Writing The Fluid Body

WRITING THE FLUID BODY JESSE MAY FISHER

CONTEMPORARY ART PRACTICE

WORD COUNT 9382 2

MOVING IMAGE

2020

CONTENTS

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List of Images

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Prologue: Holding a Flood

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Introduction: Towards a Fluid Body

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Chapter One: Ecstatic Spillage

13

Chapter Two: Permeable Boundaries

19

Chapter Three: Liquefaction

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Epilogue: Milk Fever

28

End Notes

34

Bibliography

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LIST OF IMAGES

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Figure 1. Jesse May Fisher, Water Bodies ( film still), April 2020

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Figure 2. Jesse May Fisher, Gelata ( film still), March 2020

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Figure 3. Jesse May Fisher, Blood and Spit Under Microscope, June 2020

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Figure 4. Jesse May Fisher, Water Bodies ( film still), April 2020

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Figure 5. Jesse May Fisher, Blood and Spit Under Microscope, June 2020

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Figure 6. Jesse May Fisher, Gelata ( film still), March 2020

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Figure 7. Jesse May Fisher, Water Bodies ( film still), April 2020

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Figure 8. Jesse May Fisher, Gelata ( film still), March 2020

33

HOLDING A FLOOD

Illuminated under a fluorescent strip light, the blue pleated curtains and the yellow walls fail as imitations for cornflowers, sunflowers, oceans and sand. The curtain fabric makes an abrasive scraping sound when opened and closed. Shoooooom.

I wear a scratchy paper night dress as a protective husk and swaddle my torso in stiff sheets as white coats filled with male bodies examine my ‘abnormal anatomy.’ With an off-white latex glove, the doctor enters my body with fingers and presses firmly upon the tip of the septum that divides my double uterus. The cold metal speculum1 slides inside me and expands to clamp my cervix open. I look up at the screen to see a live stream of my insides. Pink mounds of moist tissue, swollen from the sample of flesh taken. Blood seeps from the punctured wound of the cervical biopsy and clouds the camera’s vision. The men confer but I can’t hear them above the sound of my pulse pounding in my ear drums in a rhythmic du dum du dum du dum. I’m underwater.

I was fifteen when I was diagnosed with a condition called Uterus Didelphys. A congenital defect affecting 0.5-5% of the general population,2 where the müllerian ducts fail to fuse together in the embryonic stage of fetal development, resulting in the malformation of the uterus. My womb is split into two sections with a dividing wall separating each side. With this, two cervix provide openings to each uterus. One cervix is regular and the other smaller, misshapen and buried beneath folds of tissue.

My diagnosis was a long drawn out process which included trips to the emergency room, internal examinations, external and internal scans, STI testing, a pregnancy test, MRI’s, a laparoscopy, a D&C (dilation and curettage), the removal of my (healthy) appendix, keyhole surgery, an allergic reaction which resulted in my admission to the ICU, many long train journeys, and lots of missed school. The medical scrutiny that my teenage body underwent brought my materiality as a ‘woman’ into sharp focus.3 The nurses’ scrubs switch from Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck to pallid greens and pale blues as I am ferried from pediatrics to the gynaecology ward and back again. A small child with a fungal hair rash watches me intently as I throw up into my kidney shaped sick bowl. Women with enormous bellies, milk-filled breasts and fresh infants smile at me sympathetically as they assume my teen mother status. My spine crawls at their incorrect conclusion. I imagine the ground swallowing me.

I melt through my hospital bed, slide through the cracks in the floorboards, septic sludge slowly sinking into cold, damp earth. I block out the talk surrounding my fertility; C-sections, birth canals, full term, right side, left side. The thought of conceiving, carrying a fetus or giving birth evokes intrusive images of my bones dislocating from my muscles and tendons. A dull nausea germinates in this imaginary bodily dissolution of self which is rooted in an overwhelming embarrassment of my female form.

On the back of some of my files a doctor once sketched a diagram of my reproductive system. The alien womb-head, two roving fallopian tube arms and a pair of ovarian eyes stared back at me from the page. A monster. I could feel this deformed, soft-bodied entity wriggle and writhe inside me like 6

a primordial mollusk.

Excruciating back and stomach pain and excessive menstrual bleeding were my main symptoms. As these are considered normal in most women, doctors’ only suggestion was to take a birth control pill to regulate my hormones. I was assured this was simply a feature of having a female body. One night the pain consumed me, possessed my body, blurred my vision and numbed my limbs and hands. I have forgotten the exact shape of that pain, but I do recall my internal monologue willing death to take me rather than live through those moments. My mother drove me to the emergency room where I was treated for an appendicitis and operated on the following day. It was a while before I would receive a conclusive diagnosis and treatment.

Months after my initial admission to hospital, a clue was discovered during an ultrasound. As the technician smeared my fluid swollen abdomen with clear, sticky gel and glided her sonogram wand over my lubricated belly, sides and lower back, she unveiled a wet grey space where my right kidney should have been. Renal Agenesis is common in UD patients I would later find out. A trade off for the extra womb and cervix.

I later had an operation to remove the tissue that partitioned my two wombs. One side was sealed up completely, meaning the lining of my uterus was breaking down each month with no exit. This fluid stagnated and finally ruptured, leaking into the rest of my body. I learned that my body was unclean, infected, deviant. Shame creeped along my skin and sat heavy on my chest, permeating my wind pipes and throat, spreading across my shoulder blades before trickling down and congealing at my ankles. A lead heavyweight anchors my body.

Present day I still have the overarching sentiment that my body is a dangerous place. I see it as possessing indeterminable threats. As if my matter could betray me at any time. The fear is that I’m not in control of my physicality. The contents of my insides may leak beyond my limits, soaking the earth beneath the feet of disgusted onlookers, revealing what I’m really made of. My edges are not hermetically sealed. I have too much body bursting at the seams. I am not water tight. Holes, pores and wounds are the potential sites of terrible seepage. I stifle blood, urine, sweat, spit, mucus, tears.

I am a dam holding a flood.

7

TOWARDS A FLUID BODY

The pathologised female body is fertile ground for abjection, but to assign my fears of my corporeality to innate abject horror at the sight of my sick body would be to ignore the social and cultural factors that inform the perception of women’s bodies. I recall that Hysteria derives from the Greek hystera, meaning ‘womb’, and that such an affliction was thought to be caused by a wandering uterus.4 The female anatomy is seen to be inherently troublesome and at the root of feminine deviance; therefore my mysterious and mischievous organ embodies the historical weight of the pathologisation of the female anatomy. With its mutatious form and double body my womb signifies duality, a two-ness, an unwholeness within me. ‘The Double is a complex even riddling concept; it can mean a second self, or a second existence, usually coexisting in time.’5 The Uterus Didelphys is a potent image of duality that manifests woman’s slippery and duplicitous ‘nature’, exploiting a societal fear and apprehension regarding the female body. To be dual, unwhole, multiple, rejects binary identity and embodiment. Witches with human bodies and magical powers, shape-shifters with an animal form and monsters with multiple heads incarnate this doubling of self. As Luce Irigaray teaches us, ‘we haven’t been taught, nor allowed, to express multiplicity.’6 To be double, to be more than one, to be multiple is to transgress.

