries around different animals and species.
Whereas pets are both companion animals and companion species, ticks are only
companion species. As ‘generally speaking one does not eat companion animals (or
get eaten by them)’ (Haraway 2003, 14), ticksare not companion animals. This dif-
ference means that ticks also do something to theories of understandings of human-
animal relations. While the inter- and trans-disciplinary area of Animal Studies has
increasingly documented and theorised Humanimal encounters, they have predomi-
nantly dealt with large, charismatic, land-dwelling mammals. In negotiating the sig-
nificance of animals in our seemingly human social worlds, such theories have
focused on animals we humans want to share our lives with because they provide
companionship, food, clothes, medical products or are the focus of conservation
projects. In ticks, we have a different question: a creative companion that knots its
fellows together in ever-tighter knots, but that is never welcome.
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Jacob Bull is a social and cultural geographer, based at the Centre for Gender Research, Uppsala
University, Sweden. He is currently coordinator of the Humanimal Research Group and has previ-
ously conducted research on the cultures and practices of recreational fishing and worked on the
EU Welfare Quality Programme into Farm Animal Welfare. More recently, he has explored issues
around gender and animals in dairy farming, and his current project brings animal studies perspec-
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of ticks in our more-than-human worlds.
Mothering with Neuroscience in a Neoliberal
Age: Child Disorders and Embodied Brains
Linda M. Blum and Estye R. Fenton
Abstract The chapter examines the proliferating use of neuroscientific discourse

to frame child development through qualitative data from two sources: narratives
from mothers of children with invisible social-emotional-behavioral or brain dis-
abilities (such as ADHD) and recent best-selling parenting advice literature – sug-
gesting the phenomenon must be understood in the context of neoliberal privatization.
With a critical perspective on the naturalization of invisible child disorders and the
inequalities to which they tend to give rise, it is suggested that the explosion of
neuroscientific discourse results from the increasing prevalence of such disorders
within the neoliberal context in which mothers are held accountable to take personal
responsibility to prevent or offset them. These mothers do not represent an excep-
tion but are rather becoming the new norm for what is increasingly expected of all
“good” mothers, the task of taking personal responsibility for their children’s brains.
Further, the authors argue that anxieties are intensified by, and exclusive maternal
responsibility used to veil, the lack of public responsibility for economic change
and the likelihood of precarious futures for children facing a shrinking middle class
and a Walmart economy. In this sense, the new discursive focus on the child’s
embodied brain and mothers’ building such brain power may evidence a reconfig-
ured ideal of the child who will build the nation’s future productivity in an innova-
tion and information-based economy.
Introduction: The Medicalization of Childhood Meets

the Neoliberal Brain
In the contemporary USA, as in many other nations, postindustrial, information-age

restructuring and the decline in secure middle-class jobs create new anxieties for
our children’s futures. At the same time, at least in the USA, diagnoses burgeon for
children’s invisible brain disorders while public responsibility for child health is
increasingly pushed back on to mothers through neoliberal discourses of “personal
L.M. Blum (*) • E.R. Fenton

e-mail: l.blum@neu.edu; estye.fenton@gmail.com

100 L.M. Blum and E.R. Fenton
responsibility.” Of course, as countless feminist scholars have argued, maternity

was long the basis of women’s citizenship, and mothers were perennially entrusted
with material and symbolic responsibility for child health and the future vigor of the
social body.1 Such gendered citizenship subjects mothers to changing historical
forms of disciplining and notions of children’s “needs,” both shaped by new oppor-
tunities and new anxieties. In the rise of the industrial economy, mothers of the
aspiring classes gained status by turning away from religion and kin to the rising
prestige of “modern” medical science to guide the rearing of productive citizens
(Apple 2006; Blum 1999; Litt 2000) and in the post-World War II era, to that of
mental health professions as well (Hays 1996; Riesman 1948). Thus, the rising
medicalization of childhood since the 1980s centered on diagnoses of invisible
brain dysfunctions – attention deficit and attention deficit hyperactivity disorders
(ADD, ADHD); mood and emotional disorders like depression, anxiety, and bipolar
disorder; as well as the autism spectrum disorders – conveys cultural messages of
new sources of authority and anxiety and revises earlier “scientific” or “intensive”
mothering ideals. This chapter, which represents one piece of a larger project, inves-
tigates mothers’ increased reliance on neuroscientific authority to rear children for
the information age, a context in which better, New Economy opportunities assume
a hypercognitive, brain-centered character – and yet, children’s brains appear more
fragile, more easily unbalanced than in the past, while families contend with greater
odds of downward mobility.
A variety of cultural and social science scholars support such a historically spe-
cific explanation for burgeoning child disorders. Foucauldian sociologist Claudia
Malacrida, for example, has noted in research on mothers raising children with
ADHD in the UK and Canada that “increasingly broad categories of the not-normal
child” represent new forms in which “normative and disciplining institutions” of
psychiatry and medicine reinscribe maternal accountability (2003, 101, 24). From
another direction, scholars less engaged with gender and maternal citizenship such
as Davi Johnson Thornton (2011) and Victoria Pitts-Taylor (2010) similarly find
neuroscientific authority proliferating because it takes the neoliberal imperative to
individualize responsibility for health to its fullest extreme. Thornton and Pitts-
Taylor in this sense each extend Nikolas Rose’s notion that as good citizens, we are
increasingly obligated to optimize our lives and productivity at the molecular level,
particularly through ever improving our own brain functioning and “neurochemical
selves” (2007, 188). We seek to expand, however, on Rose’s and Pitts-Taylors’ brief
suggestions – along with Malacrida’s central insight – that this neoliberal impera-
tive is importantly gendered and not simply about self-governing biocitizens
because normative mothers are increasingly charged to take on responsibility for the
molecular level of their children’s future productivity (e.g., Rose 2007, 24, 29).
Glenda Wall (2004, 2010) has also suggested that “intensive motherhood” (from
Hays’ 1996 study of mid-twentieth-century advice) is increasingly linked to opti-
1
See, for example, Kerber 1980 on the USA, Koven and Michel 1993; Yalom 1997 for compara-
tive work on the USA and Europe, and the work of Yuval-Davis for a global perspective (1997,
1989).
Mothering with Neuroscience in a Neoliberal Age: Child Disorders and Embodied Brains 101
mized brain development and neoliberal privatization of child outcomes.

Surprisingly, however, Wall, in theorizing this maternal responsibility for the neo-
liberal brain, ignores the burgeoning of invisible child disorders and how these pro-
voke New Economy anxieties and “brain-based healthism” (Thornton 2011, 2).
Additional Foucauldian scholars have recently brought children’s brain-based
disorders to the fore. Majia Nadesan, Mark Osteen, and Stuart Murray, in astute
cultural analyses of the expanding autism spectrum, each suggest a “dialectic of
biology and culture” in which children’s “eccentricities” or “idiosyncrasies” only
come to matter in the current New Economy context (Nadesan 2005, 9, 49). In pre-
vious historical eras, according to Nadesan, such differences “escaped the medical
gaze altogether” (2005, 9, 49, 70–71). For such authors, rising autism rates are both
real and metaphorical, expressing current fascination with those possessed of “an
alien form of intelligence” and prowess in the technical, mathematical, and engi-
neering fields fueling New Economy innovation (Nadesan 2005, 128; Murray 2008;
Osteen 2008). (Such arguments also broaden the historical focus of those, like soci-
ologist Peter Conrad (1976, 2000) and bioethicist Carl Elliott (2003), who criticize
the over-medicalization of childhood for pathologizing underperformance and fuel-
ing the profit mongering of Big Pharma, with little attention to the import of New
Economy and neoliberal imperatives.) We aim to engage this emerging conversation
on the neoliberal brain and the collusion between neoliberalism and neuroscience in
the public imagination at this historical moment. As Pitts-Taylor makes clear, this
inherently political topic “need[s] ethnographic attention” (2010, 640) to uncover
what sorts of mothers and children are wanted for our future society – and what the
“brain” itself has come to mean.
We rely on two sources for such “ethnographic attention”: We first draw from
Blum’s oral history interviews with mothers of children diagnosed with the most
common mild to moderate invisible disabilities, listening for how these mothers
employed or relied on neuroscientific brain talk.2 We then analyze many of the new-
est best-selling American parenting advice books which emphasize advances in
neuroscience and growing insights into brain development. Because recent advice
literature highlights the intricacy and fragile balance of the brain’s neurochemical
infrastructure, it underscores that much can easily go wrong and amplifies fears of
the abnormal. Therefore, we argue that the mothers whom Blum met do not repre-
sent exceptions or deviants, only immersing themselves in “brain talk” to amelio-
rate a child’s troubles. Rather, we argue that such mothers may be the new norm, the
vanguard, for what may be increasingly expected of all “good” mothers: the fluency
to take personal responsibility for their children’s brains, and thus, in a time of
privatization, to bear the weight for a child’s future. Put bluntly, in place of collec-
tive responsibility for disordered opportunity structures, we may prefer to see only
women’s individual responsibility for disordered kids.
2
Blum conducted lengthy in-depth interviews with 48 diverse mothers raising children with
“invisible special needs” between 2002 and 2008 (described in more detail in Blum 2007, 2011,
2015).
Mothers’ Narratives of “Brain Blame”
In the USA, the number of children diagnosed with invisible disabilities has been
steadily increasing, with the federal Centers for Disease Control reporting about
9.5 % of school-aged kids counted with ADHD, another 1.14 % (or 1 out of 88) on
the autism spectrum (Akinbami et al. 2011; CDC 2010), and smaller numbers with
other mood-emotional or behavioral disorders (Harris 2011, 2006). Yet any bio-
medical consensus surrounding these controversial and diagnostically uncertain
disorders finds the causes multiple and interactive.3 One synthesis of the extant
research on ADHD might well extend to the range of social-emotional-behavioral
brain disorders: “the causes of ADHD are not completely clear [… but it appears to]
involve various combinations of neurological, genetic, cognitive, and other factors,”
including “events that compromise the nervous system before, during, and after
birth” (Mayes et al. 2009, 26, 30). Both biomedical research and its media coverage
have been buoyed by breakthroughs in our ability to “see” into the brain provided
by functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and positron emission tomogra-
phy (PET). Paradoxically, this spread of the language and imagery of neuroscience,
as well as notions of causality and prevention, may be getting ahead of what is actu-
ally known, out-claiming the caution or hesitancy in the research itself.4 At the same
time, discussions of brain development have become increasingly prevalent in par-
enting advice, with recent titles on US best-seller lists5 including Mind in the Making
(Galinsky 2010), Brain Rules for Baby (Medina 2010), and Welcome to Your Child’s
Brain (Aamodt and Wang 2011). In addition, discussion of brain development has
increased in recent editions of long-standing bestsellers, including that of the
American Academy of Pediatrics. While many such books focus on the earliest
foundations for healthy brain development and neuronal functioning, increasing
attention also turns to the adolescent brain, extending parental responsibility – as
3
Diagnostic or clinical uncertainty was found by Rafalovich in in-depth interviews with practitio-
ners (2005). There are no blood tests, brain scans, or other clear biomarkers for these disabilities,
with most assessed by some combination of clinical interviews and questionnaires filled out by
parents and teachers.
4
On flaws, overclaiming of what we know, see, e.g., Gazzaniga 2011, Who’s in Charge? Free Will
and the Science of the Brain, an account by a neuroscientist. Also Lehrer 2008, “Of Course I love
you and I have the brain scan to prove it: We’re looking for too much in brain scans” Boston Globe,
Aug 17, K-1; and Fine 2010, Delusions of Gender: How our Minds, Society, and Neuroscience
Create Difference. Some of this literature is also summarized by Thornton, who places great causal
weight on the impact of the visual imagery itself (2011).
5
This is based on the Amazon.com best-seller list for parenting titles. While this list, constructed
hourly, carries methodological limitations, it is the only best-seller list available that separately
indexes parenting titles. (The New York Times now only indexes all advice/self-help literature
together, though What to Expect when You’re Expecting is frequently near the top.) Our analysis
was therefore based on periodic checking for books that consistently appeared on the Amazon.com
top 100 parenting books in the latter six months of 2011 (actually the list includes less than 100
titles because each format, hardback, paperback, e-book, audio book, etc. is counted separately).
the authors of Welcome to Your Child’s Brain announce in their subtitle – “From
Conception to College” (Aamodt and Wang 2011).6
We suggest, to reiterate, that this explosion of “brain talk” occurs as American
families know they launch children into a world of precarious opportunities, with a
few employed at Google while the great majority find work at Walmart. Ordinary or
even good school achievement thus no longer suffices, and enhancement of brain
“hardwiring” becomes a way to think about what both typical and atypical children
“need” to confront the New Economy.7 But what about the fathers in such families?
Certainly, fathers also care deeply about their children, worry about their uncertain
futures, and have become more invested in caregiving than in the past.8 In fore-
grounding mothers, we rely on extensive scholarship finding that the primary
responsibility for children, while never biologically based (Ruddick 1990), remains
highly gendered in both material-practical and discursive dimensions. US sociolo-
gist Annette Lareau, for example, attempted to include both fathers and mothers in
her influential multi-method study of childrearing, but she discovered that only
“rare” single fathers actually organized and coordinated children’s day-to-day lives
(2000). Much research also finds that having a disabled child, whether with visible
or invisible impairments, only exacerbates this gender division.9 Blum also discov-
ered mothers of diagnosed children reporting such patterns, with single and married
mothers describing fathers’ relative lack of involvement with children, schools, and
medical specialists (2015). Just as important, cultural representations of invisible
disability, increasing in films, television, memoirs, and media accounts center on
mothers’ primary accountability, whether for harm or for healing. Cultural study
scholar Stuart Murray, for example, notes that in this newly emergent genre, it is the
mother with sufficient “love, energy, effort, and commitment” who redeems the
family shattered by a child’s troubles (2008, 161).
In contrast to fathers, who, at least according to the mothers Blum came to know,
were reading few relevant books, the mothers often discussed going to bookstores
and libraries to research their children’s diagnoses, with several bringing up specific
works (and this without prompting). This seemed to underscore that popular
6
Also, on the teenage brain: Newman, Judith. 2010. “Inside the Teenage Brain.” Parade Magazine
November 28. (Retrieved June 2011: http://www.parade.com/news/2010/11/28-inside-the-teen-
age-brain.html).
7
This postindustrial economic transformation in the USA was well underway and only deepened
by the current recession, as much prior to 2008, the nation’s largest employer had already shifted
from auto-manufacturing giant General Motors to big-box discount-retailer Walmart. Our New
Economy is also characterized by the rise of job contingency, the erosion of the stable employment
contract, unrelenting attacks on organized labor, and with the increasingly rapid circulation of
global capital, the increased movement of jobs offshore. Yearly reports from economists Mishel,
Bernstein, and Allegretto provide important information on the shrinkage of good jobs (2007), and
for sociological analysis and synthesis prior to the 2008 banking crisis, see Smith 2001. Journalist
Rosin provides an interesting gendered account (2012).
8
Indeed, this topic deserves research and ethnographic attention of its own, including, as one
reviewer astutely observed, an analysis of how fathers might be represented as distinct from “par-
ents” in popular advice.
9
Summarized in Home 2002; also Gray 2003, Scott 2010.
parenting books do still carry influence amid 24/7 connectivity to the internet
(though mothers often utilized the internet as well) (Blum 2007, 2011, 2015).
Moreover, a large number, some 36 of the 48 with whom Blum spoke in depth, drew
specifically from neuroscientific vocabularies, with nearly all drawing from bio-
medicine to depict multicausal models of their children’s disorders.10 For example,
Euro-American never-married Cassie Mueller, highly educated, but living on mea-
ger income from part-time work, mentioned that she was in the midst of reading A
User’s Guide to the Brain (Ratey 2002) to better understand her young volatile son.
Charlotte Sperling, white, middle income, married, and mother of three nearly
grown sons, two of whom had diagnosed issues, announced that she was reading
The Adult ADHD Brain.11 Charlotte lamented that her oldest son spoke often of his
“bad brain” – and she referred to her own position in the family as “brain central”:
“Like I don’t have to be just my brain, I have to be the kids’ brains, but I have to be
my husband’s brain too… I am so tired of being everybody’s brain.” Here, she
seems to recast the brain as both at once embodied but disembodied, as some super
organ that controls the embodied family, but yet as replacing the consciously reflex-
ive or self-conscious subjectivity of the mind.
Later, Charlotte brought up additional advice books. Yet, her brief criticism at
the close of the next passage suggests contrasting images of the brain, with the
ostensible plasticity inviting privatized maternal intervention hitting the limits of
inherited genetic potential:
…when I read these books and they say — Well, there’s a great book … on developing a
high IQ in your child, it’s not the Goldman. Goldman kind of defines that. But then Shafer,
Lawrence Shafer, has this wonderful book. It takes you right from birth. I mean it’s incred-
ible, three months, how they should be responding at three months. And not to panic. But if
they’re not, you know, these are the kinds of things that will help … I thought, ‘Well that’s
great.’ But you know it’s really contingent on the parents having a high IQ … So that was
the flaw.
Charlotte importantly backtracked, however, returning to a neoliberal sense of

unrelenting, individual maternal responsibility, “You still have to manage the genet-
ics. I mean, you have to say, ‘Okay, this is what we’re facing, we need some com-
pensatory skills developed.’”
Jenny Tedeschi, a divorcing, Euro-American working-class mother with a teen-
age son, had much less education than Charlotte Sperling or Cassie Mueller, but like
them, she also understood her son’s issues as housed in the brain as a site of genetic
inheritance. This heritability, as Jenny related, may even be dangerous, and mater-
nal responsibility may extend to containing it. Jenny thus recounted how she would
dissuade her son from having biological children while denying her own “selfish”
desires for a second child who might suffer similar impairment. In the following
passage, Jenny in fact repeated the term “selfish” twice:
10
That is, none depicted “nurture,” bad parenting, or psychosocial factors alone as causing their
children’s troubles, as would have been typical in the mid-twentieth century (see Blum 2007,
2015).
11
This might have referred to a number of similar titles though we could find no precise match.
He [son] kept trying to tell me, “my brain is shutting down” … it’s something… you know,
in the brain… And it would be selfish of me to have another kid I think. Because I felt like
having one: but guess what? You might have this and how selfish – No way, no! And I’m
going to tell him [my son], I haven’t told him yet, but, “You’re adopting.” You’re not, he has
a 75 percent chance of his children having his issues, 75 percent! That’s a given. And he
meets a girl, I’ll tell them, “Don’t, don’t. Either go for genetic counseling or you adopt.”12
May Royce, a divorced, Afro-Portuguese, middle-income mother with one

young, volatile son, also revealed turning to advice books: “OK I’d gotten a lot of
books on attention deficit. My brother, for my birthday, gave me two books on atten-
tion deficit. I mean I was living and breathing this.” When her son’s volatility esca-
lated beyond the ADHD profile and specialists suggested possible bipolar disorder,
May was distraught and turned to additional books. Her explanatory account, drawn
from her reading, added another layer to the genetic depiction of the brain: that
these disorders involved “a chemical imbalance” in the brain, a problem with the
brain’s “chemical receptors,” a notion she relied on – as did many others in Blum’s
interview group – to justify the difficult turn to pharmaceutical treatments. In her
level of detail and repetition, May reveals defensiveness against historically persis-
tent disciplining binaries of valorous versus demonized mothers. Such binaries
might easily paint medicating a child with psychoactive drugs as selfish and lazy
rather than selflessly devoted (at other points in the interview, May revealed aware-
ness of such demonization on talk radio programs):
And I decided I was going to look at some holistic ways [to treat my son]. I got some books
about some holistic natural ways. I was against medication. I was actually against it. But
back to the library I went, and I got some books on bipolar disease and I got another book
called It’s Nobody’s Fault [subtitled New Hope and Help for Difficult Children and Their
Parents].13 And these books stand out, and I read this book, and this book helped me come
to terms… And it’s biological. It’s not emotional, it’s not some crock. It’s legitimate. There
are different chemical receptors that are just not right and need medication to correct. It’s
like diabetes. And so the book made me feel better that… I was going to have to medicate
[my son], that it was going to be okay. And that I was doing it to help him, because he
needed it. And that I had sought out the best, and I was questioning, and I was educated.
And you know, I wasn’t just doing this because I wanted to sleep at night!
Discussions of alternative treatments to medication, in fact, also ran through

