Manchester University Press
14 Cutting into unmarked pleasures
Abstract
Fatema Abdoolcarim’s article develops an interdisciplinary methodology of multiple voices (historical, art historical, poetic, fictional, and personal) to speak to the specific practice of khatna within the wider discourse of female genital cutting. By looking closely at an Indian miniature painting of the past that depicts a group of women cutting themselves – cutting into that painting with the abstracted voice of lived experience – Abdoolcarim reassesses the nuanced complexities of the practice, of female community, of desire, of sexual and aesthetic pleasure. Cutting is hereby reimagined as a reparative gesture.
Abstract
Fatema Abdoolcarim’s article develops an interdisciplinary methodology of multiple voices (historical, art historical, poetic, fictional, and personal) to speak to the specific practice of khatna within the wider discourse of female genital cutting. By looking closely at an Indian miniature painting of the past that depicts a group of women cutting themselves – cutting into that painting with the abstracted voice of lived experience – Abdoolcarim reassesses the nuanced complexities of the practice, of female community, of desire, of sexual and aesthetic pleasure. Cutting is hereby reimagined as a reparative gesture.
Chapters in this book
- Front Matter i
- Contents v
- List of figures vii
- List of contributors x
- Acknowledgements xvii
- Foreword xix
- Introduction 1
- I Scrawl 25
- 1 The intelligent hand 27
- 2 Without word without voice blind gesture 36
- 3 ‘Language, of course, being gesture’ 47
- 4 Writing dreaming drawing 59
- II Caress 73
- 5 Perversions at her adolescent fingertips, or, Francesca Woodman’s autoerotic attentions 75
- 6 The massage is the medium 92
- 7 Et in arcadia xerox 99
- III Mutter 113
- 8 My chimeras 115
- 9 Speaking silence 122
- 10 Mamaiaith 130
- 11 Cliché is the sediment of sentiment that collects in my ear 139
- 12 ‘The strength of the gesture to move like a poem’ 148
- IV Scratch 163
- 13 My skin is a riot 165
- 14 Cutting into unmarked pleasures 184
- 15 Learning from silent teachers 197
- 16 Returning to the scene of hurt 206
- V Reach 219
- 17 Gestures for feminist transmissions 221
- 18 Between the departures and arrivals 231
- 19 Feminism’s un/common rituals 242
- 20 ‘I want a literature that is not made from literature’ 251
- VI Dialogues on gesture 265
- 21 ‘Flight [Gestures] in a Galaxy of Centres’ 267
- 22 So many social things happen with a bent head 286
- 23 In excess of the one, two 296
- 24 Gesture, a build 312
- Afterword 317
- Index 322
Chapters in this book
- Front Matter i
- Contents v
- List of figures vii
- List of contributors x
- Acknowledgements xvii
- Foreword xix
- Introduction 1
- I Scrawl 25
- 1 The intelligent hand 27
- 2 Without word without voice blind gesture 36
- 3 ‘Language, of course, being gesture’ 47
- 4 Writing dreaming drawing 59
- II Caress 73
- 5 Perversions at her adolescent fingertips, or, Francesca Woodman’s autoerotic attentions 75
- 6 The massage is the medium 92
- 7 Et in arcadia xerox 99
- III Mutter 113
- 8 My chimeras 115
- 9 Speaking silence 122
- 10 Mamaiaith 130
- 11 Cliché is the sediment of sentiment that collects in my ear 139
- 12 ‘The strength of the gesture to move like a poem’ 148
- IV Scratch 163
- 13 My skin is a riot 165
- 14 Cutting into unmarked pleasures 184
- 15 Learning from silent teachers 197
- 16 Returning to the scene of hurt 206
- V Reach 219
- 17 Gestures for feminist transmissions 221
- 18 Between the departures and arrivals 231
- 19 Feminism’s un/common rituals 242
- 20 ‘I want a literature that is not made from literature’ 251
- VI Dialogues on gesture 265
- 21 ‘Flight [Gestures] in a Galaxy of Centres’ 267
- 22 So many social things happen with a bent head 286
- 23 In excess of the one, two 296
- 24 Gesture, a build 312
- Afterword 317
- Index 322