A ‘vortex of summons and replusion’7 defines the abject and therefore situates it within a duality, a pulling and pushing of self. The female body is at the crux of the abject as it is simultaneously seductive and repulsive and has powers of doubling through processes of gestation and birth. The pregnant female body is the ultimate provocation of the abject as the fetus is between the inside and outside of the mother’s body, that is to say, it’s between the subject and object. It is this boundary violation which gives the abject its strength. As Laura Mulvey explains, ‘although both sexes are subject to abjection, it is women who can explore and analyse the phenomenon with greater equanimity, as it is the female body that has come, not exclusively but predominantly, to represent the shudder aroused by liquidity and decay.’8 Julia Kristeva’s and Mary Douglas’ work on abjection provides a baseline thread that runs through this writing. I am interested specifically in these corporeal waters and bodily materials which provoke abjection, as well as their sticky correlation with the female body. I oscillate between the terms fluidity, liquidity and watery-ness when referring to bodies and bodily fluids as a means of recodifying the abject body within language. Perceiving and writing bodies and identities as water, fluid or liquid speaks succinctly to the texture of the bodies and identities that I discuss in the preceding chapters. This writing is an exploration of spillage, porosity and liquidity within a tentacular analysis of bodies, fluids and language. I wish to distil the essence of what somatic discharges represent in their very materiality. The definition of the abject body is usually a female body undertaking a process of physical change, where fluids are released or absorbed and threaten to defile, therefore modes of transformation, both somatic and psychic recur within this text.

In order to attempt a recuperation with my body I must reject my abject body and reconcile with my fluid body. To see my body as fluid, beyond the lens of the abject, requires me to reconsider 9

my internal waters and look past the patriarchal and pathological modes of knowing my body. It allows me to re-examine the phallocentric signals that have told me my body is impure, a conclusion derived from the medical complications caused by my sexed body at age fifteen.

This writing looks at how the fluid body manifests in its physical, social, political and psychological forms. I attribute fluidity not only to femininity but also to queerness since the corporeal flows of the bodies I use as examples within my argument resist the stagnation, sanitisation and fixity associated with phallocratic and binary logic. I use ‘fluidity’ with the awareness that it holds longstanding negative associations of woman as uncontainable, disruptive and unstable, influenced

by Hippocratic medicine.9 Of course, it is not that women are of water and men are not, ‘[t]he masculine, too, experiences embodiment as a composition of blood, bile, tears, saliva, perspiration, ejaculate, urine, and breathy vapour,’10 but, it is women’s corporeality that is ‘inscribed as a mode of seepage.’11 Also, pertinent to abjection, ‘it is not the case that men’s bodily fluids are regarded as polluting and contaminating for women in the same way or to the same extent as women’s are for men.’12 Therefore, my focus is largely on the corporeal waters of the female body since feminine fluids are so potently threatening.

Kristeva refers to abjection as a ‘primal repression’ meaning it is built into the genetic DNA of our bodies and evokes a response from the subconscious, one in which evades the symbolic order.13 While I agree with her explanation of abjection stimulating a strong corporeal reaction, I disagree with its roots being solely ‘primal.’ Abjection, in relation to the female body, is learned. Even my current healthy body is still intertwined with the abject simply because it is female. Prior to Kristeva, Mary Douglas teaches us how women’s bodies can quickly slip into polluted territory and contaminate thresholds.14 The female sexual and reproductive functions (intercourse, menstruation, birth, breast feeding) are in constant danger of infringing pollution rules and structure, and therefore becoming sites of abjection. Pollution dangers are at their most potent when her body is open and her fluids are flowing. Sartre sees the female body as a series of wet holes and slimy substances. Her orifices threaten to engulf and consume the male form, enveloping him within her ‘clinging’ texture.15 Her wetness is tempting and dangerous with abilities to castrate. The female body is desired and vilified in the same breath. A stratified and calcified blueprint of patriarchal order has informed my personal fear and mistrust of my body.

Abjection is elicited by the confrontation with one’s own fleshy, mortal, animal-human body. As I have mentioned, the abject operates within margins and limits. Corporeal fluids like blood, mucus, spit, milk, and tears are cited as extractors of this horror as they transgress the boundaries of the inside body, leaking out through orifices, teats and ducts. The female body is abject because of her excretions and secretions. My blood, my mucus, my saliva, my sweat, my excrement, my urine tell me of my mortality, my mutability, my unruly shifting form, my potential for leaks and seepages.

Feminine corporeal liquids are subversive substances. My body fluids indicate to me that I am a watery body in a constant transient flow. My body will attempt to heal blockages and stagnation.

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Liquids enter and exit in a cyclical, vital movement. To understand my body as fluid is a manifestation of care.16 The fluid body is catharsis. It operates in a similar sphere to how I have framed the abject in the above passages as it centres on corporeal materiality and bodily fluids. However, through the fluid body, I intend to invert the abject’s repulsion toward the female body in a bid to fuse an enlightened relationship with my bodily matter and my entangled connection to my environment. For this, I turn to feminist, queer and post-human readings of bodies, fluids, sexuality, gender and ecology in order to untangle my learning and recentre my conceptions about my body. Through understanding my body as fluid and whilst reading it under the meniscus of material feminism, I look at how my fluid body is of water and connected inextricably to my environment and other bodies; human bodies, animal bodies, water bodies.

This writing explores the fluid body using a mix of personal, academic and poetic voices, drawing on scientific, philosophical, mythological and personal knowledge. My style and tone will shift depending on the subject I am commenting on. My intention is for each section to align in polyvocal harmony.

In chapter one, Ecstatic Spillage, I turn to the fictional text Le Corps Lesbien by French queer theorist and writer Monique Wittig. I interrogate my own heterosexual gaze and personal pull toward Wittig’s imagery of bodily decay and abject corporeal bio-fluids. Using Luce Irigaray’s work on ‘mucus’, I analyse Le Corps Lesbien’s wet and queer female sexuality, subjectivity and identity as an example of patriarchal and heternormative resistance. In chapter two, Permeable Boundaries, I look to Paul B. Preciado as a case study of a porous body. His experience of transitioning genders as outlined in Testo-Junkie allows me to further understand the body and its transformative capabilities, as well as the fluid nature of gender identity and corporeal morphology. I look at how the fluid body becomes physically enmeshed with bio-politics, technology and pharmaceuticals. Although I am very much focussed on female materiality and the cultural weight of female organs in particular, in this section I hope my exploration of fluid bodies affirms my alignment with a non-essentialist participation in feminism. The trans body is the ultimate form of subversion against patriarchy and I’m interested here in a dissolution of boundaries, including the binary dichotomy that binds bodies and identities within rigid ideology, hence my consistent drawing on queer theory throughout. In chapter three, Liquefaction, I use the watery and primordial jellyfish to draw on queer ecologies and to explore notions of posthumanism and entanglement. Within the writing overall, and using Deleuze and Guattari’s and Bradotti’s theories on becoming and nomadic subjectivity, I explore concepts relating to the animal and metamorphosis. In addition, motifs of the double and the split are interlaced within this writing, which I touch on through psychoanalysis and literature. Grounding the first half of the text with an academic reading of both Wittig’s and Preciado’s works, I then shift toward a poetic, fragmented and personal tone within the latter section. In the epilogue, Milk Fever, I turn my attention to my own practice as an artist and my intimate familial narratives that intersect 11

with my research on fluid bodies. Here, I discuss and map out future areas of research that I plan on undertaking, influenced by this writing.

Writing the fluid body has been a rip tide that has dragged me into myself, into my skin, within the folds of my flesh, into my internal waters - a journey of becoming in itself. Within the text I have included digital images that I have made in the past four months in response to my fluid body. My ambition for choosing literary references without visual elements and discluding the photographs in which I discuss is a choice driven by my desire to implore the reader to feel their own fluid bodies.

