Annemarie Schwarzenbach : Ravaged Angel

The British designer Clare Waight Keller scored the biggest fashion triumph of 2018 five months ago when the Duchess of Sussex walked down the aisle of St George’s Chapel in a boat-necked Givenchy wedding dress. No Paris catwalk show, even one that brings city traffic to a standstill on a Sunday evening and scores the starriest front row of the week, could hope to compete.

Waight Keller could very easily have revelled in royal wedding afterglow. After all, any boat-necked Givenchy dress on a sales rail would be a home banker right now. Instead, she used her evening at Paris fashion week to show that her vision and ambition reached far beyond one beautiful wedding dress.

The first twelve models – nine women, three men – on a catwalk weaving through the marbled halls of the Palais de Justice all had almost identical haircuts, a neat ear-grazing schoolboy trim. “The casting was paramount,” said Waight Keller after the show. “I wanted the women and men to be indefinable. Something about that felt relevant – and appealing, actually.” Royal wedding or no royal wedding, Waight Keller is not about to be pigeonholed into fairytale frocks. After all, Audrey Hepburn – muse of Hubert de Givenchy, whose Funny Face wedding dress was a reference for that of the duchess – was rocking a gamine pixie crop back in 1954.

This season’s muse was not Meghan but Annemarie Schwarzenbach, a Swiss writer and photographer who became a Berlin celebrity during the Weimar republic. “I was researching silhouettes,” said Waight Keller after the show, “and I came across this spectacular looking woman, whose mother had never insisted on her dressing like a girl, and who as an adult dressed sometimes as a man and sometimes as a woman but always in a modest, elegant way.”

The designer was wearing an elegant short-sleeved navy blouse tucked into high-waisted black trousers, firmly belted, with cone-heeled court shoes. It was a quiet take on the look amped up on the catwalk. Those high-waisted trousers were worn with silk blouses, cropped trenchcoats or abbreviated biker jackets. Shimmering silver evening capes brought an otherworldly glory to matt black crepe tailored separates or loose, dark silk gowns.

Waight Keller’s show notes were opaque and telegram-brief. “Silver solidifies”, she wrote, underscoring the purposeful, hard-edged mood that saw models marching past at a frantic pace that deliberately jettisoned all memories of a glide down the isle. Not content with having sparked a trend for feminine bateau necklines earlier this year, this show suggested Waight Keller might be about to make the fashion world go doe-eyed for sharp tailoring, metallic and monochrome. The latest fairytale frock? it’s a tuxedo.

Clare Waight Keller's Givenchy show in Paris shimmers sharply in a tuxedo. By Jess Cartner-Morley. The Guardian, September 30, 2018.

When American novelist Carson McCullers met Swiss author and photographer Annemarie Schwarzenbach in the summer of 1940, she fell in love – instantly and hard. “She had a face that I knew would haunt me for the rest of my life,” she said. McCullers wasn’t the only one to become enraptured with Schwarzenbach: German novelist Thomas Mann called her a “ravaged angel”; another writer, Roger Martin du Gard, said she had “the face of an inconsolable angel”; while German photographer Marianne Breslauer, who took numerous photos of Schwarzenbach, likened her to “the Archangel Gabriel standing before Heaven”.

But with the rediscovery in the late 1980s of Schwarzenbach’s body of work – a rich catalogue of journalism and photographs documenting her adventurous farflung travels – she gained new interest for more than just her angelic beauty; she was recognised as a female pioneer and a gay icon. In 2001, there was even a feature film, The Journey to Kafiristan, tracing her 4,000-mile drive from Geneva to Kabul in a Ford Deluxe with ethnologist Ella Maillart (‘How far would you go for true love?’ read the tagline).

Born in Zurich on 23rd May 1908, into a wealthy family, Schwarzenbach was always a nonconformist. Her bisexual mother Renée, the daughter of a Swiss general and descendant of the Bismarck family, dressed little Annemarie in boys’ clothes from an early age. She wore men’s clothes for the rest of her life, and was often mistaken for a man, favouring tailored suits, fitted sweaters and collared shirts – a wardrobe that both reflected her conservative background and the bohemian lifestyle she later pursued. She had a taste for haute couture too; while in the throes of a passionate affair with the daughter of the ambassador of Turkey to Persia, she would steal and wear her lover’s gowns.

This year, Schwarzenbach’s incredible style informed Givenchy’s Spring/Summer 2019 collection. The house’s artistic director, Clare Waight Keller, directly referenced images of the “hauntingly handsome writer”, presenting tuxedo jackets, leather motorcycle jackets tucked into army trousers, and elegant gowns that reflected the bias-cut 1930s fashion – and perhaps those stolen frocks. “I was researching silhouettes, and came across this spectacular looking woman, Annemarie Schwarzenbach, who dressed sometimes as a man and sometimes as a woman but always in a modest, elegant way,” explains Waight Keller. “It spoke to me, as it aligns perfectly with what we’re doing at Givenchy. I find the idea of not being defined by a gender in the way you express yourself through clothes extremely modern. Her sense of freedom in the way she would present herself as a different character from one day to the next is highly inspiring. I also love the message about acceptance and tolerance her story gives: she was at peace with her androgyny, and so many years later, it still inspires people like me to keep on colliding codes.”

Schwarzenbach’s legacy goes beyond fashion. A talented writer, she published her first book in 1931 when she was just 23 and, after a brief stint in Berlin where she enjoyed the last hurrah of the Weimar Republic (according to her friend Ruth Landshoff, “she lived dangerously. She drank too much. She never went to sleep before dawn”), she embarked on a career as a photojournalist. Producing 365 articles and 50 photo-reports for major Swiss, German and American newspapers and magazines in the space of just nine years, she travelled to Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Iraq and Persia, and later Afghanistan, the USA, the Baltic states and Russia, often unaccompanied.

Her personal life was no less frenetic. A committed anti-fascist, she helped her friend Klaus Mann, son of Thomas Mann, finance the literary review Die Sammlung, which published exiled German writers; and she used her diplomatic passport – a by-product of her marriage-of-convenience to the gay French ambassador to Persia, Claude Clarac – to rescue anti-fascists in Austria. But her political commitment resulted in unbearable tensions with her Nazi-sympathising family, culminating in 1934 with her first suicide attempt.

And then there was the matter of her morphine addiction. A user from her early 20s, Schwarzenbach spent much of her life struggling to kick the habit. In fact, that audacious car journey to Afghanistan in 1940 was another failed attempt to clean up; her co-traveller Maillart chronicled the difficult experience in the book All the Roads Are Open: The Afghan Journey. That same year, the Manns introduced Schwarzenbach to smitten novelist Carson McCullers. Seventy years later, Suzanne Vega wrote the song Lover, Beloved about McCullers’ unrequited passion: “Everyone wants you, everyone loves you, how can I possibly compete?”

The mounting stress of this doomed affair and the death of Schwarzenbach’s father led to a second suicide bid, this time in New York. She was promptly admitted to a psychiatric ward, diagnosed with schizophrenia and subjected to weeks of barbaric treatment. Schwarzenbach escaped, was hospitalised again and then forced out of the US, winding her way back to Switzerland via Portugal, the Belgian Congo and Morocco. Tragically, once home she suffered a serious head injury from a bicycle accident that resulted in more hospital and more morphine. Her mother Renée refused to allow visitors – even her estranged husband Claude was turned away. Two months later, Schwarzenbach passed away, aged 34.

In a final twisted act, Renée destroyed most of her daughter’s diaries and letters, believing they shamed the family. Thankfully, one of Schwarzenbach’s friends held on to a collection of photographs and writings, and in the process saved Annemarie Schwarzenbach from the mists of obscurity.

Clare Waight Keller on the Angelic Gay Icon That Inspired Givenchy S/S19. By  Ted Stansfield. Another Man  ,  May 1 , 2019.

Last month, at the SS19 womenswear shows, androgyny and ambiguity reigned. Across all four fashion capitals, the boundaries of gender continued to blur; from Gareth Pugh’s voguing ball, to Margiela’s first co-ed runway, Hedi Slimane’s gender-neutral suiting at Céline, and Louis Vuitton’s cast of trans and non-binary models, the season marked a welcome further push towards inclusivity.

At Givenchy, creative director Clare Waight Keller celebrated the androgynous beauty and pioneering spirit of Swiss writer and photographer Annemarie Schwarzenbach (as well as Lou Reed and Nico of the Velvet Underground). Not only did she send a collection made up of high-waisted, masculine trousers, languid silk shirts, and relaxed tailored styles down the runway, she also enlisted a number of models who bore more than a passing resemblance to Schwarzenbach to wear it.

In recent years, Schwarzenbach’s distinctive and mysterious glamour has captured the contemporary queer imagination, given her unique history. Born in Zurich in 1908, her life was one of contradictions: her struggle with physical fragility and opioid addiction co-existed with an adventurous streak and proclivity for global travel, while admirers and detractors have placed her on opposing sides of the artistic rebellion against Hitler in the 1930s.

In terms of style, her presentation was deliberately neither feminine or masculine, and, much like the SS19 Givenchy collection, instead walked the line somewhere in-between. With her short hair and understated wardrobe of slim trousers, neat shirts, and knitted sweaters, her beauty sat in stark contrast to what was deemed glamorous in the 30s and 40s, and she was all the more enigmatic for it. Captivating many who came into contact with her, she had many affairs with women throughout her short life. On a reporting trip to the Pyrenees, fellow photographer Marianne Breslauer took a picture of her, and wrote that “She was neither a man nor a woman, but an angel. An archangel.”

But who exactly was Annemarie Schwarzenbach, and what is it about her that so drew her admirers – and the contemporary queer, for whom she is a total pin-up – towards her?

Born Annemarie Minna Renée Schwarzenbach in 1908, Renée Schwarzenbach was raised as a boy near Lake Zurich by her father, who’d made his fortune in the silk industry and her mother, Renée Schwarzenbach-Mille, who descended from German aristocracy and was openly bisexual. Renée carried out an affair with German soprano Emmy Krüger, while also pursuing her passion for horses and photography. Annemarie took after her mother with her passion for adventure and her free-spirited nature, but their relationship was often fraught. Renée’s political loyalty to the reconstruction of Germany under Hitler during World War II, and the Schwarzenbachs’ sympathy for far-right Swiss Fronts, led to the deterioration of the familial bond. Annemarie denounced the fascist regime, moving with a circle that included Jews and political refugees exiled from the troubled country.

