Inhabited by text and space: a body without (some) organs

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• published: 24 May 2013
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Late last year I laid my body down on a hospital bed, gown split up the back, legs still coated in winter hair, and let a mask full of dreaming gas come down to turn me numb. When I woke this is what had been taken: uterus, fallopian tubes, cervix, possibility. This paper speaks to the ways in which gynaecological surgery performs itself upon the body and upon the performance of self. If "skin is the literal and metaphorical borderland between the materiality of the autobiographical 'I' and the contextual surround of the world" (Brewster in Kerr & Nettlebeck 1988, 211), and that skin, that surface, is pierced or cut, or looped through with tubing that lets fluid in and out, then the borderland has been crossed. The borderland is no longer border. It is rupture and split, it is simultaneously inside and out, it is Möbius strip. And then, all-of-a-sudden, I am theory, embodied, a textual drift: I am this. By taking corporeal feminist theory and weaving it through the stories that one body tells, I am able to perform a particular kind of l'ecriture feminine, a poetics of the abject, a way of speaking through flesh. I am using the word body here as a marker, some way of holding a space, of speaking all of the stories that we fold into the creases of our fingertips, that soft place behind our ears, underneath the fascia, in the places where fluid shushes between organs. And no place is inside, and nor is it out. It is, like Grosz says, Lacan's Möbius strip; that furling, chiral thing that shows "the passage, vector, or uncontrollable drift of the inside into the outside and the outside in to the inside" (1994, p. xii). And when inside and outside are no longer clear, flesh becomes theory, and theory flesh. References Grosz, E. (1994). Volatile bodies: toward a corporeal feminism. St Leonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin. Kerr, H., & Nettelbeck, A. (Eds.). (1998). The space between: Australian women writing fictocriticism. Nedlands, Western Australia: University of Western Australia Press.