Gender, Body, Water
What Might Making Contact with Ice - Cold, Numbing, Foreign, Yet Transitionary, Contradictory and Inevitably Fleeting, Teach Us About the Application of Hydrofeminist Theory and How We Distinguish Our Own Bodies Against those that Co-Exist with and Contain Us.
Over the short period of time that makes up my studies in Lapland, I’ve been faced with water in almost every form: Late August’s almost thirty-degree temperatures warmed Rovaniemi’s Kemijoki River, drew our rowboat downstream and suspended our bodies. Its life force was drunk in and lined our throats as it lined the shores, and its generosity seemed boundless. Come mid-September the water began to push against its boundaries in the form of murky fog and rains that seeped into our skin and bogged the earth. To contrast the cold damp that soaked us outdoors, we took advantage of the cleansing steam of Saunas and hot cups of tea until October deceived us with its false winters and thin cottony white blankets over rooftops and lakes. Lakes, whose placidity would not freeze for another month or more, until the mercury dropped low enough to send the world to sleep.
Throughout this essay, I will reflect upon a specific practical exercise, as introduced to me by AnastasiaKhodyreva - during our course, Gender, Body, Water - that encourages direct sensory communication between our bodies and water in a way that, to me, runs parallel to my reminiscence of my first experience of facing Finnish waters or, more specifically, Winters. I will walk through the process of the exercise as well as some of the thoughts it raises and contradicts regarding thought patterns from thinkers throughout history[1] and how it feeds into contemporary Hydrofeminist theory. Further examining this relationship between our bodies and ice, I will analyse how it encourages us to consider our personal relationship, both intimate and fleeting, to the greater bodies -of water - that make up the wider world.
We begin the exercise with a fresh ice cube, sat upon a kitchen towelette or within a Tupperware container. From these initial observations of our cube, we can gleam very little and presuppose so much. As Subject physically removed and distinct from the Object, we can recognise the shapes that make up its cuboid form; its colour – or lack thereof – which tells us that it is most likely a frozen state water. This knowledge is not acquired from a direct interaction with the cube, employing multiple sensory organs or even multiple viewpoints but rather from a prior knowledge that ice is, most often, the solid, frozen, state of water. This particular examination almost implicitly encourages us to examine the ice we see as far removed from us. This method of viewing the Object shows the confines of traditional philosophies of idealism or realism - where earth and man can be measured and should fit into boxes, ideals and rationalities - whilst simultaneously introducing existentialist thought patterns which prompts us to use individual perspective in order to understand the world we observe[2]. Existentialism recognises that humans naturally see Other as Object: a person or thing to be used or utilised. With the privilege of distinction and separation from Objects it allows us to make assumptions about water, about bodies, about the world. The problems arise in making these barriers and assumptions about who or what should fit within them.
Returning to our ice cube, still in its container, and reanalysing from a place of curiosity this time, not assumption; Where was the water before it was trapped within its solid state? What untraceable chemicals within the water will end up in our bodies? Will any? Whose hands touched that ice before we did? Did any? Who created the generators that made the electricity that froze it? If any? Although we can observe our ice cube as described by the existentialists - using the concept coined by Jean-Paul Sartre as “the look” (220-254) - or the phenomena of objectification we apply to the world when we observe and distinguish something as Other. This concept already seems to be neglectful of the life and world of our ice cube and totally ignorant of the world that interconnects us to it. The problems only multiply when Sartre lays this as law in his philosophies using “The Look” when regarding people he encounters as object: “THIS woman whom I see coming toward me, this man who is passing by in the street, this beggar whom I hear calling before my window, all are for me objects—of that there is no doubt.” As problematic as objectifying other people is, he complicates things further as he goes on to describe that “The Look” is almost always followed by a series of assumptions about the people he objectifies. These presuppositions categorise and contain people into something tangible and manageable, like tools in a box, reductions to functions, purposes that serve us or that we can serve. Although I’m not denying that this thought process, although harsh sounding, is not uncommon in contemporary society. It refuses to acknowledge the bilateral functioning and multi-sensory exchanges that occur when people exist in an awareness of others. When we live through transactions of actions or motions, we pass over the multitude of casualties of causations that slip between the gaps of Subjective Perspective.
Attention to the mechanics of watery embodiment reveals that in order to connect bodies, water must travel across only partially permeable membranes. In an ocular-centric culture, some of these membranes, like our human skin, give the illusion of impermeability (Neimanis 90-91)
Utilising this new sense[3] we open ourselves to new realities - to rest a finger on our block of ice we register the variety of sensations as they seep, flow and flood into us: The initial cold shock that cools our skin; The lukewarm layer of melting ice; The growing damp leeching through the kitchen paper sat beneath. The sensations of different parts of your hand on the ice: the fingertip, the knuckles the nails are all my own but even they do not experience equally. As we are noticing changes in the ice, some begin to defy expectation – a squeal of air escaping, a rhythmic pulsing of blood to my fingertips. We are making steps away from Subject-Object interaction but are still held, or holding, from a distance. The “Feminine touch” (Goffman 29) that “cradle” and “caress its surface” is still laden in male[4] privilege as it gives the illusion to us of an ability to remove ourselves from our study - like scientist walking away from a dissected frog. “This being a particularly Empty and maladaptive response when the withdrawal is itself a response to a real threat” (57). The threat in this case involves bearing the knowledge that prior to touching - the ice cube - our hands have already done the damage. One of the first steps of transitioning Hydrofeminist thinking to practice, is to acknowledge this and the impact that this has. Our ice cube for example, has been affected by the millions of factors that influenced the method we used to make it from the scientific variables of quantity and sterility to the memories in the water itself. The effect of our intentions on the ice, to science, means very little. To Hydrofeminism, it is everything. It instead encourages us to consider our bodies as more than our superficial barriers and “challenges… accounts of touch and the touching/touched subject, as discussed earlier, which imply that in order to touch, a body reaches ‘out’ to something other that [sic.] itself or is touched by that ‘other’. Instead, touching or grabbing our own body exemplifies how bodies can be always and already touching” (Colls 184). What we can gather from this, is that not all touch is purposeful but has effects, nonetheless. Often slow and leeching like the water drawing nutrients through our intestinal walls. To touch is to be touched.
