The terrific périphérique

When underwear shopping, try as I might to avoid it, there’s always that moment I inadvertently find myself in the big-bosom brassiere aisle. A teenage boy or young girl I’d understand, but me, a grown woman? I panic, blush. Small-of-breast I’m guilt-ridden for being where I shouldn’t. I fear being seen and judged: creep, deviate, voyeur! And every time, despite being a woman, just like our teenage boy or younger girl might, I wonder what it’s like to fill that void in those handfuls of fabric – DD, EE, F, G! The mind boggles. That large-breasted person is a woman too, yet she and I who have this word in common, couldn’t be more different – and that’s just to start.

Despite societal, political and capital forces working to narrow the definition and do away with difference, I am for the potential of that signifier: woman, to elicit the broadest possible spectrum, expression and manifestation of traits, behaviours and physical features; for the word to serve as a practical point of departure only, everything else – the myriad adjectives at our disposal – a celebration of our diversity. While those with vested interests may feel the need to translate linguistic simplicity into applied simplicity, limiting woman to any one interpretation is to risk a restriction in rights, recognition and individual agency.

The centre is unsustainable, prone to stagnate and misanthropic in its blind pursuit of uniformity. Centripetal forces, like a mass media, central government and monotheistic church dictate this perpetual march toward the middle, and its middling same-ification. The constraints and confines of the centre require identifiable and thereby manageable traits; constant refinement (distillation) resulting in a space simply too small to cater to a people naturally inclined to growth and reproduction. Thankfully, control of the future is finite, and any safety inherent in an existing consensus will eventually be disrupted by a progressive progeny, that like the throwback, alerts us to a dormant recognition, not – in this instance – of the recurring similarities, rather the explosion of possibilities evolution allows.

There have always been individuals who take their role seriously, pushing at the periphery and thereby widening the space in the centre for those of us seemingly more simply divisible (into man/woman, boy/girl). These individuals are increasingly important in a world which on the surface has sold us the idea that ‘anything goes’ while trying to categorise (limit?) all the same. Unwilling and unable to comply with the terms and conditions of inclusion, South African athletic champion Caster Semenya, and Laurence Alia – fictional antihero of Xavier Dolan’s feature film Laurence, Anyways – are two who prove that as yet, ‘anything goes’ is definitely not the case.

In 2011, Rise Films produced a documentary for the BBC covering Semenya’s reaction to and recovery from the testing and persecution she was subjected to after winning the 800 metres at the 2009 World Athletics Championships in Berlin. Too Fast to be a Woman: The Story of Caster Semenya includes interviews with the athlete, members of her family, representatives from the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF), her legal team, sport science professionals, coaching staff and peers. It confronts speculation surrounding Semenya’s gender, her ban from competition, and eventual reinstatement after a belligerent IAAF conceded she was eligible to run as a woman, as she wasn’t – as they suspected – a man. Beyond their invasive ‘scientific’ investigation, there is more compelling testimony that sheds light on matrilineal, existential and behavioural perspectives. Semenya’s mother: ‘I gave birth to her, and as a mother, know that she’s a girl not a boy’. Her coach: ‘if Caster believes she is female, she is female’. And Semenya herself: ‘what makes a lady? Does it mean if you’re wearing skirts and dresses you’re a lady? No. What kind of a lady is that? Yeah I’m a lady. There’s nothing I can say, yes I’m a lady. I have those cards of being a lady.’

Disinclined to skirts and dresses, I couldn’t agree more.

I’m not so much interested in the scientific debate, or whether Semenya is indeed ‘fully female’, as I am in looking at what ‘fully female’ might mean to begin with, not least for Semenya, but for all women, and subsequently our companions in this species we call humankind – men. With seven billion human variants and counting, and the genome code, DNA, RNA, rhizomes and chromosomes playing their part in ways to which few can testify any in-depth knowledge, it’s risky to clutch at throwaway terms that carry more meaning and power, because in the wrong hands – as power is prone to congregate – classification and subsequent claims of superiority are likely to victimise those seen by the majority, as different. Dr Gerald Conway, the Lead Endocrinologist at University College London points to one misleading example – hormones – the ‘male’ hormone, testosterone, having been a point of great contention in Semenya’s case: ‘We all have differences in our hormone levels’ he says. ‘In our gender assessment of ourselves, we’re all on a spectrum, and there’s probably no such thing as a 100% male and 100% female.’ Further, the idea and pursuit of being ‘fully’ anything points to metaphysical flaws in common thinking and exposes the vestiges of a superstitiously religious populace. If we’re to pursue a godly transcendence, a perfection, what of woman for whom the task is impossible – god as imagined in the West a distinctly male character; and what of the average man – who lets face it is a million miles from living up to Leonardo’s Vitruvian model.

