From: Shannon Stoney (shannonstoney@earthlink.net)
Date: 12/25/02-12:16:16 PM Z
Judy, I lost your original message, but I believe its main point was that
the picture of Edith Gowin urinating on the floor of an old house or
building was somehow degrading to her and to women in general. But I think
an argument can be made that this in fact a radically subversive feminist
photograph. This whole subject originally came up because Jack was positing
the idea that men and women look at the land differently: that men take
possession of it by urinating on it, "marking" their territory like dogs do,
but that women "embrace" the land, presumably nurturing it and caring for it
as if it were their child.
There seemed to me to be something slightly wrong in this formulation.
After all, caring for the land and possessing it are not mutually exclusive
but frequently go together. And, I have noticed that country women do piss
outside a lot, and they quickly discover that squatting to pee is not as
handy, and sometimes not as safe, as standing up to pee. Also urinating
erect can be done discreetly almost anywhere. I believe that this is why
the traditional garb of women the world over is the skirt, an admirably
practical garment, easy to sew, easy to convert to a carrying cloth by
holding up the hem of it, easy to use as a dish towel, etc. And I also
believe that women did not wear underpants until sort of recently: our
traditional underwear in cold climates was just a lot of petticoats.
(Underpants are hard to sew, and stretchy machine-made knits--a modern
invention-- are practically a necessity.) I read an account by a woman
visitor to India who asked a bunch of women in saris, at a bus stop, where
the women's room was, and they just laughed at her. They just pee wherever
they are, whenever they need to (she figured out).
So this photograph of Edith Gowin could be seen as a statement of the way
that women claim the land in an upright, territorial, fierce way, in the
same way that men are alleged to do. (It's hard to be very dignified or
fierce when you're squatting with your pants legs around your ankles.)
Further, it has been noted that Edith is standing at the threshold of a
building. She is claiming not only the land--the outside--but the INSIDE of
the building, the zone that extreme forms of patriarchy restrict women to
exclusively. By doing something taboo on the floor of this house, she is
challenging the idea of the house-trained, domesticated woman. She is wild.
You can be territorial and nurturing at the same time. Peeing on the ground
doesn't only mark your territory; it also nourishes the ground. Urine has a
lot of nitrogen in it. It's a good idea to pee on your compost pile from
time to time. I know people who have converted huge piles of carbonaceous
sawdust into nice rich black compost by peeing on it every day.
Also this gesture of Edith's--lifting her skirt to urinate--is the
archetypal gesture of Baubo, a Greek goddess known for her ability to make
fun of pomposity and over-seriousness by lifting her skirts and making
obscene noises and gestures. She is the one who finally made Demeter laugh
after Demeter had grieved the loss of Persephone for too long; and Demeter's
laughter caused summer to return to the earth. Baubo is a trickster heroine
like Jack in the Jack Tales, or like Coyote in Native American stories, or
like Huck in Huckleberry Finn. Trickster heroines are not as common as
trickster heroes, so that is perhaps why it is startling, and somewhat
disturbing, to see Edith re-enacting that role. But it is by no means a
degradation of her or of women generally: it is a deeply transgressive,
feminist joke aimed at people who think women should be domesticated house
pets who can't own or defend land.
--shannon
PS I hope nobody on this list got a lump of coal in their stocking.
Tangerines and chocolate money only.
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