viz.

Image Credit: Facebook, NARAL Pro-Choice Connecticut

On July 12, 2013, I was standing in a long, winding line inside the Texas state capitol. For hours I had been chatting with the amazing men and women around me, sharing stories, sharing space, and, quite frankly, sharing boredom as we patiently inched towards the Senate gallery, hoping to secure a seat as the Texas senate debated and voted on a bill proposing abortion restrictions. Visually speaking, I was bombarded. Abortion rights activists wore saturated or burnt orange while anti-choice protestors wore various shades of blue. Images and slogans splayed across signs and t-shirts caught my eye, inevitably drawing up visceral responses that, more often than not, ended in my grabbing my partner's elbow and chattering excitedly into a long-suffering ear. Protests have such an amazing, indescribable energy about them, and that day I became convinced that a large amount of the electricity in the air depended on the spectacle created by individuals proud to display their thoughts and feelings literally on their sleeves.

Then a volunteer dashed by us in line clutching a cardboard box to her chest, breathlessly asking if anyone had any tampons or pads in their bags. Apparently, state troopers were forcing people to throw away feminine hygeine products before allowing them in to the gallery. The volunteer told us what smartphones soon confirmed: security was concerned that enraged audience members would launch their pads and tampons in a highly symbolic assault at the senators. A mother and daughter in front of me in line shared a shocked look. Of course they had pads in their bags, but they couldn't surrender them up to the box already a third full of innocent-looking, brightly-wrapped “projectiles,” and for a perfectly natural reason. They were both on their period. A little while later, before word came through that the DPS had stopped forbidding pads, they left the line together.

Being present for this little farce, humiliating and enraging as it might have been, got me thinking. All day, people around me had dragged powerful images into my sight: from gorge-raising, magnified abortion leavings to the minimalist, chilling images of wire hangers, instruments that have meant injury and even death to many desperate women. Though few of these pictures actually depicted it directly, they were all haunted by the unseen presence of the female body in peril. On the other extreme, outside the realm of abortion-rights rhetoric and in mainstream culture, the sexy, healthy female form is pasted on billboards, in magazines, on television, in movies, in comic books, and, well, you get the idea. In the common cultural background that makes up our day-to-day lives, however, the permutations, the bloodiness, and the sheer excesses of the female body remain unseen and, because unseen, coded with abjection, shame, even danger. Intentionally stripping individuals of their pads, tampons, and panty-liners, communicated, clearly, that the female body is, somehow, horribly threatening. As my opening image attests, satirists later incisively pointed out that guns (accompanied, of course, by a license) could be taken into the gallery while cotton wadding designed to keep menstrating women comfortable had to be confiscated for safety purposes.

In upcoming posts, I would like to explore some of the following questions: what depictions of the female body make standard appearances in visual rhetoric and what about it cannot be seen? What parts, types, or states are frequently represented? Conversely, what existing conditions are hardly ever represented? Are there any ways to explain these divisions? Finally, is there a way to push back the veil and visually assert subversive truths? Maybe by way of, for instance, defiantly hanging tampons off your ears or around your neck in response to being told to throw them in the trash? I plan to discuss the ins-and-outs of that particular rhetorical assault on the status quo next week.