many interviews – though most combined alternative techniques with psychoactive
medications. Lucia Santos, a married Puerto Rican mother with a son diagnosed
with ADHD, like several others, was trying to at least forestall the use of medica-
tions. She reported that she was reading about fish oil supplements and enthused
12
Several other mothers, like Jenny Tedeschi, blamed themselves for passing on heritable brain
disorders to their children. One highly educated single mother lamented: “I don’t feel guilty except
for the genes we each gave him” [Kay Raso]. Another [Lenore Savage] enrolled her son in a medi-
cal research study to better understand (in her words) the inherited “predisposition” for “neurobio-
logical disorder” among “children of parents with affective disorders.” But Jenny’s words, “… go
for genetic counseling” indicate another way in which popular notions of high-tech medicine may
go far beyond actual capabilities as there are no known genetic markers for the high incidence
brain disabilities as say for Down’s syndrome.
13
Koplewicz, Harold. 1997. Three Rivers Press.
that, “This teacher, a great, great teacher in the middle school, recommended fish
oil. It helps the brain … he recommended that before we talk about medication. And
I agree with him and I’m buying that.”
In addition to depicting brains as genetic and as chemical, many mothers
employed the language or metaphor of the brain as computer. Divorced Euro-
American Susan Atkinson, for example, described her unruly daughter’s brain like
“a desktop in that she has limited amount of space in short-term memory.” While
Susan was college educated, Rhonda Salter, a divorced mother taking night classes
for the high-school equivalency exam, drew on a similar vocabulary to describe her
youngest daughter: “Her learning disabilities aren’t behavioral,” she explained to
me. She has less “memory” and requires “imprints,” “like a CD holder” in the brain,
which, if you “just fill in all the slots… you can put it away” to store the “informa-
tion.” Both also, across the wide difference in their circumstances, combined the
computer metaphor with understanding the brain as chemical: Susan justified medi-
cating her daughter, “We do have chemical imbalances,” and Rhonda explained why
her daughter might need an antidepressant: “that’s just the serotonin landing in your
brain; that’s a chemical imbalance!”
Depictions of the brain were multilayered and intertwined for many. For exam-
ple, one of the few married, college-educated mothers to remain full time at home
in Blum’s research group (Colleen Janeway) was privileged to rely on a “pediatric
neuropsychopharmacologist” for “talk therapy” and medication treatment for a
troubled young son. Colleen shared what she had learned from this specialist:
It’s actually a wire, it’s described as a wiring. And it’s also described as like a right brain
dysfunction. So there are various theories… I think that the brain is a very, very compli-
cated thing, we all know that. And there is no one model brain. There just isn’t. So along
with this nonverbal learning disorder [that he] has … his intelligence level is very high …
But the problem is he has what doctors call a dysregulation anxiety disorder.
This depiction of a son’s brain as “a very, very complicated thing” employs the
computer metaphor of “wiring” with the “dysregulation” of neurotransmitting
chemicals and chemical receptors. But less-educated mothers also described com-
plexity, such as one African-American single mother with a high-school education
(Marika Booth). She began by describing her daughter’s learning and emotional
disorders as primarily genetic and inherited: “To me basically, I think it’s a heredi-
tary thing through our family … And I’m like, ‘OK, now this is starting to make
sense.’” She then added details of processing to explain why her daughter overre-
acted to even a mild reprimand: “I think it’s the way the brain’s hearing it and taking
it in.” Finally, she depicted something like a chemical and computer model to
explain her daughter’s learning differences: “She was a very bright child … but to
sit and arrange something the way it’s supposed to be arranged, she has that prob-
lem. Why is that? … I’m really trying to read a lot on that… because… there are
certain cells or nerves on the brain that if one doesn’t connect to the other one for
some reason, they’re not going to learn how to do that function.”
Finally, another affluent, married Euro-American mother [Judith Lowenthal],
also employed a multilayered understanding of the brain’s complexity: “The way to
help these kids is not by just giving them drugs,” though paradoxically she had done
just that, if in combination with alternative treatments. But Judith continued: “but to
really look at correcting some imbalance … [whether the] result of our diets, our
genes, who knows … [or the] interplay between the two … [this] revolution in psy-
chiatry [means that] the more we learn about the brain, the more we learn about
cells, the more we learn about neurotransmission and metabolism … and the neuro-
logical system.”
Just as Charlotte Sperling (above) had backtracked to reinsert maternal responsi-
bility, it is an irony of popular neuroscientific discourse that the bio-determinism –
as in the book that May Royce was reading – does not always translate to seeing a
child’s troubles as “Nobody’s Fault.” In fact, the mothers that Blum interviewed
speak in terms of “brain blame” – but also of mother blame recast from earlier
Freudian notions in terms now proximal or secondary to biology.14 And such proxi-
mal blame is in many ways consistent with neoliberal dictates, as it makes mothers
personally responsible for unrelenting efforts to ameliorate and cultivate brain
health and development. So, for example, mothers Blum came to know who were
well read in the inherited biology of their children’s disabilities nonetheless blamed
themselves for failing to pursue greater early intervention programs, for insuffi-
ciently challenging a child with learning disorders, or for any delay in patching
together the best possible array of specialists and treatments – and this despite limits
to her time or resources, nor to how fragmented and hidden such specialists might
be within dense bureaucratic locations. As Charlotte Sperling had so insightfully
put it, as if a dictate not just for herself, but now for all mothers, “You still have to
manage the genetics.”
Advice Literature: Know Your Child’s Brain!
Indeed, Charlotte’s dictate was precisely the first point we discovered in our scru-
tiny of recent best-selling parenting books: that is, that mothers today simply must
gain fluency in the advances of neuroscience. Put differently, we suggest that newer
parenting advice books – through their ubiquity, repetition, and sometimes striking
visual imagery – instruct that all mothers must master the new brain knowledge to
raise successful children in our competitive world. One must, after all, be ever vigi-
lant to maximize child outcomes as to also, the books explicitly remind, prevent, or
ameliorate the intricate genetic, neurochemical, and hardwired flaws leading to
learning and social-emotional disorder. As one guide instructs, “The new science”
demonstrates “exactly how significant our role is in the development of the child’s
brain” as all children, those with and without “disabilities and other special health-
care needs[,] … greatly benefit from close monitoring of early brain development”
14
Social scientists such as David Karp (2001), Claudia Malacrida (2003), and Ilina Singh (2004)
have all asked whether the “brain blame” explanations and the rise of biological psychiatry relieve
Freudian notions of “mother blame” (see discussion in Blum 2007, 2015).
(Shelov and Altman 2009, 156; our emphasis). The Amazon.com description for
another best seller (Parenting from the Inside Out) also signals the weighty new
maternal responsibility to employ neuroscience: “Drawing upon stunning new find-
ings in neurobiology and attachment research, [the authors] explain how interper-
sonal relationships directly impact the development of the brain” (our emphasis).
We found that forty percent of the books on the Amazon.com top 100 parenting
books either in whole or in substantial part emphasized such brain talk, with seven
of twelve (58 %) of the most general advice titles on the list included.
We included another volume not appearing among the Amazon best sellers
because it was an American Library Association public library choice, The Science
of Parenting: How Today’s Brain Research Can Help You Raise Happy, Emotionally
Balanced Children (Sunderland 2006). This work was particularly revealing through
its sheer exaggeration of the predominant discourse and imagery. For example, the
book features many more of the arresting colored diagrams and maps of the brain
glimpsed in other books, visuals which impress readers with the “reality” and
import of technoscientific advances. Yet it opens with explicit threats, pointing both
to the rise of child disorders and to psychopharmaceutical use:
What if you didn’t have the sort of parenting that enabled you to develop the capacity to live
life to the full? What if, because of this, you have been troubled by depression, or persistent
states of anger or anxiety? For centuries we have been using child-rearing techniques with-
out awareness of the possible long-term effects, because until now we simply could not see
the effects of our actions on a child’s developing brain. But with the advances of neurosci-
ence, brain scans, and years of research on the brains of primates and other mammals, we
no longer have the innocence of ignorance (our emphasis).
And just in case the full maternal and privatized responsibility was not yet clear:
“For several years, science has been revealing to us that key emotional systems in
the human brain are powerfully modeled for better or worse by parenting experi-
ences” (Sunderland 2006, 8–9; our emphasis). Even more pronounced, the author
cites that 2 of 100 kids in the USA use antidepressants, but promises that this is
avoidable – not by enriched, revitalized preschools, schools, community child and
youth programs, community child guidance health centers, or any other public sup-
ports for families – but by proper “brain parenting” (10); “Your approach to parent-
ing can dramatically determine whether or not your child’s brain systems and brain
chemistries are activated in such a way as to enable him to enjoy a rich and reward-
ing life” (20).
Beyond the imperative that mothers now speak the language of “brain blame,”
we might well ask how much in the content of this popular advice is really new after
a century of scientific motherhood. Indeed, some works specifically reiterate argu-
ments from the past quarter-century for “attachment parenting,” exhorting “parents”
to practice the extended breastfeeding and co-sleeping claimed to enhance psycho-
logical bonding. The first author of The Baby Book (Sears and Sears 2003), for
example, states: “I believe that attachment parenting promotes brain development
by feeding the brain the right kind of information” (14). Such advice, while not new,
does provide, however, a layer of biological undergirding or determinacy to the
“nurture”-based intensive mothering norms of the latter twentieth century (Hays
1996): “The more warm, unconditional, constant, and physically affectionate your
relationship is with your child, the stronger the release of opioids, oxytocin, and
prolactin in his brain” (Sears and Sears 2003, 188). Similarly, we found references
to enhanced neurobiology rather than merely the enhanced cultural capital resulting
from affluent mother’s “concerted cultivation” of their children’s verbal reasoning
(Lareau 2003): “Using choices and consequences with a defiant child will help to
develop her frontal lobes’ capacity” (Sears and Sears 2003, 171). Perhaps what is
also new is a heightened level of fear of causing neurobiological harm rather than
simply the poor emotional adjustment of the earlier era. For example, with less
attachment, not only high “cortisol and stress hormones” plague children, but also,
“Low dopamine and norepinephrine levels make it more difficult for a child to focus
and concentrate [… and] [l]ow serotonin levels are a key component in many forms
of depression and violent behavior” (Sears and Sears 2003, 43).
Similarly, as Hays (1996), Lareau (2000/1989), Griffith and Smith (2005), and
others have compellingly demonstrated, mothers at least since the early twentieth
century have been held accountable for children’s school achievement – and as
Lareau more recently suggests (2003), New Economy competitive pressures make
this a more demanding, continuous task. What new advice literature adds, we sug-
gest, is also a physiological dimension to this charge, and a picture of more daunting
consequences for maternal shortfall or failure. This is emphasized in Brain Rules for
Baby: How to Raise a Smart and Happy Child from Zero to Five (Medina 2010).
Noticing that “smart” precedes “happy” in this particular title, this (purported
research) finding leapt out at us: “Stress” not only may “lower your baby’s IQ,”
“inhibit your baby’s future motor skills, attentional states, and ability to concen-
trate,” but it may actually “shrink the size of your baby’s brain” (46, our emphasis)!15
The author, a noted social conservative, promises all will be fine if – following one
of the top 10 Brain Rules – you simply stay married. And, of course, his assumption
is unstated, in a gender-normative heterosexual union, “An infant’s need for care-
giver stability is so strong, he will rewire his developing nervous system depending
upon the turbulence he perceives” (58–59). Continuing, the author further employs
computer metaphors to advocate gender-normative intensive parenting: “Every
brain is wired differently […] Because of this individuality, I appeal to you to get to
know your children. That means spending a lot of time with them” (6). And: “Infants
come preloaded with lots of software in their neural hard drives, most of it having
to do with learning” – learning which of course mothers are responsible for (64).
The author instructs us to fear causing neurobiological harm, tying this to dire pros-
pects for our children’s future well-being and upward mobility: “Children from
divorced households are 25 % more likely to abuse drugs by the time they are 14.
They are more likely to get pregnant out of wedlock. They are twice as likely to get
15
And if you had any doubt of the scientific basis: “‘Brain Rules,’” the author underscores, “are
what I call the things we know for sure about how the early-childhood brain works. Each one is
quarried from the larger seams of behavioral psychology, cellular biology, and molecular biology.
Each was selected for its ability to assist newly minted moms and dads in the daunting task of car-
ing for a helpless little human” (Medina 2010, 2, our emphasis).
divorced themselves. In school, they get worse grades than children in stable house-
holds […] So much for Harvard (!)” (Medina 2010, 69–70).16
While less explicitly conservative and alarmist, NurtureShock: New Thinking
about Children, nonetheless sets out to instruct that “Small corrections in our think-
ing today could alter the character of society long-term, one future citizen at a time”
(Bronson and Merryman 2009, 6–7), with this character “equal parts brain fiber and
moral fiber” (7, our emphasis). The authors describe a series of teaching experi-
ments exploring brain plasticity; one in particular stands out, with a group of high-
schoolers: “The only difference between the control group and the test group were
two lessons, a total of 50 minutes spent teaching [the test group] not math but a
single idea: That the brain is a muscle. Giving it a harder workout makes you
smarter. That alone improved their math scores” (17). Yet, this plasticity reverts to
more deterministic terms: “it turns out that the ability to repeatedly respond to fail-
ure by exerting more effort [… is] more than a conscious act of will – it’s also an
unconscious response, governed by a circuit in the brain” (23–24). This leaves good
neoliberal mothers, if confused by such seemingly contradictory advice, to consult
other books on the Amazon list (perhaps those its algorithms suggest) to decode and
reassert the role of mothers in shaping such circuitry.
Because it consistently appeared on the Amazon list, we compared editions of
What to Expect when You’re Expecting, a national best seller since its emergence in
1988, for another indicator of the emergence of neuroscientific discourse. We dis-
covered that the extent of brain talk was much less pronounced than in other parent-
ing titles, perhaps because of the work’s sole focus on pregnancy. Nonetheless, the
volume’s fourth and most recent edition does mention disorders like ADHD, and it
addresses brain and neurological development, if in scattered and sometimes skepti-
cal references. A response skeptical to neuroscience, for example, appears in the
most recent edition in reply to a question rhetorically posed by an expecting mother
about playing classical music to her baby in utero: “Talking, reading, or singing to
your baby while in the womb (no amplification necessary) won’t guarantee a schol-
arship to Yale, but it will guarantee that your baby will know your voice at birth”
(2008: 248). This equivocal response – with its similar allusion to a prestigious US
“Ivy League” university and assured route to mobility as in Brain Rules for Baby –
is much more positive than discussions in earlier editions. The question itself did
not appear in the first edition, and authors of the second and third editions responded
harshly, dismissing the idea of enriching neurological development in utero as
“nonsense” (1996: 187, 2002: 218). Authors in the second edition had also added,
“Certainly, anyone who understands child development should be very wary of try-
ing to create a super baby, either before birth or after” (1996: 187); yet intriguingly,
this skeptical commentary was removed for the third edition.
Similarly, we consulted editions of the authoritative American Academy of
Pediatrics (AAP) publication Caring for Your Baby and Young Child: Birth to Age
16
Author Medina here invokes a set of largely spurious correlations demonstrated by family soci-
ologists to be actually caused by the poverty and financial strain faced by so many US single moth-
ers rather than by divorce itself (see, for example, Rutter 2009).
5 – also prominent on the Amazon top 100 list. In marked contrast to What to
Expect, the fifth and most recent edition AAP guide provides detailed advice for
stimulating brain growth at various ages, with the consistent emphasis on neurosci-
ence we found in the majority of general parenting titles (i.e., those not specialized
around particular issues such as pregnancy, sleep issues, diet, or toilet training). As
well, brain disorders had been discussed in earlier editions of the Pediatric
Academy’s manual, with a section on autism and autism spectrum disorders added
in the fourth edition and sections on ADD/ADHD present from the earliest editions
on.
Several of the more specialized parenting titles on diet and sleeping among the
top 100 also employed neuroscience, more like the AAP manual than popular preg-
nancy guide What to Expect When You’re Expecting. If this brain talk primarily
undergirded rather standard advice, authors also alluded to fears of neurobiological
harm. For example, Healthy Sleep Habits, Healthy Child warns in its introduction,
“we know how important healthy sleep is for the growing brain […] Sleep defi-
ciency in childhood may harm neurological development […] possibl[y]
contribut[ing] to school-related problems such as learning disabilities” (Weissbluth
1999, xix). Concern about brain disorder is interweaved with advice on nutrition for
older children in The Sneaky Chef: Simple Strategies for Hiding Healthy Foods in
Kids’ Favorite Meals, while also tied to prominent fears of obesity: “New studies
have even started to link mood and attention disorders with the lack of proper nutri-
tion, contributing to the rise in ADHD, depression, and anxiety. Doctors now have
to treat weight and nutrition-related illnesses in children that used to be seen only in
adults. Do you want your kids to be among the nine million children who are over-
weight or obese?” (Lapine 2007, 26). Intriguingly, the fear of low academic perfor-
mance, mental health challenges, and ADHD was also linked to fears of obesity in
the more general advice title Nurture Shock discussed previously: “Around the
world, children get an hour less sleep than they did thirty years ago. The cost: IQ
points, emotional well-being, ADHD, and obesity” (Bronson and Merryman 2009:
27). Again, this adds a physiological undergirding of more dire consequences to
rather old advice for intensive mothering. Yet such layering also serves to under-
score the fit between neuroscience and a culture of privatized “biomedical citizen-
ship” which accepts and internalizes the renouncing of public responsibilities for
health and welfare (Pitts-Taylor 2010, 649).
Vulnerable Children in Precarious Economic Times,

from Brain to Social Disorder
In addition to becoming an imperative for all “good” intensive mothers today, and
to adding dire levels of physiological consequence to long-standing maternal
responsibilities, we also discovered that neuroscientific discourse may thinly veil
parental anxieties for their children’s circumscribed or precarious economic out-

comes in light of macrostructural change. Above, we glimpsed these anxieties lurk-
ing (most likely for middle-class parents) in Brain Rules for Baby’s threatened loss
of entrance to Harvard – and in What to Expect, of hoping to increase the odds of a
scholarship to Yale. Moreover, the long-run, social implications offered in
NurtureShock to rebuild a prosperous, upwardly mobile citizenry – a citizenry with
“brain fiber and moral fiber” – clearly rely on the transformative ability of mothers
bent on “alter[ing] the character of society long-term, one future citizen at a time”
(6–7). Put differently, this is depicted as a largely privatized and individual under-
taking to which the public responsibility of the nation-state, whether its ability to
support families directly or to protect indirectly by reigning in corporate excesses,
is held little accountable – yet this privatized mothering also ironically is in the
service of the public interest producing the children required by and for its future
affluence. In terms of concertedly cultivating the brain’s plasticity – and accepting
proximal mother blame for potentially dire future consequences and precarious out-
comes – neuroscience colludes well with neoliberal ideology.
Such anxieties about the future amid harsh new economic realities were evident
in some of Blum’s interviews and, again, might underscore that mothers raising
invisibly disabled kids represent the vanguard of change rather than exceptions.
Several privileged mothers offered telling quips about the competitiveness of higher
education today similar to those in the advice volumes: one, contemplating her
exclusive responsibility to battle with local schools for special-education services,
sighed deeply: “I’m thinking, ‘Oh my god’ … But if that can be the difference
between her working at CVS and going off to college, I have to do it!”17 (Angie
Thompson). Similarly, affluent mother Colleen Janeway exclaimed to justify her
battles: “My son will either end up at MIT or working at Blockbuster!” What is also
so remarkable in these dark-humored quips is the awareness that US job growth is
largely concentrated at the bottom of the hierarchy, in minimum-wage retail and
service-sector jobs – and even these are insecure, as since the time of Blum’s inter-
views, DVD and film-rental chain Blockbuster has gone bankrupt, replaced by the
robots and servers of Netflix (see Ahmed 2011).
Vivian Kotler, a low-income, Euro-American single mother with a troubled bira-
cial daughter, was remarkable in another way as she drew from neuroscientific
understandings and the neoliberal notion of the plastic brain to think about not only
her daughter’s but also our society’s collective future. Though Vivian began with
what sounded like privatizing, anti-welfare rhetoric decrying kids who are “a drain
on society,” she then caught herself and turned to expressing the need for some kind
of shared responsibility. She began:
[T]he impact of these kinds of kids on society is monetarily tremendous. Not just my kid,
but others like that, kids like, my next-door neighbor has a severely autistic kid … I mean
that’s got to be a drain on society.
17
CVS is a large US chain of retail pharmacies relying heavily on a low-skill, part-time
workforce.
But here Vivian caught herself, perhaps considering her own reliance on public
assistance or her political beliefs:
And not that I’m saying there’s something horrible in that, but let’s try to prevent it in the
first place. Let’s study the mind. Let’s put our resources, a lot of resources there, so that we
can have the society, you know, with upward mobility.
And rejecting the onslaught of pharmaceuticals, Vivian also added: “The medi-
cations are given to correct the brain, but how can we start out with a good brain in
the beginning? … Let’s try to prevent it [impairment] in the first place.” Vivian’s
words here also illustrate fascinating slippage and tension in current notions of the
brain, whether imagined as embodied super organ or as the site of the mind and
subjectivity. Yet she does not seem to refer to studying children’s “deep interiority”
or reflexive awareness, but rather as Rose maintains, a flattened image of a func-
tional processing center (Rose 2007).
Yet Vivian also engaged in intensive privatized efforts to cultivate her daughter’s
development including the recent purchase of software packages designed for her
daughter’s specific combined disorders. Cognizant, just like the affluent mothers
above, of shrinking opportunities – as well as that any shared responsibility was
only a future pipe-dream – Vivian took full, personal responsibility: “I need to bring
her up to speed … because, as you know, this world, it’s very competitive. And if
you don’t have the edge in some way, and if I don’t do all I can for my daughter,
she’s going to lose out. And I don’t want her to lose out just because she has all these
issues!”
In Closing: States Adopt the New Brain Science?
Both the voices of mothers and best-selling parenting advice books demonstrate the
emerging authority of neuroscience to revise and reinvigorate norms of exclusive
maternal responsibility for an American culture beset by postindustrial retrenchment.
While much of this discursive shift is “private” or privatizing, two recent develop-
ments on a larger, institutional level may indicate the full potential for neuroscientific
and neoliberal collusion as nation-states see the need for greater brain power. State-
sponsored initiatives in 2011 in the USA and the UK both stress the imperative
responsibility of a child’s primary and earliest caregiver/s to optimize brain develop-
ment, linking this to social mobility and wider economic prosperity. In the UK
“Parenting Matters: Early Years and Social Mobility,” published in 2011 by the
think-tank CentreForum, was taken up immediately by Sarah Teather, Minister of
State for Children and Families under the Conservative coalition government.18 In
the midst of austerity measures, both British researchers and government have called
for “a national parenting campaign” to disseminate “key scientific concepts behind
the development of early brain architecture,” with such enhanced “architecture” the
18
See http://www.centreforum.org/assets/pubs/parenting-matters.pdf, accessed Jan 2012.
new basis for “increasing social mobility.” The desired “culture shift” endorsed is
thus profoundly neoliberal: it essentially makes mothers “brain architects,” respon-
sible for making the time at home on publicly funded maternity leave productive.
What is now required is not simply nurturing care, but a “Home Learning
Environment.” Quite conveniently, through their inevitable shortfalls or failures,
mothers – particularly of the working and lower middle classes – can then bear the
blame for rising inequality.
On a less centralized scale, we see evidence of such campaigns emerging in the
USA. In our (the coauthors’) home state of Massachusetts, for example, the public
service campaign “Brain Building in Progress” emerged from a public/private part-
nership labeled the “National Business Leader Summit on Early Childhood
Investment.”19 Similar to the UK campaign, “Brain Building in Progress” with its
nifty yellow highway-sign logo links early caregiving and optimized brain develop-
ment to future economic prosperity. On its website home page, just under the logo,
the banner headline declares: “This is a Sign of Future Prosperity for Everyone in
Massachusetts.” Smaller text explains, “The latest science shows that these early
experiences actually build the architecture of the developing brain […] Each sequen-
tial step lays the groundwork for […] a lifetime of learning, success and productive,
responsible citizenship. Brain building is an investment that yields high returns.”
Next to this is a photo of an attractive African-American woman reading to the
young child in her lap, with the tag: “Be a Brain Builder.” This links to additional
information such as this nugget: “Young children’s brains develop 700 synapses
(neural connections that transmit information) every second.” While broadly invok-
ing the responsibility of other community members – if mainly feminized teachers,
daycare providers, and other care workers, with a nod to taxpaying businesses – the
most important responsibility is clearly delineated to families and, thus once more,
to mothers.20
In short, the results of our analysis of mothers’ oral history narratives and of
popular parenting advice literature indicate, as Victoria Pitts-Taylor theorized, that
neuroscientific discourse and proliferating emphases on brain development are
deeply political and enmeshed in power relations (2010). We add that this is a pro-
foundly gendered process, visible not only through brain scans and new technosci-
entific imagery, but through the experience and understanding of mothers now
charged to manage, stimulate, and optimize each child’s neuronal growth and bear
the consequences for future economic outcomes. This adds further, important
dimensions to the notion of a self-policing “biomedical citizen,” a falsely de-
gendered construct, as is any gender-neutral notion of citizenship itself. Feminist
scholar Joan Wolf has concluded similarly that in a “neoliberal risk culture, [with]
a veritable ‘cult of personal responsibility’” “exaggerating personal control” over
health simply makes each mother totally responsible (2010, 144, 139). While this
19
See www.brainbuildinginprogress.org, accessed 10/21/11.
20
Davi Johnson Thornton chronicles this US discursive shift, which she labels the “baby-brain
movement” in detail; yet she ignores any gender analysis or the effects on norms of intensive
motherhood (Thornton 2011, 88–110).
conceals our need to critically visualize renewed public responsibility for children’s
health and well-being, it also conceals the gendering of these fragile, potentially
productive children. While beyond the reach of this chapter, proliferating brain talk
and burgeoning diagnoses are primarily aimed at boys and fragile masculinities (see
Blum 2015). Those who will excel in the innovation or knowledge-based economy
will surely do so on “brains over brawn” (e.g., Fitzerald 2012), but nonetheless, this
future productive citizen is envisioned as masculine, the science nerd, or technology
geek who will be the next Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, or Mark Zuckerberg (see also
Murray (2008), Nadesan (2005), Osteen (2008)). In his mid-twentieth-century clas-
sic The Lonely Crowd, David Riesman argued that the USA no longer needed the
inner-directed diligence or methodical qualities of those men who built the indus-
trial economy, but wanted instead productive citizens who were outer directed, ori-
ented to fitting in and moving up the corporate ladder (1948). Perhaps what is
envisioned now is a divide between the many with insufficient brain power who
must have had inadequate mothers and the few young men with quirky hypercogni-
tive excellence and the mothers, like those Blum interviewed, who concertedly
managed their neurobiological development.
Appendix
List of titles from the Amazon.com Top 100 Parenting Books, those consistently
appearing in periodic checking, latter half of 2011, which in whole or substantial
part employed neuroscientific discourse:
Aamodt, S., & Wang, S. (2011). Welcome to your child’s brain: How the mind
grows from conception to college.
Au, S., & Stavinhoa, P. (2007). Stress-free potty training: A commonsense guide to
finding the right approach for your child.
Bronson, P., & Merryman, A. (2009). NurtureShock: New thinking about children.
Chapman, G., & Campbell, R. (1997). The five love languages of children.
Eisenberg, A., Murkoff, H. E., & Hathaway, S. E. (1988). What to expect when
you’re expecting, (1st ed).
Eisenberg, A., Murkoff, H. E., & Hathaway, S. E. (1991). What to expect when
you’re expecting, (2nd ed).
Ekman, P. (2007). Emotions revealed, second edition: Recognizing faces and feel-
ings to improve communication and emotional life.
Ferber, R. (2006). Solve your child’s sleep problems: New, revised, and expanded
edition.
Fields, D., & Brown, A. (2011). Toddler 411: Clear answers and smart advice for
your toddler.
Furhman, J. (2006). Disease-proof your child: Feeding kids right.
Galinsky, E. (2010). Mind in the making: The seven essential life skills every child
needs.
Hogg, T., & Blau, M. (2006). The baby whisperer solves all your problems: Sleeping,
feeding, and behavior – Beyond the basics from infancy through toddlerhood.
Jana, L., & Shu, J. (2010). Heading home with your newborn: From birth to
reality.
Karp, H. (2008). The happiest baby on the block: The new way to calm crying and
help your newborn baby sleep longer.
Karp, H. (2008). The happiest toddler on the block: How to eliminate tantrums and
raise a patient, respectful, and cooperative one- to four-year-old.
Lapine, M. C. (2007). The sneaky chef: Simple strategies for hiding healthy foods in
kids’ favorite meal.
Louv, R. (2008). Last child in the woods: Saving our children from nature-deficit
disorder.
Medina, J. (2010). Brain rules for baby: How to raise a smart and happy child from
zero to five.
Meeker, M. (2007). Strong fathers, strong daughters: 10 secrets every father should
know.
Murkoff, H. (2011). What to expect the second year: From 12 to 24 months.
Murkoff, H., Eisenberg, A., & Hathaway, S. (2002). What to expect when you’re
expecting (3rd ed).
Murkoff, H., Eisenberg, A., & Hathaway, S. (2009). What to expect the first year.
Murkoff, H., & Mazel, S. (2008). What to expect when you’re expecting (4th ed).
Murkoff, H., & Mazel, S. (2008). What to expect: Eating well when you’re
expecting.
Sears, W., & Sears, M. (2003). The baby book: Everything you need to know about
your baby from birth to age two.
Shelov, S. (Ed). (2010). Your baby’s first year (3rd ed). American Academy of
Pediatrics.
Shelov, S., & Hannemann, R. (Eds). (1991). Caring for your baby and young child:
Birth to age 5 (1st ed). American Academy of Pediatrics.
Birth to age 5 (2nd ed). American Academy of Pediatrics.
Birth to age 5 (3rd ed). American Academy of Pediatrics.
Birth to age 5 (4th ed). American Academy of Pediatrics.
Shelov, S., & Altman, T. R. (Eds). (2009). Caring for your baby and young child:
Birth to age 5 (5th ed). American Academy of Pediatrics.
Siegel, D., & Bryson, T. P. (2011). The whole-brain child.
Siegel, D., & Hartzell, M. (2004). Parenting from the inside out: How a deeper self-
understanding can help you raise children who thrive.
Sunderland, M. (2006). The science of parenting: How today’s brain research can
help you raise happy, emotionally balanced children.
Weissbluth, M. (1999). Healthy sleep habits, healthy child.
Weissinger, D., West, D., & Pitman, T. (2010). The womanly art of breastfeeding.
La Leche League International.
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Linda M. Blum is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at

