This
week’s readings offered slightly different views on the idea of studying
material culture. The Prosthetic Impulse:
From a Posthuman Present to a Biocultural Future, a collection of essays
edited by Marquard Smith and Joanne Morra, offered a series of interpretations
on medical prosthetics and their affect on various parts of human life. The
collection of essays aimed to examine relationships between the ideas of human
and posthuman, organic and mechanic, evolutionary and postevolutionary, and
flesh and the accompanying technologies. The
Prosthetic Impulse remains, in my opinion, the most challenging reading we
have been assigned thus far. While extremely thought-provoking, I did not find
the collection of essays necessarily enjoyable, but rather I struggled to apply
the work to other readings, as well as directly to thoughts about Emma’s
corset. The introductory essay, by Vivian Sobchack, who herself has a prosthesis,
proved the most beneficial for me. Sobchack argues against the contemporary notion
of prosthetics as seductive and the prosthetic metaphor. She discusses her personal thoughts towards
her artificial leg, claiming she does not want her limb to be extraordinary,
but rather hopes is will allow her to live her life as normally as possible.
This argument
differs from every other essay, as several other authors discuss the sensuality
(and fetishizing) of prosthesis. After reading Blue Jeans: The Art of the Ordinary last week, and our class
discussion, the notion of yearning to be “ordinary” and to blend in remained in
my mind. Perhaps this is why Sobchack’s argument appealed to me more than the
others—she seemed the most “real” of any other authors and allowed me to begin
to understand the idea of prosthesis on a personal level. Of the essays
included in The Prosthetic Impulse,
David Serlin’s “Disability, Masculinity, and the Prosthetics of War, 1945 to
2005” proved the most problematic for me. I am not entirely comfortable with his
notion that the United States military both exploited and reinforced “conceptions
of both able-bodiedness and hetero-sexual masculinity” and his application of
soldiers with prosthesis. Specifically, the idea of gender-transgressive
behavior as a component of the military’s concept of able-bodied heterosexuality
seemed exaggerated or generalized, at least in the more contemporary military.
What may have worked better with his argument concerning the modern military is
female soldiers, and their
expectation for gender-transgressive behavior within the military.
Our second
reading, Dan Rose’s “Active Ingredients” offered an analysis and study in
material culture of a bottle of Head and Shoulders shampoo. Rose claims through
the article, he intended to “emphasize the fabricated quality of contemporary
things.” His article proves successful in this goal, as he essentially
deconstructs the language behind the bottle of Head and Shoulders, to gain
insight into the world of corporations. His study includes the physical
ingredients in the shampoo, the physical bottle itself, and the written words placed
on the bottle. His article seemed a sophisticated study in material culture,
but the emphasis on text and language caused me to struggle to apply it to my
research on Emma’s corset. I hope when I dive deeper into primary sources, text
will help me understand more generally the corset within its contemporary culture.
Re: Serlin, that's a very good point about how the presence of female soldiers is elided. I'm also not 100% convinced that amputees were seen as unequivocally masculine (particularly on the 1940s end of his range)--the drag act certainly doesn't kick them out of the heteronormative military club, but I would've liked to see more comparative discussion of the representations of the Amputettes versus other military drag performances. Equating disability with sexlessness--e.g. male, female, and handicapped bathrooms--is sufficiently prevalent that I felt like it can't be automatically taken as given, but needed a bit more attention.
ReplyDeleteIt's a very broad topic for a short chapter, so I ultimately ended up feeling more convinced by arguments that touched on other things I'd read (e.g. governmental constructions of perversion, homosexuality, etc. in the first half of the twentieth century) and wanted more on other subjects.