Trau(Stig)matized!

I keep mentally revisiting last week’s documentary Stigmata (which, doubtless, has me scarred for seventeen lifetimes at least) and Acker’s interview perhaps because it discomforts me as to how underwhelmed I feel in response to what was obviously meant to be a strident, ‘call for arms’ type of sermon. A detached, critical scholar, part of me wants to empathize with these women who have chosen a radical transfiguration of their bodies as both a proclamation and a reclamation of their personal space but this whiny voice in my head keeps saying “seriously?”. And, lest I might be considered a callous byproduct of a privileged, conformist regime, I would want to say outright that it is not the struggle for rightful self-assertion that I object to it is this particular expression of it (by no means do I subscribe to cosmetic surgery and liposuction either) –even more so when (ostensibly) validated by the ongoing commentary around the gut-churning visuals.

Body art as a defiance of patriarchal domination can perhaps still be justified (body as site of personal expression that flouts conventionalities of womanhood) but vaginal piercings and corseted-to-an-inch-of-their-lives waists just strike me as a sad U-turn to the very conformation they set out to negate. It only gets weirder from here. Acker proudly says in her interview that while oral sex is painful for her, getting spanked and whipped is a much more exciting alternative; am I the only one who reads this fetishistic role play as the most generic form of slavish submission? And what is to be made of this strange self-perpetration of pain in its most depraved form? How does cutting your own wrists again and again (per Acker) become a symbolic assertion of an undaunted womanhood? How does feminism get translated into bodily disfiguration? Are there really women out there who get their nipples pierced not because they think it looks sexy but because it provides them a visual voice of dissent? Also, where are the lines drawn for this deviance? Would not the justification of ‘women are not expected to do this stuff, hence I do it’ eventually apply to, say, prostitution by extension? After all, isn’t that also what ‘good girls’ never do? While I confess that I much lesser saw the documentary as much as I heard it (I am squeamish beyond redemption), that sudden inclusion in the end of the penis piercing scene completely threw me off.

I am, by no means, putting the above out as my penultimate reading of the film or the interview; it is more a genuine inability to the logic of transfiguration as applied in this case to a subversion of conventional femininity. Any explanations to ease my tortured mind regarding the above will be much appreciated!