Schwarzenbach’s wanderings took her all over the globe. Despite a sensitive constitution, she cultivated a vast travelogue in her short life, and explored the Middle East, Asia, Europe, and America extensively. Having left behind a troubled home life, the photographer and writer moved first to Berlin, where she threw herself into the vibrant, bohemian nightlife and a hedonistic existence of drink and drugs, before marrying French diplomat Achille-Claude Clarac (who was also homosexual) to obtain a French diplomatic passport. The pair settled for a short time in Tehran, before Schwarzenbach left for Kabul, Lisbon, and the Balkans, never staying in one place too long.

“Fear makes us stubborn: we call reality only what we can grasp with our hands. War in other countries? Just twelve hours, twelve weeks from our borders? God forbid. But the journey ever so slightly lifts the veil over the mystery of space and a city with a magical, unreal name… becomes real the instant we set foot there and touch it with our living breath,” she wrote in her 1940 book All the Roads Are Open: The Afghan Journey, which documents her trip to Afghanistan with fellow writer Ella Maillart. The previous year, the pair had become the first women to travel the country’s Northern Road, as the fled the storm brewing in Europe in a beaten-up Ford.  

Schwarzenbach’s photographs offer unique insight into her singular vision. Best known, perhaps, for the images she captured of the Hitler Youth in Vienna or her self-portraits, she also extensively documented the people and sites she encountered during her wide travels. For the queer sensibility, it’s photos of Annemarie herself that most enchant though. Slim and pale, with deep-set eyes that seem to simultaneously look at and past the viewer, American novelist Carson McCullers wrote that “she had a face that would haunt me for the rest of my life”. She was often seen wearing a suit and a necktie, always with an unusual air of mystery. It’s likely this that so enchanted her queer admirers then, and continues to do so now. At a time when homosexuality was widely castigated, Schwarzenbach blazed a trail for living freely and unapologetically.

Schwarzenbach struggled with mental illness and substance abuse, both of which deeply impacted her outlook on life and work. Though she eventually died after a tragic bicycle accident in 1942, at just 34, Schwarzenbach’s chronic illnesses defined her life nearly as much as her adventurous spirit. Her trip to Afghanistan with Ella Maillart marked a decisive low in her physical and mental health, following a stint in rehab for a morphine addiction. Her physical fragility and the effect it had on her usual charisma eventually exhausted Maillart, who remarked honestly that she was sick of ‘Christina’ (as she referred to Annemarie) by the end of the journey. Maillart and Schwarzenbach’s progressive ideas about travel and photography also served as covers for the various vulnerabilities of traveling women in that era. They railed against the presumption of women’s physical inferiority via direct writing and photographs as well as their adopted, androgynous style of dress.

Annemarie Schwarzenbach’s influence is far further-reaching than just the Givenchy catwalk. Dressed by her mother in boys clothing throughout her childhood, she retained a preference for menswear throughout her life, and cultivated a style that still resonates today. Despite the physical tolls of her depression and addiction, Schwarzenbach blazed a path down the middle of more than just the binary between man and woman: she cultivated an intrepid persona, nearly unheard of for women, even as her body and mind presented untoward obstacles. At a time when women are fighting for equality, justice, and increasingly, simply to be heard, Schwarzenbach’s endurance in the name of curiosity and discovery is more than just a reference point – it’s an inspiration.

Revisiting the life of trailblazing queer heroine Annemarie Schwarzenbach. By Alexandra Julienne. Dazed , November 2, 2018. 

It was the summer of 1939, in the last weeks before war would sweep across Europe, and Annemarie Schwarzenbach and Ella K. Maillart were embarking on a 4,000-mile drive from Geneva to Kabul, Afghanistan, with the goal of curing Schwarzenbach of her morphine addiction.

At first it seemed as if this quixotic plan might be working: As the two women, both journalists and authors, made their way from Switzerland, through Italy and on into Yugoslavia, they stopped at roadside campsites and small village inns, choosing to steer clear of towns and cities where drugs might be available.

Indeed, one night, as they slept under the stars outside Belgrade, they were awakened by the sounds of village men cutting hay. Schwarzenbach, normally frail and intense, “seemed to revive,” Maillart wrote.

But then, further east, in Bulgaria, at a hotel in Sofia, Schwarzenbach had her first slip. She woke up “seedy,” pale and vomiting, Maillart wrote. That she was using drugs again became clear when Maillart discovered “the brittle glass of an empty ampoule” in the bathroom.

The women went on to endure a tense drive into Turkey, barely speaking, until, in Istanbul, Schwarzenbach turned to her friend and asked, “Why do you bother about me?”

“Why do I bother about you? … I don’t know,” Maillart recalled replying. “I can’t say it is because I love you, because I detest you when I see such gifts as yours spoilt as they are.”

The women would make it to Kabul but ultimately fail in their mission: Schwarzenbach fell back into old habits, and Maillart left her in frustration, going on to India and leaving Schwarzenbach in the hands of a pair of French archaeologists.

Schwarzenbach eventually made her way back to Europe by boat, and three years later she died in a bicycle accident in the Swiss mountains. But Maillart, who went on to enjoy a long career as a travel writer, did not forget her. In “The Cruel Way: Switzerland to Afghanistan in a Ford, 1939,” her account of their journey published in 1947, she would portray her friend as both tragic and transcendent.

And she would recant the declaration she had made in the car.

“I think I loved her profoundly,” she wrote.

Schwarzenbach was an accomplished journalist, novelist and photographer whose work was in many ways overshadowed by the drama of her life.

An heiress, she was born in Zurich on May 23, 1908, the daughter of a wealthy businessman. Her mother was the daughter of a general and a descendant of the Bismarck family. Early on, her mother, who was bisexual, dressed Annemarie in boys’ clothes. (Schwarzenbach would enjoy wearing men’s clothes for the rest of her life.)

Her androgynous glamour left a strong impression on the intellectual circles in which she mingled. The novelist Thomas Mann, whose children were close to Schwarzenbach, called her a “ravaged angel.” And the unrequited passion she inspired in the American author Carson McCullers would lead to a Suzanne Vega song, “Lover, Beloved,” written from McCullers’s point of view more than seven decades later. (“Everyone wants you / Everyone loves you / How can I possibly compete?”)

The photographer Marianne Breslauer, who made memorable images of Schwarzenbach, echoed Mann when she said that at first glance Schwarzenbach appeared to be neither man nor woman but “like the Archangel Gabriel.”

Schwarzenbach spent much of her adult life as an addict. She had numerous tumultuous love affairs with women. She had a complicated relationship with her family, who had Nazi sympathies. And she fell out with the Mann family, who thought her anti-fascism efforts were inadequate because she refused to cut ties with her Nazi-supporting relatives. It was an estrangement that hurt her profoundly, in part because she was in love with Thomas Mann’s daughter Erika Mann.

Schwarzenbach attempted suicide twice. After she died of her bicycle accident injuries at 34 on Nov. 15, 1942, in the Swiss town of Sils im Engadin — she had been showing off by riding with no hands — her mother, defying her daughter’s will, destroyed Schwarzenbach’s papers for fear of how they might reflect on the family.

Schwarzenbach’s work — ranging from striking photographs of Hitler youth to novels, from critiques of Swiss neutrality to travelogues from Central Asia — would not be rediscovered in her native Switzerland until the late 1980s, when the country began re-evaluating its World War II history. (Much of her written work is unavailable in English.)

One of her earliest books, “Lyric Novella,” tells the story of a young man from a wealthy family not unlike Schwarzenbach’s who rejects his family’s plans for him in order to pursue his obsession with a nightclub singer. The novel, said the book’s translator, Lucy Renner Jones, is a pitch-perfect portrait of an era in which to be a member of the upper class was to be a slave to family duty.

For all her seeming fragility, Schwarzenbach was adventurous. One of her best-known books, “Death in Persia,” was based on the years she lived in Tehran as a diplomat’s wife (a marriage of convenience; her husband was also gay). During that period she fell in love and had an affair with a Turkish diplomat’s daughter.

On her travels with Maillart from Switzerland to Afghanistan, the two women engaged in high-speed chases with the police in Azerbaijan and ran away from officials near the Iran-Afghanistan border. (Maillart died in her mountain chalet in Switzerland in 1997 and received an obituary in The Times.)

Schwarzenbach also spent time in the United States as a freelance reporter and photographer, traveling in the Deep South and across Pennsylvania, focusing on the mining and steel industries there. Her photographs from those travels reveal a journalist intensely interested in the social dynamics around her.

And though Mann and others saw Schwarzenbach as a beautiful but troubled soul, they may have been buying what she was selling. She knew very well what effect she had on people and cultivated her public persona carefully, according to her great-nephew Alexis Schwarzenbach, a historian who has written a book about her. “That was part of the package,” he said.

In the decades since she was rediscovered, Schwarzenbach has become something of a cult figure in Europe, though just what she represents remains unsettled. To some she was an anti-fascist; to others, her anti-fascism did not go far enough. To some she was an early L.B.G.T. heroine; to others she was remarkable for her refusal to be defined by any gender conventions.

In one of the most famous images of her taken by Breslauer, Schwarzenbach, in her mid-20s, wears a fitted sweater over a collared shirt. Her hair close cropped, she stares straight at the camera. She is unsmiling, her face half obscured by shadow, her expression languorous. It’s a remarkable face, onto which many things can be projected.

Overlooked No More: Annemarie Schwarzenbach, Author, Photographer and ‘Ravaged Angel’. By Alicia P.q. Wittmeyer. The New York Times , October 10, 2018.

Buried in the folds of his-story, Annemarie Schwarzenbach was a widely published lesbian author. Born in 1908, Schwarzenbach died young, at the age of 34. By then, she’d attempted suicide twice, after years of self-harm. Schwarzenbach defied sexist norms. Those ‘norms’ were sexist and damaging then, and they’re still sexist and damaging now.

Annemarie Schwarzenbach was haunted by a world that considered her incorrectly female—So why have there been so many attempts to revise her story, recategorize and relabel her, postmortem, only to say the same? It’s not only unethical, it robs lesbians of what few pages we have in the his-story books. If we can be revised after we’re dead, by the very thing we fight against while we’re alive, then what are we fighting for?

