Cutting/ Slicing/ Cutting Into: Mutilation and Signification.

This post is off the beaten track of my research but I felt it was worth sharing it.

CW: mutilation, surgery, inter phobia, transphobia, gratuitous use of french critical theorists.

Thank you to the tweet author for their sensitivity reading of this short essay.

Cutting/ Slicing/ Cutting Into: Mutilation and Signification.

‘I want stigmata. I do not want the stigmata to disappear. I am attached to my engravings, to the stings in my flesh and my mental parchment. I do not fear that trauma and stigma will form an alliance: the literature in me wants to maintain and reanimate traces.’ (Cixous 2005, 10)

Sterilisation of the Area/ Preparation.

Preparty to the actual text of this text I wish to make plain that I am not Intersex and, as such, I speak only for myself in pulling together some disparate threads of theory I find myself reflecting on in relation to a twitter post (Meryl Links, 2022) regarding the symbolic relationship between the mutilation of a Progress Pride flag and the mutilation of Intersex bodies, the act of cutting, of reconfiguring through violence, ‘the trace of the wound.’ (Cixous 2005, 8)

The post I react to asks us to consider the symbolism inherent within the mutilation (the reason to choose this word will become obvious as we progress, as we examine the scar) of a Progress Pride flag by two ‘Gender Critical’[1] activists who took a knife to excise the section of the flag that includes the symbol for Intersex people: ‘There's something very fucking disgusting to me about cutting off the part of a flag representing intersex people when it is precisely an act of cutting that intersex justice orgs work to prevent’ (Meryl Links, 2022) further ‘that gesture was about taking blades to something, removing what is seen as 'undesirable' and only leaving what they claim to believe is palatable.’

This piece constitutes a tracing out of the scar and a reinstatement of it as a stigmata,[2] its transformation from an evasion into a signifier. (Derrida, 2021a)

I speak not as an Intersex person but as Ophilia in Steinnes ‘An Act of Methodology: A Document in Madness – Writing Ophelia’ (Steinnes, 2012) does when we are called upon to remember that ‘we are finite beings, grafted at birth.’ (Steinnes 2021, 829) Finite, grafted beings haunting the brotherhood of the masculine.[3]

This piece constitutes a tracing out.

Pointing Inwards and Pointing Outwards: the Act of Signifying Presence and Absence/ The First Incision.

In ‘Outwork, Prefacing’ Jacques Derrida comments on the power of the quotation mark to signify: ‘the structure itself is worked in turn: the rule according to which every concept necessarily receives two similar marks – a repetition without identity – one mark inside and the other outside the deconstructed system.’ (Derrida 2021, 4a) The act of giving signification to a concept, of projecting it both outward and inward, of placing it within a relationship to its own textuality and that which exists as extra text (as extratextual)[4] brings to mind ‘the trace of the wound’ in Cixous’ Stigmata (Cixous 2005, 8) ‘the fatal nail, the sword, the knife, the axe which threatens to fix, to nail, to immobilize.’ (Cixous 2005, 8) The act of cutting is the act of signification, the creation of a concept which is stable to the viewer (when the viewer wishes to excise the undesirable, that which lies outside the bounds of stability.) If ‘what constitutes through division the ‘inner and ‘outer’ worlds of the subject is a boarder and boundary tenuously maintained for the purposes of social regulation and control’ (Butler 2006, 182) then the act of cutting, of making stable the formation of gendered bodies becomes a political act. The cut, the stab, the mutilation of bodies and the mutilation of that which symbolises them – these are political acts. These are violences enacted on bodies and the concept of such bodies as “The Progress Pride” flag points both inwards towards itself as a concept and outwards towards those it represents, the ‘presence’ of bodies and their ‘absence’ (through an act of signification) (Deridda 2021b) cannot be separated – the violence against the (absent) sign becomes a violence against the (present) body/ bodies.

The symbolic act of creating a new flag, a new territory, from the progress pride flag by the violence of cutting also evokes the process of ‘foreclosure’ discussed by Butler in ‘Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex’ (Butler, 1993) where forming an ingroup and an outgroup (a body that can exist and a body that cannot exist) involves the creation of ‘a domain of abject beings, those who are not yet ‘subjects,’ but who form the constructive outside to the domain of the subject.’ (Butler 1993, xiii) Here the group who exist outside of the foreclosure help formulate the group contained within while being lesser by the act of being defined as ‘outside.’ To exist as a body which can exist is to be ‘subject’ while to be out with a conceivable bodily form is to be subject to the objectivity[5] of those within the ingroup, those with ‘bodies that matter,’ that can be conceived of.[6]

