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The Body Embarrassed – Gail Kern Paster
Wakening in psychoanalytic interest in shame 2 “the most body-centered of affects”
2 “But in early modern Europe, despite the challenges to Galenism posed in the
sixteenth century be Paracelsus and his followers, the dominant physiological
paradigm was the classical theory of the four humours upon which ancient biology
and hence the practice of medicine were based for centuries
...
”
Mary Douglas: Natural Symbols, Explorations in Cosmology
Physical and social body
“But I wish further to complicate her distinctions between physical and social by
theorizing a connection between the history of the outer body – physical and social,
the body visible in different ways to self and other – and that of the inner body, the
physical and social body perceived, experienced, and imaged from within
...
”
4 “…no matter what the physical facts of any given bodily function may be, that
function can be understood and experienced only in terms of culturally available
discourses
...
”
“In fact, dominant physiological paradigms should be expected to produce an
ideological effect if we understand ideology in Jean Howard’s lucid quasiAlthusserian formulation to be a conditioning experienced as ‘the obviousness of
culture, what goes without saying, what is lived as true
...
Howard “Script and/ versus Playhouse: Idoelogical Production and the
Renaissance Public Stage
...
”
“But the operations of ideology upon the body may be even harder to detect than the
operations of ideology/ 5 upon emerging subjectivity because we experience our
bodies as natural and because we experience them as belonging to us…”

“…domain of the merely natural
...
”
Child becomes aware of how to react to certain reactions within his/her body
Humoral theory disintegrated in the seventeenth century
7 “Humoral materialism lingers in our propensity to describe ourselves as… ‘filled’
with emotion, but the subjective effects of humoralism in an earlier time that lived it
as true were fare more pervasive
...
”
Foucalt history of sexuality 104
“…the bodies to be mastered were humoral bodies
...
”
Body composed of four humours: blood, phlegm, choler or yellow bile and black bile
Fluids to which functions and origins were assigned
8 “Every subject grew up with a common understanding of his or her body as a
semipermeable, irrigated container in which humors moved slugglishly
...
Not only did blood, semen, milk, sweat, tears, and other
bodily fluids turn into one another, but the processes of alimentation, excretion,
menstruation, and lactation were understood as homologous and hence were less
conceptually differentiated than they may be in popular medical understanding now
...
”
Dependent on temperature, those in hotter countries
10 “The point to be made here is that when the early modern subject became aware of
her or his body…the body in question was always a humoral entity
...
”
14 “What I infer from this history of bodily regulation is the structure of a
contradiction between a popular medical practice authorizing experiences of somatic
uncontrol in the form of humoral evacuation and an emergent ideology of bodily
refinement and exquisite self-mastery
...
”
Bakhtin’s grotesque body is a collective form
“The grotesque body is a thematizing image of the popular body which by definition
cannot belong to or be identified with selfhood, with the discrete, pathetically finite
boundaries of the individual life in time
...
”
Bakhtin interested in “…body as instrument of political critique
...
”
“Finally, humoralism provides a fertile theoretical groundplot for psychoanalytically
motivated revision of both Bakhtin and Elias
...
Prime among these, of course, is the structure of gender difference, the
most basic social category of the body and one that both Bakhtin and Elias silently
subsume
...
”
We loo for the beginning of “enculturation” in the mirror stage, moment of
recognition between the baby perception of his/her bodily exterior and the movement
he/she feels animating them

“The mirror enacts only one early stage in the baby’s gradual expulsion from the
Imaginary preoedipal unity with the mother into culture, into the self-alienating
conditions of subjectivity, gender, and organized sexuality
...
”
Desire for self-control comes at moment of projective identification with the image in
the mirror
19 “What is important for my interest in embarrassment, however, is that both
sociohistorical and Lacanian conceptualizations of the demand for self-control fix it
so firmly within the cultural domain that embarrassment becomes a site where
historicist and psychoanalytic investements in the subject converge
...
”
20 “That the represented body was, like the actor’s actual body, a humoral entity is a
silent, hence rarely thematized element of dramatic representations in gesture or
discourse
...
”
“…the actor’s body offers to the spectator the contrast between fictional outer and
insufficient inner which a mirrored image offers the baby, a body of behavioural
completeness, significance and desirability
...
”
“…the actor can offer the image of an affective and physical control so masterful as to
quell, if only for a time, the inner turbulence of his own humorality
...
”
21 “Reading Elizabethan-Jacobean plays is rather the means to the end of discovering
the signifying properties of the humoral body and the disciplinary protocols of its
long-term transformation in culture
...
”
22 “The textualized bodies at its (off)center remains hadowed and inaccessible – as
much dark interior as visible surface, the effect of powerful cultural fictions even to
the thoroughly problematized selves that may be said to inhabit them
...
”
“It also characteristically links this liquid expressiveness to excessive verbal fluency
...
’” Kristeva 70
“Representations of the female body as a leaking vessel display that body as beyond
the control of the female subject, and thus as threatening the acquisitive foals of the
family and its maintenance of status and power
...
”
29 on urine “By this cultural logic, by the laws of urinary segregation in a hierarchical
society, great ladies and whoever wishes to imitate them have the greatest need to
maintain their social position before the fact of bodily need and the greatest difficulty
in doing so
...
”
39 “That women’s bodies were moister than men’s and cyclically controlled by that
watery planet, the moon, was a given of scientific theory
...
”
50 “…iconographic depiction of female virginity as a sieve that does not leak, an
allusion to the vestal virgin Tuccia who carried water in a sieve from the Tiber to the
Temple of Vesta to prove her virginity
...
”

