The Rebel Body
Part Two - Neurodivergence, Menstruation & Magic - On being with Sylvia Federici's 'Caliban & The Witch'.
“What died was the concept of the body as a receptacle of magical powers that had prevailed in the medieval world. In reality it was destroyed. For in the background of the new philosophy we find a vast initiative by the state, whereby what the philosophers classified as ‘irrational’ was branded a crime. (Federici, S: 2004: 141)
The Luteal phase:
I am badger, deep in the sett. Surrounded by ochres & the muffled song of Earth. Civilisation is not something I can easily engage with. Body is as soft as moss, porous, alert to what feels like every atom of you & I. She absorbs the environment & holds it, body like a pair of cupped hands praying. Like a pair of hands praying for the moment she can let go, withdraw & return to the woods & the waters. To the places where sound isn’t so metallic & the textures aren’t so sharp. Civilisation is overwhelm. Is noise & pollution. Is busyness. Civilisation swells like the crest of a giant rolling wave. Crash. Swell. Crash. Force pummels the body. Tries to crack the calcium carbonate of her shell. Meanwhile, rest is a word that lays resinous on my lips. Sticky & sweet. Rest is a medicine that cuts through the chaos of the world. Hormones & Body stronger than the currents pull. The desire to be at home, to nest & to rest is as primal as any hunger I have felt, as instinctual as any fear. The body turns inward. She withdraws with as much force as a germinating seed. The body brain walks me out, back into solitude, back to the sett.
Throughout my life I have had no other choice than to surrender to my body. Surrender to the explosions of puberty. To the breasts & hips, the blood. The countless times clothes & linens were stained with the body’s vermillion. Throughout my life I have had no other choice than to surrender to the pain of being woman. The iron coil of cramps winding & tightening in my womb. The passing of clots. The pre-bleed emptying. The bloating. The nausea. Sore breasts. Dizziness. Hormonal headaches. Contraceptive side-effects. The inter-generational shame of being a body that cannot conform. To be a woman, to me at least, felt like a crime. Something to be punished for.
When I think back to my memories of becoming woman, what I remember is the deceit. The dishonesty. I could not stay in bed while my uterus shed itself. I could not rest while the body screamed for silence. I had to pretend. I had to pretend to be in this body. Had to split myself between an interior & exterior territory that were not aligned. When I think of the moments which were most impactful, most formative on my conditioning of becoming woman, I think of the feeling of being at secondary school. The thick molasses, acrid sour, numbness. The predation. What I remember about school is the collective surveillance of one another’s body’s. How body’s did or didn’t conform. Unsurprising that this is the case. That school, in all it’s factory inspired capitalist pathology, it’s incessant corporeal regularization, became a place of Faustian symbolism. A place where I learnt to bargain self for state.
From an early age, I learnt there was no space to honour the rhythms of woman within the system I existed in. I formally learnt this through shame. Through the instinctual desire to hide menstruation. The cascading embarrassment of being one those girls. A girl who entered menarche at 11 years of age. A girl who inhabited a 6ft woman-body despite being a child. What surrounded this time was an affirmation of how being a woman incited punishment. As my breasts & hips blossomed, so too did the chaos. In place of menarche parties, I was bullied. Harassed by boys & men much older than me. Heckled. Grabbed by strangers. Followed. Touched. Pushed. Spat at. Pulled. Seemingly, the perception of my body invoked a sense that it belonged, not to me, but to others. It doesn’t require much of an imagination to see the historical current beneath such behaviours.
I took the pills. I wore the make-up. I slouched. I shaved away all evidence of my bush with a BIC razor & a conquistador will. Committed to tidying the animacy of my body. I straightened my curls. Forced myself into bodycon dresses & push-up bra’s, fake-tanned my fair skin with harsh chemicals, bleached my hair, superglued eyelashes, binged & vomited, calorie counted. I spent hours watching MTV, 10 years younger, America’s Next Top Model. Planned the fantasy surgeries. Drank booze by the litre. I allowed the boys & the men. I poisoned myself. History controlled the body with an iron fist. Very nearly broke her.
Hundreds of years after the witch-trials & the emergence of what we now call capitalism, I managed somehow, to reproduce upon my body a violence symbolic to that of the state. What I managed to reproduce was a desire to extinguish my body & myself, I conjured, or rather, I repeated a desire to destroy a collective body that felt, sensed & held a deep relationality with place. I was the perpetrator of violence. An agent without agency.
Today, my Woman-Body smears her blood over the starched white linens of civilisations dinner party. I am hairy of leg, pit & bush. Braless. Body, she is angry & she has every right to be. She’s a primal, intuitive, powerful, emotional mammal. This body, all 6ft of her, is irrational most of the time. Is pulled by the waters of feeling not logic. Sense is her compass. Her map. This body is the type of Woman that could & has been seen as a crime; an object to control & to tame. My Woman-Body’s existence contradicts the regularization of corporeal behaviour by just - simply - being a living, breathing creature.
“Knowledge” can only become power if it can enforce it’s prescriptions.” (Federici, S: 2004: 141)
The knowledge of my body, our collective body, enforces an opposing prescription. Body illuminates, by nature of biology, a power greater than the state. A body governed by something civilisation cannot control; the wilderness.