Dazed recently reported that Schwarzenbach “was raised as a boy.” This is a prime example of the ways in which things have been taken out of context to perpetuate sexist ideas. There’s been a media push to rebrand Schwarzenbach as ‘on the outskirts of womanhood.’

Although historically, girls were forced to abide by the rigid rules of ‘gender’ (stereotypes designated based on sex), Schwarzenbach’s parents didn’t force her to conform to ‘norms.’ On the contrary… As a child, she sported short hair, and wore comfortable clothes that were (and still are) categorized as ‘boy’s clothes.’ It’s been said that she was raised “like a boy,” not “as a boy.” And in the context of that time period, that statement refers to the stereotypes, roles and freedoms that were only granted to boys.

Until 1987, Schwarzenbach was forgotten. Her great nephew, historian Alexis Schwarzenbach, didn’t know much about her, until he discovered one of her novels on a bookshelf.

“I went to my grandmother and said, ‘I didn’t know grandfather’s sister was a writer’. And she said, ‘yes, she was a writer, and a lesbian and a morphine addict.’ ”—Swiss Info 

The mainstream media’s erasure of the word “lesbian,” is a major point of contention that the lesbian community has expressed, time and time again. In a recent article by The New York Times, about Schwarzenbach, the word “lesbian” is never used… Not even once. The article refers to Schwarzenbach as “gay,” and her husband as “also gay,” and calls Schwarzenbach an “L.B.G.T. heroine.”

By the age of 23, Schwarzenbach published her first novel, which was very well received. In ten years, she published several novels and produced more than 300 articles, and 5,000 photographs from her journeys across the world. Annemarie Schwarzenbach was finally unearthed from his-story, only to be buried in sexism and lesphobia, once again.

Schwarzenbach is one of the many women who’ve been resurrected and popularized in mainstream culture to bolster false narratives. Narratives that not only maintain the regressive idea that there’s a wrong way to be a girl, a wrong way to be a woman, but also further enshrine lesphobia.

Continuing to equate ‘femininity’ with ‘womanhood’ is about as sexist as it gets. And yet, here we are. Women who dare to claw their way out of the man-made box (of roles and expectations), deserve to be celebrated—Not reinvented postmortem, in order to further cement the very stereotypes that put them in that box to begin with.

Though Schwarzenbach’s beauty caught the eye of men and women alike, her ‘androgynous’ style left her vulnerable to regular abuse. She was a trailblazer who defied sexist expectations—But for women who don’t look and behave the way people think a woman “should” look and behave, the price is often high.

Schwarzenbach spent most of her adult life trying to escape. She wrote, took photos, traveled, drank, used drugs, and was known to regularly stay awake till the break of dawn.

She also kept away from her family, one of the wealthiest families in Switzerland. She had major political disagreements with her mother, who was a Nazi sympathizer, known to be domineering. Her mother was bisexual, and her father tolerated his wife’s extramarital affairs with women.

After Schwarzenbach had a brief affair with a German writer, Erika Mann, she settled into the Mann family’s home and became an ‘adopted’ part of their family. She spent a good deal of time hanging out with Erika’s gay brother, Klaus Mann, in Berlin. Schwarzenbach started using drugs and was introduced to morphine.

Annemarie Schwarzenbach and the Mann family, were vehemently anti-Nazi. Her association with the family caused major conflict with her parents—Especially her mother, who took issue with Schwarzenbach’s circle, which included Jewish people and political refugees.

Like many lesbians (who don’t conform to norms), Schwarzenbach, who was regularly dehumanized, was driven to self-harm. Her addiction haunted her. And in her mid-twenties, she attempted suicide for the first time, after a scandalous affair with the daughter of a Turkish Ambassador. Her family was embarrassed by the suicide attempt, rather than concerned.

Shortly thereafter, she married a French diplomat, Claude Clarac. It was a marriage of convenience that not only provided her with a diplomatic passport (which allowed her to travel freely), but also covered up the fact that they were both gay. But after only five months, she grew restless and left him to travel. Further romantic involvements with women and the resulting persecution, would eventually lead to her downfall.

The persecution she faced, is still alive and well today. “Lesbian” is still a word people hesitate to utter. And the mainstream has continually sanctioned the abuse of ‘butch’ lesbians—Still casting them as unflattering caricatures, no more than a ‘she’s really a man’ punchline. The sexism and lesphobia behind the abuse, is not only a reflection of fragile masculinity, it’s a reflection of how deeply ingrained misogyny is in most people. The resulting cruelty comes with real world consequences.

While the mainstream media has a long history of obsessively trying to expunge ‘masculine’ lesbians from the category of womanhood, ‘androgynous’ women are quite often the epitome of female beauty, the best womankind has to offer.

The media frequently uses an inaccurately translated quote, taken out of context, to push the idea that Schwarzenbach was something other than a woman because of her style—“She was neither a man nor a woman, but an angel, an archangel.” Revisionists have used this version, of a poetic statement (spoken in admiration, by fellow photographer Marianne Breslauer), to build a new narrative about Annemarie Schwarzenbach.

The sexist notion that girls and women should inherently want to dress and behave a certain way, is encoded in us from the time we are born. It’s in everything around us, from movies, to magazines. It’s the very reason women like Schwarzenbach are being revised and ‘othered,’ postmortem. Many people never realize the depths to which we’ve been universally brainwashed.

Annemarie Schwarzenbach was known to be introspective, sensitive and passionate. In her photos, she appears incredibly stylish. Women never needed men to tell us what was sexy—We already knew.

Schwarzenbach tried to run, but no road would ever lead to the escape of her demons. In 1936, she went on a road trip, in the United States, with American photographer Barbara Hamilton-Wright, and documented the industrial regions of the Northeast during the Great Depression. The following year, they went again, and she documented the Deep South. The rift between Schwarzenbach and her family grew.

In 1939, Schwarzenbach tried again to overcome addiction, by going on a road trip with fellow writer, Ella Maillart, from Geneva to Afganistan. Eventually, she got ahold of a morphine substitute and they parted ways. Schwarzenbach then had a love affair with Ella Maillart’s married friend, French archaeologist Ria Hackin, causing such a scandal, she was forbidden to travel in Turkmenistan.

She went back to the United States to work with the Mann siblings, on a committee that helped refugees from Europe. There she met writer Carson McCullers, who reportedly fell head over heels for Schwarzenbach. “She had a face that I knew would haunt me for the rest of my life,” Carson McCullers said.

Let’s take a quick detour here, because McCullers is also among a growing number of women who’ve had their lives revised, postmortem. A writer in The New Yorker, explained her decision to write Carson McCullers as a “man,” in a play and in a movie, stating, “I started to notice that McCullers had issues with her gender…Her given name was Lula, but she took on her middle name, Carson…” I’m not sure what this proves… My friends called me Jay, ages 6-12. In high school, I was called Little Joe. Siri calls me Big Daddy. My current sign out is JD. And I also go by the nickname Romeo.

As further ‘proof,’ the writer goes on to say “[Carson McCullers] wore men’s clothes, and was often photographed in a suit. Her main protagonists were young, boyish girls with men’s names: Frankie and Mick.” I wear ‘men’s clothes.’ I’ve been photographed in a suit. My protagonists have so-called ‘men’s names.’ Check, check, and check.

The writer then concludes that “…had [Carson McCullers] been alive today… she might have been living as a transgender man.” Adding, “She did once tell Capote, ‘I think I was born a boy,’ which doesn’t, in and of itself, mean much—but how many of us, as little girls, have never had that thought? Most.” On the contrary, most of us have had that thought. In fact, my wife and I don’t know any lesbians who didn’t have that experience—It’s a common theme with young lesbians, as we grapple with sexist expectations, limitations and same-sex attraction.

Are all women who break stereotypes going to be up for revision, postmortem? If we’re going on the basis of sexist stereotypes, every lesbian I know could be recategorized after death.

Annemarie Schwarzenbach is summed up in one line, in this same article in The New Yorker: “McCullers was deeply in love with a Swiss journalist, a lesbian drug addict named Annemarie Schwarzenbach.”

“A lesbian drug addict.” The way in which our history is so thoughtlessly mangled and relayed by mainstream media, is appalling. Schwarzenbach, a tortured soul and brilliant icon, was so much more than “a lesbian drug addict.”

Schwarzenbach never became involved with Carson McCullers. At the time, she was involved in a troubled relationship with a married woman, Margot von Opel, and she still had feelings for Erika Mann, who cut her out of her life.

Annemarie Schwarzenbach’s mental health further declined, and she attempted suicide once again. This landed her in a psychiatric hospital in 1940, where she was held, until 1941. After Schwarzenbach was released, she returned to Switzerland. She then went to the Belgian Congo of Central Africa, after which she took a two month trip to visit Claude Clarac.

On September 7th, in 1942, Annemarie Schwarzenbach fell from her bike, in the Alps of Switzerland, and struck her head. She was in a coma for three days and she woke with amnesia. Her mother wouldn’t permit Claude or any of her friends to see her. She was kept in the family home in Switzerland, where she didn’t recognize anyone, and died nine weeks later, in November of 1942. Her mother set all of her daughter’s letters and diaries on fire, but her published works remain.

Annemarie Schwarzenbach Died Defying Sexist ‘Norms,’ Only to be Redefined, Postmortem, By Sexist ‘Norms’. By Julia Diana Roberston . The Velvet Chronicle,  March 28, 2019.

Lace, Nostalgia and Craft : Fashion Designer Olivier Theyskens

Olivier Theyskens’ signature is sumptuous fantasy balanced with solemn formal rigor. The designer will inaugurate "In Praesentia," a rich carte blanche display of his imaginative universe, at Cité de la dentelle et de la mode, a.k.a. the Museum of Lace and Fashion, curated by Lydia Kamitsis (June 15-January 5). Located in the northern French city of Calais, the venue has previously featured exhibitions on Hubert de Givenchy, Cristóbal Balenciaga, and Iris van Herpen.

In successions of theatrical vitrines, Theyskens silhouettes mix with in-house historical garments: pairing forms, colors, and materials across decades and even centuries. The selected pieces are beautifully mixed with vintage industrial tools — a lace press, patinated bobbin boards, trestles, registries of lace samples — that double as sculptural totems. The show provides an authentic and striking tribute to Theyskens’ recurring creative obsessions.