I touch you, that’s enough to know that you are my body (Irigaray 72)
Accepting our interconnectedness, the ice[5] is no longer our belonging to grapple with but is rather an extension of us or a cause of our actions. As we pick it up, agitating its surface in timid hands; our effects on each other become immediate. The responsibility of our passenger weighs on our skin in cold wet tears that bore holes through our membranes, seep within our cracks. As we cool, the ice warms and we seem to be changing each other. As it turns from solid to liquid its fluidity and our rigidity seems so distant from one another but in truth we are becoming one. We, at first, reject the idea because it reminds us that one day our leaking bodies will one day no longer contain our fluidities (Kristeva) But if we can face the horrors beneath our skin and accept the fact that we are not confined to our flesh - That the sweat, blood, mucus, semen, milk and saliva that leak from our pores are ours also - then we can see that our watery bodies connect us to all bodies. Distinguishable, perhaps, but unified by their adaptability, fluidity and impact on one another.
The Viscous porosity I have asked you to attend to involves recognising the interaction of nature-culture, genes-environment in all phenomena. (Tuana 209)
Once the cube is gone, nothing but water between our fingers, soaking into and drying out our skin, the contradictions continue to seep in also. Nothing tangible remains of the ice: Nothing you can grip, observe, chill your drink with. It’s tactile and masculine purpose (Goffman) is obsolete. The ice, now, a pool of water can also be found in the cold in our flesh, in the flakes of skin we will pick off in days to come, in the water stains on our desk. To touch is to change and be changed. In the same way water holds wisps of memories of change since the Jurassic period, it holds memories of our brief interaction. Just as we hold memories of the water in our nerves and neural passageways. This ripple of recollection remains in everything we touch, every action we take, every word that leaves our mouth. Every interaction we make with a stranger has affected us in some way deeper than we could ever realise. These raindrops feed rivers and all streams cross eventually. All water feeds back to the larger bodies that make up this world and this is the cost of living. Stagnant waters develop Legionella.
As we consider from our being water - or being with water- from a queer Hydrofeminist perspective, rather than the Male orientated perspective from theoretical writing throughout history, it can encourage communication that goes beyond words when regarding perception of, and touch between, bodies. When put into practice, Hydrofeminism allows us to respect the in-built traumas, warnings and desires beneath our skin – in our waters – and within the waters of everything around us. We are not islands. Some of these interactions are spontaneous, unpredictable, too deep below the surface to understand within our lifetimes but with enough awareness we can learn to live with our responsibilities in order to co-exist with other bodies; building our own rituals, cultures and communities in the process. A resonance that we can catch a glimpse of with an ice cube and a spare moment.
Bibliography
Armstrong, J. “Water is Siwlkw.” In R. Boelens, Edited by M. Chiba, and D. Nakashima. Water and Indigenous Peoples. Knowledge of Nature 2. UNESCO. 2006. Paris.
Colls, R. “BodiesTouchingBodies: Jenny Saville’s over-life-sized paintings and the “morpho-logics” of fat, female bodies.” Gender, Place and Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography, vol. 19, no. 2, 2012, pp. 175–192. https://doi.org/10.1080/0966369X.2011.573143
Goffman, E. “Gender Advertisements.” Macmillan. 1979.
Irigaray, L. “Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche.” Columbia University Press. 1991, pp. 1-53.
---. & Burke, C. “When Our Lips Speak Together.” Signs, vol. 6, no. 1, 1980, pp. 69–79. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3173966
Khodyreva, A. “Gender, Body, Water.” [Online Lecture Series] University of Turku. HILMA studies. 2023.
Kristeva, Julia. “Powers of Horror : An Essay on Abjection.” Columbia University Press. 1982.
Merleau-Ponty, M., & Landes, A. D. “Phenomenology of Perception.” Routledge. 2012, pp. 103-109.
Neimanis, A. “Hydrofeminism: Or, On Becoming a Body of Water.” Undutiful Daughters: New Directions in Feminist Thought and Practice. Edited by H. Gunkel, et al. Palgrave Macmillan. 2012, pp. 85-99.
---. ). “Milky ways: Tracing posthuman feminisms.” Bodies of Water. Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology. Bloomsbury Academic. 2016, pp. 31-39. London.
Sartre, JP. “Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology.” Translated by H. E. Barnes. Philosophical Library. 1984, pp. 220-328
Tuana, N., Alaimo, S., & Hekman, J. S. “Viscous Porosity: Witnessing Katrina”. Material Feminisms. Indiana University Press. 2008, pp. 188-213.
[1] Namely prominent male thinkers of the 20th Century such Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Erving Goffman
[2] something that later goes on to be the basis of Phenomenological methodologies.
[3] Sense of touch, yes, but also a sense of self, of other, of togetherness, of separation. A general sense of awareness.
[4] This heteronormative, male-orientated, cis-gendered able-bodiness is in reference to the stance of academic writing throughout histories not of a particular individual’s gender, sex, etc. Same applies to feminist thought as a counter to this perspective not as something inherent to the female sex. In this particular context Goffman’s discussion of Feminine touch is not implicit of Feminist theory.
[5] Analogous to the wider world