By that I refer to: “an uncultivated, uninhabited, and inhospitable region.” (Cambridge English Dictionary)
What body (can) demonstrate is an antithesis to the machine, an antithesis to the mechanical order, the mechanical philosophy; all my uncultivated moon bleeding, my inhospitable wailing, sensitivity, my hormonal irrationality, my woman madness, they are uninhabited by civilisation, they demonstrate a power shunned by civilisation, a power civilisation trembles in the face of; abundant feeling.
If a body could feel, it could resist. If a body could feel, it could refuse. If a body could feel, it could remember.
“Magic, moreover, rested upon a qualitative conception of space & time that precluded a regularization of the labour process. How could the new entrepreneurs impose regular work patterns on a proletariat anchored in the belief that there are lucky & unlucky days, that is, days on which one can travel & others on which one should not move from home, days on which to marry & others on which every enterprise should be cautiously avoided. (Federici, S: 2004: 142)
Neurodivergence
Reading this excerpt, I am reminded of the uncanny similarity between Sylvias depiction of magic & that of my experience of Autism & Dyspraxia. Neurodivergence “rests upon a wholly qualitative conception of space & time.” My biology takes care of my ability to sense, to feel, to perceive the quality of place through irrational, illogical means. Means that invoke a deeply creative logic & a poetic sensibility. A sensibility that fuses with energetic states, animals, plants, creatures, colour, texture, smell, sound. There are situational moments, moments shaped by autistic burnout or sensory overwhelm where I cannot travel, days on “which one should not move from home.” Hyper sensitivity makes a mockery out of any “imposed regular work hours.”
Thus my being, or rather my biology, takes care of my inability to successfully engage with the demands of the labour market. This is not something I gloat about nor lightly express. This experience alone can cause, has caused insufferable anguish. As humans we want to participate, I want to participate. As humans we are forced to earn money to live. Being a neurodivergent compromises my capacity to earn. I need not explain the implications of this as a working class woman. Try as I might. Try as I have. I cannot participate in the way capitalism requires. I cannot sustain a regular 9-5. I cannot force the body by money alone. I cannot sustain long hours cooped up inside the walls of an office, sat at a screen. Doing these things makes the body feel as if she houses the hive of a million bees. I vibrate with the agitation of their frenzied buzzing.
Insofar as one can know, I suspect this experience is heightened by an ontological perspective, a worldview that moulds how I am in the world. My experience of being alive can be likened to Sylvia’s description of Magic, in that “my conception of space & time is qualitative”. It is a transcontextual, multi-textured, colourful meadow: time is not time, time is not clock time, time is place, time happens all at once - past, present, future. Time is like a soup, ingredients mingling & infusing with all the other components & elements of life. Time is porous. Place is porous. Consciousness moves between the membranes of these time-place-spaces.
Sylvia goes on to say that:
“The bourgeoisie had to combat the assumption that it is possible to be in two places at the same time, for the fixation of the body in space & time, that is, the individuals spatio-temporal identification, is an essential condition for the regularity of the work process.” (Federici, S: 2004, 143)
Externally, my spatio-temporal-ness often presents as a woman in two places at once, neither fully here, nor fully there: a proletariat unable to take instruction, unable to do the job. A pupil unwilling to listen. A girl, a woman who should be punished. This experience presents as a human who is often detached from the norms of corporeal regularization. Floaty. ‘In space’. A human who has spent many years vehemently trying to break herself into an accepted code. Bargaining the essential components of the spirit as a means to ‘fit’ in the box.
As a child, I believed everyone had synesthesia. Thought everyone could see people as colour, saw paintings as sound, heard sounds as taste. I thought it was normal to feel the texture of an emotion, the weight of a lie.
Synesthesia wouldn’t fit into the box.
As a child, I sang, I improvised, I wrote screenplays, I communed. I loved to move my body. Sport. Rugby. Running. I loved reading. I loved theatre. I loved art. Poetry. Words. Woods. I loved to dance. I loved the smell of the rain. The texture of the soil. The crunch of frozen grass at dawn. The peach gold sun. Sienna leaves. Lugworm. The fizzle & crack of an icy North Sea against my toes. Plants. I was deeply curious about the world.
Curiosity wouldn’t fit into the box.
So you see, body underwent/undergoes a process of abstraction, self is forced into rupture, in a radical de-characterization. I submerged spirit in the barren desert of the psyche, hidden beneath the bone pile. Self embarked on a ferocious quest to flatten the magic of the body. I tried to homogenise into the prototypical individual, an abstract individual - whose faculties were standardized, constructed in a uniform way, so I could be grasped by the state, used as ‘participating’ member of society. In doing so I underwent the transition into capitalism. In my desire to belong to the construct, I let go of the magic…but magic never loosened it’s grip on me.
Ironically, it was through the thicket of de-characterization that I found the path back to the stinking bone pile. It was through the brackish path of abstraction that I was led back to spirit. Despite all of History’s scheming & violence, despite the reign of terror, Man could not & has not extinguished this: the power of a body willing to feel.
Glossary
Rebel-Body - I’m using this term to denote a concept which symbolises a person who has become aware & acknowledges the oppression of their body by the state & initiatives of the state
Woman-Body - I’m using this term to denote a concept which symbolises the conditioning of the female body within the context of a capitalist epistemology & ontology.
References
Federici, S. (2004). Caliban and the Witch. Autonomedia.
Cambridge University Press. (2011). Cambridge essential English dictionary. Cambridge University Press.
Ooh, powerful piece, goosebumps! ❤️