Chapter Two: Laudable Blood, Bleeding, Difference, and Humoral Embarrassment
65 blood not normally embarrassing “it is most often metonymy for important and
laudable qualities such as mercy, sacrifice, or passion – both divine and human – or
their tragic loss through violence and death
...
With the reminder of
menstrual blood, not only blood’s relation to embarrassment but also its potential for
ambivalent social coding begins to emerge
...
”
“In one’s blood were carried the decisive attributes of one’s cultural identity
68 “Meanings attached to blood and bleeding as physical aspects of the body’s
structure and physiology could not be isolated from the inevitably hierarchical
structures of social difference
...
”
74 “Since the goal of phlebotomy was the restoration of an internal state/ 75
conceptualized as balance or homeostasis, moderation was inevitably the watchword
of practice
...
”
“What I want to suggest is how the hierarchy of physiological values in the blood can
be appropriated for the canons of bodily propriety, so that bleeding is construed as an
issue of bodily voluntarity and self-control
...
”
Differs from Laqueur – who argues one sex/ one flesh model ‘there is no female’ p35
Both genders had plethord and phlebotomy
79 “But the case of plethora as a common bodily event within the experiential domain
of Galenic medicine is a notable limit-case of Laqueuer’s argument, for plethora
differs from itself as soon as the variation of gender is introduced into its system of
internal classification
...
Their bodies – and here the argument
becomes very circular indeed – were naturally less soluble, since by virtue of its
colder temperature their blood tended to be slower moving, clammier, gross
...
”
“I take these humoral acioms to imply that the blood of women as a category in nature
was readily classifiable as superfluity or waste and that on the whole this was true no
matter how soluble or evenly tempered a given individual woman might be either
naturally or through the artificial evacuations induced by physic or surgery
...

Because she must produce a greater quantity of blood in preparation for pregnancy,
the quality of woman’s blood suffers both as a result…”
“Menstruation was a special, though recurrent, instance of plethora
...
”
81 “popular culture often followed Scripture in a demonizing menstrual blood and the
menstruating woman with a variety of taboos
...
”
“attitudes toward menstruation in the early modern period often seem to betray an
ironic double bind: whereas the fact of menstruation could be used to demonstrate the
natural inferiority of women, the cessation of suppression of menses was also blamed
for all manner of physical and emotional maladies peculiar to/ 83 the sex
...
”
“…the sign of phlebotomy is menstruation’s cultural inversion”
84 “More specifically, the control of blood and bleeding exemplified by the
phlebotomist’s art becomes a key determinant of agency and empowerment
...
”
The Changeling 2
...
118-21

90 “…in a hereditary culture, the sign of blood becomes a deeply contradictory site of
multiple, competing, even self-contradictory discourses
...
The
bleeding body signifies as a shameful token of uncontrol, as a failure of self-mastery
particularly associated with woman in her monthly ‘courses’
...
At such moments, the bleeding male’s blood comes to differ, shamefully,
from itself
...
To be otherwise is both
shameful and feminizing
...
1
...
The male subject can regard such
bloodshed therapeutically, as purgative, and can thus define it as enhancing rather
than endangering somatic integrity and bodily solubility
...
the blood flowing from Lavinia’s mutilated mouth”
99 “…the more conventional meaning of vaginal blood as a sign of male mastery of
the body of woman…of male sexual violence”
Shows titus lack of control over boys that raped his daughter
103 “To bleed is to bleed shamefully, to be shamefully open, to be revealed as bearing
other than patriarchal blood
...
”
Julius Caesar Portia 2
...
299-301
106 “In this reading, Portia calls attention to this bodily site not to remind Brutus of
her femaleness, her lack of the phallus, but rather to offer the wound paradoxically as
substitute phallis
...
”

“She could even claim to have become her own surgeon, her own phlebotomist, for
the wound she shows to her husband is not the vaginal wound of the signified woman,
and the blood that has flowed is voluntary
...
”

169 “In reproductive discourse, as in humoral theory generally, no stable semantic
demarcation separated ethics and physiology
...
”
179 “The cultural ambivalence generated by menstrual blood carried over into
reproduction, since it was thought to be the source of fetal nurture
...
”



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