| Due to the anti-essentialist influence of feminism and poststructuralism on the one hand, and the recent prominence of identity politics on the other, contemporary American culture has been undergoing a particularly troublesome crisis of subjectivity. In seeking to respond to this crisis of subjectivity, both literature and film have turned to the aesthetic. In popular and high culture, bodily ornaments--tattoos, jewelry, scarification, prostheses--represent the relationship between body and identity. This turn to the aesthetic might appear to be reactionary: a retreat from the exigencies of political questions into the transcendence of art. However, I argue that the bodily ornament is both politically and theoretically useful, particularly from a feminist perspective. Ornaments call into question the clear division between the inside and the outside of the body. Since they occupy the border between body and not-body, ornaments represent that body as a subject, whether apparently resistant or more clearly disciplined by society. The ornamented body is thus neither natural nor individual, but constructed and socially linked to others. That contemporary novels and film respond to political issues by having recourse to aesthetics is characteristically postmodern. It is also feminist, in that it reasserts the value of the ornament: an area of aesthetics negatively associated, in the Modern period, with the feminine. In readings of three contemporary texts--V. by Thomas Pynchon, Beloved by Toni Morrison, and the film The Silence of the Lambs--I show how the body and its ornaments act upon each other: the ornament aestheticizes the body, and the body politicizes the ornament. The aesthetic function of the ornament is a deconstructive one. As Derrida explains in his reading of Kant's Critique of Judgment, ornaments both particularize and connect the objects to which they are attached. The ornament functions politically in that it represents pain (in extreme cases, death) and the limits of the human. |