The Belgian designer precociously started his own label in 1997, after quitting fashion school. Over the next two decades, he fashioned lavish gowns at Rochas and Nina Ricci, then contemporary separates for Theory. Theyskens revived his namesake line in 2016 and, since February, his Paris atelier has been headquartered in a stunning historic building. The ground floor was built in the 19th century, for an aristocrat during the French Directory; upstairs, amidst architecture from a later period, he and his team work in an Art Nouveau jewel with dark wood panelling and stained glass windows (The setting is pulled down to earth thanks to schoolchildren screeching through recess in an adjacent courtyard).

Theyskens, sporting a black T-shirt that read “Dirty Mind” on one side, and “Clean Oceans” on the other, discussed his insatiable appetite for drama, his wariness of big brands re-writing fashion history, and the pleasures of deconstructing his own work.

You had an exhibition in 2017-2018 at MoMU in Antwerp. How will this show be different?

When the MoMU asked me to do a retrospective, I always imagined it as something you do at the end of your career — and I feel like I’m in the middle! That exhibition was purely chronological; we were featuring absolutely every show I ever did and some key outfits. The visitor would see my evolution collection by collection, plus some fashion sketches, photographs, and personal documents. It was a very classical approach to showing one designer’s path. Soon after the exhibition ended, I got this solicitation from the museum in Calais. I believe by seeing the exhibition of the MoMU, they linked my work to theirs. Their permanent exhibition is about the history of the French industry of lace… I started off by using vintages laces, and reconnected with lace when I started at Rochas — it was their logo. And the museum is celebrating its tenth anniversary during the exhibition.

You’re entwining pieces from their collection into your show.

I felt key elements in their conservation department could dialogue well with parts of my work. It was important for me that the experience of looking at my work for this exhibition be different than what I’d done two years before. I went to Calais a lot — they have clothes from the 18th to the 20th century, but they also have a department of conservation for industrial tools: machines, furniture connected to the industry. I thought that was interesting to show, and they had never exhibited it. I was looking at my own archives without the lens of "this was a great outfit from the show" — it was about the components, and things that didn't make it to shows, that I edited out; I felt some of them now had some resonance. I’m showing more the métier than what people have already seen. The way we could define a new approach in my work was to really dismantle all my methodology and focus on the key elements in my work — black, bias-cut, the feel of nostalgia… We created links between these themes and what I found in the museum. My methodology has something retro, a way of designing clothes like a couturier. With the stuff from the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th, you see the link — I’m in continuity with the past. That was interesting — to feel you’re a bit part of that family.

How do you negotiate that balance between nostalgia and reinvention? Looking back on the history of fashion, but also moving it forward?

Even when I do something new, I can have this vibe that makes you think of the past. My last show was definitely retrofuturist, in my mind, and there were things that were definitely connecting it to the ‘40s, but at the same time the clothes themselves, from my point of view, were new. They didn't look derivative. I think that the nostalgia is in my inspiration — it is fueled by these feelings of watching some elegant past — movies, paintings — that there was a beauty to the way people would dress, which then appears in the sketches. Already as kid, I would draw silhouettes that would feel costume-y, that looked 18th century. I’ve always been like that. And sometimes I love to have something that feels disconnected from anything: the novelty of a new way to create a shape or a cut.

What are some of those implicit influences?

I like artists with melancholy. I appreciate pop artists — I’m open-minded — but I don't personally feel connected to that. I love Louise Bourgeois, though never did an ode to her. I always loved Hans Bellmer, and one time I decided to integrate pieces of his photographic work in my collection. This is something I had never done. I integrated them not for valeur ajouté [added value] but like a real ingredient: with discretion and respect.

Are you yourself someone who goes to fashion exhibitions?

The first time I started seeing fashion exhibitions, I was disappointed about how fashion looks in a museum. It’s very… [pauses] fashion is generated in motion. I remember how much I was fantasizing on the idea of beautiful dresses. In Spain, in the 2000s, I saw an exhibition with some outfits from the 19th century … I saw how small the dresses were, and there wasn't this drama. There was something regional about it. Even Versailles-type dresses with the baskets on the side that are like two meters wide… I’ve been disappointed. I’ve also seen exhibitions that were amazing, where you see how beautiful the clothes are… I loved the Vionnet exhibition.

What about splashier exhibitions like, say, Dior?

I went to the Dior one but it was painful because of how many people there were. Painful. And there was so much. I wish I’d been able to stop in front of the things I truly admire. In my early 20s, I read Christian Dior’s autobiography, and it made me love his work. That exhibition had all the key pieces, which was amazing. I was aware that it was lucky, but I couldn't experience this appreciation. And I regret it. It was too splashy. With the décor! And this! And that! This overlooooad… you just think, today, there are players in the fashion industry. The marketing surrounding these brands is rewriting the culture and the way we see 20th century fashion.

Rewriting the culture in what sense?

When I was at Rochas, it was so hard to find elements about the house and its history. There were a few documents; you couldn't find anything on the Internet. There hadn't been archives or preservation work. I had a small black-and-white book from the ‘80s, and the archives of the perfume, which inspired me so much. Meeting people from fashion museums, meeting Hélène Rochas… I had so much respect for the legacy and what Marcel Rochas brought, actually, to fashion. It’s as much, if not more, than some of the famous brands today. But no one will think that because we only see Chanel here, Dior here, and that’s all. It makes me nervous sometimes, because I am aware of how much other people brought. Good curators can really put everything back in order — but that’s not the splash. That’s the history. Most books are done by brands on their own terms, with a very cleaned-up fashion history. I always take distance from that. Christian Dior, when he launched, he was in his 40s. He had been a pattern-maker for different designers. He, apparently, admired Rochas dresses during the 1940s; during the war, there were already these dresses cinched at the waist in silk taffeta. That silhouette was not absolutely new—it was just a way to bring it back, and enhance it, with talent, with a pure sense of the joy of beauty. There were precursors, and visionaries. And this you will not read in a Dior book today — I imagine! [laughs]

What about your own narrative? Gothic and Romantic are without fail the adjectives associated with your work. Do you like those associations?

I accept that — in essence, I’m first and foremost a melancholic person. I know it because of how I was as a child. I always loved drama, terrible things — I could see beauty in there. I did not fancy funny things that much. What I bring out is some sensitivity… it connects with something dark, something nostalgic, something fragile, something haughty.

Would you say your vision of femininity has remained constant over the past 20 years?

It goes back even further, like 40 years [laughs]. I feel there is a Theyskenian girl. I can never say there is a muse — my inspiration comes from things that aren't just physical, but impressions. When I sketch, it’s a female incarnation of a sensation, an emotion. I spent so much of my childhood imagining myself as a girl.

That’s interesting. Does the conversation about gender fluidity today change your thinking in any way about being a womenswear designer?

A little bit. I admire the youth, who have the bravery to get there. My parents let us express ourselves, and as a child I was so obsessed with dresses and clothes I wanted to be a princess, to have the drama of posing with that dress. In my case, it was a fantasy; not the true will of having that identity. I went to a dance school, and I was imagining being a ballerina because I thought they were beautiful and elegant. It was for the visual of it, of being a ballerina. But the kids that dare to go there and work the identity that is right for them? I can't stand hearing 60-year-old gays saying: ‘We paved the way.’ Yes, but still today — it’s a challenge for these kids. It’s not easy. Take a train and just go to a regional spot! Might be more difficult. But I think it’s really good: I always draw a girl, but it can blend, eventually, because I admire the body of a man. It can be a grey zone.

In terms of wanting to maximize drama, have you done costumes?

I did some costumes! In Brussels, I did almost 300 costumes for an opera. And it was an amazing experience because of the diversity of the physiques. There was a chorus of 80 people, men and women. They displayed all the shapes a human can have — but they had similar costumes, and so I had to adapt and fit all of that with real people. And I enjoyed it so much, whether I was fitting a large short man with legs a bit in the shape of an X…. Your eye just adapts instantly to the person. At Theory we did made-to-measure for endorsements. A football player has huge legs. You reconsider all the time how you make clothes. It’s great to collaborate on special projects. You use your brain differently.

Designer Olivier Theyskens on Drama, Reinvention, and Finding Beauty in Terrible Things. By Sarah Moroz.   i-D , June 14, 2019. 

Olivier Theyskens, the Belgian designer known for creating rarefied, darkly romantic clothing, describes working with lace as “a habit”. The centuries-old fabric is found throughout his oeuvre: from his first collection Gloomy Trips, which featured shards of antique Chantilly lace collected by his grandmother, to his tenures at Theory, Nina Ricci and Rochas – he revived the latter’s moribund signature lace, spending seven months with a French lacemaker to make sure it was just right. And, over a decade on, at his eponymous label, where Theyskens now works solely (his most recent show in February in Paris saw balconette bodices, hook-and-eye blouses and gowns in various iterations of the fabric). “It’s always captivated me,” he tells AnOther. “It is so intimate, so feminine.”

This weekend, a new exhibition, Olivier Theyskens: In Praesentia, opens at the Museum for Lace and Fashion in Calais. The city, which sits on France’s northern coastline, is known for producing lace of all types: from abundantly detailed Chantilly to lighter-than-air French tulle, and much between – houses, such as Chanel, Valentino and Dior, all use lace from factories in the region. The museum, which itself is housed in the abandoned Boulart lace factory, collects the spoils of centuries of French lace-making: clothing, furnishings and ephemera, including the machinery and tools long used to create it. In Praesentia gave Theyskens access to the museum’s entire archive – whether on display or otherwise – asking him to weave a narrative between past and present, between his work and the numerous artefacts in the museum’s collection.

“I had just done a retrospective in at MoMu [ModeMuseum, a fashion museum in Antwerp, Belgium] when the Calais museum contacted me to do something on my work,” explains Theyskens of how the exhibition began. “I never thought I’d do another exhibition, but I was interested because they talked about a new approach – at MoMu it was very chronological, a reflection, show after show after show of what I did – but here, they were interested in my creative process, and work with lace. They gave me carte blanche to do whatever I liked with their collection; to start a conversation between past and present.”

