Abstract
Seemingly, excrement cannot be gendered; the production of excrement is common to both men and women. Yet, as Elizabeth Grosz asks, “Can it be that in the west, in our time, the female body has been constructed not only as a lack or absence but with more complexity, as a leaking, uncontrollable, seeping liquid; as formless flow; as viscosity, entrapping, secreting; as lacking not so much or simply the phallus but self-containment?”2 The answer, alas, is yes. When the body is the enemy, as described in the previous chapter, “moral virtue [becomes equated] with mastery of the body and, eventually, with mastery over anyone associated with the body, such as animals, women, indigenous peoples, homosexuals, and Jews.”3 In their cultural history of menstruation, Andrew Shail and Gillian Howie argue that, although “men’s bodies are at least as f luid as women’s,”4 the female body exemplified and manifested the threat of “corporeal chaos.”5 There are dangers inherent in focusing on menstruation since it inevitably genders the corporeality of the body.6 Menstruation discourse “both furthers the alienation central to female-embodiment and works to maintain the internal stability of the terms ‘men’ and ‘women.’”7 Grosz’s argument that “there has never been space in culture for women as women”8 suggests that women can only be understood in relation to men.
“We don’t want to confront our bodily functions anymore. We’re too busy.”
Linda C. Andrist, Professor at MGH Institute of Health Professions in Boston concerning Lybrel, a pill that eliminates the menstrual period.1
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Notes
Stephanie Saul, “Pill That Eliminates the Period Gets Decidedly Mixed Reviews,” The New York Times, April 20, 2007, A1.
Shail and Howie, “Introduction,” in Menstruation, p. 2 [1–10], citing Elizabeth Grosz, Space, Time, and Perversion, p. 203.
Linda Holler, Erotic Morality: The Role of Touch in Moral Agency (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002), p. 96.
Shail and Howie, “Introduction,” in Menstruation, p. 3, quoting Iris Marion Young, Throwing Like a Girl and Other Essays in Feminist Philosophy and Social Theory (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), p. 193.
Shail and Howie, “Introduction,” in Menstruation, p. 2. See Margrit Shildrick, Leaky Bodies and Boundaries: Feminism, Postmodernism and (Bio) Ethics (London: Routledge, 1997), p. 15. See Moira Gatens, Imaginary Bodies: Ethics, Power and Corporeality (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 50. See also Patrick Viscuso, “Menstruation: A Problem in Late Byzantine Canon Law,” Abstracts of Papers-Byzantine Studies Conference 26 (2000): 72–73.
Elizabeth Grosz, “Histories of the Present and Future: Feminism, Power, Bodies,” in Cohen and Weiss, Thinking the Limits of the Body, p. 22 [13–23].
Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990).
Caroline Walker Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York: Zone Books, 1991), p. 200.
Leyser, “Masculinity in Flux,” p. 111, n. 18 [103–120]. See also Jacqueline Murray, “Men’s Bodies, Men’s Minds: Seminal Emissions and Sexual Anxiety in the Middle Ages,” Annual Review of Sex Research 8 (1997): 3 [1–26]; Bynum, Fragmentation, p. 220.
Maurice Bloch, “Death, Women and Power,” in Death and the Regeneration of Life, ed. Maurice Bloch and Jonathan Parry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 219 [211–230].
Bataille, The Accursed Share, p. 65. Cyrille Harpet, Du Déchet: Philosophie des Immondices: Corps, Ville, Industrie (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1998), p. 124. See also Allen, On Farting, p. 60.
Jacqueline Murray, “ ‘The Law of Sin That is in My Members’: The Problem of Male Embodiment,” in Gender and Holiness: Men, Women and Saints in Late Medieval Europe, ed. Samantha J. E. Riches and Sarah Salih (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 11 [9–22]. See also Bryan S. Turner, “The Body in Western Society,” in Religion and the Body, p. 24 [15–41].
Miranda Griffin, “Dirty Stories: Abjection in the Fabliaux,” in New Medieval Literatures 3, ed. David Lawton, Wendy Scase, and Rita Copeland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 255 [229–260]. Women were separated in castles along with their private privies. Roberta Gilchrist, “Medieval Bodies in the Material World: Gender, Stigma and the Body,” in Framing Medieval Bodies, ed. Sarah Kay and Miri Rubin (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), p. 59 [43–61]. Also see Cuffel, Gendering Disgust, pp. 26–35, 124–131, about women and foulness; and Emily Martin, “The Egg and the Sperm: How Science Has Constructed a Romance Based on Stereotypical Male-Female Roles,” in Feminist Theory and the Body: A Reader, ed. Janet Price and Margrit Shildrick (New York: Routledge, 1999), p. 180 [179–189].
Miri Rubin, “The Person in the Form: Medieval Challenges to Bodily ‘Order,’ ” in Kay and Rubin, Framing Medieval Bodies, p. 113 [100–122]; Elliott, Fallen Bodies, p. 179, n.76; Rob Meens, “Ritual Purity and the Influence of Gregory the Great,” Studies in Church History 32 (1994): 35 [31–43]; and Paula M. Rieder, “Insecure Borders: Symbols of Clerical Privilege and Gender Ambiguity in the Liturgy of Churching,” in The Material Culture of Sex, Procreation, and Marriage in Premodern Europe, ed. Anne L. McClanan and Karen Rosoff Encarnación (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), p. 99 [93–113]. But Becky Lee argues how postpartum purification rites, while separating the “impure,” could be empowering for women and men. Becky R. Lee, “The Purification of Women after Childbirth: A Window onto Medieval Perceptions of Women,” Florilegium 14 (1995–1996): 43–55; and Becky R. Lee, “Men’s Recollections of a Women’s Rite: Medieval English Men’s Recollections Regarding the Rite of the Purification of Women after Childbirth,” Gender & History 14 (2002): 228 [224–241].
