Comments on: Allegorical Figures

By: panchaNYC

panchaNYC — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 22:18:44 +0000

Great post. Another point might also be the relative invisibility of the female form in post-Impressionist work. Where the female body becomes mainly a vehicle for formal experimentation, and must give up its own materiality as a result. That’s basically what all of those *male* art historians are saying when they claim that the subject doesn’t matter as much as the form for the avant-garde.

By: Rachel

Rachel — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 21:36:39 +0000

God, yes. I’m so tired of well-meaning friends telling me my hips are womanly and child-bearing. That’s not what they mean; my fat just happens to land there.

By: Lily

Lily — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 05:52:23 +0000

so much to think about here….

my only comment at the moment is to repeat a sentence I heard totally out of context (no idea what the discussion was about) :
“I’d totally read “Tess of the Baskervilles”, I mean just from the title you know she’s a bitch!”

non sequitorily yours,
Lily

By: Lidon

Lidon — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 19:37:47 +0000

All I can say is, well said. Thank you for posting this.

By: Kristen

Kristen — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 19:31:10 +0000

Thank you for writing this FJ! One of my favorite allegories to wrestle with is “Mother Nature.” i fear that I might get some flack for this, but speaking as a fat feminist who works in a university setting amongst other feminist students and staff members, I often find the Mother Goddess (as a metaphor, rather than a religious figure) to be used as a commentary about what women should be. I deliberately do not use the phrase “Mother Earth” because I find the metaphor disingenuous and violent in a lot of ways: “Mother Earth is being raped!” as a way to extoll people into caring about environmental issues and debates. I agree very much with taking action in protecting our natural resources and pushing for sustainability, but I reject the usage of “rape” in this case – the Earth is not a human being. The Earth is not raped. Destroyed, depleted, and misused, yes. Raped, no. Women get raped (and men, but mostly women). That type of metaphor I think is dehumanizing in that it simultaneously dilutes the meaning of the contemporary usage of rape (ie the unwanted sexual penetration or assault of a woman against her will) and does not accurately represent the damage that we do to the earth, nor does it convey that we are destroying OURSELVES, not some metaphorical woman.

The long rambling point is that I wish people would rethink how their language dehumanizes, even when they’re trying to be a Nice Guy, and read all of these “womanly” or “motherly” traits onto my body or anyone else’s. Big breasts and a substantial girth do not a “natural mother” make, and I am not a Goddess. Just a person.

P.S. That Judith Butler shout out made me laugh aloud in my office, where other colleagues are having a retreat. Totally worth it.

By: Kit

Kit — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 08:39:46 +0000

Allegorical personifications in Western culture are mostly female because in Latin abstract nouns are feminine in gender. It’s a grammatical joke, and one which pretty much makes mincemeat of po-faced linguists who are always insisting that grammatical gender is NOTHING TO DO with biological sex. People have pretty much always joked around with the overlap between them. But did the grammatical joke come about *because* women’s bodies are widely considered to have less integrity than men’s? And if Latin abstract nouns had been masculine in grammatical gender, personificatory allegory would have taken a rather different form? I think it’s a fascinating question, but I’m not sure the answer to both is definitely yes. I think allegory empties bodies and fills them with significance regardless of sex — something violent has been done to the bodily integrity of Rodin’s Thinker just as much as Botticelli’s Venus (perhaps more so, because the Rodin is cheesy as well as cheesecake.) Good book on theis is Gordon Teskey’s _Allegory and Violence_. Much better than Marina Warner’s rather overhyped _Monuments and Maidens_, to my mind. But I am an allegory geek.

By: modi

modi — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 18:02:26 +0000

A while ago I went to a museum in Paris that contained only works by Picasso. And in the middle of touring the museum I became so enraged and disgusted I started to shake, because about 90% of the works depicted only women’s bodies being sundered, twisted, and torn apart for the sake of his artisic vision*. This phenomena enraged me, and I couldn’t get away from it, it was all around me and inescapable in the museum -women’s bodies were only symbols, objects, belonging to other people instead of belonging to the women themselves. It was like being stuck in a funhouse mirror of horror, and what made it the most surreal and horrible, was that absolutely no one else in my touring party saw any problem with it.

*Nothing against Picasso, product of his times, etc, but it doesn’t make the observation any less real.

By: volcanista

volcanista — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 00:17:11 +0000

This post is fantastic, as everyone else has already said. And Molly, your comment about token diversity reminded me of the Diversity ad from Veridian Dynamics (the fake company featured in the very funny show Better Off Ted).

By: Ostara

Ostara — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 16:22:27 +0000

It’s sort of like — and I wish it were not like — discovering that an athletic shoe company has a logo all done up in Elizabethan fonts and flowers. It doesn’t fit what they sell. Who is this home-and-hearth person looking back at me in the mirror? And why doesn’t her logo fit her brand? Because obviously SHE isn’t off making discoveries, snarking at people, crafting a delightful turn of phrase, having great sex, or making cool friends.

Holy crap. This is sort of the way I’ve felt almost all my life about my body and my personality, sort of a cross between this and the Fantasy of Being Thin. I’ve always felt that the way I look always either gives off the impression of someone too young or too old, rarely do I ever feel like I look like the 24 year old I am. Add on to that that I always felt my personality was far too incongruous with itself and it was hard for me to figure out who I was. On the one hand, I’m competitive, funny and athletic. On the other hand, I’m shy, incredibly dorky and terribly self conscious. Neither of which did I feel were a totally validated set of personality traits given that I wasn’t your supposedly “typical” thin athletic girl and I wasn’t petite in conjunction with shy and dorky. My body ruled how I perceived myself and so since I’d always been told bodies like mine were worthless so was I.

I can’t believe it’s only now I realize why for so long I felt like such an anomaly, such a freak, weirdo who just couldn’t be one thing wasn’t the fact that I WAS a freak weirdo, it was just that I was a human who happened to have a lot of interests. For so long I wished I could mold my body and my personality into one congruous symbol, something that “made sense” not a person like me full of contradictions. I didn’t even care what that mold was after a while, I just thought being one set of traits would just make everything more simple. And I tied a lot of this narrowing of interests with my fantasy of being thin. What I never realized was that I was trying to be a symbol, I was trying to be exactly what society had always said women were. I was trying to make myself into half of what I really was, just for acceptance.

By: shyvixen

shyvixen — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 15:06:56 +0000

Wow, this is post is just great. It’s given me a lot to think about.