‘Let there be writing, not about the body, but the body itself.’17

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ECSTATIC SPILLAGE

THE PLEXUSES THE GLANDS THE GANGLIA THE LOBES THE MUCOSAE THE TISSUES THE CALLOSITIES THE BONES THE CARTLIDGE THE OSTEOID THE CARIES THE MATTER THE MARROW THE FAT THE PHOSPHORUS THE MERCURY THE CALCIUM THE GLUCOSES THE IODINE THE ORGANS THE BRAIN THE HEART THE LIVER THE VISCERA THE VULVA THE MYCOSES THE FERMENTATIONS THE VILLOSITIES THE DECAY THE NAILS THE TEETH THE HAIRS THE SKIN THE PORES THE SQUAMES THE PELLICULES THE SCURF THE SPOTS.18

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Bodies swell and overflow from the pages of The Lesbian Body in thick, viscous drips. I become enveloped in their sticky corporeal discharge, soaked by their violent excretions. I swim in the effluence and roll among the decay of Monique Wittig’s textual body, devouring her foul yet delicious prose, quietly revolted but eager to read on. My eyes linger on the grammatically chaotic descriptions of somatic metamorphosis, as if I’m caressing the cracked epidermis of a scab. Each page turned is a gentle scraping at my edges, a fresh layer of matter revealed. I become raw, exposed, stripped of my skin as the text pushes me to re-inhabit my repressed teenage body. Memories of being surgically cut, drained and penetrated are soothed by tender images of carnal dissolvement and resurrection. Immortal, infinite becomings recite the female body with scientific detail and ravenous devotion. The Lesbian Body marks the impetus for this writing. I begin to unravel and trickle toward an acceptance for my own body and it’s vulnerable material wetness.

This text was suggested to me by a friend who is a non-binary dancer and poet. I first met this friend in the toilets at a Princess Nokia gig and asked to take her portrait. Since then we have collaborated yearly on video and photography projects. Within her femme queer identity she holds the capability to pivot between masculine and feminine energy in a perfect symbiosis when dancing. As she unfurls in rhythmic motion, she finds embodiment that expresses a blurring of the female body to inturn evoke corporeal shapes that are indistinct of gender or sex. Her muscular back, shaved head, wide hips with slow feminine, fluid movements are hypnotic to the point where my heart swells to see the beauty of her performance. The desire she affects within me when I photograph her or film her moving is not sexual in nature, but it does follow the transparent, tangled threads of eroticism, circling around the love and appreciation I have for her and her art, which then spills over into a queering of our collaborative image making.

This anecdotal tracing of my initiation to the text outlines my personal interpretation of a queerness that has informed my reading of The Lesbian Body. A queerness that speaks to Naomi Wolf’s autobiographical stories of female intimacy and the intricacies and complexities of relationships between women.19 A queerness that, as defined by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, operates within ‘the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone’s gender, of anyone’s sexuality aren’t made (or can’t be made) to signify monolithically.’20 Queer is multiple and many, lacking edges and definability, personal to each subject. This is not to say I’m claiming queerness for myself or approproating it to fit into a heterosexual lens, but rather situating my ideologies amongst its fluid essence because its teachings on identity and sexuality are so rich and relevant to all bodies. Wittig’s treatment of pleasure between bodies focusses on non-heteronormative desire. For this reason I follow Mary Catherine Foltz’s approach by oscillating between the terms ‘lesbian’ and ‘queer’ when examining this text.

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My friend’s shape-shifting and gender-morphing movements are articulated through the fluid body.

Bodies are filled with internal waters comprising of blood, interstitial and cerebrospinal fluid that facilitate the dexterity of our bones and muscles, and the elasticity of our skin. ‘Our bodies are hydrophilic, through and through.’21 Saliva, mucus, spit, snot, discharge, milk, jelly, and excretes form a language of the queer and desirous body in The Lesbian Body. The texture of these biological waters and feminine liquids are vital in Wittig’s queer representation of the female body. Her erotic and visceral descriptions of bodily excavation transform abject fluids into sublime corporeal rapture and deluge.

‘Great fragments of gelatine become detached trembling transparent. The parted lips tyrian pink on the inside let the fragments pass in ever-increasing numbers. The fingers caught in the flux move slightly elongate relax draw their tips along the lips move straighten out palpate the mucous membranes with dawdling movements. The flow becomes continuous, the foamy juice whitened in its eddies rises to the shoulders, the head emerging hair spread out cheeks pale. Now the fingers tap continuously on the membranes. An agitation disturbs the flow of transparent juice fluid water. Abundant salty tears are shed into the flow, I drown, the water re-enters by m/y eye juice tears.’22 Bio-fluids leak from orifices in purifying streams which are embraced eagerly and with ecstatic appetite. By way of the saliva and mucus the female body slips past heteronormative sexuality and desire. Foltz, writing on The Lesbian Body notes: ‘bodily subjects are lesbian because of how they delight in the excessive mess of the body, how they acknowledge and consume excreta and thereby discharge rigid gendered movement by revelling in the bodily fluidity that surpasses the “natural” mandates for women’s pleasure and bodily performance.’23 Queer sex and carnal female pleasure become political embodiments of phallocratic subversion.

When Wittig writes about the lesbian body, she is responding directly to heterosexuality as a ‘polictical regime.’24 Her radical prose offers lesbianism as a renunciation of the gendered female body. Wittig see’s lesbians not as ‘women’ but beyond gender because they are outside of the straight contract, therefore saturated lesbian sex and female corporeal fluids are materials for binary resistance. Furthermore, overflowing female wetness disintegrates the sterile feminine body. Bodies melt into the earth as material corporeal compost. However, the bodies in the text are not impure or defiled, quite the opposite. As ‘tears vaginal juice saliva’25 act as salve for bodily annihilation, the fragmented body is coalesced with cleansing female discharges anointed to lacerations, transmuting abject juices into ritualistic purification. The mucus is present within The Lesbian Body to write the whole female body, from breasts to bile, and to decenter the male gaze. Similarly, Luce Irigaray’s use of the ‘mucus’ symbolises female subjectivity and resides in opposition to the image of the phallus.

Her philosophy overall, as Braidotti writes, ‘challenges the univocity of the masculine saturated 16

phallogocentric symbolic and opposes to it the possibility of a virtual feminine symbolic, as a project for feminist women to actualize.’26 For Irigaray, the feminine body is watery and secreting a flow27 with the mucus being a material of symbolic and physical resistance. The gooey filament is enduring and continuous, produced by the body in a cyclical movement. It embodies Sartre’s ‘slimy’ and devouring feminine nightmare. In Irigaray, the abject bodily fluid is sublimated into a vital lubrication to assist the progression of women’s voices, thought and discourse. Her ‘two lips’ speak to a plurality and mutuality of female relationships, ‘between our lips, yours and mine, several voices, several ways of speaking resound endlessly.’28 Wittig’s all female society is concerned with relationships and love between women and their bodies. As Foltz affirms, the text isn’t ridgedly about lesbian identity ‘but a way of moving in relationship to other bodies gendered as women.’29 For me, as a heterosexual woman, this text provokes a recalibration of how I see my own female body and its fluids, teaching me to revel within my own corporeal waters, exclusive to the abject. The Lesbian Body remedies the stagnant trauma of discovering my deviant female anatomy during my growth into womanhood within a hospital regime that is still ink stained by its sexist beginnings.30 Fifty years prior to Kristeva’s meditation on abjection, Bataille named spit the ultimate motif of the l'inform (formless).31 Ontologically in between states, neither solid nor liquid, spit, like mucus, is a liminal and marginal substance that pertains to a duality of meaning. Spit and mucus are products of biohazardous waste yet they are primordial fluids containing the genetic DNA coding of the body.

They bind signifiers of both the sublime and the abject, pivoting on exaltation and abomination. The gelatinous bio-fluid facilitates the undulating transformations of the bodily forms, from human to beast and back again, through somatic corrosion and rebirth. The Lesbian Body shows the female body as protean and elastic, lacking distinct edges, capable of reconfiguring form - defying shape, species and even death.