The resulting exhibition is what the designer deems an “emotional” experience, an attempt to replicate the visceral appeal of the fabric itself. “Lace has always captivated me, even when I very young. That sexy side of lace – like lingerie – and how most lace was always hidden,” he says. “When I was growing up my grandmother used to collect little bits of antique lace offcuts for me, and since I have always used it in my collections.” In Praesentia, then, diverts from typical exhibitions on a designer’s work – instead, it is a series of reveries from Theyskens on various themes, the colour black, illusion, nostalgia and the corset among them.

One new, unexpected fascination Theyskens discovered was with the machinery of lace production itself: in the exhibition, mannequins might balance on old worker’s stools; bobbins and boxes might be stacked alongside a towering heelless boot, designed by Theyskens while at Nina Ricci. “I found myself interested in some of the pieces connected to the activity of making lace: the furniture, tools,” says the desinger. “When I was working at Rochas, and I would go to the factories, I was overwhelmed by the environment. The lace is very delicate, very intricate, subtle, fragile, meticulous, and the environment is extremely brutalist: the machines are very heavy, very ancient, there is a lot of noise, it is very dusty, and I kind of like this contrast.”

It is a contrast he has struck in his own work, too, where clothing often teeters somewhere between brutality and beauty: his early collections hinge on just this, combining the excess of 17th- and 18th-century costume with industrial elements – like the hook-and-eyelet fastening, one of his signatures – or fetishistic understones – gimp masks, leather, severe corsetry and the like. Theyskens’ own renown came on the back of Madonna – another artist astute at balancing brutality and beauty – who wore a corseted yellow Theyskens gown for the VH1 Fashion Awards in 1999, taken from only his second collection. Hook-and-eyelet fastenings criss-cross the satin skirt, like it has been slashed apart, and stitched back together.

“I think a lot has changed since then, we were never thinking about creating content,” Theyskens says of that moment. “The fashion world was a lot smaller, we were working with people who we knew, who were experts. But I like change, I never thought that the industry wouldn’t move on: I love that in the history of 20th-century fashion, there are such big changes between the 1950s and 60s, the 60s and 70s, the 70s and the 80s; the reappearance of designers, the disappearance of others. It’s always been about change.

Change might be on Theyskens’ mind, but an exhibition like this provides a chance for a designer to take stock, and look back: Theyskens recently rearranged his archive, which had previously been in storage in Belgium and not looked at for many years. Within it, he discovered a wealth of pieces that even he didn’t immediately recognise, including several garments which, for one reason or another, did not make it into the final runway collection for a given season. Some of these will appear In Praesentia: “I’m always pressured when I put collections together to take out things that don’t quite fit in the story; [with this exhibition] I’m happy to work in a way which isn’t just about ‘full looks’ or collections,” he says.

Such an approach makes the range of In Praesentia far wider than a typical retrospective: instead, it provides a brief journey into the frenetic, resourceful workings of a creative mind. “It’s a dialogue between past and present, between new and old ways of working, of nostalgia and craft,” Theyskens says. “When I make or put things together I draw on emotion, or feeling. Sometimes, I want to put the intellect aside.”

Olivier Theyskens: In Praesentia is on at Museum for Lace and Fashion in Calais, France from 15 June, 2019 – 5 January, 2020.

Olivier Theyskens’ New Exhibition Is About the Seductive Power of Lace. By  Jack Moss. Another Magazine , June 13, 2019. 

In celebration of its 10th anniversary, Cité Dentelle Mode in Calais presents “In praesentia” as a temporary exhibition from 15 June 2019 until 5 January 2020. About 10 months in the making, the exhibition invites viewers into a small part of Theyskens’ universe by expressing the connection between some of his past pieces and lace itself.

Curator Lydia Kamitsis explains the captivating title as a poetic word that evokes a sense of imagination and curiosity. Put simply, “Praesentia,” a Latin term, means “presence”. The title encourages visitors to be present and immerse themselves in the atmosphere and ambiance of the exhibit. She describes “praesentia” as a singular word that one does not have to translate into other languages, as everyone understands its meaning.

In this project, Theyskens works to protect the link between the culture and fashion of the present and the past. Certain pieces preserved by the lace museum inspired him, reminding him of his past works and other memories. Kamitsis carefully mixes pieces from different collections and different times, (as opposed to displaying the pieces chronologically) which serves as another manner of bringing the idea of nostalgia to life while presenting a new way to view modern work with museums.

The exhibit also pays homage to the “behind-the-scenes” industrial workers, bringing them to the forefront by featuring different pieces of lace-making equipment and tools alongside the pieces displayed on mannequins. These roles often go unmentioned, hence the desire to honor them.

Theyskens notes his belief that the exploration of lace with its complex motifs and complicated production techniques is unfinished; he believes that lace is not used enough in the modern context and that it has so much to offer in the world of fashion.

Olivier Theyskens’ “In praesentia” Curated by Lydia Kamitsis at Cité Dentelle. By Kiana Rizel Sales.  A Shaded View of Fashion , June 14, 2019. 

Cité de la Dentelle et de la Mode, Calais

The Monstrous Feminine

It’s easy, really, to remove a penis. It might even be luxurious, like taking yourself out to lunch: starched tablecloth, martini-olive, glint of a diamond on the finger. It’s an act of security and authority, a statement of ownership, yes, but also elegance, desire – white linen and clean nails, of long fingers reaching out to take, take, take until we’re sated, day-drunk, a little giddy. It’s less about the removal of the penis than it is about how we as the castrators feel about removing the penis.

The hex for a penis isn’t really all about
the penis
against cream
a glass of just-pink wine
teacups porcelain thrush egg blue
a penis between her legs and the next shucking it off
her big gobstopper eyes and hello kitty backpack
full of dicks.

[. . .]

hex with a plate of grilled pears

[. . .]

some woman in a mint silk pantsuit so happy with

‘/penis hex/’, WITCH

As described in WITCH, Rebecca Tamás’ collection released at the very start of 2019, the hex and its aftermath sound delightful – serene yet powerful. They hover somewhere between the aesthetic and the phenomenological; like taking a bath in the daytime or scenting your laundry with lavender. I can hardly wait to hex, convinced it will make me organised and attentive, a new and different woman, hair in a chignon, tasteful highlights, new leather. I think of what it must be like to wear those signifiers of power so easily, the kind I’ve been grasping for my entire life, to be so unconcerned, so unburdened that you can wear a jacket resting over your shoulders, arms down by your sides. I long for that newness, that space in my mind.

There are less joyful reasons to hex, of course. The kind we’d rather not speak of, because to even think of them destroys our dreams of power, of beauty, of complete ownership of oneself; the kind that act as splinters underfoot, shards of glass left in rows to make us hobble. But, more than silk against the skin or blush-coloured wine, they are why we need to hex. Often, the hex is less of a choice than it is a survival mechanism – a necessity – in a world that routinely and thoughtlessly violates, abuses and traumatises women. Tamás is aware of these, lays them out without fanfare:

hex at a child-wedding [. . .] the child-bride comes with you

When it was reproduced by the Chicago Review of Books, ‘/penis hex/’ was tagged with the phrase #MeToo.

‘And what, then, is to be thought of those witches who in this way sometimes collect male organs in great numbers, as many as twenty or thirty members together, and put them in a bird’s nest, or shut them up in a box, where they move themselves like living members, and eat oats and corn, as has been seen by many and is a matter of common report?’ asks the Malleus Maleficarum, Heinrich Kramer’s theological and legal treatise on how to find, torture and murder a witch – published in 1486, the book had as many as thirty-six reprints in the ensuing years.

WITCH’s answer:

the witches eat your book

then you

then everything.

To be a woman is to be feared, to know fear. To hold the two simultaneously within yourself, to know that your body, by the sheer fact of its existence, will be terrified by the society that claims to be terrorised by it; that the patriarchy deems women’s bodies so awful, so monstrous, that it seeks to limit and control their power. These people not only hate women, but are afraid of them; scared of the capacity for women’s bodies to be unruly, unclean, unknowable. Despite the sheer and uncommunicable amount of violence enacted upon the female body throughout history, it’s woman as terroriser, as beast, that we keep coming back to. What better way to justify the ways in which we break her?

The female body has been codified as disgusting, defective – leaking, bleeding, oozing – from time immemorial. She limps, incomplete and half-finished, across Aristotle’s theories, a deformed ‘monstrosity’ and a ‘misbegotten man’; stalks through the Talmud on Lilith’s jackal-feet, flying through the night on her bird wings to sate her demon’s appetite; drags her heavy body through Greek mythology, crowned with curls of snakes. She’s simultaneously too-much and less-than; little more than an underdeveloped man, a foetus too weak to grow entirely, pale and fragile as an orchid. It’s this that Freud evokes when he writes ‘Probably no male human being is spared the fright of castration at the sight of a female genital.’ For Freud, the female body is defined by its fundamental lack: uncanny, strange, and unfinished. It’s why so many euphemisms for the vagina focus on the female genitals as a wound: cleft, axe-wound, gash – the woman is always a site of violence.

In ‘The Construction of the “Castrated Woman” in Psychoanalysis and Cinema’, theorist Susan Lurie asserts that it’s not the female-body-as-castrated-man that inspires such horror in men, but her status as something whole, unknowable. ‘Lurie asserts that the male fears woman because woman is not mutilated like a man might be if he were castrated; woman is physically whole, intact and in possession of all her sexual powers,’ Barbara Creed surmises in her introduction to The Monstrous Feminine, her landmark essay collection that explored abjection and female horror. Freud’s vision of the castrated woman is merely ‘a phantasy (sic?) intended to ameliorate man’s real fear of what woman might do to him. [. . .] Specifically, he fears that woman could castrate him both psychically and, in a sense, physically.’

If women are unsupervised, then what might they be doing? What might they be wearing? What could they become? What if, instead of being powerless and pliable, they learned that they could fight back? What if the woman who lies next to you at night, folds your laundry, cooks your meals, is merely hiding her claws and scales and razor-teeth and licking her lips with her forked tongue, counting the wrongs you committed against her – against all women – biding her time.

