Chicana Ways - Aletta

AnyBody's Concerns 6(2003)
language and her programmatic statements resemble those by
French exponents of écriture féminine such as Luce Irigaray or
Hélène Cixous: "Für mich, die ich Frau bin, ist die Wunde auch
Ausdruck für mein Geschlecht, sie ist Ausdruck für die
blutende Spalte meines Geschlechts. Diese Wunde hat den
Charakter eines weiblichen Diskurses. Die Öffnung meines
Körpers impliziert sowohl den Schmerz als auch die Lust" (Gina
Pane cited in Zell 107) [For me who am a woman the wound is
also an expression of my sex, it is an expression for the
bloody hole of my sex. This wound is like a female discourse.
My body's opening implies both pain and pleasure.] In a
comment on her performance Le corps pressenti (1975) Pane
stresses her effort to construct wounds as a visual language
which is supposed to communicate their psychological relevance
as bodily traces (Schimmel 99). When pain and its language of
wounds are made manifest to a public, one could argue, they
take over the function of a non-verbal collective memory, with
blood functioning as a visible authentification of pain. From
the perspective of cultural anthropology, Veena Das has
convincingly argued that pain is a profoundly ambiguous social
element: it can create a moral community between those who
have suffered and those who have witnessed this suffering
(818) just as much as it can represent an individual form of
resistance against complete social incorporation (821). In
other words, pain may operate as a marker of social
affiliation or, contrarily, as a marker of individuality.
31 Initiation rites practised on male members of a
http://www.genderforum.uni-koeln.de/anybody/gutenberg.html (35 van 60)31-3-2005 18:21:57