This perception of female morphology as formless and unstable is present within ancient philosophy such as Plato and Aristotle. As Anne Carson has noted, this mistrust of the female form can be traced back to Greek Mythology where women were regularly changing shape: ‘[d]eformation attends her. She swells, she shrinks, she is penetrated, she suffers metamorphosis.’32 The women of myth were cursed into monstrous embodiment, had the power to shapeshift into devious animal hybrids as well as cause the transfiguration of others into beastial, creatural, plant or elemental forms through sorcery and witchcraft. Wittig’s reimagination of the Amazon's of mythology as a society of specifically lesbian women with immortal abilities to reform their bodies, can be understood as a comprehension and confutation of such methods of categorizing the female body and identity. In this way, she acknowledges the patriarchal tone of associating women’s bodies and identity with fluidity and formlessness but chooses to twist the tongues of the philosophers to transform and reappropriate such epistemologies into narrative and language devoid of phallocentrism.

For Aristotle, women were soft, pliable matter to be moulded where as men were already formed, hard and solid. This hylomorphic dualism also aligns women with earth, unboundedness and 17

wetness.33 ‘To be wet is to be unruly and uncontainable.’34 To be unbounded is to appear to have no limits, to be limitless, expansive, oceanic. The phallocentric concepts in Aristotle denote women as chaotically overflowing from their vessels. They threaten entropy and to fold the ‘male form into fatal formlessness.’35 Wittig’s Amazons are in a constant state of flux, spilling beyond their bounds, unfurling from their skins, melting into the earth only to restore their matter. Soaking, swampy female forms embody and exploit the phallocentric fear of drowning in woman's ‘excessive’ body.

The saturated female body melts corporeal boundaries and spins in a continuous state of becoming.

With water as her elemental catalyst for transformation, she assumes forms and appears to have amorphous, infinite margins. Following Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of ‘becoming’, Rosi Braidotti’s concept of the philosophical nomad is centered on fluidity, mutability and shifting material metamorphosis. The nomadic body ‘is open-ended, interrelational and trans-species.’36 In The Lesbian Body, figures shape-shift to resemble theriomorphic forms worthy of devotion and fear. Bodies morph into black bear, snake and sea creature with the recurring inclusion of teeth, fleece and flanks, central to the depiction of the slippery, lethal and ravenous female-animal body.

Braidotti affirms, zoomorphic ‘modes of embodiment’ are ‘pathologized and classified on the other side of normality, that is to say monstrosity.’37 Wittig reappropriates the monstrous feminine from the clutches of patriarchy and misogyny to imbue her bodily subjects with animality and multiplicity. By slashing the subjective I of m/y (j/e) the self is split in two, a fertile incision ready to gestate further becomings.38 Bodies become-lesbian to unbecome-woman at the same time as becoming-animal, unfolding into infinite becomings, performing a constant vortex of identities and corporeal realities.

As Deleuze and Guattari note, ‘the only way past dualism is to be suspended “in between.’’’39

18

PERMEABLE BOUNDARIES

The fluid body is tucked within a cutaneous mass of skin. A concealed elastic wrapping that covers the sinewy and watery internal body. The skin is an orifice surrounding our matter, breathing, perspiring, secreting fluids from its hole and pores, coating the corporeal surface in oily lipids and salty liquids. The tactile sense organ is an ‘amorphous cement’40 of stratified layers, folding and sealing our insides in. Closed yet penetrable, a ‘vulnerable, unreliable boundary between inner and outer conditions,’41 a corpulent paradox. The skin is the border to the external world, the scaley edge of the body. The fleshy film is not fixed but in a constant process of becoming. A milieu, a microcosm of life, alive and multiple. It moves and lives, shifts and regenerates, cells decay, split and renew. Carnal matter is not a congealed monolithic mass but plastic and malleable, subject to mutability. Skin is fluid. We discard several whole bodies of ourselves within our lifetime. To shed skin is to evolve beyond the body’s current physical state. The transformative properties of skin as metamorphic material is incarnated by the serpent, which maintains complex symbology in Western epistemology and beyond. The snake represents both good and evil, wisdom and deception, castration and phallus, devourment and nourishment, death and rebirth. Its ability to tear and slither out of its expired proteinous scaley sheath conceives it a creature of potent duality, multiplicity, an animal of multiple signs with layered and conflicting meaning. Its connotations do not simply rest on one definition but operate within a doubling of significance. The serpent evades solid and determined identity, always in a process of becoming.

Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of becoming requires the crossing of thresholds and it is within these boundary infractions that transformation occurs.42 Becoming is a practice of psychic and somatic evolution ‘that allows one to break into new fields of perception, affectivity, becoming; nothing short of a metamorphosis.’43 Abjection and becoming are both ‘intermediary states,’44 germinating within potent boundary collapses and the dissolution of limits. Braidotti cites Tzvetan Todorov when she writes, ‘the blurring of boundaries or distinctions is often perceived as threatening or dangerous.’45 As we know from Mary Douglas’ teachings on purity and danger, bodies undergoing a process of growth or change, and the bodies of those residing outside of social margins, like criminals or sorcerers, are at the center of such structural disintegration. Proximity to these boundary disobeyers can cause weakness, sickness and misfortune.46 Boundaries must be impenetrable. A body’s edge must be maintained rigorously to remain within social form. Danger erupts within states of inbetweenness.

Western philosophy rests on a dualist structure that ‘value(s) hierarchical thinking, and logic of domination that together characterize the ideological framework of Western culture.’47 The splitting of mind/body, male/female, nature/culture into separate columns act as a blueprint for ‘otherness and negation’ according to Val Plumwood.48 This dichotomy extends to how bodies, identity and sexuality are governed. To become one must contaminate fixed thresholds and rupture the binary codes that promote stagnation, thus remaining suspended in-between, always in a process of intermediate unfolding.

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From Monique Wittig’s corporeal spillages, I move towards an example of bodily permeability where somatic edges become sites for transgression. Paul B. Preciado’s Testo-junkie is a ‘body essay’, an intimate documentation of corporeal experimentation and an autobiographical account of bodily subversion. Preciado, a transgender man, formerly known as Beatriz (or BP within the text), begins administering testosterone gel to his biologically female body, outside of the medical protocol.49 The synthetic hormone is consumed, ‘incorporated’, through the skin as a mode of resistance to the bio-political control of the state and the binary systems of understanding gender, sexuality and the body. For Preciado, ‘it’s not a matter of going from woman to man, from man to woman, but of contaminating the molecular bases of the production of sexual difference, with the understanding that these two states of being, male and female, exist only as “political fictions.”’50 As Preciado writes, the body’s ‘limits do not coincide with the skin capsule that surrounds it.’51 He details the application of the gelatinous substance to his skin allowing the soluble molecules to descend beneath his epidermis. A subcutaneous penetration slowly rewrites the ‘materiality of gender.’52 His physicality morphs under the influence of the drug - muscles strengthen, his libido spikes and additional hair grows on his arms and face. As the transparent hormone infiltrates his matter it recodes his body’s fluids, altering the smell of his sweat. His odour takes on a sickly sweet scent as the hormone emanates from his glands and pores. A series of metaphysical shape-shifts occur as the drug courses through his cells and blood, inciting an evolution beyond the limitations of the ‘natural’. My reading of Preciado’s personal and political foiling of the fabric of matter reflects both Donna Harway’s cyborg feminism and new materialist processes of bodies being embroiled within their surroundings. His experimentation echoes the subversive, frictious meshing of both organic and inorganic substances resulting in the ‘transgressed boundaries, potent fusions and dangerous possibilities’ that Haraway speaks of in her Cyborg Manifesto.53 His absorption of the hormone through the epidermis is a trans-corporeal54 exchange with the techno-capitalist, pharmacopornographic environment from which he is the ‘illegitimate offspring.’55 Preciado’s documentation of ‘gender hacking’ is a textual, physical and philosophical erosion of the veneer of perceived boundaries. The skin becomes a site for re-embodiment, for ‘trans-materialisation.’56 And ‘why should our bodies end at the skin?’ asks Haraway.57 We are not a singular sealed corpus. Our bodies are not linear or static but rather in a fluid process of materialisation. The skin itself contains multitudes of living life; cells, bacteria, microbes, viruses. ‘Bodies are not only beings but intra-active becomings.’58 Preciado’s absorption of Testogel is an act of bodily regeneration, a ‘re-working and re-folding’59 of matter. The porous body is fluid with permeable edges and elastic flesh.