In February this year, a true-crime documentary series titled Lorena was released. It told the story of Lorena Bobbitt, who cut off her husband’s penis as he slept, of how she threw it into the long grass at the side of the road in Manassas, Virginia. I think of how they sold penis-shaped sweets outside the courthouse where her trial took place, of how the proceedings made it into a Saturday Night Live sketch, of how she was shown as crazy, fiery, a scorned wife mutilating her husband after he threatened to leave. What I think of most, though, is how Lorena Bobbitt was tortured physically, sexually and emotionally by her husband for years before she castrated him. How she became a punchline. Howard Stern, one of the most prominent voices in the discussion of the case, refused to believe the extensive evidence that supported her claims of abuse because ‘she’s not that great looking’. In the article that coincided with the documentary’s release, the New York Times ran with the headline ‘You Know the Lorena Bobbitt Story. But Not All of It.’ If Tamás asserts that the penis hex isn’t really about the penis, the way Lorena’s story was told definitely seemed to assume that it was: ‘They always just focused on it . . .’ she told one reporter. Her ex-husband – and his penis – were what attracted sympathy. The jury found her not guilty ‘by reason of temporary insanity’; she served a mandated stint in a mental health facility. The article ends with Lorena reflecting on how people react to her story of unendurable abuse: ‘“They laugh,” she said several times [. . .] “They always laugh.”’

In ‘Stop your women’s ears with wax’, from Julia Armfield’s recently published collection salt slow, an all-women band go on tour. Their music inspires feverish devotion in their female fans, with crowds of screaming and crying girls thronging the street outside their shows. At the venues they play, male employees are found murdered, and the tour bus is covered in black feathers. Their filmographer, Mona, enters the band’s dressing room and ‘briefly catches the lead guitarist without her face on [. . .] The face – the brief glimpse that she has of it – is a curious thing, familiar yet misplaced with its upturned nose and silvered eyelids, hanging over the back of a swivel chair.’ The double-meaning of ‘without her face on’ reminds us of the beauty standards women are under pressure to perform – the image of the unpolished, make-up-free face is heightened until it becomes a representation of something simultaneously inhuman and too human, the unforgivably real face of woman. This manifestation of excess – of too much – is seen in the bandmates’ feathers that litter the scene, spilling out onto the floor. Uncontainable, these evoke the image of the harpy, which Creed deems ‘another fearful image of the monstrous-feminine in classical mythology’. The music of Armfield’s band inspires its teenage acolytes to join together in ripping men limb from limb.

In March 2016, Brock Turner was found guilty of three felonies: assault with intent to commit rape, sexually penetrating an intoxicated person, and sexually penetrating an unconscious person. He was sentenced to six months in prison and served three of them. Judge Aaron Persky said that a longer sentence would have a ‘severe impact’ on Turner’s life, adding ‘I think that he will not be a danger to others’.

In September 2018, Christine Blasey Ford testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee that the then-nominee and now incumbent Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her at a party in the early eighties. Asked what she recalled the most about that night, Blasey Ford stated, ‘Indelible in the hippocampus is the laughter. The uproarious laughter between the two and their having fun at my expense.’

In April 2019, Michael Wysolovski, a thirty-three-year-old man who enslaved and sexually assaulted a sixteen-year-old girl for over a year, keeping her locked in a dog cage and starving her, was convicted of first-degree cruelty to children and interstate interference with custody. He will not serve any jail time.

Etc.

In salt slow’s opener, ‘Mantis’, a boy leads the narrator upstairs, his hands ‘grabby’. ‘I knew you wanted it,’ he says, as the familiar situation washes over the reader: party, alcohol, a tightening grip on the arm. All around us, there are small flashes of violence, so commonplace as to seem mundane – the ‘force’ with which he yanks her, the dancing that she seems to have ‘no option’ but to partake in. We recognise this narrative because we have lived it, have heard and seen it, watched it play out a thousand times on TV and in newspapers and in quiet, hushed conversations between friends. Yet, somehow, it still stings; salt in a wound you thought had healed over. We know what happens next, because it has happened to our mothers and our sisters and our friends and our lovers. It has happened, in some way, small or large, to every woman we know, and to those we don’t.

But at the moment of the kiss, as if in a fairytale, our protagonist transforms. The flaking skin and painful, aching limbs, rather than signifiers of her vulnerability, are revealed to be markers of her strength, as she slips out of her body into ‘a suddenness of mandibles and curving neck [. . .] the last of my skin falls down unheeded to the bathroom floor’. She has shed the vulnerabilities attached to her human shape, and her new, monstrous form has given her the strength she lacked. ‘I flex my arms and raise myself a little higher’, she notes, emphasising her physical prowess. ‘It is possible the boy says something, possible he screams. My mouth is wide with anticipation’. The power of the boy has dwindled to the extent that he is denied a voice – denied the power to express even his fear. Earlier in the narrative, his exact words are related to us, dominating the space on the page. Now he’s an afterthought; merely a body to use and cast aside. The explicitly sexual overtone of the ‘wide mouth’ underscores the subversion of the societal order: the woman as the predator and the man as helpless prey. She realises that this was the true form of her mother, her grandmother; that this is a feminine tradition. Female praying mantises devour up to a quarter of males during intercourse, with the number increasing during repeated sessions of mating. Typically, they eat the head first – this may happen at the start or end of the sexual encounter.

Vagina dentata is a kind of fairytale: according to Barbara Creed, ‘Yanomamo myths state that one of the first women on earth possessed a vagina that could transform into a toothed mouth which ate her lover’s penis.’ The fear of a woman with the ability to devour a man during sex seems to recur across cultures, from North America to India to East Asia. There’s something almost darkly comedic about the fact that, as the overwhelming perpetrators of sexual violence, men could be terrified of being violated during the act. I find it unsurprising – often our most acute fears involve being the victims of our own actions.

‘The vagina dentata visualizes, for males, the fear of entry into the unknown, of the dark dangers that must be controlled in the mystery that is woman. The teeth must be removed!’ writes Jill Rait. She links the fear of vagina dentata to the widespread and unabated practice of female genital mutilation.

In 2007, the founders of the Rape-aXe female condom announced that it would go on sale in South Africa. It boasted a number of ‘teeth’ which would fasten around an attacker’s penis. The device was never manufactured.

Why do things float back to the top of cultural consciousness? Why don’t they remain submerged? In the last few years we’ve seen the resurgence of the monstrous-feminine wholesale. Not only in WITCH and salt, slow, but in the eldritch nude women of Dorothea Tanning, recently exhibited to much acclaim in a major show at Tate Modern; in Luca Guadagnino’s murderous witches in his remake of Suspiria, in the bored vampires and eel-women of Daisy Johnson’s Fen. Why now? The answers feel oppressive in their frequency. Is it the sexual predator as the President of the United States, and the ‘nasty women’ he tweets to his 61 million followers each day? Or the headlines about casting couches and under-desk door locks and penises exposed beside potted plants? Or the six-week abortion limit in Ohio, whose architect termed women who exercise their reproductive rights ‘heartless’? There will always be more answers, because there will always be more ways in which women are demonised, abused, destroyed.

At my most optimistic I think: there’s something happening, the slow cracking of an ice sheet out from the centre. At my most pessimistic I think: we retreat to fantasy when we want escape from that which we cannot change. At my most measured I think: these things tend to be circular.

The protagonist of Camilla Grudova’s ‘The Mouse Queen’, from her collection The Doll’s Alphabet, is not particularly sentimental about the fact that she has devoured her children. Having begun to transform into a werewolf, she finds that ‘The next morning, when I woke up, the twins were nowhere to be found. [. . .] They were gone. I must have eaten them in the late hours of being a wolf.’ She checks her excrement, in which she finds a single white bone, and then buys herself books and a too-tight skirt with the proceedings from selling the infants’ clothes and toys. The Malleus Maleficarum doesn’t take kindly to this, stating that ‘certain witches, against the instinct of human nature, and indeed against the nature of all beasts, with the possible exception of wolves, are in the habit of devouring and eating infant children’. Eating her children seems to come as somewhat of a relief to the narrator of ‘The Mouse Queen’, who has been abandoned by her Latin-scholar partner to deal with them alone. By the end of the story our protagonist’s friend also appears to have unburdened herself as a result of her transformation – ‘Sometimes Susan arrived at work with a few stray brown hairs around her mouth, or a spot of blood, but I didn’t say anything and neither did she, and we stopped asking each other about our children’, she concludes. The werewolf is within all the women in the story, and eating your child is an unfortunate, yet necessary, side effect of freedom.

And although she does not – yet – devour children, the central character of Armfield’s ‘Formally Feral’ sees first-hand the advantages of manifesting the wolf. Supporting Walter Evans’ assertion that ‘the werewolf’s bloody attacks – which occur regularly every month – are certainly related to the menstrual cycle which suddenly and mysteriously commands the body of every adolescent girl’, it’s tampons that provoke the violence and transformation of the protagonist. Having been regularly stalked by the (aptly named) Peter, she discovers that he is responsible for stealing her tampons out of her locker, leaving her walking home ‘bleeding unchecked’. As Leviticus 14 reminds us, ‘When a woman has a discharge, her discharge being blood from her body, she shall remain in her impurity seven days; whoever touches her shall be unclean until evening . . .’ Barbara Creed notes that ‘Menstruation was also linked to the witch’s curse [. . .] Historically, the curse of a woman, particularly if she were pregnant or menstruating, was considered far more potent than a man’s curse.’ It’s apt, then, that she and her sister/wolf, Helen, attack the boy, leading to his hand going septic and being removed. At the story’s close, the narrator has become identical to Helen in mannerisms, neglecting her personal grooming and ‘join[ing] her in dragging my teeth across the floor’ – the howl of the wolf becomes a cry of freedom.

Sometimes, when I’m walking home on my own at night, I think about what it would be like to stalk silently behind men, my feet soft and easy on the pavement, quick flash of my shadow under the street lights. How I’d watch the whites of their eyes shine as they turned to look behind them – softly, quietly, can’t be too obvious – see the glisten of sweat on the back of their necks. I’d watch them quicken their pace with fear, recognise the measured gait – not wanting to run so as not to inspire a chase, keep calm, breathe deeply, act self-possessed but do not linger. I’d like to test it; to not be five-foot-four, soft-fleshed, short-sighted, to not think about the keys slotted between my fingers, the correct way to escape a chokehold. To not think, even in passing, of defence. Just once I’d like to think about attack: scaled wings, glinting incisors, long, yellowed claws. A pact with the devil that let me split concrete, burn with the touch of my finger.