Northeastern University in Boston. She is the author of Between Feminism and Labor: The
Significance of the Comparable Worth Movement (University of California Press 1991), At the
Breast: Ideologies of Breastfeeding and Motherhood in the Contemporary United States (Beacon
Press 1999), and Raising Generation Rx: Mothering Kids with Invisible Disabilities in an Age of
Inequality (NYU Press 2015). She has been a Bunting Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute, has served
as elected Chair of the American Sociological Association’s Sex and Gender Section and as edito-
rial board member of Gender & Society and currently of Signs, and was honored to visit the Centre
for Gender Research at Uppsala University in Fall 2012.
Estye R. Fenton is a Ph. D. candidate in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at

Northeastern University. Her dissertation focuses on the changing nature of international adoption
in the USA, and Estye has also spent time in Guatemala researching adoption reform. Estye has
presented at a number of conferences on Guatemala’s adoption laws, the construction of childhood
and motherhood, and urban poverty in the USA.
Sexual Arousal, Danger, and Vulnerability
Fredrik Palm
Abstract Turning to the topic of sexual vulnerability, this chapter offers a critical
approach to a reductive naturalization of the functions of the human body. The
chapter approaches the phenomenon of sexual arousal in terms of a process of sen-
semaking or cognitive and discursive accomplishment. Through a discussion of the
different sexological accounts of James Giles, Robert Stoller, and Leo Bersani,
focus is placed on the dynamic of sexual arousal as oriented around the oppositional
pair of safety and danger. The chapter suggests that raising questions of safety and
danger offers a way of articulating arousal as a relation of power in which the very
boundaries of embodied subjectivity are at stake. In opposition to the predominant
naturalistic doxa according to which sexual arousal is seen as a natural or physical
phenomenon that only in a second step is framed by different discourses of regula-
tion, arousal must be understood as always already discursive, normative, moral,
and political. Shifting focus from an interrogation of how social norms and morality
restrict sexual arousal, the author instead contends that arousal is inherently moral
in so far as it reflects cultural beliefs about good and bad and feeds on specific moral
situations tied to particular sexual economies and structures of regulation.
Introduction: Social Theory and the Naturalization of Arousal
In my ongoing research on sex addiction I – a sociologist by trade – often struggle

with the way in which popular, therapeutic, and research discourses on sex addic-
tion approach the phenomenon of sexual arousal and excitement.1 Indeed, a tacit
agreement that sexual arousal is essentially a physical phenomenon seems to guide
the discourse as a whole, with the obvious consequence that its social, symbolic,
and ethical dimensions are seldom explored. If one frequently encounters talk about
sexual arousal in literature on sex addiction, it is thus only on rare occasions that this
obviously central phenomenon in sexual experience is given any theoretical consid-
eration relevant for social thinking. In order to counter this conceptual lack of sex
1
These two terms will be used interchangeably throughout this essay.
F. Palm (*)
Department of Sociology, Uppsala university, Uppsala, Sweden
e-mail: fredrik.palm@soc.uu.se

120 F. Palm
addiction discourse, it was suggested to me that I turn to the field of sociological

sexology for inspiration. Surprisingly, and somewhat ironically due to the social
theoretical ambitions of the field of sexology, however, the same physical definition
of arousal seems to inform much social scientific, sexological thinking on the topic.
And although sexology research regularly addresses and has addressed arousal,
such studies have mostly been guided by naturalistic terminology (Chivers 2005;
Giles 2008). Influential scholars like Havelock Ellis, or Masters and Johnson, for
instance, tended to reduce much of sexual desire, not least arousal and orgasm, to
their physical, observable expressions. This naturalistic approach still seems to be
the predominant one in the field, and if we momentarily turn to the field of Swedish
sexology, we might note how two recent collections about the state of sexology
exclusively consider arousal from the medical perspective (Plantin and Månsson
2012; Traeen and Lewin 2008).
This dominant view must however be contrasted with other developments within
the sexological field. Even though this essay is based on a perception that this natu-
ralized idea of arousal seems to organize its discourses in general, there have never-
theless been important efforts within sexology to approach in particular the cognitive
structures of arousal. In the 1970s, Helen Kaplan (1974) became one of the first
sexologists to point to the role of desire in the arousal process. However, insofar as
Kaplan mainly referred this desire to the early phases of the sexual process preced-
ing actual (i.e., physical) arousal, her analysis would anticipate an important feature
of those sexological models that started to arise in the 1980s and that tried to
approach the cognitive structures of arousal. While the following decades saw the
proliferation of various cognitive models suggesting a closer or more intimate rela-
tion between physical arousal, cognition, and emotion, cognition was still often
placed in the background of or as the background to arousal. One interesting exam-
ple of this theorization is Kothari and Patel’s model in which arousal is conceived of
as always embedded or, as they say, sexually grounded in interpretative structures of
meaning making (1989). These developments within the field of sexology clearly
pave the way for a social theoretical account of arousal, for instance, along the lines
of Simon and Gagnon’s popular account of sexual conduct and sexual scripts (1973).
In other words, the attention of cognition promises to open up a whole area of
research into the way in which the concrete experience of arousal would be struc-
tured by a) larger discourses or “cultural scripts,” b) “interpersonal scripts” formed
in concrete interaction with significant others, and c) “individual scripts” shaped
through the particular life history of the subject. In this vein, behavior theorists such
as Bryan Roche and Dermot Barnes-Holmes (2002) have suggested that a “rela-
tional frame theory” can expand the traditional preoccupations of cognitivist and
learning theories within psychology, to include questions of verbal, nonverbal, and
social interaction in the interrogation of arousal (2002, 47), as well as questions of
how “modes of discourse aid in the construction and constraint of sexual behavior”
(2002, 50).
Against the backdrop of these developments, it would be easy to approach the
relative lack of social theoretical interest in the question of sexual arousal as a mere
Sexual Arousal, Danger, and Vulnerability 121
inadvertence on behalf of sexology. However, it is nevertheless the case that this

relative silence around the social dimensions of arousal plays into the hands of that
fundamental thrust toward naturalization which orients the modern knowledge
regime of scientia sexualis which Michel Foucault interrogated in his first volume
of The History of Sexuality (1980). A basic assumption of this discourse is precisely
that this natural sex has traditionally been repressed and that science in consequence
must facilitate the emancipation of it. The bracketing out of the social dynamics of
sexual arousal feeds precisely into this myth of sex as fundamentally natural, not to
be challenged as such. Important in this regard is the fact that the restriction of
arousal to the realm of medical expertise and physical phenomena cuts it off from
the realms of discourse, normativity, morality, and politics. And as these latter
realms are often bracketed out from the phenomenon of sexual arousal, implicitly
arousal is thus opposed to and placed outside these social realms, as if arousal (orig-
inal, natural) would come first and, for instance, morality (copy, artificial) only later.
And as such, one might wonder if sexual arousal is not, consequently, the perfect
trope for an emancipatory sexual discourse that continues to fight sexual repression
but in the same stroke aligns itself with the network of sexual power relations with
which arousal in contrast could be viewed as being inherently bound up?
In accordance with Foucault’s analysis of the discourse on the figure of “sex in
itself,” this essay will be organized around the theoretical claim that sexual arousal
must not be treated as a natural or original entity which in a secondary process
becomes the object of normative, political, and moralizing discourses of regulation.
Quite the contrary, arousal needs to be considered in terms of an always already dis-
cursive, normative, moral, and political act. With this turn to the inherently social
dimensions of the phenomenon at hand, the sexological question thus shifts from the
interrogation of how social norms and morality restrict arousal (and the ways we
enjoy sexually), to the one about arousal as normative and moral performance.2 The
turn toward cognition and social relations in sexological studies on arousal commu-
nicates with this latter position insofar as it allows for a theoretical account, which
acknowledges how various forms of discourse inform arousal. Recognizing the ways
in which concrete subjective experiences of sexual arousal are situated in various
discursive constellations not only insofar as these regulate desire but furthermore are
essential elements in the structure of arousal as such, the focus on discourse as cogni-
tion may enable us to pay closer social theoretical and feminist attention to the inti-
mate links between the concrete experience of arousal and larger regimes of power
and the ways in which such experience always emerges in and embodies particular
“sexual economic” orders which confer different values to different forms of sexual
expressions, idealizing some, marginalizing, and oppressing others (Butler 2004;
Irigaray 1985, 1993; Rubin 1984/2008). As contemporary research on sexuality indi-
cates but does not adequately theorize (Dowsett et al. 2008), the determining of such
sexual economic value is not only a messy and complex process that comprises a
2
When I speak of arousal as moral behavior, this is to be understood along the lines of Gayle
Rubin’s discussions of moral norms which regulate sex (1984/2008).
122 F. Palm
number of economic parameters such as sexual identity, age, race, health status, body
shape, looks, language, and economic and social status. Also, this ongoing evaluation
process is part of the arousing experience.
Arousal, Subjectivity, and Danger
In this context, one particularly intriguing question for a social theoretical engage-
ment with the phenomenon of sexual arousal is how its dynamic seems to be ori-
ented around the pole of safety and control on the one hand and the pole of danger
and powerlessness on the other. Within the field of contemporary sex research, it is
mainly psychoanalytic research that up to now has paid attention to this dynamic. A
crucial feature of this psychoanalytical interrogation is that it raises issues of cogni-
tion and discourse along with questions of intersubjectivity and emotion.
Approaching arousal as a phenomenon that emerges through the experiential oscil-
lation between safety and danger, psychoanalysis not only addresses arousal as an
emotional and cognitive process, but furthermore as a process through which the
subject relates and passionately invests itself in an intersubjective, sexual economy.
This not only adds emotion to cognition but more interestingly points to the ways in
which the discursive situatedness of arousal precisely presupposes a particular
“position of enunciation” (Lacan) or perhaps more correctly formulated: a particu-
lar symbolic or intersubjective position of enjoyment (Žižek 1997).
This essay suggests that the introduction of questions of safety and danger into
the theorization of arousal therefore provides us with an important key in the formu-
lation of arousal as a process or relation of power. To begin with, the aroused sub-
ject, according to contemporary psychoanalysis, unconsciously struggles with his
or her sense of safety and vulnerability in relation to some other (Bader 2002). To
be aroused is thus to position oneself, or rather a positioning, in an intersubjective
network of relations. As an experience, sexual arousal involves and embodies the
boundaries of subjectivity, and as contemporary psychoanalysis suggests, arousal
therefore must be considered as a phenomenon where what is ultimately at stake is
the subject as such (Stein 2006; Laplanche 1999; Bersani 1995).
In this sense, I would claim that psychoanalysis provides social theory with a
vital clue to our understanding of arousal as an ongoing (inter)subjective act or
accomplishment. Because insofar as the stake of this accomplishment harks back to
the very constitution or origins of the subject, it is equally a productive act in the
present and one which reproduces and repeats relations, structures, and traumas
from the past. And if thus a particular chain of arousing events produces a certain
relation of power to the other who embodies the subject’s object of arousal in the
present context or situation, it also draws on relations to a more abstract or imagi-
nary other. Indeed, psychoanalytic thinkers such as Lacan do not conceive of desire
or arousal in terms of a simple expression of physical instincts but always already
link such phenomena to the register of a drive originally caught up in the subject’s
relation to the other. And as we will see when we turn to Stoller’s analysis, arousal
is an act which seeks to transform this past sense of endangerment, vulnerability,

and powerlessness by way of the present.
In Lacanian psychoanalysis, traumas from the past return through the subject’s
struggle with a certain excess in his or her psychological economy. That is, the fas-
cination or arousal which the other/object stirs in the subject stems from the particu-
lar role that the former plays in the repressed or rather disavowed fantasies which
according to Lacan function as the foundation for the subject (Žižek 1997) and
whose status as disavowed has to do with their (the fantasies) traumatic and threat-
ening impact in the psychological economy of the subject. Thus, we see how Žižek
in one of his commentaries on how psychoanalysis conceives of the role that trau-
matic fantasies play in the subject:
In the case of the Wolf Man […] the Cause, of course, was the traumatic scene of the paren-
tal coitus a tergo – this scene was the non-symbolizable kernel around which all later suc-
cessive symbolizations whirled. This Cause, however, not only exerted its efficiency after a
certain time-lag, it literally became the trauma – that is, Cause – through delay: when the
Wolf Man, at the age of two, witnessed the coitus a tergo, nothing traumatic marked this
scene; the scene acquired traumatic features only in retrospect, with the later development
of the child’s infantile sexual theories, when it becomes impossible to integrate the scene
within the newly emerged horizon of narrativization-historicization-symbolization. Herein
lies the trauma’s vicious cycle: the trauma is the Cause which perturbs the smooth engine
of symbolization and throws it off balance; it gives rise to an indelible inconsistency in the
symbolic field; but for all that, the trauma has no existence of its own prior to symbolization
[…] it acquires its consistency from the structural necessity of the inconsistency of the
symbolic field. As soon as we obliterate this retrospective character of the trauma and ‘sub-
stantialize’ it into a positive entity […] we regress to common linear determinism. (1995,
31)
In this formulation, the danger or trauma does not stem from any univocal out-
side but rather pertains to a particular narrativization-historicization-symbolization,
which implies that it is situated in a certain symbolic or discursive context. If it
could be defined as a cause, it is not as a linear cause, but a structural one, which
furthermore involves precisely that impossibility which evades the structure. It
derives its attractive quality from some dangerous instance which is obliterated
from the symbolic field – that is, from the conscious experience – of the subject.
And therefore, it is the structurally dangerous nature of this other or object which
explains why the subject is stirred, fascinated, and not least aroused by it. And,
along with Žižek, I would claim that this excessive, dangerous, and arousing func-
tion of the other-object plays a central role in the reproduction of any relations and
systems of sexual power and morality on the subjective level. As Žižek pointed out
in his early work, even politics is fundamentally made possible only by way of a
certain subjective investment or enjoyment (1989).
This focus on arousal as an act that repeats the past, furthermore, offers a way
into a long tradition of social theory which has addressed how social order more
generally emerges in the interplay between safety, on the one hand, and danger, on
the other (Douglas 2002; Bauman 2000; Derrida 1998; Baudrillard 1993). In accor-
dance to such (post)structuralist accounts, the sexual economics of arousal might be
conceived of as implicated in a continuous struggle with dangerous objects or
124 F. Palm
structural elements which mark and embody its own boundaries. Dangerous objects
in this sense have a double function, insofar as they let subjectivity and social order
alike constitute themselves simultaneously as they pose a threat to the order by sig-
naling that which the order cannot fully incorporate. This latter “exteriority” which
functions as a kind of condition of (im)possibility of all social order has in structural
anthropology often been conceptualized in terms of the other, which explains why
its account often has considered the ways in which social order grounds itself
through a certain repression or exclusion of various particular others (Lévi-Strauss
1963; Bourdieu 1979). It is in this vein that Mary Douglas (2002) has claimed that
social order arises precisely through the cultural regulation of danger, where “dan-
ger” does not denote an inherent quality of a particular other but rather a danger
associated to the structural role of the other.
In addressing the issue of arousal, I will engage the particular formulations of
arousal in James Giles’ sexological inquiry into the phenomenology of sexual
desire, Robert Stoller’s psychoanalytical studies on perversion and erotic imagina-
tion, and Leo Bersani’s queer theoretical analysis of desire and powerlessness –
three accounts which all situate arousal in the context of the subjective experience
of and struggle with some dangerous other. The selection of these particular formu-
lations of arousal is admittedly questionable and does not reflect any underlying
claim that these are the only possible routes to follow in order to develop a social
theoretical perspective on arousal. Still, the essay makes a claim to introduce three
discussions that, to different extents, not only give issues of discourse, power, and
morality a privileged role in their respective understanding of sexual arousal but
furthermore inquire into the way in which the discursiveness of arousal unfolds as a
struggle with some danger.
Thus, the contribution of Giles’ sexological account is to provide us with a phe-
nomenology of sexual desire as a process of ongoing and active meaning constitu-
tion, in which the intersubjective relation between the subject and the other plays a
pivotal role. Although Giles’ discussion from a feminist as well as a queer perspec-
tive could be accused of not paying sufficient attention to the way in which desire
intermingles with and reproduces sexual and gender normativity, his analysis never-
theless introduces us to a sexological discussion which takes into account the
embodied and intersubjective structure of sexual desire and, more particularly,
arousal. Most importantly, his argument points to the way in which arousal emerges
through the very struggle with subjective boundaries, vulnerability, and power and
as such could be useful as a point of entry into the inquiry of subjective and inter-
personal power dynamics of arousal. In that sense, I draw on Giles’ research while
at the same time using it to pose two important questions which arise in the encoun-
ter with his account.
The first of these questions concerns the already raised issues of power, sexual
economics, and morality. It is in order to address more specifically how arousal
could be related to these issues that I turn to the theories of Robert Stoller. Although
heavily criticized in some contemporary discussions on sexuality, I would claim
that Stoller’s psychoanalytical account of the dynamics of sexual arousal is still
highly relevant for a feminist social theoretical analysis of arousal insofar as he

elaborates a theory that links the very sensation of arousal – or excitement as he
sometimes calls it – to the way in which the subject transforms feelings of power-
lessness to feelings of triumph. In this context, arousal is conceptualized as a way of
managing or translating some traumatic instance in the subject’s existence. In
Stoller’s view, arousal is then about managing the menace that this trauma and the
sense of powerlessness pose to the subject. But as his discussion shows, this manag-
ing is a way of dealing with a dangerous element which never rids itself of this ele-
ment but rather stays loyal to it, maintaining it as a central element of its own
structure. In this sense, Stoller’s account images arousal as an experience organized
around feelings of aggression, humiliation, and fear. In short, it is essentially bad.
Not as a simple deviation from the socially good, but its thrill lies exactly in the
transgression of social and normative boundaries, in the movement toward the “sin-
ful” and “immoral.” As such, it is not merely something that moral institutions
construct as immoral and refer to the dark back yards of society. Rather, it is in
Stoller’s argument an experience which derives its own substance from its very
affinity to and play with the immorality. Arousal in this sense is a deeply conserva-
tive and violent operator of power and normativity, and as such, Stoller’s account
raises interesting questions for a social theoretical analysis of the relation between
arousal and sexual power structures in contemporary society.
Giles’ work confronts us with a second question, as his argument ultimately
seems to reproduce the predominant naturalization of desire and arousal in sexol-
ogy. Although he refrains from posing it as directly natural or physical, Giles nev-
ertheless ends up in a quite typical sexological celebration of the ability to “fully
enjoy.” In that sense, his whole interrogation of desire and arousal is subordinated
to the telos of producing sex as pleasure. In contrast, Leo Bersani’s queer theoretical
discussion approaches desire with a more psychoanalytically informed emphasis on
the more distressing, traumatic, or destructive impact of enjoyment as Lust im
Unlust or pleasure in pain. Bersani’s account of sexual pleasure as a process of self-
shattering in a sense comes closer to that of Stoller, as it insists on the traumatic
impact of enjoyment for the subject. And yet, Bersani elaborates this notion of self-
shattering in a way that constructs this pleasure – not as a conservative force – but
as a radical interruption of the power of the ego and phallogocentric sexual econo-
mies of the same.
Sexual Arousal, Enjoyment of Vulnerability, and Loss

of Control
Although James Giles’ recent effort to approach the phenomenology of sexual

desire and arousal overall lacks a systematic reflection of how arousal as a personal
and interpersonal phenomenon is informed by more general discursive regimes, it
126 F. Palm
nevertheless raises important questions about power in terms of subjective control

on the personal and interpersonal level.3 I will in this section mostly deal with the
latter contribution of his theory, in particular organizing my account around the way
in which his text links the structure of arousal to subjective feelings of vulnerability
and control in relation to the other. Situated around a certain transgression of the
boundaries of the ego, arousal for Giles is intimately linked to subjective vulnerabil-
ity, both to the extent that arousal disrupts the ego and insofar as authentic pleasure
in his view consists in the acceptance of the position of being vulnerable and giving
oneself over to the other.
A central feature of arousal in Giles’ discussion is the fundamental oscillation
between activity and passivity, between the position of being in power over the
other and that of being vulnerable and in the power of another. For Giles, the subject
is neither aroused by simply being in control or being deprived of control, but
arousal emerges in the very movement between these opposite poles. This concep-
tion originates from his idea of desire as a process or a becoming essentially char-
acterized by a movement toward an “other” that functions as the object of desire,
and this implies that arousal like desire is always a movement which transcends the
subject toward the exteriority of the other. However, there is also a contrasting direc-
tion or movement in this process, insofar as the desirability of this other seems to
point us back to the subject.
The attraction of the object of desire, however, is not the reason for my awareness reaching
out to it, for the awareness, which the desirability of the object shines upon, is already in the
configuration of desire toward the object. Indeed, it is just my desiring of the object that
imparts to it the sense of desirability that it then sends sparkling back to my awareness.
(Giles 2008, 10)
This statement of course resonates with the cognitive notion of sexual grounding,
which states that arousal always erupts against that cognitive background which
decides what we interpret as erotic and not erotic. As such, Giles’ theory, like cogni-
tive theories, opens up to broader questions of how the power of this other as “sex-
ual trigger” resides in a contingent constellation of discursive and embodied
meaning. But we could also highlight how this notion of the process of desire as a
fundamental oscillation between interiority and exteriority communicates with psy-
choanalytical accounts of the relation between desire and fantasy. Precisely as in
Lacanian psychoanalysis, the other in Giles’ account is only an apparently exterior
object which essentially contains within its own structure an element of the subject,
so that the attraction of this object is merely an “external correlate” of the direction
of desire as a movement of “reaching out.” In that sense, the excerpt from Giles
neatly captures the structure of “the gaze” as objet petit a in Lacan, that is, as that
3
Even if one chapter of Giles’ book is devoted explicitly to the question of gender, I would argue
that this part of his argument is only marginally interesting in this context insofar as it rests on a
problematic idea of gender relations as complementary which, for instance, leads him to make
assertions such as “[M]y gender presents itself as only half of an interlocking twoness” (Giles
2008, 123).
element in the exterior (other) partial object of desire which somehow refers the
subject back to herself (Palm 2007). As Slavoj Žižek has noted, the mysterious
quality of this object lies in the fact that its gazing upon the subject from a position
outside the subject actually marks something strictly internal to the subject as such
(Žižek 1991). In comparison to cognitive theories, psychoanalysis ultimately links
the particular quality of this object – its power to upset and stir the subject – to some
traumatic and repressed instance of subjective existence. In that sense, psychoanaly-
sis provides us with a conceptual link between the structural role of this object in the
psychic economy of the subject on the one hand and the question of the relation
between arousal, vulnerability, and danger on the other. That is, fascination and
excitement over a certain sexual object are here understood as grounded not only in
a certain set of discursive cognitions but in a kind of cognition which emotionally
traumatizes the subject and which he or she therefore has repressed.
Even if this link to repressed trauma is not present in Giles’ account, danger is
nevertheless crucial to it insofar as he explicitly links arousal to loss of control and
vulnerability, and since excitement seems to appear only to the extent that some-
thing in the subject is put at stake and threatened. Thus, as the basic oscillation
between activity and passivity appears on a number of levels of experience in his
argument, it is always already informed by a sense that something in the subject is
put at risk in this process. His description of excitement as a subjective alteration
between her reaching out and her wish of being reached (tactile register) and an
oscillation between her gaze on the object and her wish of being gazed upon by the
subject (visual register), thus, both contain moments of activity and control insofar
as to reach out and to gaze obviously are active acts through which the subject
imposes her will on the other. But they also contain a more passive drive toward the
subjective exposure to the other’s reach or gaze, which for structural reasons
deprives her of control.
To bare one’s body to another person is not only to experience oneself as naked before
another person but also, at a further level of awareness, to experience oneself in a vulnerable
position before that person. (Giles 2008, 75)
The desire to expose one’s naked body to another person here entails a desire to
be vulnerable before the other, and similarly the desire to see another’s naked body
implies a wish to experience his or her vulnerability (Giles 2008, 78). In fact, Giles
juxtaposes this concrete experience of vulnerability to the sexual meaning which is
established through the “interplay between clothing, baring, and enticement.”
Sexual enticement is thus the affective expression of the process of baring and being
bared, and it is crucial for the purpose of the present essay that this expression is
intimately linked to the risk associated with being vulnerable. If there is a “turn on”
in this interaction, it ultimately rests in the parallel sharing of one’s own and taking
part of another’s vulnerability, that is, in the process of opening up toward the other
and of relinquishing any safety or control. It thus should come as no surprise that
many people report feelings of loss of control to play an integral part of sexual
excitement (2008, 80). Loss of control in other words excites, and the physical trem-
bling of the body is precisely the embodied reflection of an enjoyment of this loss.
128 F. Palm
Excitement is here understood as the continuous movement back and forth