I’ve consumed approximately three thousand birth control pills in my lifetime.60 My pill contains 150 milligrams of Desogestrel and 30 milligrams of Ethinylestradiol, which work to keep me momentarily sterile, in addition to 80 milligrams of lactose, which helps my gut digest the drugs.

The Pill changes the course of the fluids within my body, making my blood thinner and suppressing 21

sebum production on my skin and scalp. It works by thickening the mucus in the neck (or necks in my case) of my womb(s) so it’s harder for the sperm to reach my eggs. Each day on the pill when urinating I leak these hormones into the water. They become a part of the hydrological system and will eventually be ingested by another body. These hormones have been linked to the feminsation of male fish in British rivers and to the sterility of human male sperm also.61 My fluid body carries these drugs and leeches them into the land and water, absorbed by humans and animals alike. ‘As bodies of porosity, we are constantly interpermeating our surroundings.’62 Corporeal contamination links bodies, human and non-human, through organic and inorganic systems, dissolving boundaries between natural and artificial. Liquid seepage leaks chemicals of sexual difference, gestated by the pharmacopornographic era, from my body into the larger fluid systems within the bio and techno sphere.

The normalcy of synthetic hormone use among cis-females and also cis-males with erectile disfunction and male pattern baldness is used by Preciado as an argument to push for a democratisation of artificial hormones regardless of gender.63 Preciado maintains that testosterone could achieve the Pill’s function of temporary infertilisation, but counteract some of the side effects, such as the common symptom of a diminished libido.64 But before prescribing a healthy, cis female body testosterone, the medical regime requires an admission that one feels ‘trapped inside the body of the wrong sex’ and is suffering with ‘gender dysphoria’, which is categorised as a mental disorder in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM).65 The transgender body is pathologised as a split self within psychiatry, an unresolved mirror phase ‘based on anatomical incompleteness,’66 hence Preciado’s consumption of the hormone outside of medical authority. Lacan’s theory of the split subject rests on the ego being ‘ruptured or split in its identity, divided between a body it claims as its own, and another it strives to be like.’67 Psychoanalysis insists that bodies maintain their borders to resist dissolving into psychosis. For Merleau-Ponty, madness ensues when ‘the boundaries of the skin which ‘normally’ outline the subject’s spatial corporeal limits have become permeable.’68 Preciado presses against this polarized view of trans-identity by maintaining his plural and amorphous gender expression. He writes, ‘[w]hat is most urgent is not to defend what we are (men or women) but to reject it, to disidentify ourselves from the political coercion which forces us to desire the norm and reproduce it.’69 Paul B. Preciado is not split, he is both Beatriz and Paul, as a unified whole, which is reflected in his decision to keep the B in his title. ‘Understand that Paul absorbs and assumes all that was once BP.’70

22

LIQUEFACTION

A slow expansion and release pulsate bio-morphic rhythms and liquid undulations. Thread-like arms move in gentle locomotion swayed in circles by tidal flows and lunar pulls. Hypnotic, ectoplasmic apparitions held in salty oceanic depths, thinking through skin. Viscously multiple. Viciously ethereal.

A lung of hot glass. Aqueous ancestors from a time before time, drifting in thick translucence. As I follow the motion of the mucus-like bodies of the gelata - light weight, see through, barely there - I become aware of my fluid body. The pressure of my cerebral fluid encasing my brain, pressing upon my temples and bubbling in my ear drums. The synovial fluid pop primordial wetness from my bones. My blood filled veins running like tributaries under my skin, their blue and purple snake figurations transporting vital liquid to my organs. I feel the saliva on my tongue, the oil on my skin, the viscosity of my mucus, the acid of my bile. I smell the metallic tang of my blood. I smell my sweat as it leaks from the warmest parts of me. I touch the skin of my laptop screen, fingers plunging into the liquid plasma crystals toward the slick, jellied bodies of the medusae. I slide into genderless, asexual, utopic immortality. I become soft, liquid, ether. The wet invertebrate pulls me into sensuous embodiment with my fluid body.

Immanuel Kant’s sublime is that of formless, edgeless endings and infinite boundlessness.71 Its exquisite effect is evoked in witnessing the awe and terror of nature; a stormy tumultuous sea, a black thunderous sky, infinite mountain tops reaching unseeable heights. As these expansive wild and elemental forces confront the viewer, the mind requires a psychic rationalisation to soothe the shapeless horror at one’s immortal position within the colossal universe. The mind wrestles with nature to overcome its immensity and conquer its power. Esther Leslie writes of Kant’s theory of the sublime that it should be ‘contained mentally, bounded within thought, with Reason.’72 The sublime is a desire to conceptually dominate nature - mind over body. On the contrary, my feeling whilst watching the viscid smack of swirling moon jellies in my computer is purely sublime, in that I experience them with awe beyond beauty, for these alien creatures are not conventionally beautiful.

What they arouse in me is bodily, visceral, embodied. As I gaze at their primordial watery-ness, I surrender my thoughts to their liquid mesmeric throb. In my sublime, body is over mind.

Hilda Doolittle or H.D., a poet and writer, moved to the Isles of Scilly in 1919, seventy-four years before I was born on almost the same patch of sand. She writes, from a place of deep contentment and peace, ‘I am in my spiritual body, a jelly-fish.’73 For H.D., the gelata translated a form of consciousness which she describes as her ‘over-mind’. An intense vision of great depths connecting her mind and body succinctly. Subject to psychic breaks H.D. frequented ‘unknown boundaries and strange thresholds’74 after a series of painful events during World War 1, including birthing a still born baby. Her ‘jellyfish experience’ marks a psychic equilibrium and a harmonious merging of an internal splitting that she was experiencing. Dualisms of body/spirit, womb/head are littered within Notes on Thought and Vision as she wrestles their segmentation. The over-mind is a space where these binaries disperse and dissolve, an awakening described as ‘a cap, like water, transparent, fluid 24

[...] a closed sea-plant, jellyfish or anemone.’75 She imagines this state of consciousness ‘centered in the love regions of the body or placed like a foetus in the body.’76 The womb jellyfish with its bell shaped body and umbilical cord arms extend like arteries giving life blood to H.D.’s personal perception of feminine subjectivity, whilst also providing a channel to re-birth herself. Her jellyfish vision, nurtured by her friend and lover Annie Winifred Ellerman or Bryher, on the shores of the Scilly Isles, becomes the tencalcular embodiment of her womanhood, motherhood, queerness and artistry. For H.D., the jellyfish fuses the mind-body connection that was severed when she lost her baby, resulting in her abandoning her body psychically. The oceanic creature becomes a symbol of life after delivering her second baby, a healthy daughter named Perdita (meaning lost and moon).

Jellyfish vision is a transcendental experience that teaches her to be within her body, a feeling of catharsis and balance that drives her creativity and writing. Through becoming-jellyfish, she heals splintered selves and unifies psyche and soma whilst simultaneously connecting to the cosmos at large.

My mother’s body swelled and bulged with fluid, expanding from a dress size eight to eighteen stone in the space of nine months. Water retention thickened her wrists, feet and cheeks as she carried me. She was twenty-two when she went into labour on those same shores that H.D. and Perdita’s feet had pattered across decades before. Her waters broke upon the tidelines where water meets dry land. Amniotic fluid soaking the sand underfoot and flowing toward the sea. Her gestational waters and my urine mixed together and returned to the ocean. Time stretched out like a blanket of black, punctuated by undulating waves of pain. She held on, riding the crests and breaks, fighting opinions to cut me out. She swims in the vast blue sea, held within its cavernous depths. Skin blurring into the wet space, becoming indistinct from her watery surroundings. A body of water, in a body of water, in a body of water. I was blue, red and purple when I finally emerged forty-two hours later. My mother urged hospital staff to allow the sticky white mucus to soak into my skin. A milieu of microbial protection from her body to mine.

