More on Pain...

Pain is discomfort. It burns, it threatens to crumble you, disintegrate you, ashen you such that you will lose your solidity, it inflames, like the new skin peeling of your fresh wound. It is pointed.

It questions the hegemony of institutions one is part of by opening oneself to the pains of being objectified, racialised, judged by making it personal, by making it subjective. The avowal of pain allows us to embody ourselves. (I reckon, more intimately than pleasure, but I am willing to accept that I may be wrong… already) It disrupts continuity of oppressive (whatever that may be, capitalism, patriarchy, sexual normativity, physical wound) experience by injecting subjective experience.

How does the perception of the hysterical woman change then?

Something I want to research on...........anyone want to fund me?

I want to start at the psychiatric space. The psychiatric clinic in Sunflower Hospital, Juhu Scheme, Mumbai. In the basement of the hospital, hidden underneath the superstructure of our lives, I want to visit the countless upper middle class families who come to this clinic to discuss their “private” problems in private. Each space leads to a smaller cell to hide and the more you’re hidden the more comfortable you are. Outside in the waiting room, everyone is a partner in an imperfect ideal.

Starting at the healing or remedial space, where families come to unite their fragments, usually the fragments in their mother’s, wife’s bodies, I want to explore the construct of the hysterical, irrational wife in the psychiatric space where these treatments take place. The body to be "treated" is usually her body. The domestic space, hidden from the world, through the psychiatric space, further gets enclosed, gets undiscovered and mystified into the darkness of the human mind.

Why?
Where hysteria has been perceived as an "illness", I want to understand hysteria as a form agency for bourgeois women in India. Families usually go to the psychiatric space when there is a break down in the family, in the domestic sphere, when the patriarchal household is consumed by the hysteria of the wife, mother. Her agency takes the most painful form here, for that moment in time; she claims subjectivity through pain, through the avowal of her pain. (The psychiatric space is the space of disavowal of her agency, where patriarchy regains control, sometimes at her wish, sometimes not). At that point, pain is her only self, it is the pain of expression of subjugation, domination, powerlessness, unrealised, unfulfilled desires, that is avowed...What kind of opening does it create? I dont know yet...

The Beauty of Borat..............

Borat has invoked such strong reactions from people from those who claim to like him to those who have filed suits against him etc.

But theres something else that has happened. Which I call his beauty. He has become everyone’s alter ego. He has ruptured the heterosexual space and has created a space for heterosexual men, to talk about sex illicitly and dirtily in the public. And within that dirt he has allowed men to express their desire for women, which is dirty but erotic, which is dirty but titillating and because it is dirty it has desire. And it has allowed heterosexual women to respond, engage, and flirt in this dirty space.

When guys talk, they talk not as themselves but as Borat and in that sense are liberated from having to bear the moral consequence or conscience of their talk. He gives them that space. For example, when my friend rounds his forefinger with his thumb to make a “hole” and hits it against his palm and says “it is a taeeght”…. Or “I like-uh taeeght”…He talks like Borat. Or when he talks about “the vajeen”….Infact, he is Borat. It is Borat talking through my friend’s body. And hence when I listen to him, I don’t get “offended”, I laugh, I respond. I enjoy the sexual interaction. Because I think Borat is talking and not my friend. We’ve created a strange hallucinatory dirty space between us. As we talk we are making fun of Borat. He has been internalized by us and given our evil, dirty side, our alter ego an identity, his identity. Once done, he has allowed us to detach a part of ourselves, externalize it, bring it out in the public in his identity and make fun of him. We have othered it and then enjoyed it. And in that process he has a made of ourselves more public, or a “repressed” discourse public.

Now to think that if every man spoke like that, the woman would like it would be a misconception as well. Secondly I am not legitimizing his movie but am more interested in seeing how men and women have appropriated him in their daily bodies. Though does he give heterosexual women the same space to talk or does he silence them? I do agree that he does not give me space to talk about my body the way it liberates men to do so.