Writing, Not Lack
Emma L. Rees, The Vagina: A Literary and Cultural History
Bloomsbury, 352pp, £19.99, ISBN 9781623568719
reviewed by Jane Cleasby
It is virtually impossible to begin reading Emma L. Rees’ The Vagina: A Literary and Cultural History without the spectre of Naomi Wolf’s 2012 publication – Vagina: A New Biography – hovering over it. That Wolf herself offers the primary quote of praise on the back cover of Rees’ book is cause for trepidation. Thankfully, The Vagina offers none of the narcissistic memoir, dressed up in Cosmo-style, essentialist pseudo-science that is peddled by Wolf: the similarities between their two works begin and end with the titles.
Rees doesn’t pussy-foot around (sorry); she drops the C-bomb six pages in, noting that ‘cunt’ is a more encompassing word for what Germaine Greer describes as ‘the whole box and dice’ than the rather anatomically specific ‘vagina’. However, Rees does not go all guns blazing for straightforward femmo reclamation of the word; rather, in the rest of the introduction she thoughtfully lays down the question of whether such a reclamation is possible. Can we use the word ‘cunt’ without invoking its history of misogyny and disgust? If not, where does that leave us as women, unable to talk about our own bodies without conjuring abjection and obscenity? Rees poses the question that runs throughout her book: ‘Is it the case that, no matter how much a woman endeavours to reclaim the word, the boomerang comes back too swiftly, so that it knocks her over, shattering her identity?’
By looking at different artistic and cultural representations of women’s sexual organs, from those in 12th-century French fabliaux to South Park, Rees explores ways in which the experience of the female body and the female self can be one of division, as the cunt is represented as autonomised and alien. This struggle for an assimilation of the cunt into a cohesive and unified female identity is satisfyingly grounded in a broader context of identity theory; for example, Rees elegantly fuses Lacan’s idea of the mirror, with the ‘Ideal-I’ in writing, when discussing the fantasy of the unified self in Eurydice Kamvyselli’s 1991 novel f/32.
Despite Rees’ obvious comfort with theoretical and academic writing (she is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Chester), The Vagina is a particularly accessible read. Occasionally the flow of a sentence is upset by a bracketed explanation of one or other of the more obscure terms used, but this is a small price to pay for not having to reach for Wikipedia every few pages. An evident love of smutty puns (‘he puts the jism in neologism’), and a willingness to illustrate through anecdote, makes Rees’ style refreshingly human, in contrast to the faux-objectivity and stuffy authoritative voice of some academic texts. Rees refuses any kind of high-low culture binary, as she understands that the cunt as represented in HBO’s Sex and The City is just as important a consideration, as the cunt in the work of Frida Kahlo.
It is this engagement of the contemporary moment that really sets The Vagina apart. Rees’ commitment to read the body as always both ‘symbolic and anatomical’ ensures a safe distance is kept from both a damaging biological essentialism, and a constructionist erasure of women’s lived bodily experience. Any work that is primarily engaged with marginalised identities and manacled bodies is severely lacking if it does not consider the experience of transgender people: thankfully Rees is well aware of this. She notes that the struggle for cisgender women to find an appropriate language for their bodies finds corresponding resonance with the need for trans people to source a syntax similarly rule-breaking. Rees’ engagement with trans identity is admittedly brief, acknowledging that the area ‘warrants a book all of its own.’ And in her conclusion, Rees voices a belief in theory as activism; refusing to leave these musings on the cunt as simple philosophical debate, she explores the material impact that these discussions might have, on issues such as female-genital-mutilation (FGM) and labiaplasty.
The Vagina is exactly what it purports to be: a literary and cultural history of impressive breadth and frequently rewarding depth. A whole chapter is given over to the work of the artist Judy Chicago, with the main focus on her installation The Dinner Party. First exhibited in 1979, The Dinner Party was immediately ‘controversial’; at one point it was the subject of debate in Congress, as Chicago struggled to find anywhere that would display the work, due to the (albeit abstract) cunty nature of the piece. There are striking resonances between Chicago’s and Rees’ projects: both aim to illuminate the experiences and achievements of women that history has erased or ignored, both seeing these women as part of a network that reaches through history and across the globe. It is perhaps because of the compatibility of their projects that although Rees’ discussion of The Dinner Party is detailed and interesting, it lacks a critical examination of some of its more problematic elements. I am thinking mainly of Hortense J. Spillers’ criticism of Chicago’s representation of women of colour.
There are a few jarring moments in the book, such as Rees’ dismissal of those who purchase fleshlights from eBay as ‘people who don’t get out much,’ or her snobbish mockery of SATC’s Carrie’s decision to go shopping to ‘unleash the creative subconscious’ (Rees quips: ‘I must have missed that moment in A Room of One’s Own’). In a book that is engaging in its nuanced critique of the structural and representational forces that act to oppress women and dictate their behaviour, these snipes stand out as cheap and lazy. Moreover, her language regarding transgender issues, although generally considerate and well informed, slips up when she problematically uses ‘transgender’ as a verb, describing the ‘transgendered body’ (guidelines from the trans community explicitly request such use be avoided). One final grievance: while Rees’ discussion around FGM notes the implicit racism which often accompanies condemnation of the practice in the British media, in her own critique of it the voices of those directly affected by FGM are alarmingly absent; this is ironic given her insistence that the procedure has the psychological effect of silencing the women who go through it.