Scattered across my desktop are images of jellyfish, wombs post-hysterectomy, fetus’ in utero and microscopic images of spinal and umbilical cord jelly, spit, sweat, hormones and blood.

The screenshots are often indiscernible from each other as they blend into one another in digital fluidity. Blood reds, peach pinks and tangerine oranges merge into a warm pixelated pastiche of corporeal familiarity. The jellyfish looks like a womb, the womb a dead sea nettle, the human fetus in amniotic fluid is a polyp/sea-horse/ameba in the ocean, the cellular images of bodily excretes resemble universal things like iron rich cracked earth, swirling marble, aerial weather maps, a milky way, light from the Aurora Borealis. I try to decode these connections and visual overlaps but my intellectual comprehension and language fail. It is a knowledge of the body, a somatic and prelinguistic rhizomatic tangle resonating with all matter on this earth, vibrating in energetic chorus.

25

‘At some microscopic or intangible scale, bodies are breaking into one another’77 writes Daisy Hildyard in The Second Body as she attempts to trace the location of the bodies that enmesh with our own, solidifying a physicality to the often invisible and immaterial. Her second body theory posits our bodies as vulnerably fluid. ‘A human body is rarely understood to exist outside its own skin - it is supposed to be inviolable.’78 Here the double body maps the cause and effect of our daily lives and interactions as a means of analysing our responsibility to others and the planet. This materialist approach links our bodies to anything or anyone we have a global connection to. Similar to how Timothy Morton uses the term hyperobject to designate tangibility to abstract and opaque concepts such as climate change, Hildyard gives form to nebulous ideas that feel removed from our own bodies, but are in fact directly related to our movements and choices.79 Our bodies are entangled with the harmful gasses in the atmosphere that we emit and breathe, the chemical-laden water trickling from our kitchen taps that we ingest and then expel and the jellyfish blooms that proliferate within the acidic oceans. Our fluid bodies are corporeally intimate and involved with one another and implicated within the cyclical contamination of our environment. ‘The space between our selves and our others is at once as distant as the primeval sea, yet also closer than our own skin.’80 Toward the end of the text the speaker meets her second body in full force when her home is flooded by the river near her house. She admits to ignoring the warnings from the environmental agency and overlooking the consistent swing from flood to drought, and the erosion of the river bank due to devegetation that all point toward incremental and detrimental changes within the biosphere. Her second body seeps into her first body, under the door, gushing through the hallway, drenching the carpet and making tatters of her paperwork. ‘Fishes’, ‘bacteria’ and ‘slug-like creatures like early life forms’ take up residence in her home.81 Hildyard’s The Second Body echoes Karen Barad’s intra-active spatial and temporal enfoldings, overlaps and boundary spills82 as well as Haraway’s writing on entanglement with the ‘the more-thanhuman, other-than-human, inhuman, and human-as-humus.’83 Post-human entanglement and queer ecology is performed within the illustrious and primordial phylum of the jellyfish. Tentacular arms and a singular oral mouth, colonial habitats, transsexual and gender indistinct identity with abilities to reproduce through cloning its own body, in addition to being deathless,84 makes the jellyfish the ideal entangled and queer subject ‘[t]o contemplate ecology’s unfathomable intimacies...not geared to ideologies about where the body stops and starts.’85 Astrida Neimanis reminds us that all water on this planet is already present, there is no more and no less, it flows in hydrological cycles through bodies, landscapes and all that lives on this planet.86 Aqueous ‘molecular intimacy.’87 The water molecule is the basis and beginning of existence. The gelata is the ‘maternal primordial feminine.’88 With a body consisting of 95% water, jellyfish are ‘water in water.’89 When washed up on the beach shore the splatter of mesoglea returns to the clouds in osmotic vaporous ascension, to begin again in another shape. Through jellyfish vision I witness amorphous embodiment with everything that flows universally and energetically. I am involved in

26

a transcorporeal exchange with water from the moment I become the wet cluster of cells within the maternal body until I decay into compost - fertile matter for life beyond our material bodies. Water is the fascia of entanglement connecting living things. I am a body of water.

27

MILK FEVER

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Metallic threads the colour of the moon stretch across her soft stomach and thighs. Her breasts full with milk hang from her chest like two teardrops. A gentle itching spreads across her surface, a fire in her chest like molten rock beneath earth’s crust. No matrilineal knowledge of rosemary tea, dandelion poultice, or cold cabbage leaves to press to skin. Without balm of honey and beeswax to salve, nipples crack and break. Milk and blood. With a body ripe to nourish and a swollen belly now filled again, her reflection evokes a stranger. Sugary smell on neck and mouth, her odour belongs to someone else. She grows beyond her flesh, her body spilling from her skin. Veins bulge thick as earthworms from her calves and feet. A stifling heat wraps itself around her body. ‘A feminine inferno.’90 Her eyes are shards of glass slicing blue iris. White foam rushes to lick her ankles, disintegrating the ground beneath her. She swallows her tongue and peels off her skin. Layer by layer, cell by cell, she melts into oceanic white noise.

29

When my great grandmother was in her late twenties she was admitted to an asylum after the birth of her third child. Her postnatal depression mutated into psychosis and there she remained for forty years until her death. Milk fever, as it was called, was thought to be the psychic manifestations of congealed milk within the ducts. The stagnant fluid infected the blood and fevered the brain. A madness of the body.

Milk fever ferments in my mouth. I would spit it out but language fails. Too rich (full fat) to write.

I try to give this familial story form. A stack of blank pages inscribed with invisible ink are lodged in my tissue. I taste words like Mother, sour, milk thistle, black milk, milk teeth, voodoo, Lakshmi, milky way.

Milk Fever haunts this writing.

At the inception of this paper I tested a milky lyric essay that would work through the matrilineal tale and trauma of milk fever, as a means of distilling the essence of the lactic liquescent body.

After jamming my fingers into my computer keyboard for a couple of days, I shelved the idea.

Each sentence fell flat, bland and without energy. I felt my words were ill equipped to speak to the thick folds and deep crevices of this story. I followed a different trajectory, with research initially focussing on formlessness, shapeshifting and metamorphosis. This in turn led me to water, body fluids and fluid bodies, and what is essentially the prima materia of this writing. Incredibly, these two works, Writing the Fluid Body and Milk Fever were entirely separate from one another in my mind’s eye. But now, clear as day, they are the same story. Milk fever seeps between my words and circles me back to the beginning, to the origin. It encompasses so much of what I have been trying to articulate about bodies, fluids and pathology. Milk fever embodies the weight of feminine corporeality and liquidity.

I ask my grandmother to send me a photo of Mona, my great-grandmother. I’m unsure if I have ever seen an image of her. She pulls one from the loft and shares it with me. Mona sits on the edge of a floral armchair, wearing a bright orange cardigan. She sucks on a cigarette looking to camera, there is a halo of crepe paper resting on her short brown hair. It was taken on her last ever christmas. She was sixty-five. When Mona was sectioned and admitted to Morpeth Lunatic Asylum my grandmother was four years old. She was passed around within the family until going to live in a convent aged seven. We speak candidly of this over video call. ‘It’s very easy to become institutionalised’ she reminds me. She tells me about her garden and how it’s growing wildly. She reminds me that I was a difficult teenager.

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Milk fever stains my maternal lineage. A layered and complex illness and family history boiled down to two short and mild words. Milk fever with a hysterical after taste.

