Bodily Fluids

"Representations", N. 129, Winter 2015.

The essay analyzes the project of maintaining the body of V. I. Lenin in the Mausoleum in Moscow for the past ninety years, focusing on the unique biological science that developed around this project, and the unexpected political role this body has performed.

Anton Szandor LaVey wrote The Satanic Witch in 1970 as a response to the contemporary discourses of his time: feminism and the occult revival. This essay focuses on LaVey's treatment of the scent of feminine fluids-blood, sweat, and urine-in The Satanic Witch and selected texts in order to demonstrate that LaVey's emphasis on the importance of bodily secretions is an extension of his carnal-magical worldview; he employs the arcane language and aesthetics of the occult to methods of physiological and psychological manipulation in order to influence others and achieve desired ends. Throughout this essay I apply Mary Douglas' theories in Purity and Danger (2002 [1966]), which address our notions of contagion, dirt, and taboo; feminist rhetoric on 1960s and 1970s feminine hygiene products and their putative cleansing of natural feminine scent; and finally, the use of sexual fluids in esoteric magical practices such as described by Aleister Crowley. This article illustrates that LaVey's use of feminine fluids for magical efficacy reflects his notion that magic is firmly rooted within one own's body, and the capacity of one's own will, while also incorporating and responding to the surrounding discourses of his time.

In this article I explore how transgender and cisgender participants in internet-mediated visual and print-based sexual cinematic discourse frame the construction of orgasms among trans masculine and other male-identified, female-assigned at birth, subjects. Specifically, I focus on the visual and linguistic
platforms of amateur videos featuring trans men’s genitals posted on XTube, a website that hosts user-submitted films as well as space for user commentary. Importantly, the ‘visual’ text of the film content articulates in productive and perhaps unexpected ways with the ‘figurative’ dialogue of language used to frame the video as well as that deployed by posted responses to the film. Situating trans men’s genitals as both discursively and phenomenologically managed alongside ‘the privileging of the visual over the figurative’ I focus on employing frameworks of audience reception, how trans men and their sexual interlocutors, as either consumers of film or physical participants, both reproduce and destabilize hegemonic notions of maleness. Specifically, I consider how hegemonic notions of maleness extend to genital function and the politics of ejaculation and ‘cum’, or the bodily fluids produced peri and post orgasm, to reflect the ideological ‘productivity of genitals’ for trans subjects.

Registration is now open for ‘Bodies and Minds in the Early Modern Catholic World’!

University of Warwick, 24th-25th March 2017.

Keynote speakers: Alex Bamji, Nancy Caciola, and Andrew Redden.

This conference will explore embodied experiences of Roman Catholicism, c.1450-1800. Distinctive Catholic ‘somatic’ theologies and practices developed in the medieval period; however, the era of the Reformations, colonial expansion, scientific revolutions, and Enlightenment presented dramatic new opportunities and challenges to Catholic theories and practices of the body and mind.

The aim of this conference is to draw on a burgeoning body of research on early modern Catholicism in order to address the key, yet still insufficiently understood, questions of how Catholics understood and constructed bodies and minds, and how this changed and differed across geographical, social, and gendered variables.

This conference is generously funded by the interdisciplinary Conversions Project, based at McGill University.

We are very fortunate to be holding the conference in the wonderful facilities of Warwick’s Scarman Conference Centre. We have decided to make this conference FREE in order to make it as accessible as possible to postgraduate and early career scholars.

For more information, and to register, please see http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/history/research/conferences/emconversions

In addressing the issues of obtaining bodily evidence, such as bodily fluids, from a suspect, Rule 312 of the Military Rules of Evidence must be considered in conjunction with the issues of self-incrimination, due process, and the Fourth Amendment. The Rule describes the procedures for collection of bodily evidence of service members. For example, a service member may not invoke the right against self-incrimination for external bodily evidence, but may when bodily fluids or cavity searches are requested. Any nonconsensual search may be conducted if it is both reasonable and performed under one of the authorized procedures of Rule 312. Any invasive search must also be conducted by a medical professional. Treating bodily evidence collection as a Fourth Amendment issue from the outset and using extreme care in conducting search and seizure helps avoid self-incrimination and due process issues.

