11.

 Naked vs. Nude II : The Dangers of Uncertain Bodily Limits

In colloquial speech, a woman may say she knows something "like the back of her hand." Our hands are familiar in a very powerful sense - they perform simple tasks before our eyes, allow us to express ourselves conveniently in gesture, and indicate our age with wrinkles. Always exposed and at arm's length away, they are immediate, optical proof of our own concrete existence. A fingers touch tells us where, relatively, we end and external space begins.

The vagina is not so familiar. In the texts we have read, women are, physically and psychologically, seriously detached form their bodies, specifically their vaginas. This lack of physical self-awareness leads to identity crisis, lack of self-respect and deteriorated mental health. In The Beauty Myth, Naomi Wolf cites multiple health conditions induced by poor body awareness. She says,  "Schizophrenics are characterized by a disturbed sense of body boundaries...Narcissists fee that what happens to their bodies does not happen to them. Surgical expectations and weight fluctuations subject women to weak body boundaries..."(230). Wolf proves that a sense of complete physicality, or wholeness, is so crucial to identity. One must be capable of recognizing the extent of one's own body and its pains in the same way that one must be capable of recognizing one's own emotional status. Wolf argues that the myth causes women to "lose a bit more of our ability to feel for our own bodies and identify with our own pain..."(250). Without distinct body boundaries, one cannot identify one's own pain and recognize one's self as human. For me, this inhumanity is what distinguishes the "naked" from the "nude." While the "naked" individual knows her body as her own, the "nude" individual is numb, impersonal, an outsider to her own body.

With The Vagina Monologues, Eve Ensler brings attention to how this bodily disconnect has been perpetuated by the stigma of shame surrounding female genitalia. One woman reflects, "I did not know my vagina in practical or biological terms. I did not...see it as a part of my body, something between my legs, attached to me...My vagina existed for me on some abstract plane"(45). Another woman refers to her vagina as an "invaded village" (63). Again, this lack of basic bodily awareness and inability to express the vagina as concrete, proves to be at the heart of the mental and emotional issues of women.

 In The Handmaid's Tale, Offred also experiences multiple sensations of bodily discontinuity. Her oppressively concealing robes and demeaning role in society place her psychologically outside of her own body. She refers to her own body as a "swamp" of "treacherous ground" (83).

When writing about this, I cannot help but incorporate Georgia O'Keeffe, who, in my mind, parallels Eve Ensler in artistic terms by "painting the unpaintable." Her paintings are a monumental elevation of female physicality. In precisionist style, her flowers are concrete, weighty and formally suggest the vulva. The genius of O'Keeffe, for me, comes from the fact that throughout her life, she never officially recognized  her paintings as vaginal. Instead, she kept her audience guessing who, like many of us do today, were unsure of whether or not to articulate the unsayable - to recognize the vagina as concrete. By omitting formal analysis, she left viewers hanging, left to ponder for themselves, their own inability to articulate what they saw.

"...Well, I made you take time to look at what I saw and when you took time to really notice my flower you hung all your own associations with flowers on my flower and you write about my flower as if I think and see what you think and see of the flower - and I don't."

 - Georgia O'Keeffe

http://www.artwallpapers.net/paintings/georgia_o_keeffe/02/georgia_o_keeffe02.jpg