Mona’s breakdown was greased by the hands of her husband Frank. ‘A sadist’ according to my grandmother. She tells me that each time Mona would make progress and return home, within six months she would find herself back inside the hospital. It feels odd to hear my grandmother speaking of her mother. Grandmothers seem motherless. ‘My mother’ she says ‘was flighty and nervous.’

Mona was diagnosed with schizophrenia and treated with electric shock therapy from which she never recovered. My grandmother considers this an unauthorised experimentation at the hands of the hospital. ‘She was never the same again’ she affirms.

When I search the term ‘milk fever’ into Google only papers on dairy cows result. Wikipedia explains that calcium demands on the bovine body exceeds its capacity, causing hypersensitivity, restlessness, twitching, bloating, flaccid muscles, and lowered a heart rate.91 My only solid fragment of evidence that proves milk fever in human women existed beyond word of mouth and my grandmothers memories, is a poetry anthology entitled Milk Fever by contemporary writer Megan Ross, which chronicles the agonies and ecstasies of young motherhood. It’s blurb reads ‘hallucinatory, imagewet, and navigating the eternal tides of spirit and body.’92 To make work, textual or otherwise, that responds to milk fever, a deep dive into the lactic history of gendered madness and the pathology of female bodies and fluids should be undertaken. At the late and blind-sighting realisation that the story I was writing was a mirror image of Milk Fever, I felt it urgent not to force Milk Fever into one chapter. Instead this section lays out some preliminary thoughts on how I might approach my next area of research. Milk Fever is the expansive white space full of potentiality for a body of work.

If I was to create Milk Fever in whatever form it may assume, I would include an analysis of my five year old subconscious when I dreamed of sour milk just before my brother’s birth. I would consider the significance of my mother saving my milk teeth in a box on the windowsill next to my brother’s shrivelled up umbilical cord stump. Using medical, mythological, folkloric and matrilineal knowledge, as well as academic, theoretical, feminist and queer observations, I would explore breast milk as pathological substance, root of psychosis and fluid of feminine deviance. Writing the fluid body has endowed me with clarity to see the fecund potential of milk fever, in addition to stretching my ability to interrogate and articulate the epicentre of my area of interest.

Quick to spoil, milk is a potent fluid of duality. It ‘flows between purity and abjection,’93 nourishment and contamination. Milk shifts in significance and solidity. Vital, intimate, abject, poisonous, as it streams, curdles, dries, congeals. Kristeva’s abject is strongly stirred as she presses her lips to the skin of fat which sits on the surface of the lactic fluid. The slimy film upon the liquid threatens to fold the 31

outside in, dissolving the boundaries between self/(m)other. Milk fever gives rise to similar images of hot milk, boiled milk, coagulation, protein and fat separated, split. Milk as bodily binding between mother and child is severed in milk fever. It also speaks to the splintering of the mind and body unity, in addition to the social and cultural weight of womanhood and motherhood. ‘Feminine materiality and biology are not simply or unproblematically a source of difference or resistance; they are also the rationale for women’s historical silencing and exclusion,’ warns Elizabeth Stephens.94 Milk fever is the underbelly of the fluid body and displays how fluids, corporeality and ‘nature’ have been used against women. In milk fever the liquid of motherhood does not flow outwards but gets fixed inside the flesh, contaminating and infecting the body and brain. It allocates blame to the female body for causing and crystallizing madness within it. Here, the lactic fluid becomes pathological weaponry to dominate the female body and the feminine psyche. Physical manifestations of psychological gendered insanity are reflected in the white surface of milk, the colour of purity and silence. Mona’s illness can be read as a language of the body - a corporeal rejection of motherhood, womanhood, patriarchy and heterosexuality. Her madness speaks to the importance of mind-body cohesion. The image of the clotted milk stuck in the chest urgently reveals the necessity of corporeal fluidity. The fluid body must flow.

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33

END NOTES 1 I want to note here that the vaginal speculum design has not been updated since 1870 and is ‘inextricably linked to extreme racism and misogyny’. The ‘father of American gynecology’ James Marion Sims invented the speculum and would experiment his design on slave women.

See: Rose Eveleth, ‘Why No One Can Design a Better Speculum’, The Atlantic, (2014), <https:// www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/11/why-no-one-can-design-a-better-speculum/382534/> [accessed 12 June 2020].

2 Rajshree Dayanand Katke, Sivanandini Acharya, Soni Mourya, ‘Uterus didelphys with pregnancy and its different maternal and perinatal outcomes’, International Journal of Reproduction, Contraception, Obstetrics and Gynecology, 6 (2017), 4690-4693 (p.4690) <http:// dx.doi.org/10.18203/2320-1770.ijrcog20174465> [accessed 19 July 2020].

3 Woman is presented here in quotations because having female sexual characteristics and reproductive function does not necessarily determine gender. Many women are tran-gendered and some are intersex and have bodies which comprise of various sexual characteristics. In addition, some trans-men and non-binary people have female reproductive systems and sexual characteristics. In my personal experience as a cis-gendered person, my female reproductive system and sexual characteristics inform my identity as a woman. This being said I reject an essentialist approach to gender as it is limiting and reductive to one’s identity and self expression.

4 Cecilia Tasca with Mariangela Rapetti and others, ‘Women And Hysteria In The History Of Mental Health’, Clinical Practice and Epidemiology in Mental Health, 8 (2012), 110–119. <10.2174/1745017901208010110> [accessed 06 July 2020].

5 Marina Warner, Fantastic Metamorphosis, Other Worlds: Ways of Telling the Self, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 163.

6 Luce Irigaray, ‘When Our Lips Speak Together’, in The Sex Which is Not One, trans. by Catherine Porter with Carolyn Burke (New York: Cornell University Press, 1985), pp. 205-218 (p.210).

7 Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror, trans. by Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), p. 1.

8 Laura Mulvey, ‘Phantasmagoria’, cited in Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind E. Krauss, Formless: A User’s Guide, (New York: Zone Books, 1997), p. 244.

9 Adriel M. Trott, ‘The Feminine and the Elemental in Greek Myth, Medicine and Early Philosophy’, in Aristotle on the Matter of Form: Α Feminist Metaphysics of Generation (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019).

10 Astrida Neimanis, Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology, (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), p. 81-82.

11 Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Towards a Corporeal Feminism, (Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1994), p. 203.

12 Ibid., p. 197.

13 Kristeva, Powers of Horror.

14 Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo, (New York: Taylor & Francis e-library, 2001), ebook.

15 Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, (Oxon: Routledge, 2003), pp. 620-37.

16 Candice Lin, A White Hard Body, ed. by Lotte Arndt and Yesomi Umolu, (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2019). p. 22. Here, Lin refers to liquid states as ‘caretaking’, ‘tender’ and ‘supple’.

17 Jean-Luc Nancy, Corpus, trans. by Richard A. Rand (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), p. 9.

34

18 Monique Wittig, The Lesbian Body, trans. by Peter Owen (Boston: Beacon Press, 1975), p.

48.

19 Naomi Wolf, Promiscuities: A Secret History of Female Desire, (London: Random House, 1998).

20 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Tendencies, (London: Taylor & Francis, 2005), p. 7. ebook.

21 Neimanis, Bodies of Water, p. 65.

22 Monique Wittig, The Lesbian Body, trans. by Peter Owen (Boston: Beacon Press, 1975), p.

34.

23 Mary Catherine Foltz, ‘Excremental Eros: Pleasurable Decomposition and The Lesbian Body’, Bodily Fluids: InterAlia. A Journal of Queer Studies, ed. by Michael O’Rourke and Karin Sellberg and Kamillea Aghtan, 9 (2014), 203-224 (p. 205).

24 Monique Wittig, ‘Straight Minds’, in The Straight Mind And Other Essays (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992), pp. 21-32.