Alcuin Blamires, ed., Woman Defamed and Woman Defended: An Anthology of Medieval Texts (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), p. 64.
Nelson, “Monks Secular Men,” p. 132. See also Sabbath and Hall, End Product, p. 23; J.-P. Migne, ed., Patriologia Latina, 221 vols (Paris, 1844– 1846), vol. 133, col 556; G. G. Coulton. Five Centuries of Religion, 3 vols (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1923). Vol. I, p. 528.
Millett and Wogan-Browne, Medieval English Prose for Women, see for example, pp. 9, 13, 24, 31, 33. Hildegard von Bingen depicts an excremental vision of the Antichrist and the harlot who pretends to be a virgin. Hildegard of Bingen, Scivias, trans. Mother Columba Hart and Jane Bishop (New York: Paulist Press, 1990), p. 493, quoted by Madeline H. Caviness, Visualizing Women in the Middle Ages: Sight, Spectacle, and Scopic Economy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), pp. 172, 508. Scatology and eschatology fuse in this image of an excremental end of the world.
The Parson’s rhetoric is reminiscent of Wolf’s [Wulfstan’s] Sermon to the English under Viking persecution in 1014, where Wolf condemns those who act against common decency. Swanton, Anglo-Saxon Prose, p. 181.
Anke Bernau, “Virginal Effects: Text and Identity in Ancrene Wisse,” in Gender and Holiness: Men, Women and Saints in Late Medieval Europe, ed. Samantha J. E. Riches and Sarah Salih (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 41 [36–48].
Liz Herbert McAvoy, Authority and the Female Body in the Writings of Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2004), p. 138.
For a detailed discussion of “hol” and its implications for the Miller’s Tale, see Elaine Tuttle Hansen, Chaucer and the Fictions of Gender (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), p. 226, n. 29; also Lochrie, Covert Operations, p. 173.
See Jeffrey L. Singman, Daily Life in Medieval Europe (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999), p. 49. Mempiria were medieval balls of hay used to wipe oneself. Reynolds, Cleanliness and Godliness, p. 306. See also J. R. A. Greig, “The Investigation of a Medieval Barrel-Latrine from Worcester,” Journal of Archeological Science 8 (1981): 265–282, whose excavation of a fifteenth-century barrel latrine uncovered straw, hay, and sedge, which most likely were used as toilet paper.
Griffin, “Dirty Stories,” p. 239. Similarly, the fistula resembles a mouth. See Citrome, “Bodies That Splatter,” 166 [137–172]; also David Williams, “Radical Therapy in the Miller’s Tale,” Chaucer Review 15 (1981): 227–235.
Robert Cook, trans. Njal’s Saga (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 2001), pp. 223, 297.
Ilza Veith, Hysteria: The History of a Disease (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965), p. 5.
Von Staden, “Women and Dirt,” 16; also Ruth Mazo Karras, From Boys to Men: Formations of Masculinity in Late Medieval Europe (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), pp. 105–106, on cures for baldness involving goat excrement and her discussion on how hazing rituals involving excrement masculinized the initiates, p. 108.
Von Staden, “Women and Dirt,” 16. One Old English spell against miscarriage utilizes running water, identified as a stream, to wash away the filth; the clean, running fluid symbolically flushes the filth-laden container of her womb. Nigel Barley, “Anglo-Saxon Magico-Medicine,” Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford 3 (1972): 72 [67–76].
Swanton, Anglo-Saxon Prose, p. 262. Although the bidet is an invention of the eighteenth century, it has been speculated that something of the kind was used in the Middle Ages to clean the intimate parts of women. Fanny Beaupré and Roger-Henri Guerrand, Le confident des dames: Le bidet du XVIIIe au XXe siècle: histoire d’une intimité (Paris: Éditions la Découverte, 1997), pp. 31–32.
Hrotsvit of Gandersheim, The Plays of Hrotsvit of Gandersheim, trans. Katharina Wilson (New York: Garland, 1989), p. 113.
This can have a political dimension as well. Peggy McCracken, “The Body Politic and the Queen’s Adulterous Body in French Romance,” in Feminist Approaches to the Body in Medieval Literature, ed. Linda Lomperis and Sarah Stanbury (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), p. 57 [38–64]; also Citrome, “Medicine as Metaphor,” 264 [260–280].
Though Cuffel, Gendering Disgust, especially pp. 99–116, writes how anxiety about Mary and her body heightens in anti-Christian polemic of the twelfth and fourteenth centuries. This polemic carried power only because both attacker and victim were drawing on the same images and medical texts. For example, the Virgin had to have menstruated or else she could not have lactated according to medieval medical beliefs (p. 110).
Elizabeth Alvilda Petroff, Medieval Women’s Visionary Literature, trans. Barbara L. Grant (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 157.
Louise O. Fradenburg, “Criticism, Anti-Semitism, and the Prioress’s Tale,” Exemplaria 1.1 (1989): 88 [69–115, 88].
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© 2008 Susan Signe Morrison
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Morrison, S.S. (2008). Gendered Filth. In: Excrement in the Late Middle Ages. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230615021_4
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