Carnival and Desiring Bodies (Reading Response)

Discussions of dangerously unruly bodies, the carnivalesque and the body’s simultaneous bearing of both transgression and regulation seemed to me a logical extension of Jackie Stacey’s piece Star Gazing. Specifically, Bordo’s sometimes over-determined and dogmatic examination of eating disorders and women’s near compulsory disciplining of the body has everything to do with the activation of desire that Stacey was so concerned with. Considering the traditional construction of woman as forever tied to the body (I’m thinking of Bordo’s “heavy bear” here) and the almost logical sexual objectification this invites, suppression or disciplining of the body is suppression of desire. For Stacey, the denial of desire is of course a strategy of larger frameworks of subordination, crippling further resistance. The solution seems to be a reclaiming of the female body. Rather than distancing itself from the oppressive sexual labor traditionally associated with the female body, this discourse takes measures to own it instead. Speaking of the rationalizations deployed in slenderness practices, Bordo uses terms like “newfound freedom” and “empowerment,” which seem to resonate with liberal feminist discourses. I’m wondering to what an extent the liberal feminist principles of “agency” and “personal empowerment” can be seen as (distorted) catalysts of the disciplining practices Bordo analyzes.
To return to desire though, for Stacey, that temporary activation was possible in the fashion show. Mary Russo’s discussion of “female grotesques” and carnivalesque bodies can be seen as an extension of the same theory. The obvious reference here is to the productive spectacle laden in carnival. It is the privileging of play and performativity for their transgressive potential, as opposed to traditional struggle. Now, I have no intention of resurrecting Bakhtin’s nostalgic celebration of carnival and the “festive critique” (although, admittedly, his giddy excitement about the matter can be happily contagious), but it seems that despite carnival’s temporal inconsequence, its status as licensed event, as sanctioned transgression, the very fact that a woman’s body is “dangerous” inside the space of carnival can offer some subversive redemption. Russo says that women’s bodies “in certain public spaces, are always already transgressive – dangerous, and in danger” (217). The notion that woman’s position outside of carnival informs her “dangerous” subjectivity inside seems to be the very thing that redeems the otherwise purely escapist and rather conservative practice. Here, spectacle can be overtly political and transformative.