25 Wittig, The Lesbian Body, p. 80.

26 Rosi Braidotti, Metamorphosis: Towards a Materialist Theory Of Becoming, (Malden: Polity Press, 2002), p. 143.

27 Neimanis, Bodies of Water, p. 78.

28 Luce Irigaray, ‘When Our Lips Speak Together’, in The Sex Which is Not One, trans. by Catherine Porter with Carolyn Burke (New York: Cornell University Press, 1985), pp. 205-218 (p.209).

29 Foltz, ‘Excremental Eros’, p. 205.

30 For additional information see: Mary Daly, Gyn Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism, (Boston: Beacon Press, 1990).

31 Georges Bataille, ‘Visions of Excess’, cited in Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind E. Krauss, Formless: A User’s Guide, (New York: Zone Books, 1997), p. 5.

32 Anne Carson, Men In The Off Hours, (New York: Random House Inc, 2000).

33 Ibid., p. 133.

34 Neimanis, Bodies of Water, p. 79.

35 Carson, Men In The Off Hours, p. 134.

36 Braidotti, Metamorphosis, p. 124.

37 Ibid., p. 123.

38 In the author’s note in The Lesbian Body, Wittig explains the stylistic choice of interjecting a / between the J and e of ‘Je’ as a desire to do violence to the masculine French language by entering it by force. She rejects the neutrality of the masculine default and remoulds the language into a form which she can speak through.

39 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, ‘Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal, BecomingImperceptible’, in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. by Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), pp. 232-309 (p. 277).

40 Didier Anzieu, The Skin-Ego, trans. by Naomi Segal (London: Karmac Books, 2016), p.

18.

41 Steven Connor, The Book of Skin, (London: Reaktion Books, 2004), p. 67.

42 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus.

43 Braidotti, Metamorphosis, p. 147.

44 Ibid., p. 161.

45 Ibid., p. 142.

46 Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger.

47 Val Plumwood, ‘Feminism and the Mastery of Nature’, cited in Greta Gaard, ‘Towards a Queer Ecofeminism’, in New Perspectives on Environmental Justice: Gender, Sexuality, and Activism, ed. by Rachel Stein (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press), p. 22.

35

48 Greta Gaard, ‘Towards a Queer Ecofeminism’, in New Perspectives on Environmental Justice: Gender, Sexuality, and Activism, ed. by Rachel Stein (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press), p. 23.

49 At the time of writing Testo-Junkie Preciado identifies as a lesbian, a cis-female and also a trans man. Since the book has been published Preciado has changed his name from Beatriz to Paul and uses masculine pronouns, which are the pronouns I will also be using throughout my analysis of the text.

50 Paul B. Preciado, Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era, trans. by Bruce Benderson, 6th edn (New York: Feminist Press, 2019), p. 142.

51 Ibid., p. 143.

52 Ibid., p. 142.

53 Donna J. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), p.154.

54 Trans-corporeality is a term coined by Stacey Alaimo to refer to ‘the time-space where human corporeality, in all its material fleshiness, is inseparable from “nature” or “environment.”

Stacey Alaimo, ‘Trans-corporeal Feminisms and The Ethical Space of Nature’, in Material Feminisms, ed. Stacey Alaimo and Susan Hekman (Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2008), p.

238.

55 I use ‘illegitimate offspring’ here in reference to Haraway’s quote: ‘The main trouble with cyborgs, of course, is that they are the illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism, not to mention state socialism. But illegitimate offspring are often exceedingly unfaithful to their origins.’ Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women, p. 151.

56 Eva Hayward, ‘More Lessons From A Starfish: Prefixial Flesh and Transspeciated Selves’, Women’s Studies Quarterly, 36 (2008), 64-85 (p. 69). <https://www.jstor.org/stable/27649785> [accessed 7 April 2020].

57 Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women, p.78.

58 Neimanis, Bodies of Water, p. 75.

59 Hayward, ‘More Lessons From A Starfish’, p. 67.

60 I want to note here the exploitation that the bodies of non-white and poor women endured during the initial testing of the birth control pill in Puerto Rico in the 1950’s. Preciado, Testo Junkie, pp. 144-236.

61 Steven Connor, ‘River Pollutants Linked To Male Infertility’, Independent, (2009), <https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/river-pollutants-linked-to-male-infertility-1419284. html> [accessed 9 July 2020].

62 Neimanis, Bodies of Water, p. 76.

63 Paul B. Preciado, Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics In The Pharmacopornographic Era, trans. by Bruce Benderson, 6th edn (New York: Feminist Press, 2019), p. 230.

64 Ibid., p. 210.

65 Kenneth J. Zucker, ‘The DSM-5 Diagnostic Criteria for Gender Dysphoria’, Management of Gender Dysphoria: A Multidisciplinary Approach, (2015), <10.1007/978-88-470-5696-1_4> [accessed 19 July 2020] 66 Elizabeth Grosz, Jaques Lacan: A Feminist Introduction, (London: Routledge, 1998), p.

32.

67 Ibid., p. 42.

68 Ibid., p. 43.

69 Paul. B Preciado, ‘Letter From a Trans Man To The Old Sexual Regime’, Text Zur Kunst, trans by. Simon Pleasance (2018), <https://www.textezurkunst.de/articles/letter-trans-man-oldsexual-regime-paul-b-preciado/> [accessed 30 June 2020].

70 Preciado, Testo Junkie, p. 10.

36

71 Esther Leslie, Liquid Crystals: The Science and Art of Fluid Form, (London: Reaktion Books, 2016), p. 9.

72 Ibid., p. 9.

73 H.D., Notes on Thought and Vision & The Wise Sappho, (San Francisco: City Light Books, 1982), p. 50.

74 Ibid., p. 7.

75 Ibid., p. 19.

76 Ibid., p. 19.

77 Daisy Hildyard, The Second Body, (London: Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2017), p. 25.

78 Ibid., p. 13.

79 Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2013).

80 Astrida Neimanis, ‘Hydrofeminism: Or, On Becoming a Body of Water’ in Undutiful Daughters: Mobilizing Future Concepts, Bodies and Subjectivities in Feminist Thought and Practice, ed. by Henriette Gunkel, Chrysanthi Nigianni and Fanny Söderbäck (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), p. 96.

81 Hildyard, The Second Body, p. 95.

82 Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning, 2nd edn (London: Duke University Press, 2007).

83 Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in Chthulucene, (London: Duke University Press, 2016), p. 101.

84 For more information on Jellyfish life cycles see: Lisa-ann Gershwin, Stung! On Jellyfish Blooms and the Future of the Ocean, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), p. 91.

85 Timothy Morton, ‘Queer Ecology’, Modern Language Association, 124 (2010), 273-82 (p.

280). <http://www.jstor.com/stable/25704424> [accessed 07 Jul 2020].

86 Neimanis, Bodies of Water, p. 89.

87 Heather David, ‘Molecular Intimacy’, in Hyperobjects for Artists, ed. by Timothy Morton and Laura Copelin with Peyton Gardner (Texas: Ballroom Marfa, 2018).

88 Neimanis, Bodies of Water, p. 80.

89 Georges Bataille, Theory of Religion, trans. by Robert Hurley, (New York: Zone Books, 1989), p. 19.

90 Georges Didi-Huberman, Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpêtriè, trans. by Alisa Hartz (Massachusetts: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2003), p. xi.

91 ‘Milk Fever’, Wikipedia, <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milk_fever> [accessed 20 July 2020].

92 Megan Ross, Milk Fever, (Cape Town: uHlanga, 2018).

93 Melanie Jackson and Esther Leslie, ‘Journeys of Lactic Abstraction: The Meanings of Milk’, Cabinet, (2017) <http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/62/jackson_leslie.php> [accessed 1 July 2020].

94 Elizabeth Stephens, ‘Feminism and New Materialism: The Matter of Fluidity’, Body Fluids: InterAlia. A Journal of Queer Studies, ed. by Michael O’Rourke and Karin Sellberg and Kamillea Aghtan, 9 (2014), 186-202 (p. 188).

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