Tag Archives: Lidia Yuknavitch

Rape Culture: “These Are Not the Sad Stories”

Debbie says:

I can’t in good conscience recommend this article by the brilliant Lidia Yuknavitch, whose work I have written about here before.

So why am I linking to it if I can’t recommend it?

It’s an explicit, detailed account of her own history with abuse and rape, set in the context of what rape culture means to women. Even for a woman like me, with very little violence in my history, not enough fear of men to be sensible about the dangers, and a long history of reading/hearing other people’s horrible stories, Yuknavitch goes almost too far. If your background isn’t as atypically lucky as mine, she probably does go too far.

But here are some of the things she says between telling her stories:

I’m trying to tell you something here, but it’s starting to sound like what I’m saying is that I deserved these violences. Let me be clear. I did not. No one does. Ever. But when women tell how it is for them, when they self narrate their ordinary lives, it’s instantly sucked up by the culture—there’s already a place waiting for the story. A place where the story gets annulled.  It’s 2012 and I’m still reading about what the girl or woman was wearing that night. Or how she should hold aspirin between her legs. Or how she shouldn’t say the word “vagina” on the floor of congress. Or how a friend at a bar wants the sob stories to end. [This last is a reference to the opening paragraph of the article.] What I’m trying to tell you is that violence against girls and women is in every move we make, whether it is big violence or small, explicit or hidden behind the word father. Priest. Lover. Teacher. Coach. Friend. I’m trying to explain how you can be a girl and a woman and travel through male violence like it’s part of what living a life means. Getting into or out of a car. A plane. Going through a door to your own home. A church. School. Pool. It can seem normal. It can seem like just the way things are.

To be honest, the first reason I understand the complexities of male violence against girls and women is that I went to college and read a shit ton of books—and even that wasn’t enough education—I went to graduate school, where finally, finally, the books that I read and the films that I watched and the art that I experienced and the teachers that I had showed me just how not normal male violence against girls and women—or boys and men—is. Ever. And yet at the same time, the more conscious I became, the more I also understood that the pervasiveness of that violence has saturated the entire culture. It’s both omnipresent, and unbelievably invisible in its dispersed and sanctioned forms. So many times the cult of good citizenship covering over the atrocities of girls and boys. Mothers who go numb. Counselors who ask the wrong questions. Coaches and priests and teachers whose desires are costumed and sanctified by their authority. Neighbors who go blind and deaf. Paying bills. Drinking lattes.

The second reason I understand is that I am alive. Still. Differently.

It wasn’t that I did not understand the violences against me were wrong. I did. Even at three years of age. It was that I thought I deserved it, and possibly worse:  that deserving it, I could withstand it. Mightily. Heroically. You see? As a righteously indignant defense. I could take it. As good as if I was some body’s son. It was a choice.

Listen, these are not the sad stories. Worse things happened to me. Those aren’t the sad stories either.  These stories don’t carry the pathos to signify culturally in my culture. These stories I’m telling you are commonplace. That’s the point. They just happen and you live them and as you go you have to decide who you want to be.

If that wasn’t enough, the article goes on to discuss how Yuknavitch truly feels about abortion, and then she connects the dots:

I don’t know a single woman alive who is “happy” to have had an abortion. Or two. Or four. And it’s not just me. Other women. Republicans. Democrats.  Unaffiliated women. Atheists. Christians. Muslims. Buddhists. Armies of us walking around carrying our body secrets. Our shame over the zygotes. Or maybe there’s something deeper than shame—maybe there’s a second self I had to kill in order to live. The Lidia who believed she deserved it. Could take it. Should. It was a choice.

Only read it if you feel that it’s right for you. At the same time, I hope you (whether or not you read her story) share her message, as I have tried to excerpt it here, with anyone and everyone who still believes that abuse stories are a form of one-upmanship, that the (mostly) male violence that “saturates the culture” is somehow acceptable, and that abortion is something women choose recreationally

Thanks to wordweaverlynn for the pointer.

Boobs, Bodies, and Book Covers

Debbie says:

Lidia Yuknavitch has a marvelous post on The Rumpus on the decision she and her female publisher made to put a woman’s breast on the cover of her new book, The Chronology of Water.

book cover featuring breast with nipple

(cover photograph by Andy Mingo)

It’s a boob.

With full frontal nip.

What happened next of course is that the book went into design and production. We all understood we were making a cover that was at the very least atypical. Possibly controversial. Absolutely, as it turned out, problematic for some in terms of visually showcasing the cover. For example, Facebook does not “like” naked boobs.