To mutilate the progress pride flag is to mutilate intersex bodies, to take the excised portion of the flag and toss it to the ground while holding the unexcised portion is to create a separate domain that contains bodies that cannot be conceived of and as such cannot be said to form part of society. (Rancière, 2021)

The ”Progress Pride” flag is marked by ‘one mark inside and the other outside,’ (Derrida 2021, 4a) a pointing towards the extratextual context of the flag, the world external to the sign, to the bodies of those it signifies while ‘the trace of the wound’ (Cixous 2005, 8) signifies that which is lost, that which has been removed and excised. This formulation points towards the body politic as well as the body itself and an act of violence against one is an act of violence against the other.

Stitching the Wound Together/ Aftercare.

I have a scar on my left thumb. It is roughly triangular and, I am told, has been with me from infancy when I reached up to take a sweet from a counter where there was broken glass (another incision.) I have few memories of childhood and my scar, my Stigmata is a trace of that time – it is a reminder of the excised.[7]

In her preface to Stigmata Cixous states ‘all these texts aim to flee the fatal nail, the sword, the knife, the axe which threatens to fix, to nail, to immobilize them in, by, death. Their first and best ally in the evasion is the poetic use of the languages of language. If only we listen, a language always speaks several languages at once, and runs with a single word in opposite directions.’ (Cixous 2005, 8) This piece is an exercise in ‘the poetic uses of the languages of language,’ a spell against hate, a memory of that which is excised. ‘Language’s tricks are the allies of the artist who goes into resistance or exile’ (Cixous 2005, 8) meanwhile ‘we are called to write’ (Steinnes 2021, 829) and we write.

Against hate I offer language. Against violence I offer Play.

References:

Butler, J. (1993) Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex.’ New York and London; Routledge Classics

Butler, J. (1990) Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York and London; Routledge Classics.

Cixous, H. (2005) Preface: On Stigmatexts by Hélène Cixous, in Cixous, H. (2005) Stigmata. Translated from the French by Eric Prenowitz. London and New York: Routledge Classics.

Derrida, J. (2021a) Outwork, Prefacing in Derrida, J. (2021) Dissemination. Translated from the French by Barbara Johnson. London and New York; Bloomsbury Revelations.

Derrida, J. (2021b) Plato’s Pharmacy in Derida, J. (2021) Dissemination. Translated from the French by Barbara Johnson. London and New York; Bloomsbury Revelations.

Lawlor, L. (2021) Jacques Derrida. The Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy. Zalta, E. N. (ed.) Available at: https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2021/entries/derrida/ (Accessed 29th November 2021)

Meryl Links (2021) ‘There's something very fucking disgusting to me about cutting off the part of a flag representing intersex people when it is precisely an act of cutting that intersex justice orgs work to prevent.’ Twitter, 21st September 2021 Available at: https://twitter.com/minusplnp/status/1572239317270929408 (Accessed on the 21st, Sep 2021)

Rancière, J. (2021) The Politics of Aesthetics. Translated from the French by Gabriel Rockhill. London and New York; Bloomsbury Revelations.

Steinnes, J. (2012) An Act of Methodology: A Document in Madness – Writing Ophelia. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 44(8) pp. 818-830.

[1] I use ‘Gender Critical’ here as I choose to refer to them by the term they use, by the term by which they can be found and observed in all their patriarchal glory. [2] ‘Scar adds something: a visible or invisible fibrous tissue that really or allegorically replaces a loss of substance which is therefore not lost but added to, augmentation of memory by a small mnesic growth. Unlike scar, stigmata takes away, removes substance, carves out a place for itself. [3] ‘So if we look closely enough into this last paragraph of Spectres of Marx, we will find that she [Ophelia] in there after all.’ (Steines 2012, 827) [4] The extra text, the extratextual is a key concept within ‘Outwork, Prefacing.’ [5] For the importance of binary oppositions such as objectivity/ subjectivity to the creation and maintenance of power relationships see Lawlor’s piece on Derrider in the Stamford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy (Lawlor, 2021) [6] Also of relevance here is Rancière and concept of ‘the distribution of the sensible’ found within ‘The Politics of Aesthetics’ (Rancière 2021) which argues that those excluded from that which can be conceived are no longer ‘sensible’ that is they cannot be understood to be a part of the body politic. [7] This is not intended to make a comparison between the mutilation of children’s bodies in the service of the gender binary and my own scar. Such a comparison would be a horrific comparison to make. It was intended to refer to Cixous' observation that 'all literature is scary' (Cixoux 2005, 9)