between the position of being safe and being exposed, so that, for instance, a
penetrating body part while temporarily submerged by another body not only pen-
etrates another but also in a sense vanishes into the unknown of that other, while the
penetrated body is in a similar vein not simply passively penetrated but also actively
takes in a foreign body (Giles 2008, 80). It is here vital for Giles that we do not
reduce the subject’s activity and power to control over the other. For Giles penetra-
tion in itself is not phallic. Instead, he alerts us to the way that both bodies during
the penetrative act venture through a process of “othering.” It is not part of a strug-
gle for control over the other nor an outright aggressive act. Rather, Giles refers to
it as ultimately an act of care which not so much appropriates the other as opens
itself up to it. Thus, according to Giles, vulnerability is “a state of anticipation that
waits upon the care of the caress”, and which expresses itself in the form of an
awareness of receptivity which spreads all throughout the body (2008, 81).
This brief description of Giles’ phenomenology clearly points to the ethical char-
acter of his sexology. This ethics situates arousal in-between the subject and the
other, as an unfolding process of interaction which constantly transcends and chal-
lenges the boundaries of the subject. As such, it offers a perspective sensitive to the
ongoing power dynamics of sexual arousal and of the existential drama which
arousal embodies. Insofar as Giles’ account of desire overall stays faithful to the
value-neutral thrust which seems to guide most sexological research on sex, authen-
tic sex, for Giles, consists of precisely this dialectic between power and powerless-
ness. In order to really or fully enjoy, we have to take and be taken. This implicitly
introduces something akin to a sexual politics into Giles’ text, an idea of a sexual
equality based on the constant disruption of the boundaries between the subject and
its other.
The most challenging aspect of Giles’ theory in this context is the way in which
he formulates this concept of care without depriving sexual interaction and excite-
ment of its dangerous and threatening qualities and against conventional dualist
thinking which privileges soft and tender sex over hard and violent sex. That is, if
he suggests a form of “good sex,” it does not exclude a certain violence. Indeed, he
writes that lovemaking does not necessarily amount to an intimate act purified of
“roughness,” since it is ultimately not the content of the sexual act but rather its form
that decides whether we should conceive of it in terms of an abusive act or an act of
care (2008, 84). Just as the intensity in “making furious love” functions as a force
which effectively disrupts the defenses of the ego and its control systems, roughness
plays a vital role for the interpenetration between self and other. This makes it an
important element in the ability to “fully enjoy,” in the surrender to lovemaking
outside any systems of control and the being present as vulnerable and allowing for
the other to be equally so (Giles 2008, 81). No longer any inherent contradiction
between care and violence but rather rough sexual actions always already play a part
in the logic of care. Giles’ account suggests that it is not only essential to be vulner-
able in lovemaking but more disturbingly that it is equally important to enjoy the
other’s vulnerability and loss of control.4 In that sense, sexual interaction opens up
as an arena of exploration of this traumatic instance of both being in control of and
being exposed to the other. And the good thing about this sexual arena is that, it
seems to situate the interplay between control and vulnerability in an arousing con-
text of care, so that sexual interaction provides a safe form for the exploration of
these threatening dimensions of existence.
And yet despite Giles’ focus on the concrete phenomenology of sexual desire
and arousal, it seems that he remains too faithful to the universalistic and naturalis-
tic drive of sexology. As he restricts arousal to these presently ongoing interactions
between self and other, he never elaborates how these concrete interactions are
embedded in, feed upon, and reproduce structures and relations of power.
Concentrating on the unfolding experiences of desire and arousal, he discerns com-
mon patterns of control and vulnerability involved in sexual interaction while
remaining largely inattentive to the way in which sexual interaction and arousal are
also shaped by, for instance, dynamics that involve differences in subject positions.
Overall, I would argue that this latter set of structural questions is subordinated to
his sexological ambition to approach the essence of full sexual enjoyment as care.
And in the remaining parts of this essay, I will claim that this subordination of the
sexual act and sexual arousal to the frame of full enjoyment and care raises interest-
ing questions in relation to Stoller’s and Bersani’s respective works.
Arousal as a Triumph Over Vulnerability
In contrast to Giles, Stoller conceptualizes sexual intercourse less as an arena for

creative exploration than as a highly creative defense mechanism. As he constructs
excitement/arousal as an “esthetic” dynamics whose function is to triumph over
something which threatens the subject from within, he regularly draws attention to
ways in which subtle sexual dramas allow the subject to project inner conflict on
specific others in his or her everyday life experience (Stoller 1979). Appointing
himself the role of an “esthetician,” he claims the conviction that the construction of
sexual arousal is “every bit as subtle, complex, inspired, profound, tidal, fascinat-
ing, awesome, problematic, unconscious-soaked, and genius-haunted as the cre-
ation of dreams and art” (Stoller quoted in Fisher 2010, 148). If then Giles’ account
points to sexual interaction as an ongoing and open accomplishment, Stoller’s
4
This would, for instance, render the position of the masochist unethical insofar as it treats the
subject as univocally vulnerable. The double moral standard of the masochist, according to which
he gains moral superiority in relation to the sadist through the act of being violated, does not solve
this but only shows the rigidity of the relation. On the manifest, physical level, it is the sadist which
has the power and the masochist which is subordinated. On the latent, moral level, it is the masoch-
ist which represents the good and the sadist which is in the wrong. The weakness of this relation
according to the ethics which Giles suggests would then be that activity and passivity – which of
structural necessity belong to both parts of the sexual interaction – are split up and reduced to a
rigid opposition.
130 F. Palm
position places us in a contrasting situation where the stakes are already settled and
in which it is the dramatic manipulation of the other on the level of fantasy which
stirs the subject. Drawing on a whole cognitive-emotive-discursive schema of
morality, sin, and humiliation, excitement is not so much a playful way of approach-
ing this danger, as a dynamics which uses existing sexual discourse in order to come
to terms with and master the other. And whereas Giles’ sexological account discov-
ers the enticing element in the very encounter with and acknowledgment of vulner-
ability, Stoller argues that the erotic function of sexual arousal is precisely to deny
this traumatic sense of being vulnerable.
If then both Stoller and Giles organize their accounts around danger and vulner-
ability, their understandings differ insofar as Giles describes arousal more in terms
of ongoing interaction, while the arousal that we encounter in Stoller’s work is more
psychological or fantasmatic. The latter description might put off the social theorist.
However, as it seems adequate to describe this fantasmatic arousal in terms of an
arousal made up of abstractions, it becomes highly relevant for a social theory inter-
ested in arousal as a social structural phenomenon. And it is precisely this level of
abstraction which seems to lack in Giles’ argument. In that sense, it almost seems as
if Stoller and Giles deal with different phenomena, as if they deal with two different
forms of sexual arousal.
According to Stoller the structure of sexual arousal is essentially a system of
binaries, organized around the central opposition between safety and danger. Sexual
arousal or excitement for Stoller is basically about movement and thus consists in a
“dynamic tension: a buzz, vibration, an oscillation, a pulsation, a current, alternat-
ing with immense speed between two poles” (Stoller 1985, 52). The trick to be
excited – according to Stoller – is to take the risk of positioning oneself in between
the poles of safety and danger, and it is when they are switched on simultaneously
that the subject gets off. That is, the “turn on” is the experience of the very relation
between the poles and when my safety consequently is at stake due to the presence
of danger and the other.
However, arousal is not merely a movement in between binary opposites. This
movement in between safety and danger is also linked to a certain relation of time.
First, we might here note that this danger is partly the danger of a potential threat in
the near future, the uncertainty of an “oncoming trauma” (Stoller 1985, 56). In this
sense, arousal is essentially about potentiality; it points forward to a certain future
of possibilities and insofar as it thus reveals a structure of anticipation – “a tease, a
swarm of possibilities” – the anticipation of successful enjoyment is always doubled
by the sense of failure and danger. But we should also point out that danger equally
springs from the past, since as embedded in a personal narrative, this “oncoming
trauma” also reverberates with a past trauma.
The crucial contribution of his analysis in the context of this essay is, however,
his formulation of sexual arousal as fundamentally an “esthetic excitement” always
already embedded in cultural dramas, scripts, or narratives. The dangerous past is
the deciding element in the structure of esthetic excitement as Stoller describes it,
since according to him, the erotic interpretation of present threats against the back-
drop of trauma is constitutive of the function of erotic excitement.
At this instance, we then approach the specific function of excitement, that is,
what excitement according to Stoller accomplishes for the subject. As in Giles’
work, this function is part of a broader existential game with subjectivity and
otherness, which we are from early on engaged in and which manifests itself in our
way of relating to the other’s presence and absence (which Freud captured in his
well-known description of his grandson’s fort-da game). The contribution of esthetic
excitement is to bring the existential uncertainty linked to the other under the con-
trol of an eroticized scenario, subordinating not only danger but also the becoming-
other to the safe domain of the imaginary. In this sense, the crucial function of
esthetic excitement in Stoller’s text lies in this defensive or controlling practice.
This function or defense formation unfortunately never satisfies the subject since it
is structurally organized around a certain lack. We find a key to the understanding
of this fundamental lack of excitement in Stoller’s theorization of perversion as an
act which responds to trauma (Stoller 1975). Esthetic excitement shares with per-
version this aim to respond to something which in the past put the subject in a state
of vulnerability. They embody ongoing repetitions of this (once) lived experience of
vulnerability, in which the subject through the imaginary drama of esthetic excite-
ment not merely relives trauma or harm but furthermore neutralizes its painful
dimension through the erotic triumph of excitement. That is, through the enjoyment
characteristic of excitement, the subject turns the harm once done to him into some-
thing from which to derive pleasure. And the specific role of excitement is here to
interpret, translate, or transform this previously harmful instance to a merely threat-
ening and defeated danger. Thus, sexual excitement at one stroke obliterates and
retains danger and trauma. This would then, perhaps, be the core function or mean-
ing of the term “eroticizing” in Stoller’s understanding.5
Excitement in this sense is then strictly linked to the operation of power and the
ability to control and only involves a dialectic between being in control and being
vulnerable insofar as the former triumphs over the latter (which means that this
excitement would rather be associated with violence than with authentic lovemak-
ing in Giles’ account). In this reading, the problem with sexual arousal insofar as it
emerges as a consequence of triumph over past harms inflicted to the subject would
be that it fixes or territorializes any radical encounter with the other in a deadening
repetition where vulnerability is reduced to an exterior to be overcome. This would
thus be the dead end of sexual excitement – the projection of one’s past vulnerability
on to an exterior object or screen to be violated. As Stoller argues, this structure of
power and revenge plays a constitutive role in many contemporary sexual practices.
And it is this function of arousal which could contribute to feminist understandings
5
As such, the repeated drama of esthetic excitement parallels the emotive structure of ressentiment
as a simultaneously cognitive and emotional repetition or reliving of harm which was once directed
at the individual (Denzin 1993). Precisely as in resentment, the pervert is obsessed by the re-feel-
ing of this once inflicted harm, as well as by the accompanying fantasies of revenge and of taking
back what that act of violence once deprived him or her of. In the same manner, the subject of
esthetic excitement in Stoller’s view is caught in an eroticized replay machinery – that is, in an
imaginary scenario in which he or she gets even and where debts are cleared through the extraction
of erotic enjoyment.
132 F. Palm
of the way in which arousal is involved in reproduction of social power relations.

Because for Stoller, excitement as we encounter it in pornographic sexuality (even
in its softer versions, for instance, in excitement triggered by the centerfold) draws
on rigid cultural stereotypes which for the subject have the comforting function of
providing a safe drama for his or her encounter with the other, and he shows by a
bundle of detailed examples how such erotic dramatizing enacts and draws on vari-
ous forms of cultural discourse in order to accomplish this triumph over vulnerabil-
ity, be it in pervert actions such as exposing oneself in public or in the “minor
perversions” of pornography.
One important element of his analysis in this context is his account of the deeply
moral character of this pervert dynamics (which is not necessarily deviant). Stoller
insists that a certain desire to “sin” is essential for this triumph over past traumas
(1985, 6). That is, its structure depends on a certain crossing of the boundary
between good and bad and pure and dirty. It is organized around transgression and
as such is closely relying on cultural perceptions of the morally good, albeit in an
inversed manner. Rather than simply being regulated by and restricted by conven-
tions and morality, it thus thrives precisely on the obscene underside of these sexual
norms. It is thus deeply indebted to culturally situated discourses and games.
Let us add more poles to our list of excitement’s oscillations: goodness and evil, Heaven
and Hell, aliveness and deadness, buoyancy and boredom, pleasure and pain, clean and
dirty, food and feces, obscenity and shame. For to be obscene is exciting: will we get away
with it? If we would use the obscene – not everyone needs to – we must know what we are
about and weigh the acceptable against the forbidden. To do so requires us to understand
what society in general and the present moment in particular can bear: we imagine our audi-
ence in order to decide if we can get away with it. (Stoller 1985, 89)
What Stoller shares with more sociological and feminist accounts is his empha-
sis on how sexual practice – including arousal – repeats and is linked to other forms
of social relations and practices. We get a sense of the potential of Stoller’s text in
this regard if we briefly turn to Julia O’Connell Davidson’s sociological study of
prostitution and in particular her analyses of sexual oppression in practices such as
pedophilia and “fucking dirty whores.” O’Connell Davidson shows how these prac-
tices are best understood as simultaneously drawing on psychological drama and
cultural discourses on such as sexuality, age, purity, and innocence in order to tri-
umph over some exterior other placed on the position of the vulnerable. Thus, like
Stoller, she highlights how the pedophile, for instance, violates the body of the child
in order to triumph over a past experience of being humiliated and vulnerable.
However, as she argues, this violence of the pedophile is not merely caused by the
personal history of the pedophile. Furthermore, the violence that he is trying to
inflict on the body of the child must be understood against a more general cultural
contempt of vulnerability and powerlessness in contemporary society (O’Connell
Davidson 1998). And as we will see, in Bersani, this contempt often plays a crucial
role in the oppression of non-hegemonic groups in society.
On the other hand, Stoller’s position seems to suffer from the same allergy to sex
as radical feminists like Andrea Dworkin (1981) have been accused of (Segal 1998).
This marks the possibly unsettling dimension of his position, since he never
addresses what sexual arousal could be outside this triumph over the vulnerability
of the same and the destructive dynamic of esthetic excitement. Sexual arousal per
definition is the dramatic eroticizing of a simultaneously oncoming and past trauma,
and it therefore has no apparent place in that intimacy based on respect for the other
which Stoller opposes to arousal (Stoller 1985).
Arousal as Ecstatic Suffering and Recognition

of Powerlessness
As I finally turn to the work of queer theorist Leo Bersani, I will maintain this
Stollerian focus on the way in which sexual pleasure plays on discursive structures
of power. In Bersani, we find the same line of argument in his dealings with phal-
locentric desire, a desire which he describes as relying on and reproducing struc-
tures of egocentric power and control. Phallocentric desire, and arousal linked to
this desire, is for Bersani organized around a deep rooted drive for or will to power
which denies all value to that which is vulnerable and powerless.
Phallocentrism is exactly that: not primarily the denial of power to women (although it has
obviously also led to that, everywhere and at all times), but above all the denial of the value
of powerlessness in both men and women. (Bersani 2010, 24)
The sexual “turn on” of such phallocentrist desire would certainly seem to be
understandable from Stoller’s perspective. However, as Bersani develops his account
of sexual pleasure, it is not this conservative form of pleasure which reproduces
hegemonic sexual economies but rather a more radical one which takes center stage.
This account both affirms and challenges the way in which arousal has been con-
structed so far in this essay. To the extent that he treats sexual pleasure as ultimately
pointing beyond power and subjectivity, there is a certain affinity between his posi-
tion and that of Giles insofar as they both treat sexual pleasure as a force which
disrupts discursive structures of power. However, if Giles focuses on pleasure in
terms of a complete sexual enjoyment, Bersani in contrast conceives this radical
force as one which ultimately breaks with the very idea of “completeness.” For
Bersani, desire and excitement do not emerge in the interaction between self and
other. Rather, it alerts the subject to a pre-subjective dimension of existence. Heavily
indebted to Freudian psychoanalysis, in particular, Freud’s idea of the antagonistic
relation between the ego and the id – or, to be more exact, the death drive – Bersani
interrogates how sexual pleasure involves a form of shattering of everyday reality’s
fundamental structures. “Completeness” in this context, if anything, functions as a
protective shield for these structures.
To grasp this Freudian influence, we might turn to the way in which Bersani
evokes Freud’s idea of sexual pleasure in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality.
Influenced by Jean Laplanche’s notion of sexual excitement as a momentary destruc-
tion of the psychic structure of the organism and as a defeat of power (2010, 109),
Bersani offers a reading of Freud in which he defines sexual pleasure as a sensation
134 F. Palm
which “occurs whenever a certain threshold of intensity is reached, when the orga-
nization of the self is momentarily disturbed by […] affective processes somehow
‘beyond’ those connected with psychic organization” (2010, 24). What Freud
according to Bersani explores in this context is thus sexual pleasure as a form of
ecstatic suffering in which the subject “momentarily plunges” into a domain of radi-
cal self-shattering and powerlessness. Bersani thus shares Stoller’s idea that the
very notion of an ecstatic suffering implies that the subject here encounters and
deals with something traumatic, but Bersani does not link this ecstatic quality to the
egoistic appropriation of pleasure as triumph over this traumatic instance. That is,
arousal as Stoller describes it would in Bersani’s view merely be a secondary phal-
locentric and egoistic misrecognition of some pre-subjective instance of existence
which arousal sets the subject up with.
Now, a crucial feature of this argument is how it situates enjoyment beyond the
opposition between subjective pleasure and pain (2010, 24–25). Faithful to the
queer theoretical deconstruction of conventional subjectivity (Green 2007), Bersani
analyzes the ways in which this suffering peaks in the orgasm which marks the
ultimate point of one’s loss of control over the body (Bersani 2010; Dean 2009,
106). This beyond of the opposition of pain and pleasure is not however a beyond of
pain and pleasure altogether. Rather, it is instructive to read this beyond along the
lines of Stoller’s definition of this ecstatic quality in terms of two opposite poles (in
this context, safe pleasure, on the hand, and dangerous pain, on the other) being
switched on simultaneously. In that sense, we would not risk to confuse this beyond
with a transcendent enjoyment, but rather the beyond of opposition would be inces-
sant movement in-between.
To move on in this discussion of Bersani’s view on sexual pleasure, another vital
feature of his account is his effort to outline an alternative to the predominant phal-
locentric desire organized around power and the ego (or subject). If he then marks
out a pre-subjective domain as that for which arousal presents us, his real project is
to ask how we could create a social order which authentically acknowledges this
domain. Bersani’s account of sexuality in this context operates on the borders
between mainstream sexuality organized around power and another sexuality
founded on the experience of powerlessness. As he directs our attention toward
what he conceives of as the fundamentally anonymous and even apolitical dimen-
sion of sexual pleasure, he particularly observes how its momentary suspense of
subjectivity equally suspends the realm of intersubjectivity proper. A Bersanian
account of arousal would in this sense be organized around some “anticommunal,
antiegalitarian, antinurturing, antiloving” instance of human existence (2010, 22).
This clearly distinguishes him from Giles’ treatment of sexuality more as a private
arena which we retreat to from our dealings in everyday reality to subjectively
explore our existence. Indeed, the shattering process of sexual pleasure for Bersani
is not a place which we should go to in order to momentarily escape reality but one
which must actively be used in order to challenge prevailing orders of dominance.
In psychoanalytical terms, this means that Bersani refuses (as did Freud) to balance
out the destructive impetus of the death drive. In fact, he embraces something in the
latter by letting the question of how to form a sociality that authentically recognizes
it occupy center stage.
This effort to think some kind of relationality outside intersubjective phallic
order is then the central stake in Bersani’s analysis of practices of anonymous sex
and his concomitant notion of homo-ness. With the concept of homo-ness, Bersani
(1995) explores gay sex in terms of what Foucault termed a “new relational mode,”
in which special emphasis is put on sameness and impersonality. What Bersani aims
at in this context is a sociality which precisely recognizes that dimension of experi-
ence which from the perspective of the ego or the same arises as uncanny. In
Bersani’s account, the uncanny appears through a love relation which suspends the
clear cut distinction between the subject and the other insofar as it “includes within
itself its own object.” Such relation, for Bersani, is never merely relational but a
kind of desire that, within itself, inscribes both subject and other, as well as its own
loving movement toward the other. For Bersani, homosexual desire is emblematic
of this desire since he argues that in homosexuality, the lover lacks something that
he describes as “always already identical with him – or herself.” In this sense, homo-
ness connotes something that demands more of the same and which therefore pres-
ents us with a desire based on a profound extensibility of sameness. Although this
account seems prone to idealize the homosexual relation, and to reify homosexual-
ity in its opposition to heterosexuality, Bersani’s argument is interesting insofar as
he also points out that this extensibility of sameness concurs with the more general
notion of the disintegration of the subject. In this sense, his idea of homo-ness
applies to desire on a more universal level. Indeed, according to Bersani, “all being
moves toward” and “corresponds with itself outside of itself” (Bersani 2010, 118),
and it is this fundamental direction of being that Bersani terms impersonal narcis-
sism – a concept which therefore denotes this very confrontation with a radically
external and impersonal self out there, a self which is “mine” without belonging to
any “me.”
In the present context, this implies that arousal would amount to an affective
response to a certain sameness (which the phallic gaze misrecognizes as en exterior
otherness). As such, arousal marks a confrontation with the very origin of relation-
ality, an origin which according to Bersani is that anonymous dimension which
simultaneously grounds and haunts all social relations. Bersani’s preoccupation
with the question of Foucault’s new mode of relationality here implies a restructur-
ing of this experience as something threatening, into an experience that begins to
recognize this simultaneous disintegration of self, and accompanying identification
with another sameness (which is thus not that of the self-same). We thus move from
a relationality based on antagonism, difference, and separateness (i.e., phallic order)
to one of correspondence, identity, and oneness with the world (homo-ness). And
since this latter oneness is more original, Bersani posits the former as “contingent
violations of a more fundamental correspondence” (Bersani 2010, 150). If then
arousal is anticipation as Stoller suggests, and if it stirs up something in the subject,
it is this original homo-ness – which in fact is an at-homeness with the world –
which originally functions as the trigger.
136 F. Palm
Conclusion: Sexual Arousal as Discursive Accomplishment
In this essay, I have approached the phenomenon of sexual arousal in terms of an

ongoing process of sensemaking – or as a discursive accomplishment – through the
reading of three thinkers who in different ways have interrogated questions of sexu-
ality, desire, and arousal throughout their work. Although their positions on arousal
sharply differ from each other on numerous questions, they all suggest that arousal
is intimately linked to the subject’s encounter with danger: in Giles, this danger
emerges through the sexual interaction with the other, through the exposure of one-
self to the gaze of the other, and the handing over of oneself to the control or care of
the other; in Stoller, arousal is associated with the triumphant act of power through
which the subject defeats past traumas and humiliations; and, finally, for Bersani,
arousal originates from a radical encounter with a sameness which simultaneously
is presumed by and disrupts all subjective experience and which thus poses a danger
or challenge to the egocentrism of the subject. In conclusion, I will thus round up
my discussion by pointing to a number of questions that I argue the discussion so far
have raised and which would be worthwhile to further inquire into from the point of
view of a feminist social theoretical interrogation of sexual arousal.
The first aspect of the above discussion that I would like to highlight is a shared
sense in Giles, Stoller, and Bersani that arousal is not only grounded in cognition or
discourse but also that it is essentially a cognitive or discursive accomplishment.
Arousal is not merely framed by discourse. It does something discursively. It relates
different aspects of existence to each other and appears only insofar as such a relat-
ing is done. It relates safety to endangerment and certainty to uncertainty by the
simultaneous experience of these poles (Stoller). It emerges through being in con-
trol and by turning oneself over to the control of the other (Giles) or by the subject’s
encounter with something that is more authentic in the subject than the subject itself
and which therefore upsets and disintegrates the “safety” of subjectivity (Bersani).
For a social theoretical account, this shared emphasis on activity is crucial and
something which seems to be lacking in current discussions of arousal as an interac-
tion between cognition, emotion, and physical arousal. This lack apparently springs
from a structural problem in this model, insofar as it often refers cognition to the
background of the experience of arousal, while my discussion in this essay points to
the way in which arousal is an ongoing calculation of cognitive and discursive
stakes. That is, arousal takes place not as grounded in cognition but in-between dif-
ferent cognitions. It is not based or grounded on structures but a structural game or
play, and this conception should guide the social theoretical study of arousal.
Secondly, the discussion points to the way in which arousal is always already
about power. On a basic level, arousal unfolds as an existential struggle over power
on the personal and interpersonal plane. This struggle is present in Giles’ idea of the
oscillation between being in control over the vulnerable other and being controlled
by him or her, in Stoller’s discussion of how the subject momentarily escapes past
traumas through the sexual triumph of arousal, as well as in Bersani’s idea of how
powerlessness undermines subjectivity and how phallic power disavows this vital
dimension of experience through the systematic undervaluation of vulnerability and