Yuknavitch goes on to talk about the gender issue that arises when a book cover like this is chosen, designed, and supported by women, and is considered “unacceptable” by a system that is predominantly male. (Her publisher, Rhonda Hughes of Hawthorne Books, has created a wrapper that covers the tit, so in effect the book has a boob cover and a no-boob cover.)

When it comes to representation, it is not entirely OK for women to insist upon the representation of their own bodies in their own terms. And by OK, I mean culturally sanctioned, commercially viable, literarily or intellectually respected. And when I say in their own terms, I mean with a specific representational validity and aim, and without apology. You are just going to have to trust me with this next statement when I say, virtually NO agents or mainstream or commercial presses would touch this cover. Few literary presses would.

You don’t have to trust her with that statement; you can trust me instead. I’ve worked in book publishing on and off since 1988, and I do it now. Nipples are taboo in publishing. Laurie and I know exactly which Women En Large photographs we can send to newspapers and magazines, because the nipples are either not in the picture or not very visible. On book covers, nipples and pubic hair can’t even be discussed in the cover conference. Yuknavitch is also right that women’s bodies, which are used to sell everything else under the sun, are not common on “literary” book covers, perhaps because they are used to sell everything else under the sun, and literary books perceive themselves as different. The nipple rule is decades old. In the 1990s, when we discussed revisiting it at the publisher where I was working, we were told that it was not open to discussion.

In her discussion of people’s reaction to holding the book, Yuknavitch says:

… people would be embarrassed to be seen with a boob book in their hands. Though it’s true enough that LOTS of other people would be downright skippy and proud to hold one in public and wave it around – I have a boob book! HA! – she also meant, at least implicitly, you can’t have a nude woman on the cover of your book if you intend to be taken seriously by the wizards in charge of marketing and consumption in the literary industry.

I think she misses one point here: books are things that we hold. Advertisements are things that we look at, and either turn the page or keep driving. I expect people who understand most or all of Yuknavitch’s arguments about the body (we’re getting to those) might still feel a little uneasy holding that naked boob in their hand for the hours it takes to read the book, especially (but not only) in public.

She goes on to discuss the philosophy behind her choices. By philosophy, I mean an extremely appealing mixture of Plain Talk and references to famous philosophers.

Let me tell you why I became insistent about the cover. My memoir is, at its heart, about how I survived the life I was dealt, kind of like we all do. The central and enduring metaphor that holds the story together is swimming. And the central site of meaning in this story I have told about making a self from the ruins of a life is a body. A real body.

An eating, fucking, shitting, peeing, sweating, bleeding, body.

… Part of the dire problem is that it is quite difficult to make the assertion that one owns ones mode of representation and ones mode of production and the meaning making operations of ones body as a woman.

Yes, I mean that in the Marxist sense.

As it turns out, those ideas – commodity, labor, production, distribution, epistemology and ontology – seem unequivocally reserved for the realms of philosophic discourse, on the one hand – and in particular, whether we want it to be true or not, a rather patriarchal philosophical discourse, and on the other hand, market driven rules and regulations, another patriarchal bastion which does not include women owning the signification modes.

One of the things I kept thinking as I was reading was, “Well, yes, but the reader can’t tell that the cover was chosen and designed by women. From a purchaser’s, or advertiser’s, or even store bookbuyer’s point of view, what’s the difference? Yuknavitch answered me quite neatly by the end of her post:

That body ain’t no airbrushed hot model’s body. That boob is not “man-made.” That nip isn’t quite right – and what’s not quite right about it is that it’s a real nipple. It sits how it sits, is sags a bit, there are imperfections all around it. Also, I have it on good authority that it’s the boob and nip of a woman closing in on fifty years old.

… this is what happens when you put the mode of representation, production and distribution in the hands of, well, smarty women. There is no silicone or push-up bra or tantalizing sexualization, fetishization, or ironic stance. There are freckles and saggages and discolorations.

The cover is showing you something about an ordinary woman’s body. Inside, the text is saying something about how an ordinary woman found a self by and through her own body. Between seeing and saying, a dialogic exists.

Now she’s speaking Body Impolitic’s language: images of real bodies are the truly radical images of these times. The wizards in charge of marketing and consumption in the literary industry may shy away from all nipples, whether sagging and aging or perky and young, but the wizards in charge of marketing and consumption in the wider world love every image they can find of young women’s bodies (or at least Photoshopped young women’s bodies). No one but a few smarty women are smarty enough to love images of all bodies … and to be aware of just how transgressive it is to not just show, but showcase, the otherwise invisible ones.

As she makes all of these clear points, Yuknavitch references Kristeva, and Cixous, and Bakhtin, and Zizek, and Jhally, and more, all with links for those who don’t know their work.

Now I want to read the book.

Thanks to Alan Bostick for the pointer.