Over Her Dead Body: Expelling the Monstrous-Feminine in Touching Earth Lightly

Abstract

In lieu of abstract, here is the first paragraph of the article:

Death and sex/uality are inextricably linked in the Western cultural imagination. The French slang term for ‘orgasm’ (la petite mort) is said to literally translate as ‘little death’, for instance, while the ‘sex-leading-to-death’ motif is pervasive in narrative and aesthetic representations. Although not always consciously articulated, throughout history the most fundamental taboos on human behaviour have also been those concerned with death and sexual functions (McNay 1994, p.41). Much of the work of cultural theorists Sigmund Freud, Georges Bataille and Julia Kristeva intersects around this idea as well. Freudian psychoanalytic theory is based upon the notion that the psychic life of the subject is governed by two antagonistic biological or instinctual urges—one toward reproduction, and the other toward destruction. In Bataille’s view, the framework of the law that shapes the subject (the processes of socialisation) is associated with the expulsion of the ‘accursed share’—that portion of the self that is bodily and material: forbidden eroticism (incest), excrement, and death (the return to material nature of human life) (Rivkin & Ryan 1998, p.337). An ‘aura of death is what denotes passion’, Bataille contends (1986, p.20) because at the same time that humanity pushes death away by trying to exclude what is horrifying, it is drawn (or desires) to approach what threatens (Hegarty 2000, pp.61-62).2 Kristeva makes a similar claim when she argues that erotic pleasure emerges as a symbolic response to the uncontainable threat of mortality. For Kristeva, the erotic is both a reaction to the threat of castration and an attempt to sustain life itself in the face of death (Tanner 1996).