powerlessness. However, in this instance, the difference between these three posi-
tions begins to show. It is, for example, obvious that Giles’ discussion overall lacks
an account of how arousal relates to social structures of power and oppression,
while in particular, Bersani’s discussions situate sexual pleasure in the context of
present sexual relations of power. In this instance, it is informative to compare
Bersani’s theory with that of Giles. Giles’ idea of excitement as an effect of surren-
dering to the other, and as a mark of full vulnerable presence in lovemaking, clearly
resonates with Bersani’s idea of sexual pleasure and orgasm as moments in which
the self disintegrates and confronts the original powerlessness of the subject. And
yet, for Bersani, it is vital that the disintegration of the subject constitutes a dreadful
event in human experience. Arousal contains an element of the uncanny, and it is
this uncanny dimension which interests Bersani, while Giles’ primary interest lies
in the completeness of the sexual communion between two individuals (where he
seemingly subscribes to the romantic idea that the other fills a lack in me and more
particularly to the heteronormative idea that the male fills the lack in the female and
vice versa). For Bersani, the sexual economy of power is an economy of fear which
as a response to this uncanny bases itself in an antagonistic relation to the world, a
relation which thus needs rigorous defenses and sharp boundaries between itself
and the other. This idea of the phallic system as a defense mechanism against some
traumatic aspect of lived experience rhymes well with Stoller’s critique of esthetic
excitement and the eroticizing dramas on which this excitement relies, as well as his
idea that such esthetics is ultimately a way of avoiding what is dangerous for the
ego. And together their theories could certainly be used in order to further our
understanding of how arousal thrives on and reproduces social relation of oppres-
sion and dominance in contemporary society.
This leads us to a third question, which concerns the relation between arousal
and social order. While both Stoller and Bersani tie arousal at least in part to rela-
tions of power, only Stoller treats it as necessarily tied to the operation of power. For
Bersani, on the other hand, the phallic function is merely a misrecognized deriva-
tion from the more destructive or disintegrative dimensions of ecstatic suffering.
That is, in Stoller, sexual arousal seems to be inherently connected to the operation
of power, insofar as the dynamics of sexual arousal always already involves the
eroticizing appropriation of danger, while Bersani maintains a space for sexual
practice and arousal as results of a radical encounter with the alterity of the other. In
this sense, Bersani’s view of sexual excitement does not wholly exclude Stoller’s
idea of excitement as an effect of triumph or control over the other. Rather, he for-
mulates a theoretical position which simultaneously allows for phallic and more
radical forms of arousal which challenges phallocentric desire. In this sense, it
would be fruitful to relate Bersani’s ideas of ecstatic suffering and homo-ness to
feminist thinkers of sexual difference like Luce Irigaray and Rosi Braidotti, thinkers
who regularly have attended to the differences between phallic and feminine desire.
For these latter thinkers, like for Bersani, Stoller’s position would certainly risk to
deprive feminine sexuality of arousal and to make of feminine sexuality something
akin to a sexuality without sex!
138 F. Palm
Nevertheless, Stoller’s more unambiguous critique of sexual arousal in its rela-

tive simplicity also raises questions in relation to Bersani’s position. Stoller’s analy-
sis of esthetic excitement as something which relies on the opposition between
safety and danger provides us with a coherent account of the dynamics of arousal
and gives us a sense of arousal as a response to a certain sense of danger on behalf
of the subject. This also seems to apply to Bersani’s account of sexual pleasure as
pleasure in tension (ecstatic suffering). That is, this arousal or excitement is like the
one Stoller thinks linked to a certain suffering, pain, or danger, which as we have
seen is the suffering/danger associated with the disintegrative quality of arousal, but
this formulation becomes logically problematic if we want to take arousal outside
the complex of power and subjectivity. Why? Precisely because its dynamic seems
structurally dependent on the very disintegrating movement and because it is not
clear of what exactly arousal would consist outside a minimum of power and ego-
centrism. In that sense, the question remains how to conceive of and account for
sexual arousal beyond this phallic structure. Bersani’s argument seems to rely on a
tension between the phallic law and the sexual ecstasy of a transgressive exception
to this law, a tension which contemporary psychoanalytical thinkers like Slavoj
Žižek have rejected as essentially phallic (Palm 2007). And in this context, I would
suggest that it would be worthwhile for a social theoretical formulation of arousal to
develop an account of arousal along the lines of Lacan’s formulae of feminine sexu-
ation. As Bersani’s analysis of homo-ness suggests, this arousal would be an arousal
not dependent on power and egocentrism. However, as such, it cannot be maintained
as an ecstasy triggered by disintegration. To follow Žižek, we must instead insist
that it be an enjoyment in its own right, outside the whole logic of exception and
disruption, which does not however amount to an enjoyment outside discourse. As
Bersani’s analysis of homo-ness suggests, this enjoyment would be of another mode
or modality than phallic desire, and as such, an important part of such a Žižekian
reflection would encompass the Foucaultian question of a “new mode of relational-
ity” which Bersani raises. However, as Žižek’s theory has not been the object of this
essay, all further reflection in this vein will be postponed for the time being.
These discussions of how arousal should theoretically be linked to discourse,
danger, power, and social order, let us return to a final question, which concerns the
claim which was made early on in the essay that sexual arousal is inherently and
essentially moral. Throughout the essay, a number of accounts supporting this claim
have been presented, and insofar as we conceive of arousal as thriving on cultural or
structural representations of danger which the subject invests in from a specific
position of enunciation (or enjoyment) in a given sexual economy, it is not difficult
to see how arousal reproduces sexual morality even in its apparent resistance to such
morality. Sexual arousal in this sense reflects cultural beliefs about good and bad.
But rather than presenting any straightforward defense of good morality, the arous-
ing “turn on” here feeds on a specific moral situation. This moral situation is of
course as Rubin has suggested tied to particular sexual economies and structures of
regulation (1984). But contrary to Rubin, we must in relation to what has here been
said about arousal and danger emphasize how this moral economy not only relies on
a good sex which is hegemonic and a bad sex which is excluded. On the contrary,
I would argue that hegemonic sexual arousal is structurally tied to and invested in a
certain “badness.” What gets lost in Rubin’s account of the hierarchic structure of
sexual order is the way in which mainstream, phallic sexuality is not merely ideal or
good but rather feeds on transgression. If this sexuality to some extent surely ideal-
izes certain sexual tropes, the erotizing of these tropes never merely produces good
objects and desires. For instance, the conceptualization of porn as dirty or sinful is
not a quality simply given to it from the outside but an inherent quality of main-
stream porn in itself. It is a constitutive element in pornographic arousal as such. It
is only good insofar as it is bad and only achieves its good by way of a “transgres-
sive adherence” to the rule of morality. Bersani’s account in general paves the way
for asking how more marginalized forms of desire and arousal take part in and
reproduce such transgressive sexual regimes. A more detailed interrogation of the
relation between such marginalized sexual practices, phallic transgression and the
arousal apparatus, however, still remains to be done.
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logical theory.
The Author’s Body: Almodóvar, Film Theory,
and Embodiment
Anne Fleche
Abstract This chapter turns attention to the porosity of bodily boundaries in the
films of Pedro Almodóvar. Considering the trope of the body in relation to the func-
tion of authorship in film studies, it takes the authorship of Almodóvar as a case in
point. The chapter addresses both the representation of bodies in Almodóvar’s films,
as gendered, transformable, vulnerable, permeable, lost, and resurrected, and the
formation of Almodóvar’s corpus as a vulnerable body in itself. It brings out how
Almodóvar’s invocation of bodily themes at the level of film structure effects a split-
ting and doubling of each individual film that contain stories within stories, identi-
ties within identities, and bodies within bodies. Such splitting and doubling also
bring about a blurring of filmic boundaries, between an inside and outside of the
film’s narrative structure. The author calls attention to a motion of self-differentiation
within each individual film body on the level of structure, story, and character in
which inside and outside are blurred and elliptical, dividing the work from within.
This blurring and splitting applies not just to individual films, but also to the work
as a whole, troubling its relation to the author and the boundaries between and
within individual films and the full corpus of films.
Introduction
Does the Author have a body? And if so, where would we find it? In film theory, no
one really asks this question. The theories of film authorship and of film embodi-
ment discussed in this essay invoke quite distinct periods and approaches. Indeed,
the notion of film’s embodiment seems to require a bracketing of its authorship, as
though the film’s phenomenological existence needed only the spectator’s encoun-
ter with the screen. But assuming the spectator’s encounter is what matters in film
experience, what becomes of the film as utterance, and how does embodiment help
us to develop our understanding of film’s discursive power? This essay explores the
A. Fleche (*)
MIT, Cambridge, USA
e-mail: ashleyfleche@rcn.com

142 A. Fleche
function of authorship in film studies and considers whether the trope of the body
helps us to see that function more clearly.
Film Theory: Auteur and the Film Corpus
Perhaps a return to the auteur theory of film can shed some light on this question.
As a means of canonizing certain male directors, auteur has become both ubiqui-
tous and redundant. But the theory remains relevant in its designation of the work as
corpus, as body—a body that is produced via encounters, not single and immediate,
but multiple and longitudinal. Auteur offers an additional reflection upon the way
film becomes an object of perception, that is, by becoming a work, with the author
as its guarantee. The director Pedro Almodóvar provides a case in point: he has
become recognizable as an author by virtue of his 30 years of making films in which
authorship and embodiment are both represented and, as we will see, enacted.
In the plots of these films, the body is invoked repeatedly: as gendered, as trans-
formable, as lost, and as resurrected. Characters lose and find each other again,
change their gender identity, and organize in complex family relationships. Looking
over his oeuvre, one can see Almodóvar working out these bodily themes at the
level of the films’ structure, particularly in the relations between inside and outside,
or diegetic and nondiegetic, elements, such as sound, image, autobiography, and the
film within a film. The blurring of inside and outside applies not just to individual
films, but to the work as a whole, troubling its relation to the author. How do the
films enact a (place of) utterance? And how does the question of authorship help us
to examine these separate strands of structure, plot, and body?
With its complicated narrative of stolen identity, Bad Education (Almodóvar
2004), for example, seems to turn on the question of authorship or authority. In fact,
the film announces this problem in its very first shot. The credit sequence ends with
a frame naming the writer and director as “Pedro Almodóvar.” The name is framed
within the frame by horizontal strips of red. These strips cross-fade out—and in—to
the image behind it, a colorful picture of airplanes and flight attendants naming the
writer/director as “Enrique Goded.” The camera tracks back, revealing this frame as
a still within a gilded frame on a wall, and then pans left, to reveal Enrique at his
desk. The introduction to the film’s world thus includes, first, a confusion of author-
ship (written/filmed) and, next, its doubling, as the citation from Enrique’s film, and
finally he himself comes into view without a cut that would signal a spatial or tem-
poral shift. Seamlessly, Bad Education divides and displaces the notion of the
author, presenting it as, indeed, a frame, a border between inside and outside, on
whose authority the “film” becomes itself.
Can we call this framing the film’s signature? In his response to J. L. Austin,
Jacques Derrida considers whether, as Austin avers, the signature certifies the pres-
ence of the author, “the utterance-origin” (Austin, cited in Derrida 1988, 19). Yes
and no Derrida responds, since the signature can only assure itself via a code that is
not, in some sense, at all singular. The signature, Derrida writes, “must be able to
The Author’s Body: Almodóvar, Film Theory, and Embodiment 143
be detached from the present and singular intention of its production” (1988, 20).
The utterance becomes utterance through its invocation of a code. By focusing on
the relation of the frame to the author/director, Bad Education suggests that the
diegetic (story) world of the film is produced via a transfer or signing off of author-
ity from an outer to an inner world, a transfer that is enacted by the film. Our ability
to enter the fiction of the diegesis is predicated on our obeying the law of this trans-
fer, the law of the shots’ grammar, of what we may call the film’s “code.” Moreover,
to recognize the film as an enunciation that announces its origin also unsettles this
fictional world. Who is “Enrique Goded,” and why are we introduced to him via the
film poster? Is it because the film has to write him in, to show his signature? Like
the spectator, Enrique takes up his position inside the diegesis because he has been
situated by the function of authorship, the function by which film becomes an utter-
ance, someone speaking, a code that is not reducible to the film and is thus outside
it. Enrique produces an emotional and structural bridge between the spectator and
the film, the way narrators do, and in the opening shots of his film, his function is
both enacted and revealed.
Enrique is thus spoken by the film, and this revelation seals the deal: Almodóvar’s
self-consciousness as an author, like Hitchcock’s, compromises the spectator by
making them a willing accomplice in the fiction. The active presence of the specta-
tor is both assumed and invoked, so that the crises of meaning, when they come, will
be more fully felt by a viewer whose role mirrors that of the author as creator/actor.
Laura Mulvey describes this effect in Hitchcock’s Vertigo in relation to “the impli-
cations of the active/looking, passive/looked at split” (1989, 24). The narrative, she
says, replicates and exposes the spectator’s role so that “erotic involvement with the
look boomerangs” (1989, 24). Mulvey’s analysis illuminates the complex organiza-
tion of the film as an object of perception that is also conditional on the spectator’s
participation and belief: the film is simultaneously a text and a performance, “a
meaning and a moment”. Performance, as Peter Wollen notes, involves perceptions
of the moment, “continuous phenomena,” or what linguists call “graded” features of
language (Wollen 1972, 106–107). In his structuralist analysis of auteur theory,
Wollen describes the director’s role as similarly unstable, both inside and outside
the text, as both composer and performer: “The director’s position is shifting and
ambiguous. He both forms a link between design and performance and can com-
mand or participate in both” (Wollen 1972, 112). And Truffaut’s original formula-
tion on auteur is similar: “The artist cannot always dominate his work. He must be,
sometimes, God [or “Goded”?] and, sometimes, his creature” (Truffaut 1976, 232).
In Wollen’s linguistic turn, then, the film becomes both story and “performance” or
enactment; just as in speech, we distinguish between the code and the utterance. The
performance invokes a performer or speaker, an author who is thus enacted “perfor-
matively” by the oeuvre. As Wollen notes, auteur theory “reveals authors where
none had been seen before” (Wollen 1972, 77). Bad Education suggests this process
in its very title, which means, “education,” but also a kind of act or performance
(“behavior”).
This gesture toward what is enacted or performed reveals the unseen place of the
author, the speaker, a role created by the film that nevertheless stands outside it.
144 A. Fleche
When we lose sight of the speaker, do we risk remaining trapped inside the film,
spoken by it?1 Conversely, when the author’s place is held open, the spectator is
positioned both inside and outside the film text, conditioned, and enabled by its
structural openings. Psychoanalytically, this position mimics the subject’s forma-
tion. In its trope of the mirror, of the film encounter as a repetition of primordial
experience, spectatorship theory suggested that the spectator perceives the film
through the same process as that of the subject, that is, through internalizing the
outside of the body (Lacan 1977, 1–7). Auteur and spectatorship theory, then, for-
mulate the encounter with film as something not immediate but belated. Inside the
perception of film is the apperception of what has come before.
Film Theory: Embodiment and the Enactment of Film
More recently, there has been a certain return to the question of the encounter with
film, not as text but as object. Embodiment theories of film seek to explore this
encounter using phenomenological and materialist approaches. How does the film
become perceivable? And how is it experienced? After the spectatorship theory of
the 1970s and 1980s, which stressed the notion of the subject in its encounter with
the film, theories of embodiment moved the question from the subject to the body.
Vivian Sobchack, for example, writes that there is a “film body,” to which the spec-
tator responds as in any encounter with another—film “implicates a ‘body’,” she
says (Sobchack 1991, 133). Like us, Sobchack argues, the film has to enact its exis-
tence and to be seen or met by another:
The screen, then, is the substantial “flesh” that allows the perceptive activity of the film situ-
ated presence and finite articulation. The screen is the material substance that enables the
frame its function. (Sobchack 1991, 211)
The materiality of film study—the need to experience the film in its own form,
and in its own time, then, rather than the film as signifier—is stressed, as necessary
to any understanding of its perception by a spectator. And here there is a connection
to the earlier theories of film as performance. But the embodiment theory of film
seeks also to recover another body, the perceiving body that was thought to have
been lost to theories of the perceiving “subject,” to “occularism,” or to whatever
remained of Descartes’ cogito. It seeks to examine the encounter with film as an
in-body experience, action, and reaction, happening at all levels of sensory and
1
The problem of “enunciation” in film theory is generally discussed in terms of the film “appara-
tus” rather than the author and thereby linked to an ideological critique. However, Kaja Silverman
notes that even in theories of film’s ideological apparatus, the author “makes the occasional sur-
reptitious return.” For Silverman, the author is inseparable from the film’s representations and
constituted through them; Silverman’s author “would in fact be nothing outside cinema—an author
‘outside’ the text who would come into existence as a dreaming, desiring, self-affirming subject
only through the inscription of an author ‘inside’ the text” (1988, 201, 202. Emphasis in
original).
material subjectivity. Sobchack’s embodiment theory proposes not a visual encoun-

ter, but an encounter with film in the flesh, screen, and spectator, “the common
existential ground of body and world” (Sobchack 2004, 286). The body and (film)
world have to meet, and it is this meeting Sobchack’s theory attempts to describe.
Arguably, spectatorship theory, despite its name, was not merely ocular; it too
sought to explore the specificity of the encounter with film and to explore its consti-
tutive role for the subject. Thus, the embodiment theory of film neither subsumes
nor contradicts spectatorship theory, for “even such philosophical emphasis on the
particular leaves aside some very salient aspects of spectatorship,” as some scholars
have noted (Corrigan et al. 2011, 4); surely it matters who meets the film, and where,
and when? An example of the crossing between spectatorship and embodiment is
the writing of Laura Marks, who, working on intercultural cinema, explores the
significance of memory, an internalized sense perception that is culturally defined,
nonuniversal. Sense memory—which includes the memory of images as well as
sounds, smells, textures, etc.—produces a response in the viewer that is less psycho-
logical than “mimetic.” “In fact,” Marks writes, “cinema is a mimetic medium,
capable of drawing us into sensory participation with its world even more than is
written language” (2000, 214). This sensory or mimetic relation to film Marks con-
trasts with “the mainstream narrativization of experience” (2000, 214). Paradoxically,
then, the mimetic or “haptic” relation is not accomplished by immersion in the
film’s world, as it is in Mulvey’s theory, but by a resistance to it that pulls the viewer
toward the outside. “The haptic image forces the viewer to contemplate the image
itself instead of being pulled into the narrative” (Marks 2000, 163. Emphasis added).
This “affective” response to film, however, has nothing to do with abstraction (“I am
suggesting that a sensuous response may be elicited without abstraction”); it is not
a “representation” (Marks 2000, 164). Marks invokes Deleuze’s “time-image” and
Trinh’s “speaking nearby” as analogies, suggesting that there is a response to film
that is less a moving narrative involvement than a (static? coded?) bodily
“co-presen(ce).”
Indeed, for Deleuze, the time-image specifically breaks with representational
(“human”) space and is instead defined “in relation to the speech act” (1989, 266).
The reference to Deleuze returns us, then, to the film as utterance and to the screen
as a space that projects meaning. The screen is in fact not a body for Deleuze, but
“an opaque surface which receives, in order to disorder, and on which characters,
objects and words are inscribed as ‘data’” (Deleuze 1989, 266). It is in this sense
that the time-image is “a direct experience,” engaged with “this specific content,
images and signs” (Deleuze 267, 262). The return to auteur theory gives us a way
to understand film as a speech act, a performative whose meaning both exceeds and
is conditional upon an event that cannot be qualified in advance. Drawing on Marks’
idea of “resistance,” we might say that the film frames the act, but cannot represent
it: the act remains thus, in some sense, outside the film. The auteur’s presence is not
visible, but performatively produced in the spectator’s engagement with the film, as
a frame, and in a structural relation. In this way auteur has presaged the whole ques-
tion of film’s embodiment, because as Deleuze suggests, the film not only has to
provide the data; it also has to enact it.
146 A. Fleche
Pedro Almodóvar: Auteur, Embodiment, and Film

as a Performative
Pedro Almodóvar’s films, looked at longitudinally, in auteur mode, perhaps offer