The  resurgence of the monstrous feminine.   By Hannah  Williams. Granta ,  June 24, 2019.

Punctureby  Rachel Frances Sharpe

This film essay Puncture, by Rachel Frances Sharpe, and accompanying paper, by Sophie Sexon, examine the abject qualities of blood and breastmilk. The film and paper make comparisons between late medieval imagery of Christ’s wounds and feminine tropes found recurrently in horror movies such as Suspiria (1977) and Possession (1981). The application of Julia Kristeva’s theoretical notion of the abject and Barbara Creed’s concept of the monstrous-feminine will demonstrate how blood and milk inspire a particular horror of the female body that renders the body monstrous. This can be seen trans-historically by comparing medieval to modern conceptions of abject maternity. The analysis will look at the fungible quality of milk and blood in historical contexts and their ability to create feelings of fear and repulsion towards maternal icons and women’s bodies. This paper has been adapted from the original, presented at the Fluid Physicalities symposium at Birkbeck, University of London, in 2017.

When the eyes see or the lips touch that skin on the surface of milk – harmless, thin as a sheet of cigarette paper, pitiful as a nail paring – I experience a gagging sensation and, still farther down, spasms in the stomach, the belly; and all the organs shrivel up the body, provoke tears and bile, increase heartbeat, cause forehead and hands to perspire. Along with sight-clouding dizziness, nausea makes me balk at that milk cream, separates me from the mother and father who proffer it. “I” want none of that element, sign of their desire; “I” do not want to listen, “I” do not assimilate it, “I” expel it. But since the food is not an “other” for “me,” who am only in their desire, I expel myself, I spit myself out, I abject myself within the same motion through which “I” claim to establish myself.

This paper explores the role of milk and blood in both medieval art and contemporary film with a response to the film essay Puncture, as featured above. The paper applies Julia Kristeva’s theoretical concept of abjection and Barbara Creed’s definition of the monstrous-feminine to both historical periods in order to show how the female body is conceived of as abject in distinct cultural moments that have recognisable overlap.

The female body has a cultural and critical history of being conceived of as monstrous owing to certain maternal associations in critical and theoretical discourses. The conceptual notion of the female body as that which is monstrous is conceived via its fluid outpourings. The appearance of milk and blood remind us of the figure of the mother and her role in relation to us as distinct subjects. As Julia Kristeva has argued, the maternal female body threatens social order and semantic cleanliness in that it produces fluids which transgress the bodily boundaries of the flesh (Kristeva, 1980). The symbolic associations of mother’s milk and menstrual blood induce a reaction of horror from the observing subject, who associates these fluids with a monstrous form of maternity.

The female body collapses the boundaries between self and other via reproduction. The reproductive capacity produces substances that bring the internal to the external; birthing, bleeding and breastfeeding. In socio-cultural terms, these traits cast the mother figure as an abject monster: that which dissolves the borders between the flesh and the world.

The abject refers to a subject’s first distinction between self and other that is precipitated by certain fluids relating to the mother figure. I use Julia Kristeva’s psychoanalytic theory of abjection in Powers of Horror (1980) as it touches on both psychic and social states of self-awareness and identity formation. The abject is that which ‘disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect border, positions, rules’ (Kristeva, p. 2). For instance, a wound disturbs bodily order by rupturing boundaries, aligning it with the other ‘corporeal orifices…constituting the body’s territory’ (Kristeva, p. 71). Certain abject substances including urine, tears, faeces, blood, semen and milk must be cast off, literally abjected, as they threaten social and bodily order. Abject reactions to such substances in later life include horror, disgust, vomiting and gagging, however, they also evoke some feelings of enjoyment which elucidate our strange attraction to horror films and gore. Kristeva posits that abjection is a crucial stage in psychosexual development, associating the abject with the Lacanian notion of jouissance that pre-dates the infantile mirror-stage, noting that jouissance in itself engenders violent, painful, yet pleasurable passion. As Georges Bataille notes in Visions of Excess, ‘extreme seductiveness is probably at the boundary of horror’, which is inextricably bound up with the obsessive act of looking at that which horrifies us. Historical comparisons of how abject substances relating to motherhood elicit a sexual response in the visual terrain of the modern horror film and medieval imagery help us to understand the sexualisation and objectification of the female body at this boundary of horror, which edges insistently towards pleasure.

Barbara Creed writes in Film, Feminism and Psychoanalysis: The Monstrous Feminine (1993) that ‘all human societies have a conception of the monstrous-feminine, of what it is about woman that is shocking, terrifying, horrific, abject’. This paper interrogates this claim by comparing late medieval paintings and metaphorical imagery concerning Christ’s wounds to the monstrous feminine as identified in two horror films: Dario Argento’s Suspiria (1977) and Andrzej Zİuławski’s Possession (1981). Images of abject bodily fluids placed together frame by frame in Puncture (2017) with shots of medieval art and contemporary horror films show how such images inscribe a universalising historical idea of the monstrous-feminine, substantiating Creed’s argument.

Utilizing a theory of Kristevan abjection has the potential to be problematic.  Feminist discourses relating to feminine ‘otherness’ have moved away from the conceptual abject in order to critique the negative and immobile values ascribed to the maternal through such a regimented essentialist biological focus.  This analysis and video essay are not constructed as feminist critiques of abjection, monstrosity, and their relation to the maternal body. Rather, they signal the cultural moments where theoretical notions of abject maternity in the twentieth century may have had similar aestheticising resonances with creative works from the medieval period, both fraught with their own misogynistic structuring. To make such aesthetic comparison is more in line with queer theoretical works on time and affect that demonstrate where contemporary literature, film, and art meet medieval materials than contemporary feminist discourses that challenge the notions of abjection and monstrosity.

I use the concept of abjection to historically contextualise a moment in theoretical discourse that has subsequent resonances in the horror films of the late seventies and early eighties. Kristeva’s theory aligns with the rough time of production of these horror films, the film Suspiria being released in 1977, Kristeva’s Powers of Horror having appeared in 1980, and the film Possession in 1981. I use this theoretical approach to support Imogen Tyler’s argument that ‘employing a Kristevan abject paradigm risks reproducing, rather than challenging, histories of violent disgust towards maternal bodies’ (Tyler, p. 77). The use of the abject in this article demarcates, but does not critically challenge, a particular theoretical historical moment where the maternal body is characterised by a number of negative physical attributes. This has a direct relation to a late medieval history of the maternal body, where disgust typifies a reaction to the aspects of abject femininity that are imbued in representations of Christ.

Barbara Creed’s theory of ‘the monstrous feminine’ appears somewhat later than the theory of abjection, in 1993, but distinctly exemplifies how maternal bodies are particularised within the horror genre, and imbued with historically negative notions of abjection. At the beginning of the 1990s various discourses were emerging around the notion of the female ‘other’ in anglophone feminist literatures. Feminist theoretical discourses sought to move away from the biological essentialism of the monstrous in order to reconceive of the female body in materialist terms, for example in the concept of the female other as cyborg. Cyborg theory emerges around the same time as Creed’s publication, with Donna Haraway publishing Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature in 1991. However, I focus here on the concept of the feminine monstrous as it aligns maternity with a fixed set of abject values that are concurrently symbolic, psychosexual, and in many cases, physical. I use this theory not as a tool of feminist critique, but to underscore a language of negativity surrounding discourses of maternity in the twentieth century that are historically congruent with medieval values and modes of representation. The hope is to demonstrate how these theories can be applied across time and across discipline, choosing to use theoretical frameworks that are roughly contemporary to the production of abject imagery in the horror films discussed here. Puncture bears the echoes, in other words, of the cultural moment where maternal abjection was at the peak of its monstrous manifestation, produced by male film makers that reified a biologically essentialist and abject feminine other.

Creed lists a number of monstrous tropes that define women in film:

The horror film is populated by female monsters […] The female monster, or monstrous-feminine, wears many faces […] woman as monstrous womb (The Brood, 1979); woman as bleeding wound (Dressed to Kill, 1980); woman as possessed body (The Exorcist, 1973) […] the monstrous girl-boy (A Reflection of Fear, 1973) […] Although a great deal has been written about the horror film, very little of that work has discussed the representation of woman-as-monster (Creed, p. 1).

Creed’s analysis shows how women are commonly presumed to be constructed as the diametric opposite of the monster within the horror film genre when, antithetically, they themselves are constructed as monsters through this series of tropes. By historical comparison, the figure of Christ was commonly constructed as feminine in European late medieval devotional text and imagery. This female Christ was, by virtue of symbolic association with motherhood, also conceived of as monstrous. Looking specifically at the tropes of woman as bleeding wound and woman as monstrous girl-boy, I will compare and contrast the role of the abject in constructing these tropes, while discussing the imagery in Puncture that illustrates clear visual parallels between medieval and the modern images of the monstrous-feminine.

Kristeva notes that abjection is a crucial moment in terms of self-identification and identity formation, recognising that materials such as blood and breastmilk are those which transgress the boundaries of the flesh. The abject stage is characterised by the destabilising of known boundaries; a horror of insides becoming outsides and the shock of knowing the self to be separate from the previous bounds of the maternal. Many of the excretory functions, or symbolic icons linked to the abject, relate to the symbolic icons of motherhood. Blood and the open wound refer back to the moment of birth where subject-object relations are still ill-defined, and a pre-social infantile self cannot distinguish the boundaries between their own flesh and the mother’s womb. Abject fluids must be expelled in order for the infant to make sense of its world and establish subject-object boundaries, which exist primarily in relation to the mother, and then, by extension, to the clean and proper self within society. The sight of maternal fluids such as blood and breastmilk create an abject reaction by threatening a return to disordered subject-object relationships and a loss of self-identity.

In some cases, the symbolic impact of abject fluids renders them interchangeable within the psyche. Kristeva lists and discusses the metaphorical import of many abject substances in Powers of Horror, and a large range of them recurrently appear in horror films intermingled with one another. The interchangeable abject quality of semen, milk, blood and tears was likewise a prominent feature in the iconography of the Middle Ages. The late medieval female body bore aspects of monstrosity as it was believed to be the inverted or imperfect version of the male body. According to Aristotle and Galen, women were considered to be the cold, wet and incomplete counterparts to the heat-generative dry male, therefore constantly seeking the heat of male bodies in a frenzied state of perpetual lust. The female body was characterised by this abject moistness which was inextricably bound up with moral judgements and impositions on female sexuality. Liz Herbert McAvoy recognises how the female body was a ‘primary conceptual sign. In her capacity as misconceived or ‘deformed’ male, woman occupied a highly problematic cultural space and frequently became translated into an expression of cultural monstrosity’. Her moist qualities rendered her culturally inferior to her male counterpart.