Both Athletics South Africa (ASA) and the IAAF conducted tests on Semenya, (the ASA obfuscating the nature of and reason for the tests). The documentary claims they failed in their duty of care to Semenya, mishandling the case from the outset. They made no effort to protect her from the perception she had, at the least, a ‘disorder of sexual development that gives her an unfair advantage on the track’ or at the most extreme, covered up the fact she was a man, and was therefore a cheat. Conway concedes: ‘If you’re going to set competitors against each other, then you need a set of rules to decide what’s a fair competition and what’s not a fair competition.’ Fair enough. Maybe. A contradiction, actually. Competition suggests a winner and a loser. To a degree it operates outside of what’s fair. Certainly as Conway says ‘more testosterone would be a biological advantage’, but so would longer legs, bigger muscles, lower BMI, faster reflexes. South African sports scientist Professor Tim Noakes asks: ‘What about a male who has a biological advantage…? We call him Usain Bolt. This man Usain Bolt is a complete biological freak. There’s never been an athlete like him. So he’s genetically different. But do we expel him? No! We say he’s the greatest athlete ever... But when a female comes along, we say no, no she’s abnormal we’ve got to kick her out. That’s the whole point of sport. The best are genetic freaks.’

Giving the John Peel Lecture for BBC Music in 2015, Brian Eno gave his definition of art as ‘everything you don’t have to do’. In which case, it included once, sports. We ran. Certainly we ran fast if we could to avoid lions, hyenas and the like. But as for the first running race? It sounds like play to me. Just like we play games, we ‘play’ to our strengths and eventually we may play to win, but using the example of dance – an art form that involving the body crosses borders between art and sport – Eno quotes from Barbara Ehrenreich’s book Dancing in the Streets... where witnessing spontaneous dancing rippling through the streets around Carnivale, she writes: ‘There was no point to it, no religious overtones, ideological message, or money to be made...just the chance...to acknowledge the miracle of our simultaneous existence with some sort of celebration.’ Which is possibly how running felt for Semenya when she first started playing soccer with the boys, preferring it to the ‘typically feminine’ activities of her female friends. Later though, when there was money to be made, everything changed. Hardly the first tomboy – but a successful one for sure – rejecting a ‘feminised’ role had an affronting effect.

French philosopher, Luce Irigaray connects societal anxiety of this kind to the disruption of the entrenched trope of woman as commodity. ‘In our social order, women are ‘products’ used and exchanged by men. Their status is that of merchandise, ‘commodities’. In her work This Sex Which Is Not One she breaks down the component parts: ‘A commodity – a woman – is divided into two irreconcilable ‘bodies’: her ‘natural’ body and her socially valued, exchangeable body’. The threat of women reclaiming their bodies poses a challenge to our central structures. Irigaray wonders what, ‘without the exploitation of the body-matter of women...would become of the symbolic process that governs society?’ If woman attains a status comparable or equal to man, her potential is equal, she is competition. For many, this unacceptable levelling requires a new distancing, so in the ‘market of sexual exchange’, Irigaray suggests women would then ‘have to preserve what is called femininity. The value of a woman would accrue to her from her maternal role, and, in addition, from her ‘femininity’’. Rather than real change, this looks more like a re-objectification campaign. Reacting to the question of Semenya’s femininity or perceived lack thereof, Noakes highlights the tension that suggests ‘if you don’t look like Angelina Jolie you’re not really a woman, and there are a vast number of women who are fed up with being told what they should look like – they interpret this as another male dominated intervention, where a female is being told what to do by men.’

