The Fragmented and Corruptible Body: Gendered Waste

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Compare to the homo sacer of Roman culture as discussed by Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel HellerRoazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998).Google Scholar

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See Jacqueline Vanhoutte, “Denmark’s Rotting Reconsidered,” Philological Quarterly 91.3 (2012): 397. Hayden White comments that “perceived differences between men had less significance for Greeks and Romans than they had for Hebrews and Christians. For the former, differentness was perceived as physical and cultural; for the latter, as moral and metaphysical.” “The Forms of Wildness: Archaeology of an Idea,” Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 156. Quoted inGoogle Scholar

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See also Michael Mayerfeld Bell, “Deep Fecology: Mikhail Bakhtin and the Call of Nature,” Capitalism, Nature, Socialism 5.4 (1994): 73–75. “The grotesque body is a popular-festive body that, outgrowing itself, threatens forms of established order for the sake of its own immediate self-celebration and for the long-term goal of promoting social cohesion and purposiveness from below.” For Bakhtin, then, the body is of interest as an “instrument of political critique.”CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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Dominique Laporte, History of Shit, trans. Nadia Benabid and Rodolphe el-Khoury, Introduction by Rodolph el-Khoury (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), 60. See also how Peter Ackroyd equates the dead with rubbish in London: A Biography (New York: Doubleday, 2000), 337. “To rise above the body is to equate the body with excrement… T]he peculiar human fascination with excrement is the peculiar human fascination with death … Excrement is the dead life of the body.”Google Scholar

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All quotes from Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Ashmole 1434, 292–294. The manuscript consists of three sections or works sewn together; the final one dating from, apparently, 1586. See Will Stockton, Playing Dirty: Sexuality and Waste in Early Modern Comedy (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), xv, for more on excrements and hair; andCrossRefGoogle Scholar

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It has been argued that liquid was linked to goddesses in old matrilineal tribes. “Why is Beowulf so hostile to the sea that he must swim with his sword in his hand? Perhaps because the water was especially thought the domain of the chthonic female deity.” Frank Battaglia, “The Germanic Earth Goddess in Beowulf?” The Mankind Quarterly 31 (1997): 427, [415–446].Google Scholar

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See a parallel Gertrude Stein’s poem as discussed by Christopher Schmidt, The Poetics of Waste: Queer Excess in Stein, Ashbery, Schuyler, and Goldsmith (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 43.Google Scholar

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“Yet [Ophelia] ‘speaks’ through snatches of ordinary, albeit disjointed, discourse: popular ballads, traditional legends, routine pieties, even familiar expressions of greeting and farewell. The important work her psyche attempts, to pervert convention in order to find a vehicle through which she can protest her lifetime of repression, is ultimately undermined by the very conventionality of her discourse.” Her conversation is “irrational and disconnected.” Gabrielle Dane, “Reading Ophelia’s Madness,” Exemplaria 10 (1998): 419.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

The act of processing waste even becomes associated with women when, in 1903 in Woolwich, England, a new refuse destructor had engines baptized “‘Flavia’, ‘Wilhelmina’, ‘Gertrude’, and ‘Muriel’ after the names of the wives of the engineer and the Electricity Committee.” J. F. M. Clark, “‘The incineration of refuse is beautiful’: Torquay and the introduction of municipal refuse destructors.” Urban History 34 (2007): 273.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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