examples of the way film resists perception, producing meaning instead via what is
called embodiment, which is thus a kind of apperception or internalized, contingent
meaning, what Marks might call a “mimetic” one. The spectator, over time, devel-
ops a sense of the auteur’s work that is not contained within any single film and,
through this internalized sense of the work, recognizes its outside, the place of the
auteur. By losing its singularity, then, the film can begin to become an object of
perception. In their liberating plot structures, premised upon sexual desire, and in
their increasing level of reflexivity and confusion at the point of the narrative frame,
Almodóvar’s films have persistently frustrated the work of visual logic and narrative
objectivity. The diegetic world of the film is increasingly a deferred or belated event,
experienced in the moment of recognition and return. Indeed, what distinguishes
him as an auteur is, arguably, his attempts to frame the film experience so that what
is perceived is not the representational “reality, obviousness and truth” (Mulvey
1989, 25) of visual pleasure, but the resistance to it, in which the film is experienced
through a process both coded and performed—repeated and singular.
Looked at over time, Almodóvar’s films have seemed autobiographical and
therefore metafilmic, reworking a story of liberation that is historically relevant both
to gay liberation and to the Movida movement in which his art developed. Indeed,
when he makes the film Law of Desire, he names his new production company El
Deseo, “Desire.” The meaning of “desire” across Amodóvar’s films thus seems very
close to Tennessee Williams’ notion of it in A Streetcar Named Desire, a play per-
formed at various points in All About My Mother (1999). To know desire is to know
what you don’t have, to recognize that you are indeed in the closet, and to want
something beyond it. Thus, desire cannot be expressed except as a liberation, even
a liberation that comes as a result of bondage (Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!). In this
way the films, individually and collectively, are bound together by a structure that
invites its own undoing. His films are as much about enclosure and entrapment as
about liberation, regeneration, and rebirth. Something bound has to give. For
Almodóvar the enclosure and rebirth structure depends upon a physical encoun-
ter—not unlike the one in Streetcar—often violent, between adversaries driven by
desire, a dynamic structure that has been read as an allegory of creation (Almodóvar
1996, 226). Indeed the hothouse atmosphere invoked in Williams’ play is often
present, the sense of entrapment in a fatal encounter. This is no mere clash of wills,
but a primordial recognition, born of the ooze. While it can be a destroyer, for
Almodòvar, desire is always the desire to liberate, to transform: the Almodóvar
corpus is thus permeable, contingent—a vulnerable body. Over time, in the films,
there is an increasing use of ellipses, and also individually, each film often splits and
doubles, containing stories within stories, identities within identities, and even bod-
ies within bodies: a nun becomes pregnant by a transgender woman; another nun
has a double life as a novelist; a lawyer is also a serial killer. At the level of both
story and character, inside and outside become blurred, elliptical, dividing the work
from within.2
In the later films the openness and non-singularity of the film is becoming per-
haps even more pronounced, at all levels—narrative, thematic, metaphorical. For
example, All About My Mother (1999) begins with a nurse, Manuela, deciding to
call the organ donor bank about her patient, who is brain dead. Later, Manuela per-
forms the role of a woman being asked to donate her husband’s organs in a simula-
tion watched by a seminar at her hospital. Still later, we will see Manuela, who is
also a mother, being asked to donate her own son’s organs. We even see the man
who gets the son’s donated heart, and Manuela stalks him, as though following that
heart. The rest of the film is the story of Manuela’s journey, in some sense, to con-
tinue to follow her son’s heart. The body’s breakup into organs both prefigures and
motivates the plot. In addition, as Almodóvar’s critics have noted, this repeated
organ donor sequence in turn repeats the opening scene of an earlier film, The
Flower of My Secret (1996), in which a mother is told that her son is dead and is
asked to donate his organs, which a series of cuts also shows to be videotaped for a
watching audience at a seminar, in another inside/outside narrative structure. The
names, scenes, and even scenes within scenes quote and circle back to each other.
Inside the work, then, is an outside, a referent that is elsewhere in the body of work,
creating both a comforting promise of return and a curious sense of belatedness or
déjà vu. “Identities are never individual,” in Almodóvar’s films, Bersani and Dutoit
write; “[i]t is as if the reappearance of identities were antecedent to their realiza-
tion” (Bersani and Dutoit 2009, 264, 263). The characters share with their author
the shimmer of the performative; their appearance requires a complex internal/
external play of graded experience and referential code.
Character, the keynote for the narrative in classical style, is thus divided, belated.
The split analyzed by both embodiment and spectatorship theory enables us to see
the way the object is (per)formed. Who is this character? She is, uncannily, also
someone else—strangely returned from the dead, lost, but also there. Volver, one of
his titles, means “return.” The bodies within bodies are echoed by the film within
the film, sometimes a second plot or subtext—Hitchcock’s Vertigo in The Skin I live
In, for example—and sometimes by a second film conjured up in some way by the
first film and inseparable from its development. The extra plot, like the extra body,
might also be called “uncanny,” and indeed as in Freud’s account, the woman’s body
in Almodóvar frequently emplots the maternal space of home and strangeness, both
filmically and metafilmically (Freud 1959, 368–407).3 This uncanniness is, as in
2
Something like this noncoincidence of the self is expressed in embodiment theory, which often
seeks to explain the role of consciousness in reversible terms. The self is produced in a state of
internal/external awareness and experiences consciousness from a divided perspective. Thus, for
Lisa Folkmarson Käll, “My very self-awareness is predicated on the fact that I never quite coincide
with myself, but as one, embody two aspects in reversible relation, thereby continuously differen-
tiating myself from myself” (2009, 115).
3
In his essay, Freud explains that the perception of “uncanniness” is both an experiential moment
and a moment of return (“heimlich/unheimlich”) to the mother’s body, a familiar inside that has
also become alien, strange.
148 A. Fleche
Freud, both spooky and funny. In Volver, the mother (Carmen Maura, an early col-
laborator with whom Almodóvar had had a falling out) is thought to be dead. But
then she seems to be alive and in the old family home, in La Mancha, which is not
just the home of Don Quixote, but also the ancestral home of Almodóvar, whose
muse she had been, a metafilmic gesture not unlike Cervantes’ ironic intertextuality.
(Almodóvar reminds us of the literary allusion frequently, with shots of the local
wind turbines.) (Cervantes 2003)
Similarly, In Talk to Her (2002), the film within the film marks a return to the
mother’s body. The nurse Benigno goes to the movies and sees a silent film that
disturbs him: a man shrinks, crawls over his naked female lover’s breasts, then fur-
ther down, and then climbs inside her. The vagina is presented as a mound of hair
with a slit in it—no genitalia, no specificity. It seems to be a kind of soft, dark cave,
the womb as tomb, like Freud’s uncanny mother. The shrinking man stays in there,
Benigno tells his patient Alicia, “forever.” This film within a film might be a gesture
toward the unconscious, in its similarity to Freud’s description of the woman’s geni-
tals in “The Uncanny” and in its style—silent, surrealist. And this inner film does
seem to have an effect on what happens next to Benigno, the gentle caregiver to the
comatose Alicia. The funny creepiness of the film is, on one hand, a Freudian read-
ing of Benigno: in the process of creating a consciousness for Alicia, he encounters
the possibilities offered by his own unconscious desires, among them perhaps the
desire for his own (dead) mother. And yet, this surrealist film has another role to
play: it stands in, as many critics have noted, for a bodily encounter that is not else-
where in the film. It takes up the space where that encounter would be. And in this
way, it uncannily represents something that is also lost to the film. It produces a gap
in the structure. So the uncanniness is not a recurrence of something repressed, so
much as a figure of repression, of the fact that a bodily encounter is left out. Like
Almodóvar’s other films, Talk to Her incorporates other performances very easily—
film, dance, song. But arguably his distinctive corpus is especially marked here,
with the incorporated film that is not even a simulation like the earlier films, so dif-
ferent in form as to seem nondiegetic. The film insert performs the narrative’s the-
matic struggle with bodily presence and absence: the woman the film’s title urges us
to speak to is a woman in a coma. The silent film too points to the notion that these
images are bodies and that we are in some sense communicating with them. “You
have to talk to them,” Benigno says of the comatose women. “They exist.” Once
again, auteur’s implied question of who is speaking, and to whom, is invoked in
relation to the film and enacted in its inner/outer structural relationships.
In Almodóvar’s earlier work you can already hear the problem of speech in rela-
tion to the corporeal in the frequent recourse to disembodied voices: the song of the
lost German lover in What Have I Done to Deserve This? (1984), the dubbing artists
who break up over the answering machine in Women on the Verge of a Nervous
Breakdown (1988). Talk to Her stresses the separation of body and voice repeatedly,
in its mise-en-scène as well as its plot. The scene in which Benigno and Marco meet
at the jail, sitting in glass booths, attempting to communicate by telephone, is espe-
cially poignant. Like Benigno’s “talk,” the films provide voices for these other bod-
ies, so that inside the narrative, a space opens up where the film itself might seem to
speak. But this voice too is a citation: Women on the Verge began as an adaptation
of Cocteau’s La Voix Humaine, a work that also came up in Law of Desire (1987);
in All About My Mother, the scenes from Lorca and Tennessee Williams stand in for
the encounter with the lost child. These citations liberate the character’s desire by
enabling them to become someone else, perhaps to become someone they have been
before (Manuela had played Stella in Streetcar when she was young). Thus, the
release comes as a back-formation, as a performative effect. And it is produced by
the film’s incorporation of the citation, so that once again the film organizes mean-
ing around an internal foregrounding, an inside/out structure.
It is this technique of incorporation, this restless allusiveness and self-
referentiality of Almodóvar’s films, that makes it hard on his critics. These are dif-
ficult films to describe. In lieu of the encounter with the film, critics seem to feel
they must recount the entire plot in detail—as though compelled to repeat a trau-
matic event. But also, how else to explain adequately the complex crossings of plot
and character? How to account for all those ellipses? As Bersani and Dutoit suggest,
each section of the film seems at once a reflection on the rest and yet something new,
unforeseen. It is both singular and circular. Almodóvar’s work is thus especially
resistant to any totalizing image or narrative. Like surrealism, it blurs the contours
of inside and outside, character and performance, plot and citation.
Despite these similarities in his work, Talk to Her seemed to some critics to mark
a new kind of film for Almodóvar, structurally. “The story appears to unfold and
unfold,” as one interviewer says (Almodóvar 1996, 213). And indeed the film within
the film develops into a highly textured experience, at once open and evolving and
tightly wrapped, enclosed. It is not just that we watch that other, silent film, The
Shrinking Lover, it is also the significant fact that this other film becomes a kind of
medium through which much of the rest of the film is understood. Its many contrasts
to the outer film (silent, black and white, surrealist), as well as its narrative topogra-
phy, which takes place on and in a body, constitute a new experience that is contin-
gent upon its embeddedness in the outer text. It cannot simply be integrated. Like
any surrealist film, it is there to provoke meaning, not to represent it, producing the
experience it purports to show. In a conflation of inside and outside, the scene
equates impregnation with pregnancy, as the Shrinking Lover both enters the woman
and takes up residency there. And it is above all the fact that someone—Benigno—
is narrating this film as an experience to another character—“talking to her”—that
makes it an experience for the viewer, rather than a piece of the plot: the viewer does
not see it, in a sense, for themselves. Digression is a familiar avant-garde technique,
but in Talk to Her, the digression is a fully formed second film, at the same time that
it has a function in the narrative. So it is not, I think, like the performances of the
German choreographer Pina Bausch that frame the film, performances at which the
onlooking characters’ presence is integrated diegetically via reverse angle shots.
The term diegesis normally means that there is a distinction between what is nar-
rated and what is performed, what is inside the film and outside it. The inner film in
Talk to Her floats in its own space, making its own diegesis, opening onto another
story.
150 A. Fleche
Bad Education (2004) goes a little further. Here, the film within a film that is
narrated by one character to another interrupts the outer film right away and without
announcing itself—that is, without creating its own separate diegesis. And the way
it is filmed makes it clear, eventually, that we are experiencing it, not from the point
of view of the one who is telling the story, the one we might call the author—as in
Talk to Her—but from the point of view of the one who is reading it. In this way the
author/reader/spectator distinction is obscured. The reader, Enrique, a writer/direc-
tor looking for a story to film, imagines this story, The Visit, as a film. And in this
reading he unwittingly conflates two other characters, Juan and Ignacio. After this
opening section, the story recurs from different sources, revising and complicating
this original reading. But the original reading is still there, acting as a distorting
baseline for any future information. So it is as though no single moment in the rest
of the film can actually be experienced directly, that is, without the reading’s media-
tion. In an interview, Almodóvar, asked about the confusion wrought by the intru-
sion of this second film, seemed not to care whether The Visit obscured his characters’
fictional “status” (Almodóvar 1996, 218). And indeed these layered fictions consti-
tute the foundation of his status as an auteur.
By entwining The Visit in an outer film that includes revisions, flashbacks, and
changing identities, Almodóvar seems to give up Bad Education to a kind of fright-
ening, treacherous, shifting experience, an encounter with a fairly undefined film
“body.” He provides a kind of test for theories of film by leading the viewer toward
the experience of something that cannot be perceived directly, but only apper-
ceived—that is, understood internally via some previous experience. That is why
you cannot really say what any scene, or shot, in Almodóvar’s films means, particu-
larly in these later films. Thrown off from the point of view provided by a centered
subject, the narrative multiplies metonymically, into a kind of grid without a cen-
ter—not, as one critic has it, simply a “complex multi-perspectivism” (Fuentes
2009, 438), but something more like the “liquefaction” of identity Bersani and
Dutoit find in the opening of All About My Mother. Without a stable subject, in
either sense of that term, the film’s diegesis becomes a performative; instead of the
contained world of the characters’ performance, organized around the character’s
unique identity, the diegesis is experienced as an effect of the film’s structural laws.
What are all the echolalic scenes repeating? Bersani and Dutoit ask. We might haz-
ard an answer by considering their function. The scenes repeat to cite each other, to
authorize each other, in the production of that larger, longitudinal corpus, what
auteur theory constructs as the author’s body. What is instructive for embodiment
studies here then is Almodóvar’s exploration of the film as an object of perception
that is produced over time, as a body of work, a performance, and an act. The auteur
authorizes a body that has not been authorized in advance, a body that demonstrates
the need for bodies to perform, to act, to be cited. And this citation conditions the
visible, troubling the film as an object of perception.
Acknowledgments This paper owes much to two sources. First, I would not have thought of writ-
ing it but for Jeffrey Whitman, an undergraduate at Northeastern University, with whom I spent a
summer studying all of Almodóvar’s films. It was a pleasure to discuss the films with Jeff, who not
only feels totally comfortable disagreeing with me, but who also, unlike his teacher, understands
Spanish. I learned more than I could ever consciously acknowledge from his work. In addition, I
wish to thank the Body/Embodiment Group at Northeastern and Uppsala Universities, for whose
volume this paper was written. In particular the group’s leaders, Lisa Folkmarson Käll, Linda
Blum, Ann Grenell, and Lihua Wang, have been excellent role models. The problems and flaws in
this paper I acknowledge my own.
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Sobchack, V. (1991). Address of the eye: A phenomenology of film experience. Princeton: Princeton
University Press.
Sobchack, V. (2004). Carnal thoughts: Embodiment and moving image culture. Berkeley/Los
Angeles: University of California Press. eBook.
Talk to Her. (2002). Dir. Pedro Almodóvar. Perf. Javier Cámara, Darío Grandinetti, Leonor Watling,
Rosiario Flores. El Deseo SA.
152 A. Fleche
The Flower of My Secret. (1996). Dir. Pedro Almodóvar. Perf. Marisa Paredes, Juan Echanove,
Carme Elias. El Deseo SA.
Truffaut, F. (1976). A certain tendency of the French cinema. In B. Nichols (Ed.), Movies and
methods (Vol. 1, pp. 224–237). Berkeley/Los Angeles/London: University of California Press.
What Have I Done to Deserve This? (1984). Dir. Pedro Almodóvar. Perf. Carmen Maura, Gonzalo
Suárez, Luis Hostalot. Kaktus Producciones Cinématográficas, Tesaura SA.
Wollen, P. (1972). Signs and meaning in the cinema. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. First
published 1969.
Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. (1988). Dir. Pedro Almodóvar. Perf. Carmen Maura,
Antonio Banderas, Julieto Serrano. El Deseo SA.
Anne Fleche has a Ph.D. in English from Rutgers University and an M.A. in Applied Linguistics
from The University of Massachusetts-Boston. She Lecturers in Drama and Film at Northeastern
University and at MIT. Fleche is interested in connecting theories of language, performance, the-
atricality and film. Her publications have appeared in Semiotica, TDR, Theatre Journal, Modern
Drama, and Twentieth Century Literary Criticism, as well as book collections, and she is the
author of Mimetic Disillusion: Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams and U. S. Dramatic Realism.
Performativity and Expression: The Case
of David Cronenberg’s M. Butterfly
Abstract Through a reading of David Cronenberg’s 1993 film M. Butterfly, this

chapter brings Judith Butler’s idea of the performativity of gender into conversa-
tion with Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s writings on the expression of embodied subjec-
tivity. The chapter brings out how the portrayal of the two protagonists in
Cronenberg’s film, Song Liling and René Gallimard, on the one hand illustrates
Butler’s contention that gender identity is performatively constituted through a
stylized reiteration of bodily acts that produce the illusion of an inner core on the
surface of the body and on the other hand points to the limitations of a strictly
performative framework. The character of Song Liling is portrayed in such a way
as to also provoke questions of how to account for subjectivity or a felt sense of self
that cannot be captured by third-person descriptions nor reduced to a product of
reiterated performative imitation. Challenging Butler’s simplistic account and dis-
missal of expression, the chapter turns instead to the account of expression offered
by Merleau-Ponty and argues that this provides a non-reductive way of under-
standing subjectivity as embodying both a first- and a third-person perspective in
interrelation and of rethinking the relation between interiority and exteriority with-
out reducing one to the other.
Introduction
David Cronenberg’s film M. Butterfly (1993) portrays the love affair between the
French diplomat René Gallimard, stationed in China in the mid-1960s, and the
Chinese opera singer Song Liling. The affair is a play of power, fascination, secrets,
and seduction on both parts. During their time together, Gallimard reveals classified
information that Song takes straight to the communist party. After some time
Gallimard returns to Paris where Song a few years later looks him up and
L.F. Käll (*)

Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden
e-mail: lisa.kall@gender.su.se

154 L.F. Käll
“encourages” him to get involved in further spy activities. When these are exposed
and both of them are brought to trial, what is also exposed is that Song Liling is “in
fact” a man. Gallimard is put in prison where he during a stage performance in
heavy, grotesque makeup as Madame Butterfly cuts his throat in front of his fellow
inmates and to the sound of Puccini’s opera from a cheap tape recorder. Song Liling,
in suit and tie, is deported to China.
Cronenberg’s M. Butterfly is based on a Tony Award-winning play by David
Henry Hwang (1989), who also wrote the screenplay for the film. They are both
“inspired” by an actual international spy scandal involving the French embassy atta-
ché Bernard Boursicot and the Beijing Opera travesti actor Shi Pei Pu. Boursicot
and Shi were both convicted of espionage in 1986 and sentenced to 6 years in prison
but released already in 1987. When they first met, Shi told Boursicot that she/he was
born a girl but had been raised as a boy in order to please her/his paternal grand-
mother who had ruled the household and that she/he had continued living disguised
as a man. Boursicot accepted Shi’s story and initiated a sexual relationship with her/
him, which was supposedly carried out on and off over a period of almost 20 years
without Boursicot questioning Shi’s sexual identity as a woman. When they were
arrested, the court ordered a physical examination of Shi Pei Pu who was found to
be a man with no trace of surgical intervention (Wadler 1993). The sensationalist
news of this story prompted Hwang to use it as content for his play, a deconstruc-
tionist version of the myth of Madame Butterfly, effecting “mutations on Puccini’s
1904 opera” (Testa 2006, 91).
The portrayal of René Gallimard and Song Liling in M. Butterfly invites a read-
ing of gender identity as constructed and performatively constituted (de Lauretis
1999; Käll 1997; Rosenberg 2009; Suner 1998). In fact, David Cronenberg states
that it was the idea that the “sexuality of each of us is an agreed-upon fantasy that
we both create for each other” that triggered him to make the film (Rodley 1993,
184). The film troubles gender in much the same way as Judith Butler’s account of
the performativity of gender in her groundbreaking Gender Trouble (1990a). It
illustrates Butler’s contention that gender is what she calls a stylized reiteration of
bodily acts that produce the illusion of an inner core on the surface of the body. At
the same time, however, the film also points to the limitations of a strictly performa-
tive framework and calls for a more careful reflection of the relation between interi-
ority and exteriority than the notion of performativity seem able to offer. In the
following, I argue that such reflection can be carried out through a nuanced under-
standing of the notion of expression as articulated in Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phe-
nomenological philosophy.
Performativity and Expression: The Case of David Cronenberg’s M. Butterfly 155
Performativity of Gender
In her now classic account of the performativity of gender, Judith Butler forcefully
argues that gender is a “stylized repetition of acts”1 that congeal over time to pro-
duce the illusion of a substantial inner core on the surface of the body.2 Gender,
according to Butler, should be understood as “the discursive/cultural means by
which ‘sexed nature’ or ‘a natural sex’ is produced and established as ‘prediscur-
sive,’ prior to culture, a politically neutral surface on which culture acts” (1990a, 7).
Sex, she contends, is already a gendered category, continuously produced through
the highly regulated reiteration of acts and gestures which attempt to approximate a
gendered ideal of a natural sex. The ideal of a natural sex is, in Butler’s view, a
phantasmatic construction “that bodies are compelled to approximate, but never
can” (1990a, 146).
She writes,
[G]ender is in no way a stable identity or locus of agency from which various acts proceed;
rather, it is an identity tenuously constituted in time – an identity instituted through a styl-
ized repetition of acts. Further, gender is instituted through the stylization of the body and,
hence, must be understood as the mundane way in which bodily gestures, movements, and
enactments of various kinds constitute the illusion of an abiding gendered self. (Butler
1988, 519; see also 1990a, 140)
Butler asks us to consider gender as “a corporeal style” (1988, 521) and stresses
the absolute centrality both of embodiment to performativity and of performativity
to embodiment. She denies any ontological status of the body apart from its perfor-
mative acts and argues that the reality of the body is fabricated in terms of an abiding
1
In articulating gender as a “stylized repetition of acts,” Butler makes reference to Jean-Paul
Sartre’s “a style of being,” Michel Foucault’s “a stylistics of existence” and her own reading of
Simone de Beauvoir as offering an understanding of gender in terms of “styles of the flesh.” Style,
for Butler, is a “corporeal enactment” that “is both intentional and performative” (1990a, 139). To
enact a certain style, of, for instance, gender, is not, she writes, “a radical act of creation,” but
rather “a tacit project to renew one’s cultural history in one’s own terms” (1986, 40). She is careful
to stress that styles are “never fully self-styled, for styles have a history, and those histories condi-
tion and limit the possibilities” (1990a, 139). How one renews one’s cultural history in one’s own
terms is thus conditioned by that very cultural history in which “one’s own terms” are situated but
which is nevertheless continuously rearticulated and continued in different directions through sin-
gular intentional and performative enactments. Butler’s characterization of style modifies her
claim that identity is a product of performative reiteration in so far as it recognizes style as both
intentional and performative.
2
The idea of an illusion of an inner core on the surface of the body not only involves a displace-
ment and reconceptualization of interiority but also rests on a view of the body as a surface entity
on which such an illusion can be drawn or inscribed. The displacement of interiority onto the sur-
face of the body thus seems to maintain an assumption of the body as a thing, albeit not a thing as
the container of an inner core but instead as a surface upon which an inner core is inscribed. By
accepting the terms on which the body is conceptualized within a dualistic framework of inner and
outer, mind and body, subject and object, the displacement of interiority, in effect, runs the risk of
remaining within the very framework it seeks to disrupt. Any displacement of interiority onto the
surface of the body must go hand in hand with careful consideration of how to conceptualize the
body and bodily surfaces.
156 L.F. Käll
interiority and integrity of the subject. Gendered identities, she writes, are repro-
duced “through the various ways in which bodies are acted in relationship to the
deeply entrenched or sedimented expectations of gendered existence” (Butler 1988,
524). These scripted identities and “the illusion of an interior and organizing gender
core” are, argues Butler, “maintained for the purposes of the regulation of sexuality
within the obligatory frame of reproductive heterosexuality” (Butler 1990a, 136).
The reiteration of gender norms that produces “the peculiar phenomenon of a natu-
ral sex, or a real woman” through a set of performative corporeal styles over time
comes to “appear as the natural configuration of bodies into sexes which exist in a
binary relation to one another” (Butler 1988, 524; see also Butler 1990a, 140).
Furthermore, according to Butler, it is not only sexual difference in terms of a binary
opposition between male and female that is maintained for the purpose of reproduc-
tive heterosexuality; she famously argues that also desire is produced within this
frame and governed by what she calls the “heterosexual matrix,” a “grid of cultural
intelligibility through which bodies, genders and desires are naturalized” (Butler
1990a, 151, note 6). The heterosexual matrix, writes Butler, grounds its own con-
structions through exclusionary, regulatory practices that produce what they claim
only to discover.3
Cronenberg’s M. Butterfly seems to offer something of a textbook example of the
performativity of gender, explicitly made manifest through the character of Song
Liling who performs femininity to perfection. She4 embodies two extremes of the
eternal feminine and is, as Teresa de Lauretis points out, “both a glamorous diva and
a demure, self-effacing little woman” (1999, 315). However, Song’s gender perfor-
mative is also an explicit performance and her embodiment of femininity brings out
3
Further, how one is sexed is regulated in a binary relation which fully excludes one sex/gender
from the other. The differentiation of the two opposite sexes/genders has a strengthening effect on
both of them; the more the gender terms are differentiated from each other, the clearer and more
distinguished is the core and definition of each term. The identity of one gender depends on the
exclusion of another, and the exclusionary practices constitutive of gender differences reinforce
and stabilize specific gender identities which in a binary relation are limited to being only one of
two.
The reiterated practices of performative acts not only account for the continuous affirmation
and strengthening of gender identities but also for possibilities of changing these identities. While
Butler stresses that there is no possibility for agency outside of the discursive practices through
which the very term agency is made intelligible, she also points to the possibility of performing
differently: “The task is not whether to repeat, but how to repeat or, indeed, to repeat and, through
a radical proliferation of gender, to displace the very gender norms that enable the repetition itself”
(Butler 1990a, 140). However, I agree with Sara Heinämaa that the effects of repeating otherwise
and performing differently should not be exaggerated. Heinämaa writes, “By generating alterna-
tive combinations of gendered features, performative acts are able to disturb our habits of perceiv-
ing and challenge our theorizing about sex and gender, but in so far as these exercises remain
momentary or local, they cannot reverse the sedimentation of gender types” (2011, 145).
4
Following among others Beard (2006) and Suner (1998), I will refer to Song Liling with feminine
pronouns when she appears in her feminine persona and masculine pronouns when he appears in
his masculine persona. When the persona appears as ambiguous, I will refer to Song in the gender
neutral zie/hir/hir. De Lauretis rightly notes that the problem of how to refer to Song Liling reminds
us of the “constructedness of gender and its overdetermination by language” (1999, 313).
the interrelation and tension between willful performance and habituated, reiterated
performativity. Butler clearly states that performativity cannot be understood in
terms of performance. Whereas the latter rests on the assumption of a preexisting
subject who deliberately carries out the performance, the former rejects the idea of
a preexisting subject altogether and instead accounts for the constitution of such a
subject as an illusion or object of belief (1988, 1990a). Song’s performance and
performative enactment illustrate Butler’s contention that drag “subverts the dis-
tinction between inner and outer psychic space” and that it, as an imitation of gen-
der, “implicitly reveals the imitative structure of gender itself – as well as its
contingency” (Butler 1990a, 137). The transvestite, she writes, challenges the dis-
tinction between appearance and reality and shows the performance of drag to be
“as fully real as anyone whose performance complies with social expectations”
(Butler 1988, 527). Through subverting the distinction between inner and outer psy-
chic space and between appearance and reality, drag, according to Butler, effec-
tively mocks the idea that there is a true gender identity that is unambiguously
expressed in bodily behavior and desires.
Song Liling is well aware and quite critical, scornful even, of the cultural fantasy
of Butterfly that she performs and becomes in relation to her trusting lover. In her
very first meeting with René Gallimard, when he compliments her on her perfor-
mance of Madama Butterfly saying that he has never seen a performance as con-
vincing as hers, she immediately and bluntly puts him in his place as a Western
imperialist arrogantly unaware of his Orientalism. She confronts his homogeniza-
tion of the Orient provocatively returning his compliment with the words
“Convincing? Me as a Japanese woman? Did you know the Japanese used thou-
sands of our people for medical experiments during the war? But I gather such an
irony is lost on you.” Of course, the irony is lost on Gallimard as well as on anyone
lost in an idea(l) of the Orient as an homogeneous Other to the heterogeneous
Western world.5 When Gallimard tries to explain himself saying that what he meant
was that she made him see the beauty of the story and the sacrificial death of Cio-
Cio San (Madame Butterfly), Song responds with continued straightforward sharp-
ness, “It’s one of your favorite fantasies, isn’t it? The submissive Oriental woman
and the cruel white man.” She asks him to consider an alternate scenario,
What would you say if a blonde cheerleader fell in love with a short Japanese businessman?
He marries her and then goes home for three years during which time she prays to his pic-
ture and turns down marriage from a young Kennedy. Then when she learns her husband
has remarried, she kills herself. Now, I believe you would consider this girl to be a deranged
idiot. Correct? But because it’s an Oriental who kills herself for a Westerner you find it
beautiful.
5
Gallimard is, as Jonathan Wisenthal writes, “a Westerner who is totally innocent of the political,
social, and human realities of Asia. Gallimard’s Orient is altogether a construction from the out-
side,” and he embodies Orientalism in the sense articulated by Edward Said. In this respect,
Wisenthal argues, Gallimard is like both Cronenberg and Hwang who “wrote works about – and at
the same time paradoxically were – Westerners who tried to appropriate and impose an identity on
the East” (2006, 5).
158 L.F. Käll
The figure of Butterfly is here unveiled as a cultural cliché of the submissive