Over the holidays I ran a pop-quiz past my friends: What is a woman? But reading Irigary I started to question my question and the choice of the word ‘what’ as it automatically assumes a position of objectification. Perplexed by my philosophical musing, a female friend said: ‘girls have vaginas, boys have willies...end essay’. Simone de Beauvoir’s 1949 introduction to The Second Sex starts with: ‘I hesitated a long time before writing a book on woman. The subject is irritating, especially for women; and it is not new. Enough ink has flowed over the quarrel about feminism; it is now almost over: let’s not talk about it any more. Yet it is still being talked about.’ And so it was I knew it wasn’t that simple, and talk more I must. At the back end of 2015 Caitlin (née Bruce) Jenner marked her womanhood with a full frontal lingerie shot on the cover of Vanity Fair and Lili Elbe (or Eddie Redmayne as The Danish Girl) marked his/hers as red-lipped coquette with come-hither eyes that seductively stared me down in an advertising campaign spread across the city. So, I thought, we’re looking at the camera (good), but must we look only if scantily clad and seemingly sexed? Is this what it has become to be a woman? This narrowing, a frightening detour from the initial liberating intentions of feminism.

Xavier Dolan’s splendid film Laurence, Anyways avoids similar stereotyping with a story that wades through the complexities of gender by focussing instead on the transformative effects of love and the transcendence of conformity in pursuit of a holistic, true, though probably ‘imperfect’ identity. Like the recent, much-hyped release, The Danish Girl, Dolan’s 2012 feature has as its protagonist, a male character who feels, knows he is a woman, but Dolan’s focus for Laurence and his transition has less to do with the familiar ‘feminising’ accoutrements, than the pursuit of an identity that reclaimed and revealed can be better met in relationships with colleagues, lovers, parents and friends. Professor of French and Literature at the University of Wisconsin, Tom Armbrecht, in a paper from 2013, calls Laurence, Anyways ‘a film about sexual identity, but without sex’ (un film sur l’identité sexuelle, mais sans sexe) and as such, says Dolan is able to explore trans-sexuality as a metaphor and focus on the effects of his ‘coming-out as a woman’ (aux effets du coming-out en tant que femme). For Laurence, the passage of another birthday as a man is a marker of yet another year living with death ‘a breath away’, living as he describes it: ‘under water’. Waiting to surface, he finally reveals to his girlfriend, Fred, ‘I can’t breathe...I can’t take it anymore. I’m dying.’ Armbrecht likens the dual desires of the gaze in the formation of the self – the need to perceive and be perceived – to the rebirth necessary for Laurence to become visible. He says: ‘the invisibility of even one part of the being, for example, sexuality, is indeed what, if oppressed, risks asphyxiation.’ (L’invisibilité de seulement une partie de l’etre, comme la sexualité, est si oppressante qu’elle risque de l’asphyxier.) In order to live, Laurence must change and be changed by his decision to pursue his truth. Though this change includes electrolysis, hormones, an earring, and a vague trace of make-up, these are not the most important components of Laurence as ‘woman’. She is strong, determined, she is up for a fight, she has a career, she’s a writer, an intellectual. She is, to his mother’s relief, still able to move the TV upstairs. Through Dolan’s use of significant relationships: Laurence and his girlfriend (boyfriend/girlfriend/friend/lover), Laurence and his mother (son/daughter), he’s able to emphasize what it is that is permeable and therefore constant – despite gender, despite sexuality – to delve deeper and discover what it is that’s unique in his/her being.

From here I’ll continue to refer to Laurence using she/her pronouns as she does in the film.

Amid her struggle for acceptance, Laurence faces dismissal from her position teaching literature. The school board buckles under pressure from a parents’ group determined to see her removed. They cite the inclusion of trans-sexuality as a mental illness in the DSM, suggesting she’s unfit to teach (this despite industry awards and accolades). She’s told that as she’s about to write a book, she should see this as an ‘opportunity’, to which she rebuffs: ‘In short, I should thank you for the gift of unemployment because, silly me, who needs an income when you work in the arts right?’ The injustice is echoed in Irigary where in Between East and West she writes: ‘It is thought to be normal, moral, a sign of good policy, for a woman to receive no payment, or low payment, to be asked to do charity work. Especially if the woman does intellectual work. Especially if she works for women’s liberation.’ And again in Sexes and Genealogies: ‘I am putting the two together: intellectuals and women. Their status is linked to an interpretation and an evolution of the mode of thinking and conceiving social organization’ which is to say – patriarchal, sacrificial.