Conference at the University of Warwick, 24-25th March 2017

Keynote speakers: Alex Bamji, Nancy Caciola, and Andrew Redden.

Convenors: Rebecca Noble and Anastasia Stylianou.

This conference will explore embodied experiences of Roman Catholicism, c.1450-1800. Please see the CFP for more details.

In this article I explore how transgender and cisgender participants in internet-mediated visual and print-based sexual cinematic discourse frame the construction of orgasms among trans masculine and other male-identified, female-assigned at birth, subjects. Specifically, I focus on the visual and linguistic platforms of amateur videos featuring trans men’s genitals posted on XTube, a website that hosts user-submitted films as well as space for user commentary. Importantly, the ‘visual’ text of the film content articulates in productive and perhaps unexpected ways with the ‘figurative’ dialogue of language used to frame the video as well as that deployed by posted responses to the film. Situating trans men’s genitals as both discursively and phenomenologically managed alongside ‘the privileging of the visual over the figurative’ I focus on employing frameworks of audience reception, how trans men and their sexual interlocutors, as either consumers of film or physical participants, b...

Anthropology and Egyptology share the same interest in mortuary rituals. However, the higher-order interpretative framework developed by anthropology is not standardly applied by Egyptology. The present study focuses on summarizing a comparative framework of mortuary rituals and applying it to the study of bodily fluids in ancient Egypt. The bodily fluids under discussion—menstrual blood, milk, efflux of Osiris (rDw-fluids), and semen—have been chosen because of their specific connection to birth and rebirth in the ancient Egyptian symbolical system.

This research starts from the premise that from Greco-Roman Antiquity up to the nineteenth century, when new discoveries in the field of biogenetics appear, one of the reproductive models that we find in Southern Europe is intra-extrauterine. This model includes four stages: conception, pregnancy, delivery and lactation. Human milk is perceived as menstrual blood that disappears for nine months in order to feed the embryo in the uterus, and then reappears in a purified form as milk. This process of mutation means that in the collective imaginary the frontier between the bodily fluids (milk-blood) is not defined, and blood, in its broader sense, is seen as the guiding principle. That is why, when two so far biologically unrelated infants are breastfed by the same wet-nurse, they can be recognized as milk siblings and the lactating woman as their milk mother. Based on this premise, the goal of this research is to make a theoretical proposal to the Anthropology of kinship by incorporating human milk in its double symbolic dimension: as food, by our conditions as mammals, and as a potential symbol of reproduction and, therefore, kinship as a result of circulating and being shared. In order to support this proposal, we will proceed with the analysis of some historical sources, comparative ethnology, and the result of an ethnohistorical case study focused on the role that domestic wet-nurses have had in the construction of milk kinship in Spain.

En esta investigación partimos de la premisa que desde la Antigüedad grecorromana hasta el siglo XIX, que es cuando aparecen los primeros descubrimientos en el campo de la biogenética, uno de los modelos de procreación que encontramos en el sur de Europa es intra-extrauterino. Un modelo que incluye cuatro etapas: concepción, embarazo, parto y lactancia. La leche humana es percibida como sangre menstrual que desaparece durante nueve meses para alimentar al embrión en el útero, ser desviada y purificada al transformarse en leche. En el imaginario colectivo, la frontera de los fluidos (sangre-leche), por su carácter de mutación, no está muy definida, siendo la sangre, en su sentido más amplio, el principio rector[1]. Por eso se entiende que dos personas, hasta el momento no emparentadas biológicamente, al lactar de la misma mujer-nodriza, se puedan llegar a reconocer como hermanos-as de leche y, a la mujer lactante, madre de leche. A partir de esta premisa, el objetivo de esta investigación es hacer una propuesta teórica a la antropología del parentesco, al incorporar la leche humana en su doble dimensión simbólica: como alimento, por nuestra condición de mamíferos, y símbolo de la reproducción y, por tanto, del parentesco en el caso de circular y ser compartida. Para amparar esta propuesta se procederá al análisis de fuentes históricas, la etnología comparada, y al resultado de un estudio etnohistórico centrado en el papel que tuvieron las nodrizas domésticas en la construcción del parentesco de leche en España.