Gender Roomours I

Works Cited

Freud, Sigmund. Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious. New York: Norton, 1963.

Glaspell, Susan. "Trifles." Plays By American Women, 1900-1930. Ed. Judith E. Barlow. New York: Applause Theatre Book Publishers, 1981. 70-86.

Irigaray, Luce. This Sex Which Is Not One. Trans. Catherine Porter with Carolyn Burke. Ithaca, New York: Cornell UP, 1985.

König, Wolfgang. "Adolf Hitler vs. Henry Ford: the Volkswagen, the Role of America As a Model, And the Failure Of a Nazi Consumer Society." German Studies Review 27.2 (May 2004): 249-268.

Michie, Helena. "The Greatest Story (N)Ever Told: The Spectacle of Recantation." Tattoo, Torture, Mutilation, and Adornment: The Denaturalization of the Body in Culture and Text. Ed. Frances E. Mascia-Lees and Patricia Sharpe. New York: State U of New York P, 1992. 10-29.

Mulvey, Laura. "Pandora: Topographies of the Mask and Curiosity." Sexuality & Space. Princeton Papers on Architecture. Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press, 1992. 53-72.

_____. "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema." Screen 16.3 (1975): 6-18.

Murphy, Pat. "S.Y. resident recalls Chappaquiddick." Santa Barbara News-Press (17 July 1994) B3.

Penley, Constance. "Spaced Out: Remembering Christa McAuliffe." Camera Obscura. Special Issue on "Imaging Technologies/ Inscribing Science." 29 (1993): 179-212.

Walton, Jean. "Sandra Bernhard: Lesbian Postmodern or Modern Postlesbian?" The Lesbian Postmodern. Ed. Laura Doan. New York: Columbia UP, 1994.

Notes

• 1) One of the most lucid commentaries on the equation of the comic principle continues to be found in Henri Bergson, An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, trans. Cloudesley Shovell Henry Brereton and Fred Rothwell (New York: Macmillan Company, 1911).
• 2) Perhaps this is partly because of the "masculinate" stigma attached to Eastern bloc women: female astronauts came predominantly from Soviet countries.
• 3) In this case I use quotation marks to indicate a definition implied or in question. Like Michie in her article, I avoid examining "Dobson's" guilt, focusing on a more significant issue than finding proof of rape.
• 4) Bobbitt's scenario metaphorically recalls Susan Glaspell's short play Trifles. In Trifles, a dutifully private and silent Mrs. Wright at last resolves her husband's violence by strangling him with a rope. Under his violent ministrations the bed had already become a stage; Mrs. Wright chose to ring the curtain down. "[A] strange death," the townspeople remarked; "who'd have thought it?" Yes, who'd have thought little Minnie Foster Wright capable of carrying out such a deed, after so many years of abuse and deprivation at her husband's hand? And who'd have thought Mrs. Bobbitt capable of amputating Mr. Bobbitt's cock? Many women must surely dream such moments of "truth," wherein they alter or repay male violence in pure gestures. Physical truncation, diminution and neutralisation together perform a complete and absolute gestus-asignature gesture, or gist. Trifles' never-seen character Mrs. Wright goes silently to jail, presumably to perish there for want of favourable evidence. She will never speak the truth of the murder because the men of the town will never speak the truth of her abuse by her husband. Susan Glaspell creates a powerful presence in the unseen character of Mrs. Wright. She also comments on the fact of female absence in marriage: Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters, the two women "friends" who discover onstage the truly incriminating evidence of Minnie Wright's dead canary (clearly killed - by her husband), are equally invisible to their own husbands. I do not subscribe to the theory that lack of conclusive evidence, in this case Wright's tiny, quilt-squared canary coffin, guarantees her release. While the Missus Hale and Peters withhold evidence that would certainly result in Wright's death, I do not believe that Wright will eventually be let off. Glaspell reveals Truth to be a gendered issue, and male and female Justice as distinct operations. Although in the play male law appears to defeat female revenge, the ability of the townswomen (but not the men) to discern what really happened gives the women an authority to women as bearers of the truth.
• 5) Henrik Ibsen's play A Doll's House was commended by Norwegian women's societies for a perceived feminism - a platform Ibsen, however, refused.
• 6) The initial question of how John did it - how he attracted women-became in this act the wonder of how he "does" it - how he has sex with a re-constructed penis: given the media attention to his plight, I suspect that John now has the best male organ that money can buy, a bionic marvel. John later made a more or less public "butt" - of himself by starring in a pornographic movie. That is, seeking to prove the wholeness of his masculinity, John chose a market notorious for its methods of graphic exploitation: in pornography the objectified body is never really whole but exists only because of and through the sexual organ, the camera's central focus. Thus John's desire to show the world his new penis backfired: instead John Bobbitt again showed the world that he is a penis, a man whose sole grounds for mastery over women lies in the violence of his sexual organ.
• 7) The Olympian gods punish Prometheus for bringing fire to mankind by chaining him to a rock where swooping eagles routinely devour his liver.
• 8) Note Luce Irigaray's argument that femininity is erased by binary configurations of the body.
• 9) The Biblical Eve is constructed as a knowing corrupter of men: not only does she eat from the forbidden tree, but she also wittingly offers the fruit to Adam.
• 10) Compare Annette Kuhn, Women's Pictures: Feminism and Cinema (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982).
• 11) These are aspects which neither Penley nor the authors she cites discuss.
• 12) See also Thomas Huang, "Hey - That Wasn't Funny!" Santa Barbara News-Press (23 April 1995) D1.
• 13) I cite two examples, as follows:
       1) McAuliffe's private thoughts were to be surrendered to the space mission for public fare. In comparison with the scientists performing experiments and prognoses in space, McAuliffe's justification for "taking up space" was to have been a journal of her travels, emulating the pioneers who drove their wagon trains across North America. The idea of journal entries remains consistent with the concept of women as silent participants whose offerings subsist in the personal and emotional realm, more or less passive responses reached only by the active encounter of reading.
       2) The inner space of the shuttle, which might have penetrated as a closed inner capsule into outer space, was instead exploded, becoming outer space (nearly spacelessness) in the under or inner space of the Atlantic Ocean.
• 14) Deejay Matthew Arnett was fired in September of 1994 from rock station KCQR 94.5 FM for "floating rumours over the air" that the station was to be sold. He had invited listeners to participate in "Nasty Rumors Tuesday" by telling all the ill rumours they'd lately heard. Three days after his (Tuesday) firing, the station was indeed sold, and twenty-seven of the thirty employees laid off. Read Andrew Rice, "KCQR Bites the Dust," The Independent (22 September 1994): 22.
• 15) Several years ago, when I took the ferry to Nantucket, I walked about the small island towns and discovered what the residents had learned years earlier: there is big money in tragedy. Residents of the area want to talk about it. The horrible death of Mary Jo Kopechne provided Chappaquiddick with its perquisite Warholian fame-as well as a means of avenging itself upon a local family eerily protected by wealth and distinction. Every tourist shop, no matter how small, carried a locally printed version of the scandal, while one bookstore specialised in the grisly subject.
• 16) For a recent discussion of the Volkswagen challenge to Henry Ford, see König, Wolfgang, "Adolf Hitler vs. Henry Ford: the Volkswagen, the Role of America As a Model, And the Failure Of a Nazi Consumer Society," German Studies Review 27/2 (May 2004): 249-268.
• 17) Because of the nature of the death the possibility of suicide was considered.
• 18) Private conversation, University of California (Santa Barbara, May 1994).
• 19) Compare Freud on the image of the jewel case, which comes to replace woman in his studied fantasies.