Oriental woman, as a narrative image embodying an Orientalist fantasy nurtured by
political and economic interests of Western imperialism and by ideologies of racial
and sexual supremacy. Song knows this cultural stereotype and is well aware of both
its artificiality and its reiterated reality. Yet, she comes to embody it as the source of
both her own and René’s desire, sustaining itself through their enactment. The opera
singer is convincingly “pulling a Butterfly” that is “playing the submissive Oriental
number” (Hwang 1989, 95), but she also quite easily steps out of this performance
and into that of the male spy who demands “a Chinese baby with blonde hair” from
her party contact Comrade Chin, in order to strengthen the heterosexual bond with
Gallimard and thereby seduce him to disclose more information on American troop
movements in Vietnam. In fact, Song’s superb display of different characters and
identities magnificently well manages to rock any solid distinction between reality
and appearance as it provokes an uncertainty of whether or not she is in fact genuine
in either of her identities (Chow 1996, 87).6 In sharp contrast to Song, as if to further
highlight the masquerade of femininity, Chin is portrayed as “the utterly unfeminine
woman” (de Lauretis 1999, 312).7 Responding to Song’s rhetorical question of why
women’s roles are always played by men in the Peking Opera, Chin answers that it
is probably a reactionary remnant of patriarchal society. Song of course, playing the
part of the woman, knows better and says that no, it is “because only a man knows
how a woman is supposed to act,” thereby expressing the point that “woman” is a
role performed in a heteronormative fantasy. This point is made all the more explicit
through the portrayal of the “Oriental woman” which is a doubly feminized fiction
(Wisenthal 2006, 6). The Western construction of the Orient as woman is perhaps
brought out most clearly in Gallimard’s embarrassing and fatal misreading of the
6
The issue of Song’s genuineness raises questions of how to understand what it means to be genu-
ine that go beyond the scope of this essay. To be genuine involves reference to a norm to which one
is or is not genuine and to a tension within the self between that which is subjectively experienced
and that which can be intersubjectively observed in behavior and action. In an everyday sense of
the word, genuineness is often understood in terms of being authentic, honest, sincere, or, in the
words of an overused cliché, “true to oneself” meaning that one acts in a way that corresponds to
one’s subjective thoughts, convictions, or feelings. However, genuineness can also be understood
in terms of acting according to a norm external to oneself, as in, for instance, much ritual action.
Ritual action is to behave in a proper manner, to repeat, and obey a prescribed form, in short, to be
sincere or genuine to the identity of the ritual action rather than being genuine to the subjective
thoughts, feelings, and convictions of who one is.
7
In fact, as de Lauretis so carefully draws attention to, the representation of women who do not
appear in drag is downright misogynist: “As if to set off the femininity of Song, all the female
characters are constructed by similarity and high contrast to ‘Butterfly’: Gallimard’s wife is ludi-
crous when, sitting in bed with a cold and blowing her nose, she sings a few notes of ‘Un bel dí’
out of tune (and probably because of this soon disappears altogether from the diegesis); Frau
Baden’s matter-of-fact attitude toward sex, no less than her naked female body, only serves to
incite Gallimard’s desire for the white-robed, reticent, prepubescent girl’s body he imagines in
Song; Comrade Chin, whom Gallimard never sees, epitomizes the unwomanly woman – the mas-
culinized, militarized, ‘communist,’ policewoman or prison matron – purely for the spectator’s
edification; and the servant Shu Fang, unlike Suzuki, her feminine counterpart in Puccini’s opera,
is genderless and merely functional to the plot as ‘servant’” (1999, 321).
Oriental attitude toward the United States during the Vietnam War. Gallimard proj-
ects his own Butterfly fantasy onto the political situation and, in Asuman Suner’s
words, “envisions the ‘Oriental world’ as a shy but in essence passionate virgin,
submissively welcoming Western ‘penetration’” (1998, 54; see also de Lauretis
1999, 320).
However, the Oriental woman, the Butterfly, enacted and embodied by Song
Liling is, as de Lauretis writes, “not a victim of the colonial master, the ‘white
devil,’ or a passive object of his desire; Song Liling’s Butterfly is not guileless and
not passive, not an object but indeed the subject – the conscious and willful sub-
ject – of a fantasy that sustains the agency of his own desire” (de Lauretis 1999,
313). Risking imprisonment in a labor camp for the sake of the relationship with
René, Song willingly embarks on “the most forbidden of loves,” a possible descrip-
tion of homosexuality that Gallimard leaves without comment. Song constitutes
himself as Butterfly and creatively invents, as he later testifies at the trial, “ancient
Oriental ways of love” just for Gallimard (Rodley 1993, 186). As de Lauretis so
rightly points out, Song’s predicament is “his politically incorrect desire, which
exists in spite of his awareness of its orientalist, colonialist nature and indeed in
spite of its impossibility”. Living the predicament of both femininity and homo-
sexuality within a heteronormative framework, Song “can be loved only as a woman
created by a man and for a man [and] loved by a man only as a woman” (de Lauretis
1999, 333).
In contrast to the performance-performativity of Song Liling, the portrayal of
René Gallimard brings out performativity as the mundane and unreflective habitua-
tion of norms in gestures and bodily comportment.8 In addition to illustrating the
constitutive force of performativity, the portrayal of Gallimard also makes manifest
its intersubjective, or more specifically intercorporeal, dimensions.9 In the case of
Gallimard, it is made clear that gender is far from a subjective performance but
rather intersubjectively achieved through different forms of corporeal interrelation.
As René’s relationship with Song progresses, his character is transformed from a
rather awkward, meticulous but insecure accountant who is bullied by his superior
colleagues at the French embassy and whose bodily comportment testifies to his
insecurity and subordination, to an arrogant (yet in some respects equally insecure)
8
The performative character of gender in M. Butterfly is further emphasized by the spectator posi-
tion embodied by René Gallimard throughout the film, save for the very last scene in which he is
on stage both enacting and seeing himself as Madame Butterfly.
9
The notion of intercorporeality appears in Merleau-Ponty’s later writings (1968) to describe a
constitutive interconnection between bodies, a topic with which he is engaged throughout his writ-
ings. The idea of intercorporeality, writes Gail Weiss, “defies any attempt to affirm the autonomy
of the body apart from other bodies or from the disciplinary, technological practices that are con-
tinually altering and redefining them” (Weiss 1999, 105). The notion challenges ideas of the body
as a self-enclosed discrete entity with distinct boundaries and instead brings out a corporeal inter-
connectedness as the very ground for the individuation of bodies. The intercorporeal being of
bodies constitutes the condition for their singularity and singular lived bodies emerge in mutual
intercorporeal exchange in which boundaries between them are established, reinforced, chal-
lenged, and continuously altered. See also Diprose 2002 and Marratto 2012.
160 L.F. Käll
vice-consul who makes himself the center of attention through sexist and racist
jokes.10 Gallimard’s corporeally stylized repetition of his masculinity, nationality,
whiteness, and heterosexuality is sustained and strengthened through the figure of
Butterfly (and the performative identity of Butterfly is in equal measure sustained
by that of Gallimard). The performative constitution of Butterfly embodying the
idea(l) of Oriental femininity is, to speak with William Beard, what allows Gallimard
to be “heterosexually attracted to, and heterosexually intimate with, the wrong
body” (2006, 377). Beard continues,
To be retiring and abashed, to be well wrapped in clothing whose purpose is to cover the
ineffable as fully as possible, to seek refuge always in (bogus) thousand-year-old Oriental
doctrines of modesty, concealment, mystery – these are meant to stimulate a heterosexual
male desire that is enflamed by what is hidden and shy of discovery, and the exquisitely
exciting penetration of which is concerned at some level to preserve the mystery that it is
engaging. (Beard 2006, 377)
The feminine Oriental Other, Butterfly, remains desirable through the mystery of
unknown traditions and the fantasy and imagination of what may be mysteriously
hidden underneath the layers of silk covering her body.
Transformation
What is brought out with striking clarity in the film, however, is precisely Butler’s
assertion that there is no mysterious reality unambiguously hidden underneath
appearance. Rather appearance is reality as it is reiterated, reinforced, and eventu-
ally drastically transformed and altered. The revelation that Song Liling is “in fact”
a man is not necessarily a revelation at all but should perhaps instead be read in
terms of transformation, a theme that according to Cronenberg is central to the film
and indeed is central to the whole body of Cronenberg’s work (Rodley 1993, 174).11
Transformation figures as both willingly sought and carried out as well as brought
about without conscious deliberation through dynamic intercorporeal exchange.
Both Song Liling and René Gallimard willingly transform themselves in relation to
each other and to the reality they create for themselves, but they are also trans-
formed by one another, by the interrelation between them and by their relations to
10
As William Beard points out, it is not only as zones of Gallimard’s success that the personal-
sexual and the professional mirror one another but also as emblems of his delusion: “A character
who makes confident predictions of American success in Vietnam looks, twenty-five years after
the fact, as completely foolish as a character who mistakes a man for a woman while having a
sexual relationship with him” (Beard 2006, 356).
11
There is an abundance of references to transformation and change throughout the film. Song
expresses that zie tries hir best to become somebody else and that zie does not know how to change
hir body into that of another. Gallimard, after he has had his “extra-extra marital affair” with Frau
Baden, says to Song that he is not who she thinks he is. Also the butterfly theme indicates transfor-
mation and change: Butterfly is not only the figure in the opera but also an insect that is given birth
through transformation from larvae through cocoon to Butterfly.
their specific situations, conditions, and surroundings. Transformation furthermore

figures as both liberating and threatening. Gallimard’s transformation into Butterfly’s
“Western master” (who is also her victim) appears to be propelled by an irresistible
force as it interrupts Gallimard’s disciplined and rather unexciting routine life
(Chow 1996, 73–74). The entrance of Butterfly into Gallimard’s life provides him,
as Chow writes, with “a kind of anchorage for himself” and keeps him “afloat with
life by inscribing in him an unanswerable lack” (Chow 1996, 74). Also Gallimard’s
final transformation into the figure of Butterfly appears liberating in a sense as it
involves an element of recognition of Gallimard as all along having been Butterfly.
His suicide on the prison stage is a killing of Butterfly and a suicide of himself as
her. Chow argues that the final performance of Gallimard’s transformed identity
“should perhaps be described as a retroactive enactment” offering a new twist to the
story of Butterfly. The playwright David Henry Hwang describes this new twist as
the basic arc of his play and writes in his afterword, “the Frenchman fantasizes that
he is Pinkerton and his lover is Butterfly. By the end of the piece, he realizes that it
is he who has been Butterfly, in that the Frenchman has been duped by love; the
Chinese spy, who exploited that love, is therefore the real Pinkerton” (Hwang 1989,
95–96). Chow adds another twist suggesting that Gallimard’s fantasy is not one of
having Butterfly but, rather, of being her and that his encounter with Song and her
embodying of Butterfly serves to shield him from the Butterfly that is himself (Chow
1996, 81).
Song’s transformation into a man in a suit and tie, and finally naked before
Gallimard, is far from liberating in any positive sense, however. Instead this trans-
formation is a tragedy for both Song and Gallimard. By getting undressed and
thereby challenging Gallimard to see what he has always said he wanted but never-
theless always failed to see, Song attempts to change the very terms of their rela-
tionship.12 While Song’s brave gesture of undressing may well be intended, as Chow
12
According to Cronenberg, the portrayal of Gallimard is one of a “willed suspension of disbelief.”
Gallimard, says Cronenberg, is not fooled; “He wants to be fooled” (Rodley 1993, 186). Also
according to David Henry Hwang, “Gallimard chooses to believe he is heterosexual” and on some
level “knows he’s having an affair with a man” (DiGaetani 1989, 145). This willed suspension of
disbelief is not, however, all the film is about. I agree with Cronenberg’s contention that it would
be simplistic to say that M. Butterfly is a story of repressed homosexuality even though “there is an
element of that – coming to terms with his [Gallimard’s] own sexuality” (Rodley 1993, 182).
Further, as Rey Chow convincingly argues, a “‘homoerotic’ reading intent on showing Gallimard’s
real sexual preference would run a parallel course with the ‘antiorientalist’ reading, in the sense
that both readings must rely on the belief in a kind of repressed truth – repressed homosexuality or
repressed racism – for their functioning.” Both homoerotic and antiorientalist readings rely on the
assumption that there is a truth behind or beneath the surface structure of appearance. Chow con-
tinues, “critics who read this story as the story of a confused sexual identity would lend themselves
to the lure set up by the film itself, in that they would be seduced into going after the real penis, the
visible body part, the ‘fact’ of Song being a male; their re-search would echo the re-search of the
antiorientalist critics, who are seduced into going after the real penis, the visible body part, the
‘fact’ of Gallimard being a white man. Be it through the route of race or the route of sexual prefer-
ence, such critics would be trapped by their own desire for a secret – the secret of cross-cultural
exploitation or the secret of homosexual love – which they might think they are helping to bring to
light, when in fact it is they themselves who have been seduced. In each case what seduces (them)
162 L.F. Käll
notes, as “a new beginning for their relationship – a beginning in which they can
face each other honestly as they really are, two men physically and emotionally
entangled for years – what he actually accomplishes is the death of that relation-
ship” (Chow 1996, 77),13 for Gallimard, the tragedy of Song’s transformation is the
disappearance of the fantasy of Butterfly which has provided him with the very
ground for his own identity. It is precisely, as de Lauretis argues convincingly, the
end of the fantasy rather than the revelation of Song’s male body that causes
Gallimard to lose the object of his desire (1999, 321). For Song, the tragedy lies in
the devastating insight (an insight that is also Gallimard’s) that what Gallimard
desires is not and never has been Song, whether as woman or man, but instead the
fantasy of Butterfly. The film quite painfully brings to light that the end of fantasy
is not simply a waking up to an undistorted reality but rather a drastic alteration of
consciousness. Fantasy is, as Chow argues, “an inherent part of our consciousness,
our wakeful state of mind” and cannot be understood in terms of a mere distortion
of reality (Chow 1996, 63; see also de Lauretis 1999, 306). The fantasy of Butterfly
is the lived embodied reality for both Song and Gallimard, in different ways and
with different implications, and the disappearance of this fantasy is in effect a disap-
pearance of that reality.
While the theme of transformation in M. Butterfly brings out the idea that what is
self-created is experientially real, it does not, however, in any way deny the pres-
ence of what is recognized as objective reality. As William Beard puts it, irrespec-
tive of how objective reality “has been philosophically and psychologically
undermined and rendered indeterminate, it is the distance between inner and outer
realities that is the source of tragedy here” (2006, 364). Albeit with problematic
vocabulary of “inner” and “outer,” Beard points to a discrepancy between what is
subjectively lived on the one hand and what is intersubjectively recognized as objec-
tive reality on the other. Regardless of how real the Butterfly fantasy is as it is lived
and experienced by Song and Gallimard, their performative acts do not have the
force of altering the outer reality to which they are both subjected by being part of
a world and interrelated with others outside of their own isolated reality.
We might say, drawing on Butler, that the film shows how gender performativity
outside of an established heteronormative framework has punitive consequences,
not only in the form of the labor camp that Song risks but also (and more so) in
terms of a complete annihilation of lived reality through incorporation of norms
producing shame, disgust, and hatred of “wrongful” performative acts. We might
is, shall we say, the ‘purity’ of a secret – an indubitable orientalism or an indubitable homoeroti-
cism – the way the indubitable love, the pure sacrifice, of an ‘oriental woman’ seduces Gallimard”
(Chow 1996, 70).
13
Here, Chow makes an explicit statement regarding what Song and Gallimard really are, namely,
two men, and thereby implies that there is and has always been a reality behind the performance
that has been going on for years. Even though Song’s gesture may well be intended as a revelation
of a reality behind appearance (and indeed hir final words to Gallimard “Under the robes, beneath
everything, it was always me” does indicate such an intention), this revelation, I argue, should be
understood in terms of a transformation.
also say, again with reference to Butler, that continued reiterated acting of the
Butterfly myth (or any other myth) in a specific way may in fact have the power in
its persistence of constituting and establishing outer reality in altered ways, thereby
enabling new and different materializations of gendered bodies (Butler 1993, 9,
1990a, 33, 145f). However, I want to stress that this recognition of the potentially
transformative force of reiteration, which Butler grants, does not do away with pos-
sible conflicts between what we might (albeit reluctantly and again with problem-
atic vocabulary) call “inner” and “outer” realities, between that which is subjectively
lived and that which is intersubjectively agreed upon. Butler acknowledges the pres-
ence of such conflicts and states that they are what make displacing and altering
notions of gender a difficult task. However, unfortunately she does not discuss them
further in her writings on performativity. The notion of “woman,” she writes, refers
“not only to women as a social category but also as a felt sense of self, a culturally
conditioned or constructed subjective identity” (1990b, 324), but the implications of
acknowledging such a felt sense of self remain largely unexplored.14
Even though Butler in the statement just quoted clearly recognizes the presence
of a felt sense of self, she nevertheless speaks of this in terms of construction; ulti-
mately the felt sense of self can, for Butler, be understood as a product of reiterated
performative imitation, as a fabrication “manufactured and sustained through cor-
poreal signs and other discursive means” (Butler 1990a, 136). The felt sense of self,
subjectively experienced from a first-person perspective, is thus on Butler’s account
made potentially observable and graspable from an external third-person perspec-
tive. While I recognize full well that this does not by any means make subjective
experience any less experientially real, the explanatory leap by which subjectivity is
reduced to a construction is nevertheless in my contention a rather hasty one to
make. It is problematic in so far as it ultimately makes subjectivity into something
that can potentially be captured as an object of observation. I argue that Butler’s
notion of performativity, as described in her early work, only takes us part of the
way toward understanding the constitution of gender as this is articulated and sub-
jectively lived. Performativity, as many others have also argued, does perhaps not do
much to disrupt the distinction between the inner and the outer, but instead serves to
displace interiority as an effect and object of belief on the surface of the body, i.e.,
reduces interiority to exteriority.15
14
While Butler explicitly discusses the performativity of gender (and its constitutive force in estab-
lishing the belief in a prediscursive sex), her claims already in the early works are not limited to
gender but rather concern the formation of the subject more generally. Performativity, she says in
a 1994 interview in Radical Philosophy, “contests the very notion of the subject” (Butler 1994, 33)
and following Althusser’s account of the interpellation of subjects, Butler argues that the I only
comes into being through being called and that this constitutive naming takes place prior to the I
(Butler 1993, 225).
15
This is a charge directed against Butler’s theory of the performativity of gender from several
different theoretical perspectives and points of departure. See, for instance, Susan Hekman (2000)
who argues that Butler’s theory is fundamentally flawed by the presupposition “that there is no
middle ground between the metaphysical modernist subject on one hand and the total deconstruc-
tion of identity on the other.” “[I]n her zeal to deconstruct the modernist subject,” writes Hekman,
164 L.F. Käll
By so clearly bringing to light the discrepancy and conflict between “inner” and
“outer” realities, discussed above, Cronenberg’s M. Butterfly illustrates remarkably
well the limitations of the notion of performativity. As much as the film, as we have
seen, demonstrates the performativity of gender, it also troubles the very idea of
performativity and, in my view, highlights also the expressive force of desire,
despair, and devastation. I will turn here to the end of M. Butterfly, when the “truth”
is out and the two lovers face each other for the very last time. I will read the por-
trayal of this encounter together with the notion of expression and the expressive
body in Merleau-Ponty’s writings. His philosophy of expression offers a non-
reductive way of understanding subjectivity as embodying both a first- and a third-
person perspective in interrelation and thereby provides a productive tool for
rethinking the relation between interiority and exteriority.
Expression of Gendered Subjectivity
The final encounter between Song Liling and René Gallimard takes place in a prison
van right after the trial where Song has appeared as a man in suit and tie.16 The scene
portraying this encounter highlights Cronenberg’s description of the film as a whole
as ultimately being “two people in a room” (Rodley 1993, 178, 183). As prisoners,
caught in the act of espionage, Song and René are locked up together, isolated from
the outside but in an entirely different way than they were when living the fantasy/
reality of Butterfly. In the prison van, they are also isolated from each other. The
scene, as Cronenberg points out, “provides the only chance for reconciliation and
understanding for the characters and for the audience” as René is forced to face
Song’s nakedness and physical sex (Rodley 1993, 183). Tragically predictably, this
chance for reconciliation goes unfulfilled.
The scene in the prison van brilliantly brings out the performativity of identity as
well as the troubling, not so much of that identity, as of the very idea of performativ-
ity. Sitting opposite Gallimard, Song Liling in a suit and tie begins to undress him-
self. Quite horrified, René asks Song what he is doing and Song answers, “Helping
“Butler embraces its polar opposite: the subject as fiction, fantasy, play” (2000, 290). See also
Benhabib et al. (1995), Heinämaa (1997), Hood-Williams and Cealey Harrison (1998), and Moi
(1999).
16
In this preceding courtroom scene, René is exposed to the “truth” of Song’s gender as he enters
the courtroom to testify about the spy activities. Also Song is exposed and on display before the
court and before René’s eyes that resist meeting his look. The portrayal suggests that the burning
question at the trial is not one of the two lovers’ acts of espionage but rather concerns their relation-
ship, their concealment of desire and sexuality, and, ultimately, their troubling of gender. Revealing
how irrelevant the judge’s question “Did he [Gallimard] know you were a man?” was to the two
lovers while they lived their reality of Butterfly, Song responds, “You know, your honor, I never
asked.” The courtroom scene removes the viewer together with Gallimard from the reality of the
fantasy of Butterfly. At the same time, and with equal, if not stronger, force, this reality remains,
and the courtroom scene, with the theater-like form of the trial with actors and audience, appears
as a fantasy, a performance in the reality of the fantasy of Butterfly.
you to see through my act.” Standing naked before his “Western master,” Song
demands that René looks at hir and René despairingly laughs to himself saying how
ridiculously funny he finds it that he “wasted all this time on just a man.” Song with
the same despair reminds René that zie is not just a man. Zie kneels completely
naked before René, takes his hand, and kisses it, letting it caress hir face, taking
René once again, if only briefly through the touch, back to the fantasy/reality of
Butterfly, transforming hirself into her and making her real under René’s caress. “I
am your Butterfly,” says Song with soft voice and continues “Under the robes,
beneath everything, it was always me. Tell me you adore me.” René with eyes wide
open responds with an accusation: “How could you, who understood me so well,
make such a mistake? You show me your true self and what I loved was the lie, the
lovely lie. It’s been destroyed. […] I’m a man who loved a woman created by a man.
Anything else simply falls short.”
Their final encounter in the prison van is key for seeing Song both performatively
constituted as a man and as a woman, as well as expressing hir desire and despair
otherwise than in registers of any performative gesture or categorizable identity.
The viewer sees Song in the prison van as both-and-neither man and woman. When
zie undresses in order to help René see through hir act, it is unclear which act is
meant to be unveiled. It might just as well be the act of Butterfly as the act Song has
just performed in the courtroom. Rather than showing how different hir naked self
is from Butterfly, Song by undressing shows how much the same zie is and expresses
this sameness with the words “I am your Butterfly […] it was always me.” Through
this expression, Song is constituted and constitutes hirself once again as Butterfly
and Butterfly is made manifest as the full reality of hir appearance. Song’s naked
body, hir flat chest, indicates that zie anatomically is a man, but through hir way of
moving, hir acts, and hir gestures, zie expresses hirself as a woman.17 When René
cruelly rejects hir, Song tries to hide hir naked body crossing hir arms over hir chest,
as a woman covering her breasts. Whether Song is a man or a woman, what hir
physical anatomy or gestures and voice reveal, is in many ways unimportant (while
at the same time being of urgent importance). Hir words “Under the robes, beneath
everything, it was always me” force us to raise once again the question of who this
me is, the question of how to understand subjectivity. I argue that this is a question
to which Butler’s account of performativity cannot provide a satisfactory answer in
so far as it seems to turn not only the subject, the spoken “I,” but also the felt sense
of self (of speaking this “I”) into a construction. Instead, the notion of expression
will, in my contention, prove fruitful for understanding subjectivity and for rethink-
ing the distinction between interiority and exteriority in a non-reductive way.
Expression does not fare well in Butler’s writing, and in her aim of moving
beyond what she calls an “expressive model of gender,” she is careful to distinguish
17
The film never shows Song’s sexual organs which in a sense makes his nakedness more ambigu-
ous. Cronenberg says in an interview, “I didn’t want to show [John] Lone’s cock because suddenly
it becomes a scene about a cock. I think it’s important that Jeremy [Irons] sees it for an instant,
that’s all. I don’t think we need to see it. […] Nakedness, not the cock, is important in our scene”
(Rodley 1993, 183).
166 L.F. Käll
her own notion of performativity from that of expression (1988, 1990a). The dis-
tinction between expression and performativity is for Butler crucial (1990a, 141),
and with her claim that gender is a performative act and constitutes the identity it is
said to express, she positions herself in sharp contrast to an “implicit and popular
theory of acts and gestures as expressive of gender” (1988, 528). However, Butler
relies on a rather simplistic and one-dimensional understanding of expression,
which she dismisses without exploring further. In fact, as Silvia Stoller points out,
the notion of expression functions as a negative term for Butler against the back-
ground of which she delineates her own account of performativity (2010, 102).
Butler’s literal use of the term expression, writes Stoller, assumes that “what is
expressed is the result of a preexisting self that ex-presses something from the inner
to the outer” (2010, 101). The assumption is “that something is pressed or squeezed
out, like juice from an orange, mustard from a mustard tube, or toothpaste from a
toothpaste tube. Everything is ready to be squeezed out: the juice, the mustard, the
toothpaste, and perhaps gender identity or any other essential being” (2010, 107). It
is on the basis of such a literal and simplistic understanding that Butler rejects the
notion of expression and, in relation to gender, argues that there is “no gender iden-
tity behind the expression of gender; that identity is performatively constituted by
the very ‘expressions’ that are said to be its results” (1990a, 25; see also 7, 33, 136).
However, expression deserves much more careful consideration than Butler
grants, and her dismissal is in fact quite surprising given her strong familiarity with
the phenomenological tradition in which the notion of expression is brought out in its
richness and complexity. To a certain extent, however, this dismissal is built on a
critical reading of phenomenology and perhaps particularly on Butler’s early critique
of Merleau-Ponty’s account of the body in its sexual being (1989). Diana Coole
argues that Butler’s early critique of Merleau-Ponty has played an important role in
persuading feminists that phenomenology is ideologically tainted. Butler herself,
writes Coole, is “more circumspect in her criticisms, and more ambivalent in her
conclusions about Merleau-Ponty’s worth, than her poststructuralist followers tend
to recognize” (2007, 209). It is fair to say that the notion of performativity has taken
on something of a life of its own and the numerous Butlerian accounts of the perfor-
mativity of gender identity are not the same as, and often very different from, Butler’s
own account. As many feminist phenomenologists have convincingly demonstrated,
the stark contrast and division between performativity and expressivity and between
poststructural feminism focusing on the former and phenomenology stressing the
latter rest on misconceptions of phenomenology and an underlying attachment to a
dualistic structuring of the inner and the outer (Heinämaa 1997, 1999, 2003, 2011;
Kruks 2001; Stoller 2010; Weiss 1999). It is furthermore worth noting that Butler
also relies quite heavily on phenomenological philosophy in turning to the reiteration
of mundane everyday acts as constitutive of meaning (See Käll 2015).
In phenomenological philosophy, from the early writings of Edmund Husserl
and onward, the notion of expression is of key importance for understanding the
constitution of embodiment, subjectivity, and intersubjectivity. Here I will turn spe-
cifically to the writings of Merleau-Ponty who, in his 1945 Phenomenology of
Perception, turns to expression in order to finally do away with the traditional dual-
ism between an interior mind and exterior body. Like Butler, he strongly dismisses
philosophies that argue for an inner self as the sole and absolute constituting force,
and he rethinks the notion of expression to reflect an understanding of the self as
embodied, embedded in the world, and interrelated with others.18 Expression on
Merleau-Ponty’s account cannot be understood in simple one-directional terms of
something inner that is made public on the outside. Instead throughout his work he
speaks of expression in terms of a paradox. The paradox lies in the event of expres-
sion itself between, on the one hand, the actual expression in which something is
already expressed and, on the other hand, what is yet to be expressed through that
expression. The event of expression, writes Merleau-Ponty, “presupposes that there
is a fund of kindred expressions, already established and thoroughly evident, and
that from this fund the form used should detach itself and remain new enough to
arouse attention” (Merleau-Ponty 1973, 35; see also 41, 43, 113, 1962, 389, 391,
1968, 144). Expression thus rests on the already established forms of expression as
well as the new ways in which these are reiterated to stir attention and initiate
meaning.
In order for expression to be expressive at all, it must embody both these ele-
ments of reiteration and creation. The purely creative and the purely repetitive,
argues Merleau-Ponty, are impossible extremes that the event of expression can
approximate but never reach (1962, 389ff, 1973, 13). If an act of expression were to
be purely creative, it would express nothing for it would have no past to provide it
with meaning to “frame” or found the meaning of its expression. And along the
same lines, if it were to be purely repetitive, it would have nothing to express for it
would merely reiterate what had already been expressed and completely lose its
voice in the fixed forms of ready-made expressions. As Bernard Waldenfels writes,
pure creation would be “a saying without a said,” while pure repetition would be “a
said without a saying” (Waldenfels 2000, 92). Merleau-Ponty’s insistence on both
the creative and the reiterative elements of expression paves a path that avoids
reducing subjectivity to either an inner core or an outer surface. In the same way as
embodied subjectivity is neither mind nor body, the event of expression can be
reduced neither to pure experience nor to already established forms. Expression as
a framework for understanding subjectivity, on this account, captures the predica-
ment of human existence of being both, and simultaneously, a subject for the world
and an object in the world. Instead of reducing the subject to an expressive essence
(consciousness, mind, or soul) or to a discursive effect, it provides a foundation
necessary for a sense of self while still recognizing the instability of any
foundation.19
18
Already in the preface to Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty writes, “there is no inner
man, man is in the world, and only in the world does he know himself” and in the later The World
of Perception, “there is no ‘inner’ life that is not a first attempt to relate to another person” (1962,
xi; 2004, 88; see also 1968, 138).
19
In his foreword to Gary Madison’s The Phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty, Paul Ricoeur writes,
“the theme of expression […] tears us in one stroke away from the philosophy of the subject and
the object” (1981, xvi).
168 L.F. Käll
In the event of expression, there is thus no meaning which precedes it and which
it simply translates. Expression is rather a founding event in which something
emerges as something.20 This is something that is brought out clearly in the prison
van scene where Song emerges in an entirely new way as hirself. This scene also
makes manifest the unity of the expressive body and illustrates Merleau-Ponty’s
contention that each singular expression is in each moment that which it expresses
(1962, 391). In the case of the lived body, writes Merleau-Ponty, the sign does not
convey its significance “in the way that stripes indicate rank, or a house-number a
house,” but, instead, “it is filled with it; it is, in a way, what it signifies” (1962, 161).
He illustrates this expressive unity with a description of perceiving an angry and
threatening gesture,
I do not see anger or a threatening attitude as a psychic fact hidden behind the gesture, I read
anger in it. The gesture does not make me think of anger, it is anger itself. (1962, 184)21
The identity between expression and that which is being expressed (such as the
gesture of anger and the anger) does not, on Merleau-Ponty’s account, entail a
reduction of one to the other. Further, this unity is in no way static but must rather
be thought of as self-relational and containing an element of otherness or difference
within itself. While any separation between what we might call interiority and exte-
riority is secondary to an original unity, this unity encompasses a seed of self-
differentiation or noncoincidence which cannot be fixed in terms of secondary
separations. Expression thus provides a way out of the traditional impasse between
an interior mind and an exterior body, and it does so both without collapsing one
into the other and without doing away with a tension between that which is subjec-
tively experienced from a first-person perspective and that which is intersubjec-
tively accessible from a third-person perspective.
What is brought to light and emerges in the event of expression is a difference or
gap between an “inner world” of experiencing subjectivity and an “outer world” of
the intersubjectively accessible body, whether these are experienced as harmoni-
ously corresponding to one another or as being in conflict, which is the case dis-
played in M. Butterfly. It is not because an inner thought or experience and an outer
gesture or language are separate parallel realms that we express ourselves, as if from
20
This is not to say that subjective gestures and thoughts never succeed in expressing intentions,
nor that it is impossible to find meaning in what has already passed. However, the expressed mean-
ing is a necessary alteration of both the given meaning of the means of expression and the intended
meaning with which the expression is carried out. A solidified and institutionalized meaning has
the power of cutting through the subjective intention with which an expression is expressed, but
the intention also exceeds the given meaning which it thereby necessarily alters through the
expression. Once it has been expressed and created, the new meaning falls into a “fund of kindred
expressions” (Merleau-Ponty 1973, 35) and is solidified but continuously open to reconfiguration
and necessarily altered in new events of expression.
21
At another point Merleau-Ponty writes, “I could not imagine the malice and cruelty which I
discern in my opponent’s looks separated from his gestures, speech and body. None of this takes
place in some otherworldly realm, in some shrine located beyond the body of the angry man […]
anger inhabits him and it blossoms on the surface of his pale or purple cheeks, his blood-shot eyes
and wheezing voice…” (2004, 83).
one to the other, but, rather, it is the event of expression that constitutes them as
parallel orders. The weakness of every parallelism, or dualism, is, to speak with
Merleau-Ponty, “that it provides itself with correspondences between the two orders
and conceals the operations which produced these correspondences by encroach-
ment to begin with” (1964a, 18). The difference between experience and its expres-
sion is a function of the event of expression itself. In expression, we find the seeds
of reflection which when in full bloom generate a split by which both thought or
experience and gesture or language seem to already have been present all along as
separate orders in a relation of one representing the other. We might thus say that,
like for Butler, also for Merleau-Ponty, the idea of the “inner” is a product as it is
the outcome of the event of expression. However, the “inner” is not entirely dis-
placed onto the surface of the body but, rather, emerges in intimate coupling with
the “outer” which is equally an outcome of expression. Both Butler and Merleau-
Ponty provide accounts of how a secondary separation between interiority and exte-
riority is brought about, but while Butler focuses on how interiority is produced as
a compelling illusion on the surface of the body, Merleau-Ponty draws attention to
an original unity that contains its own element of self-differentiation.
While there is no meaning that precedes the event of expression, Merleau-Ponty
stresses the presence of an intention or will to express. This will to express is
informed and limited by already reiterated expressions which to a greater or lesser
extent cut through and alter my intentions. I cannot will without willing something
precisely as something. There is a necessary presence of meaning which arises
anew in every moment of expression. This meaning stems from me as an expressive
self and is solicited by the world in which I am embedded but it at the same time
stems from the world and is solicited by me. The meaning of an expression is not
merely the meaning I intend and not its particular use on any one particular occasion
but must be understood in terms of the rules and conventions which govern its use
on all occasions. The intention with which I express something is, to speak with
Waldenfels, a “‘broken’ intention, broken like the stick in the water, immersed in an
alien medium” (2000, 98). It depends on “what the words want to say” (Merleau-
Ponty 1962, xv). Merleau-Ponty very forcefully states that simply by virtue of being
in the world “we are condemned to meaning, and we cannot do or say anything
without its acquiring a name in history” (1962, xiv). It is, in fact, by being con-
demned to meaning that we are able to do or say anything at all. I express myself by
intentionally or unintentionally taking up meanings in which I dwell and which in
part define who I am, and I make these meanings my own through expressing them.
I reiterate meaning simply by being in the world, but this reiteration is in each
moment also a creation through which established meanings are altered and reestab-
lished. Merleau-Ponty does not subordinate subjectivity to an overarching structure
but, rather, offers an account of expression that preserves spontaneity and creativity.
It is this spontaneity and creativity that in my contention is brought out in Song’s “it
was always me” at the end of the prison van scene. Acts of expression inscribe the
expressive body within a system of expression while at the same time resisting its
complete enclosure within that system. Song’s expressive body which is both-and-
neither man and/or woman is inscribed within a system of expression in which zie
170 L.F. Käll
is in some sense incomprehensible but at the same time also comprehended (and
thus comprehensible) precisely as incomprehensible. While Song’s will to express
hirself relies on “what the words want to say” (Merleau-Ponty 1962, xv), hir acts of
expression nevertheless resist being fully enclosed within a system of expression,
and they furthermore forcefully disclose the limitations of such a system by present-
ing themselves as incomprehensible (though comprehensible as incomprehensible).
Reminding René that zie is “not just a man” and giving voice to hir irreducible first-
person subjectivity, Song demonstrates that, like anyone else, zie cannot be captured
in any category of identity, whether comprehensible or incomprehensible.
Troubling Performativity
I have suggested above that Cronenberg’s M. Butterfly offers both a convincing