But in spite of these lexical problems, and struggles for inclusion, The Vagina remains an informative and considered book: it is a resource, and a source of power. A polyphonic mixture of high and low, it will engage the feminist philosopher at home with Kristeva, as well as those comparably new to these ideas. The Vagina is not, to borrow a term from Laurie Penny, the ‘feminism-as-spectacle’ that Wolf and many others who court the mainstream gaze are so keen to offer us; rather it is feminist writing of the best kind, that which comes from genuine engagement and real political concern.
Rees doesn’t pussy-foot around (sorry); she drops the C-bomb six pages in, noting that ‘cunt’ is a more encompassing word for what Germaine Greer describes as ‘the whole box and dice’ than the rather anatomically specific ‘vagina’. However, Rees does not go all guns blazing for straightforward femmo reclamation of the word; rather, in the rest of the introduction she thoughtfully lays down the question of whether such a reclamation is possible. Can we use the word ‘cunt’ without invoking its history of misogyny and disgust? If not, where does that leave us as women, unable to talk about our own bodies without conjuring abjection and obscenity? Rees poses the question that runs throughout her book: ‘Is it the case that, no matter how much a woman endeavours to reclaim the word, the boomerang comes back too swiftly, so that it knocks her over, shattering her identity?’
By looking at different artistic and cultural representations of women’s sexual organs, from those in 12th-century French fabliaux to South Park, Rees explores ways in which the experience of the female body and the female self can be one of division, as the cunt is represented as autonomised and alien. This struggle for an assimilation of the cunt into a cohesive and unified female identity is satisfyingly grounded in a broader context of identity theory; for example, Rees elegantly fuses Lacan’s idea of the mirror, with the ‘Ideal-I’ in writing, when discussing the fantasy of the unified self in Eurydice Kamvyselli’s 1991 novel f/32.
Despite Rees’ obvious comfort with theoretical and academic writing (she is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Chester), The Vagina is a particularly accessible read. Occasionally the flow of a sentence is upset by a bracketed explanation of one or other of the more obscure terms used, but this is a small price to pay for not having to reach for Wikipedia every few pages. An evident love of smutty puns (‘he puts the jism in neologism’), and a willingness to illustrate through anecdote, makes Rees’ style refreshingly human, in contrast to the faux-objectivity and stuffy authoritative voice of some academic texts. Rees refuses any kind of high-low culture binary, as she understands that the cunt as represented in HBO’s Sex and The City is just as important a consideration, as the cunt in the work of Frida Kahlo.
It is this engagement of the contemporary moment that really sets The Vagina apart. Rees’ commitment to read the body as always both ‘symbolic and anatomical’ ensures a safe distance is kept from both a damaging biological essentialism, and a constructionist erasure of women’s lived bodily experience. Any work that is primarily engaged with marginalised identities and manacled bodies is severely lacking if it does not consider the experience of transgender people: thankfully Rees is well aware of this. She notes that the struggle for cisgender women to find an appropriate language for their bodies finds corresponding resonance with the need for trans people to source a syntax similarly rule-breaking. Rees’ engagement with trans identity is admittedly brief, acknowledging that the area ‘warrants a book all of its own.’ And in her conclusion, Rees voices a belief in theory as activism; refusing to leave these musings on the cunt as simple philosophical debate, she explores the material impact that these discussions might have, on issues such as female-genital-mutilation (FGM) and labiaplasty.
The Vagina is exactly what it purports to be: a literary and cultural history of impressive breadth and frequently rewarding depth. A whole chapter is given over to the work of the artist Judy Chicago, with the main focus on her installation The Dinner Party. First exhibited in 1979, The Dinner Party was immediately ‘controversial’; at one point it was the subject of debate in Congress, as Chicago struggled to find anywhere that would display the work, due to the (albeit abstract) cunty nature of the piece. There are striking resonances between Chicago’s and Rees’ projects: both aim to illuminate the experiences and achievements of women that history has erased or ignored, both seeing these women as part of a network that reaches through history and across the globe. It is perhaps because of the compatibility of their projects that although Rees’ discussion of The Dinner Party is detailed and interesting, it lacks a critical examination of some of its more problematic elements. I am thinking mainly of Hortense J. Spillers’ criticism of Chicago’s representation of women of colour.
There are a few jarring moments in the book, such as Rees’ dismissal of those who purchase fleshlights from eBay as ‘people who don’t get out much,’ or her snobbish mockery of SATC’s Carrie’s decision to go shopping to ‘unleash the creative subconscious’ (Rees quips: ‘I must have missed that moment in A Room of One’s Own’). In a book that is engaging in its nuanced critique of the structural and representational forces that act to oppress women and dictate their behaviour, these snipes stand out as cheap and lazy. Moreover, her language regarding transgender issues, although generally considerate and well informed, slips up when she problematically uses ‘transgender’ as a verb, describing the ‘transgendered body’ (guidelines from the trans community explicitly request such use be avoided). One final grievance: while Rees’ discussion around FGM notes the implicit racism which often accompanies condemnation of the practice in the British media, in her own critique of it the voices of those directly affected by FGM are alarmingly absent; this is ironic given her insistence that the procedure has the psychological effect of silencing the women who go through it.
But in spite of these lexical problems, and struggles for inclusion, The Vagina remains an informative and considered book: it is a resource, and a source of power. A polyphonic mixture of high and low, it will engage the feminist philosopher at home with Kristeva, as well as those comparably new to these ideas. The Vagina is not, to borrow a term from Laurie Penny, the ‘feminism-as-spectacle’ that Wolf and many others who court the mainstream gaze are so keen to offer us; rather it is feminist writing of the best kind, that which comes from genuine engagement and real political concern.