Body Politics in Poetry: A Cross-Cultural and Feminist Perspective

Abstract

The phenomenological body-lived-by-me and the Spinonist affected body diverge from Cartesian dualism which renders the body the fixed, knowable and natural extension in space: the former emphasizes the primacy of lived experience and the absolute openness of any theorizations on the body; the latter sees the body in terms of becoming instead of being which is in constant modifications as the body encounters other bodies. In Confucian culture, the perception of the body is different from that of the western one. The body is believed composed of a fluid material called qi, which also is the constituent material for everything in the universe. The human nature, since the human body not defined by the anatomical structure, is considered to be found in human culture. Therefore, Confucianism assigns various social functions to different bodies to separate one from another, based on contingent historical events. In Poetry, the naked, female, aging body becomes the un-representable abject for the camera because Confucian culture is established on the symbolic and metaphysical meaning of the female, aging body whereas the representation of the naked, female, aging body threatens the certainty of cultural identity. With respect to the becoming men of an impotent, aging, male body through penetration, the penetration is the bodily desire mediated by the social discourse of gender identity. Besides, because of the fallen of the Confucian family and the main character's dislocation within the space of nei – the traditionally women’s space, penetration becomes the only way to acquire an unambiguous sense of subjectivity. Regarding the Alzhimer’s body, becoming no body is both an actualized, temporal stage as a sense of united bodily experience gets disrupted from time to time and space to space because of the disease; and a metaphoric process as the Alzheimer’s body deterritorializes itself to form a rhizome with an immaterial body in the course of schizophrenic writing.