illustration of the performativity of identity, and particularly gender identity, and a
troubling of a strictly performative framework. The lucidity of the performative
constitution of identity made manifest in the film makes this troubling all the more
apparent. The character of Song Liling, who brilliantly exemplifies performativity,
is portrayed in such a way as to also provoke questions of how to account for sub-
jectivity or a felt sense of self that cannot be captured by third-person descriptions.
I have argued that careful consideration of the notion of expression, offered by
Merleau-Ponty, would provide a possible answer to such questions.
As we have seen, Merleau-Ponty’s interrogation of expression entails a rejection
of essentialist theories, something that also Butler shares in her account of perfor-
mativity. They both reject the assumption of a subject existing prior to its, in Butler’s
case, performative acts or, in Merleau-Ponty’s case, expressive acts. Even though
Butler takes issue with the notion of expression, her own notion of performativity is
in fact perhaps not quite as far removed from the phenomenological account of
expression given by Merleau-Ponty. Butler’s contention that the subject and subjec-
tivity (the felt sense of self) are performative constructions is equally a contention
that these constructions are not brought about by any external power, such as a
subject or a pattern of laws, but that the reiterated performative acting is itself the
power in its persistence (1993, 9, 1990a, 33, 145f). Further, as we have seen, these
performative constructions do not hide any underlying reality but, rather, are them-
selves the only reality there is. Contrary to Butler’s view that expression is in danger
of essentialism by presupposing a preexisting subject that expresses its identity
from the inner to the outer, Stoller argues that the notion of expression, such as it is
articulated by Merleau-Ponty, “is by its very definition the realization of meaning in
the act of ‘expression’” (Stoller 2010, 98; see also Heinämaa 2003). Such an under-
standing of expression would in this respect come very close to Butler’s understand-
ing of performativity. According to Stoller, Butler’s theory of performativity and
Merleau-Ponty’s theory of expression have a common focus on meaning in statu
nascendi, i.e., the idea that meaning is not a stable value but something that is con-
tinually constituted and “comes into existence at the same time as it is produced”
(Stoller 2010, 109; see also Waldenfels 2000, 92f). However, in spite of this
commonality, there are significant differences between the ways in which the two
thinkers account for subjectivity.
One difference between Merleau-Ponty and Butler is, as Stoller points out, their
focus: While Butler is mainly concerned with discursive productions of meaning,
Merleau-Ponty is concerned with the lived body and its relation to others and its
surrounding world.22 Also his extensive writings on linguistic production of mean-
ing are firmly founded in a concern with embodied and situated subjectivity. Even
though the issue of how to understand subjectivity is not of main concern for Butler,
her theory of performativity as a way of accounting for the constitution of subjects
nevertheless also has implications for how to understand subjectivity. By displacing
interiority fully on the surface of the body as a product of performative acts, Butler
risks, as I have argued above, reducing subjectivity, or the felt sense of self, to an
object that can potentially be grasped from a third-person perspective. While recog-
nizing that third-person accounts of subjectivity – both from a larger cultural and
historical context and from particular people in our immediate surroundings –
doubtlessly make a significant contribution to first-person experience, it is impor-
tant to also remember that third-person accounts are always founded in first-person
experience which in turn always emerges as situated in the midst of third-person
accounts.
I strongly disagree with Stoller’s contention that it is unimportant that Butler
speaks of performativity and Merleau-Ponty speaks of expression since the com-
monalities of their accounts are greater than their differences (2010, 109). In fact, I
argue, and I am quite convinced both Butler and Merleau-Ponty would agree, that
what something is called matters a great deal for how it is perceived and made
meaningful. Butler rejects the notion of expression on the basis of a rather conven-
tional and straightforward understanding of its meaning in literal terms of some-
thing inner that is pressed out to the outside. What she does not discuss is that this
literal meaning of expression also to a significant extent reflects an everyday experi-
ence of a difference between a private interiority and a public exteriority. This expe-
rience, I contend, must be taken seriously and brought to careful analysis. While
there is a unity of the expressive body, as in Merleau-Ponty’s example above of
seeing an angry gesture, at the same time, there also exists a common implicit
assumption of an inner life that is connected to outer visible or audible expression
only through acts of translation or interpretation. And this assumption exists for
good reason: We do have the experience of being private first-person perspectives
on the world and of more or less successfully getting our thoughts and experience
across to others through our expressions.23 Merleau-Ponty preserves this experience
22
In his candidacy to the Collège de France, Merleau-Ponty writes that his work so far has in the
first place been concerned with reestablishing “the roots of the mind in its body and in its world,
going against doctrines which treat perception as a simple result of the action of external things on
our body as well as against those which insist on the autonomy of consciousness” (1964b, 3f).
23
As Merleau-Ponty writes in the very beginning of The Prose of the World, “We believe expres-
sion is most complete when it points unequivocally to events, to states of objects, to ideas or rela-
172 L.F. Käll
of a privacy that is not immediately accessible to others but that needs to be brought
out and communicated, and he does this in part through the very notion of expres-
sion. He does not take the conventional understanding of the meaning of expression
as reason to reject the notion, the way Butler does, but rather as motivation to inquire
into its meaning and develop this further. He recognizes that the literal meaning of
expression reflects an experience that is not merely worth holding onto but in fact
impossible to do away with without also doing away with experience and subjectiv-
ity as such.
Butler’s account of performativity superbly demonstrates the force of reiteration
and of coercive structures in the constitution of identity but her hasty dismissal of
expression risks, in my contention, to simplify also her notion of performativity. By
using the notion of expression as a negative term against the background of which
she lets her own notion of performativity take shape, Butler to some extent locks
performativity into an oppositional bind difficult to untie. Recognizing the richness
and complexity of the meaning of expression can, as we have seen, bring it into
close proximity with the notion of performativity and thereby also serve to enrich
this notion. The proximity between expression and performativity does not in any
way pose a threat to either of the notions but rather highlights the different ways in
which they critically approach essentialist conceptions of expression and subjectiv-
ity and how these complement one another. I have brought out this proximity
between performativity and expression through the portrayal of Cronenberg’s
M. Butterfly. The film offers a forceful encounter with subjectivity as in equal mea-
sure performative and expressive and demonstrates the insufficiency of accounting
for subjectivity from a first-person or third-person perspective alone.
Even though Song Liling’s expression of subjectivity is a scripted construction in
so far as Song might be said, in several ways, to be nothing but a fantasy, this fantasy
nevertheless has “the effect of something deeply felt and experienced” (de Lauretis
1999, 304) and is in important respects quite real. Song’s final line “It was always
me” is significant here. After all, zie does not say “It was always a man in love with
a man” or “It was always Butterfly.” Zie exhibits an expression of subjectivity in the
first person, thereby providing a link to anyone, irrespective of differences, embody-
ing a first-person perspective. As a narrative and cinematic construction, the story of
Butterfly and the character of Song Liling, as well as René Gallimard, allow an
encounter with situations and dilemmas that raise questions and concerns whose
relevance well exceeds the limited universe of the film.
Acknowledgments An earlier draft of this essay was presented at the conference Bodies in Crisis
organized by the Nordic Network Gender, Body, Health at the University of Iceland in November
2011. I owe great thanks to everyone participating in the discussion that followed my presentation.
I am also grateful to the members of the Body/Embodiment group at the Center for Gender
Research, Uppsala University, and its sibling group at Northeastern University, Boston, for giving
me helpful comments on earlier drafts of this essay. I would finally like to thank two anonymous
peer reviewers for their thorough readings and thoughtful comments.
tions, for, in these instances, expression leaves nothing more to be desired, contains nothing which
it does not reveal, and thus sweeps us toward the object which it designates” (1973, 3).
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Lisa Folkmarson Käll is Associate Professor of Theoretical Philosophy and Associate Senior
Lecturer in Gender Studies at Stockholm University, Sweden. Her work brings together phenom-
enology with current gender research and feminist theory to inquire into questions concerning
embodied subjectivity, bodily constitution of sexual difference and sexual identity, intersubjectiv-
ity, and the relation between selfhood and otherness. She is currently working on a project on
intercorporeal sharing and alterations of self-experience in dementia. Käll is editor of Dimensions
of Pain (Routledge 2013) and coeditor of Feminist Phenomenology and Medicine (SUNY 2014)
and of Stil, Kön, Andrahet: Tolv essäer i feministisk filosofi (Style, Sex, Otherness: 12 Essays in
Feminist Philosophy) (Daidalos 2010).

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Crossroads of Knowledge

Lisa Folkmarson Käll Editor

Bodies, Boundaries and

ISSN 2197-9634 ISSN 2197-9642 (electronic)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2015951621

Springer Cham Heidelberg New York Dordrecht London

Printed on acid-free paper

Springer International Publishing AG Switzerland is part of Springer Science+Business Media (www.

Vulnerable Bodies and Embodied Boundaries ............................................ 1

Lisa Folkmarson Käll

L.F. Käll (*)

© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016 1

While ideals of ﬂexible and dynamic bodily boundaries in combination with

an understanding of dams as vulnerable bodies. Once constructed by human beings,

Lihua Wang and Linda M. Blum

New literature on gendered embodiment instructs that processes of embodiment can

© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016 13

believe in a free market, private property, entrepreneurship, and competition. This

Reframing the Past to Move to the Future: Remaking

Village Women and New Governmentality: Normalizing

Providing economic assistance to the “households of family planning” is not the

since she was regarded as incapable of participating in farming or cash-generating

A discussion of production ﬁrst, followed by reproduction, had become the new

an incentive in the project. As a consequence, many households have already ben-

Linda M. Blum is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at

Abstract Addressing interrelations and boundaries between differently situated

© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016 31

of people with different nationalities, ethnicities/races, and ages. Ellen (Michelle

Spatial and Material Aspects of Arrogant Perception

Loving Perception, World-Travelling, and Playfulness

The Failed World-Traveller: Leo as World-Backpacker

Barad, K. (2003). Posthumanist performativity: Toward an understanding of how matter comes to

© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016 47

Erik Olsson Rim, the State Power Company,

The Giant/Giantess Julevädno and Me

Fig. 3 At Harsprånget, Lule River/Julevädno, waterfall 10 km south of Porjus/Bårjås. Constructed

Julevädno Dancing with the Humans

Fig. 4 Sinkhole at Messaure, Stuor Julevädno, in 1963 (Photo: Vattenfall)

Disillusion of River Control

“Large dams” as a concept is a matter of volume, heights, lengths, and storage

Fig. 5 During normal

Human Bodies, Dam Bodies and Water Bodies: A Long-Time

Dam Bodies as Vulnerable Unprotected Bodies Depending

His heartbeat increased as the radio broad cast continued:

Julevädno, my river, calm because all my personal memories, my relations, my

Water Bodies and Dam Bodies: A Relationship of Watery

Pleading with the Julevädno to Remain Kind and Gentle

Fleitz, J. (2012). A proposal to optimize maintenance of dam monitoring systems seepage:

Kuokkanen, R. (2008). Globalization as racialized, sexualized violence. The case of indigenous

Suchman, L. (2007). Human-machine reconfigurations – Plans and situated action. Cambridge:

May-Britt Öhman is Lule/Forest Sámi of the Jokkmokk–Lule River/Julevädno region. She is

Abstract This chapter draws attention to bodily boundaries between species of

© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016 81

Threats and Species Boundaries

The Frontline of Defence: Creating Toxic Skin

The US Frontline website describes Frontline as ‘the #1 choice of veterinarians

animals. It is non-systemic (meaning it is not distributed through the bloodstream);

Toxicity, Boundaries and ‘Good Life’

Hinchliffe et al. (2012) demonstrate how much biosecurity policy is premised on

Conclusions: Knotting Species Parasitically

Nourishment is an important theme in understandings of Humanimal relations.

Linda M. Blum and Estye R. Fenton

Abstract The chapter examines the proliferating use of neuroscientiﬁc discourse

Introduction: The Medicalization of Childhood Meets