Intellectuals, writers, women, women-writers, it doesn’t bode well. Of her practise as a writer and on her desires, Laurence reflects: ‘Can [they] be great enough to exempt one from the rejection and ostracism that affect people who are different? One who, in another time-space could be you or me?’ Speaking to a journalist on the publication of her book Head Above Water the interview takes a Freudian turn: ‘What do you want, Laurence Alia?’. She replies: ‘Someone who understands my language and speaks it... who will question not only the rights and the value of the marginalised but also those of the people who claim to be normal.’ Normal, mainstream, like what? You? Me? ‘Our generation can handle this!’ Fred exclaims enthusiastically, thinking she’s ready to share the transformative journey. But our generation – with their pink hair, tattoos, piercings – risks complacency. It’s best we don’t forget how the space was won, and the fact it’s not yet wholly safe, egalitarian. The project to procure rights isn’t over, and new forces are infringing previously made gains, or capitalising on them in bad faith – to make money, win power, influence people.

In South Africa, there is a rich history of human rights activism and the support team surrounding Caster Semenya proves there’s unfinished business. Intersex South Africa founder, Sally Gross, was previously an activist against apartheid. Her hopes for change are based on the belief that the South African experience provides a model for progress. She says: ‘Struggle against class-based oppression, against racial oppression, and against forms of oppression rooted in sex and gender, cannot really be teased completely apart; and, in a fundamental sense, liberation is not complete when any of these forms of oppression persists.’ Having been born into relative poverty, one of the lawyers who acted pro bono for Semenya, Benedict Phiri, likened her struggle to his: ‘I understand the story of a person who is marginalised. I was born into a family that lived in a back room.’ His efforts on her behalf, indicative of what Gross says is: ‘a moral obligation [of the liberation history and culture] to take the issue up and to ensure that law and practice afford the intersexed adequate recognition and protection in the context of a culture of rights’.

In her essay on 'Women, the Sacred and Money', Irigary further examines the role of women in a sacrificial society suggesting: ‘it is crucial that we rethink religion, and especially religious structures, categories, initiations, rules, and utopias, all of which have been masculine for centuries. Keeping in mind that today these religious structures often appear under the name of science and technology.’ The testing to which Semenya was subjected is exemplary of this scientific structure, which along with economic structures can still be deployed to subjugate women, despite advances and the evolution of self-determination. ‘Independence’ is still contingent to a degree on external, validating structures at best judgemental, at their worst – violent, abusive. Gross highlights real ‘fears for Semenya’s life in the context of gender-based violence, particularly increasing numbers of rapes and murders of black lesbians who transgress gender expectations. The 2008 gang rape and murder of South African lesbian soccer star Eudy Simelane is mentioned as a prominent point of comparison 'highlighting the violent hatred that accompanies gender non-conformity.’

As a woman who spent much of my adult life playing soccer, I am shocked and amazed that anyone could find the idea so threatening. I’m not a lesbian, perhaps it was assumed – still my person was only ever at risk of injury on the field – even then the risks were minimal, after all it’s only a game. Generally, I’ve been free to be me and though this may not fit an-other’s idea of ‘feminine’, I fail to see how the act of playing soccer, or sitting spread legged on a couch can make you a ‘man’ – as many claimed in comments following Semenya’s appearance on a South African chat show.

If part of Semenya’s problem is her elite physicality, and physical prowess – ie a male domain – then what of men who are physically less? Are they women? When Laurence expresses his need to be a woman it’s not because he has a need to be weak, subjugated or sexualised. For him – smart, strong and ‘woman’ are not mutually exclusive. True we live in times where free-to-air TV can screen The Black Lesbian Handbook and a women’s World Cup win makes front page news, but we musn’t forget the people at the periphery who make it all possible – without them we risk limits to our self-expression and the blandness of an authoritarian idea of belonging.

Don't be bland. Be terrifying, be terrific, live on the périphérique...