Elizabeth Robertson describes how physicians believed the female ovaries to be an inverted form of the male testes and identifies that many physicians of the period believed in the Galenic theory of dealbation; a belief that breastmilk was created from blood transformed from within the body. Robertson identifies that this medical belief in the fungible quality of fluids bore out in the culture of the period as ‘in religious texts the interchangeability of blood, milk, tears, and semen is often stressed’. This chimes with Creed’s notion of woman as monstrous girl-boy, as the ‘inverted’ monstrous female was imbued with a number of negative attributes linked to abject fluids. It was believed that women were capable of purging their excessive moistness, and therefore purging their inappropriate lustfulness, through menstruation. Therefore blood was both a generative substance and a fluid that had to be abjected in order to accord with certain moral impositions; a fluid that acted as a controlling mechanism depending on whether it was being produced internally or being expelled. Upon its expulsion from the body it gained symbolic transitional qualities that signified its monstrosity; the appearance of breastmilk reminding one that the female body had converted this substance from blood, and blood being a substance that signified the excessive lustful aspects of femininity. The property of creating transitional fluids is a particular quality of the monster that is evidenced in gendered terms in representations of the abject in both medieval imagery and modern horror films.

This particularly feminised form of monstrosity can be seen in artistic and literary iconography depicting Christ in the late medieval period, and it relates to a conception of the monstrous feminine that can be seen in modern cinema. Barbara Creed defines the monstrous feminine in film in saying that, ‘the monstrous is produced at the border which separates those who take up their proper gender roles from those who do not; or the border is between normal and abnormal sexual desire’ (Creed, p. 11). Christ’s body inhabits this monstrosity by deconstructing proper gender roles in artistic representation. A common artistic trope in Europe from the twelfth century onwards was that of ‘Jesus as mother’, where Christ’s body was imbued with a range of maternal qualities to associate his body with the capacity to physically and spiritually nourish Christian devotees. In an assessment of visual piety in the Late Middle Ages, Suzannah Biernoff writes that ‘Christ’s body is semantically unstable. It signifies excessively. And it is literally fluid in its outpourings of redemptive blood: an attribute often associated with the ‘maternal Jesus’.  Christ’s semantic instability varies in a number of ways, but the feminisation of the body seems inherently wrapped up in the production of fluids. Christ’s body assimilates femininity by manner of its bleeding, which mimics both lactation and menstruation, constructing Christ as an icon simultaneously capable of being a mother and a lover.

 Caroline Walker Bynum’s landmark text Jesus as Mother (1982) collates a wealth of textual and artistic sources from the medieval period which were intended to encourage a religious devotee to think of Christ’s body in explicitly maternal terms. Note that this text was also produced in a period coterminous with the publication of Kristeva’s text and the release of the films analysed here; exemplifying a distinct theoretical-cultural moment in time in which scholars were thinking about the role of abject maternity. Images such as The Man of Sorrows by Jacob Cornelisz van Oostsanen demonstrate how bodily fluids intermingle and exchange in late medieval imagery. The tears from Christ’s eyes seem to run down to become the blood upon his breast, and the blood from his wounds flows into the holy chalice to nourish and provide sustenance for the devoted, much like a lactating breast. The English abbot Aelred of Rievaulx uses a number of metaphorical images concerning Christ that resemble this; ‘his outspread arms will invite you to embrace him, his naked breasts will feed you with the milk of sweetness to console you’ (Bynum, Jesus as Mother, p. 123).

Many of these metaphors emphasise Christ’s capability as a consoling mother, however, there are passages where the substances issuing from Christ’s wounds are fungible and, arguably, would inspire an erotic response:

Then one of the soldiers opened his side with a lance and there came forth blood and water. Hasten, linger not, eat the honeycomb with your honey, drink your wine with your milk. The blood is changed into wine to gladden you, the water into milk to nourish you. From the rock streams have flowed for you, wounds have been made in his limbs, holes in the wall of his body, in which, like a dove, you may hide while you kiss them one by one. Your lips, stained with blood, will become like a scarlet ribbon and your word sweet. (Bynum, Jesus as Mother, p. 123)

This union with Christ portrays how a bloody and goring act – the repeated spearing of Christ’s flesh – creates holes which the lover can enter and kiss. In a metaphorical gesture, the horror of the bleeding wounds is transported into an image of tenderness. There were, however, prohibitive cautions regarding wound imagery as it was recognised that sucking at these wounds which pour forth blood and milk might inspire an erotic response. Bernard of Clairvaux urges devotees that, ‘if you feel the stings of temptation […] suck not so much the wounds as the breasts of the Crucified [suge non tam vulnera quam ubera Crucifixi] He will be your mother, and you will be his son’ (Bynum, Jesus as Mother, p. 117). These wounds break down the barriers between appropriate and inappropriate sexualised responses to the body. Christ’s body is entered by the protruding fingers and tongues of devotees, his penetrated wound encapsulating the monstrous aspects of motherhood by bleeding like a menstruating vagina or lactating like a mother’s breast. Puncture shows comparisons between a shot of a finger pushing into the hardened skin of rotting milk and the finger that pushed into Christ’s wound in Caravaggio’s The Incredulity of Saint Thomas (c.1601). Both acts have an air of the horrific and the erotic by penetrating the whiteness of the flesh to signal an encounter with the dark and mysterious interior.

 In Puncture we see a range of medieval paintings and manuscript illuminations which focus specifically on Christ’s wounds. In medieval contexts, Christ fits Creed’s filmic trope of woman as bleeding wound via metonym, whereby his whole body is translated into one powerful devotional image of a bleeding wound. There is symbolic proximity of the wound to the female labia and vagina in late medieval imagery. Michael Camille writes:

'Medievalists, recently freed from a tyrannous propriety that for so long obfuscated the body as a site of cultural meaning, are at last able to describe and trace this verbal and visual gender-bending, where parts of Christ’s body, such as his wound, as depicted in fourteenth-century Books of Hours, becomes a vast vagina-like object of desire, a transference of the dangerously open body of woman in all her horrifying ‘difference.’

It would have been appropriate for late medieval devotees to adore the Christ wound as part of Christ’s male body. Wound images show signs of having been touched, kissed or rubbed in medieval manuscripts. However, the capacity to induce both horror and erotic response arises from its feminine symbolic association with the vagina. Kissing the manuscript but could render erotic abject reaction to Christ’s feminised body.

Looking at the Loftie prayerbook shown below, the five wounds of Christ show evidence of having been touched by the lips or fingers of the devotee, noting in particular the abrasion of the pigment in the lower two wounds. These images are painted on parchment made of dead animal skin. This material use circumvents any moral sense of medieval social transgression. Touching animal skin would not have presented the same threat as scandalously touching human skin, and as it is not living flesh it would not have verisimilitude to a human body. However, the devotee could have traced hairs and folds in the vellum to imaginatively bring this skin to life, this monstrous skin which is imbued with abject erotic significance. Mark Amlser writes that:

A reader wouldn’t actually have to read the book or even the words on the page to affectively respond to the image […] The reader’s hand or lips search the image on the page, the dark space ambiguously depicting the wound (vulna) as vagina (vulva), with a reading gesture at once sacred, erotic, scandalous, and transgressive.

In this private devotional gesture, readers could animate the red pigment of their prayer books by mixing it with their own fluids such as saliva and sweat; animating the blood of Christ on the page and arousing feelings of abjection by kissing dead animal skin.

Puncture draws our attention to the affinities between eyes, mouths, and wounds, foregrounding the symbolic vaginal potentialities of all three, and relating to Georges Bataille’s comment that ‘it seems impossible, in fact, to judge the eye using any word other than seductive’ (Bataille, p. 17). The eye, the open mouth, the open wound and the vagina merge with one another and overlap in Puncture. Images from medieval manuscript illuminations are placed comparatively next to images of bleeding wounds.

The most explicit comparison between the two in Puncture is between an image of Christ’s vertically orientated side wound in the Psalter of Bonne of Luxembourg (c.1348), and the following shot of scored and bloodied flesh which echoes an early scene in Dario Argento’s Suspiria. At the opening of Suspiria a young woman named Pat Hingle is stabbed in the heart repeatedly. The film lingers on an intense close up of Hingle’s stabbed heart which lies open in the wounded whiteness of the flesh of her chest, resembling the interior of the vagina and cervix. It is impossible to ignore the vaginal and erotic connotations of such imagery, particularly in horror films invoking the trope of woman as bleeding wound.

The horror film offers apt visual terrain to examine the effect of abject fluids in proximity to the female body. Creed notes that the horror film abounds with images of abjection when it addresses sweat, vomit, blood and gore (Creed, 1993). Noting how this relates to theoretical abjection, she writes that, ‘in terms of Kristeva’s notion of the border, when we say such-and-such a horror film ‘made me sick’ or ‘scared the shit out of me’, we are actually foregrounding that specific horror film as a ‘work of abjection’ or ‘abjection at work’ – almost in a literal sense’ (Creed, p. 10). I wish here to focus specifically on the abject qualities of a film that is referenced in Puncture: Andrzej Zıuławski’s Possession (1981).

Possession focuses on the breakdown of a marriage between a woman called Anna and her absented husband, Mark. Mark uncovers an affair that Anna is having with her lover Heinreich. However, it transpires that Anna is also having an affair with a horrific creature composed of pulsating and oiled flesh that appears to excrete milk and blood. Anna repeatedly comments that she has made love to the creature, and in doing so, the creature has not only entered her, but it has bodily possessed her, bidding her to do its murderous will and to neglect her husband and her son.

To return to Creed’s remark on how the border is central to our construction of what is monstrous, this idea can be applied to the monster in the film. It transgresses borders by portraying mixed gendered characteristics and by inspiring unnatural sexual desire. Creed writes that ‘most horror films also construct a border between what Kristeva refers to as ‘the clean and proper body’ and the abject body, or the body which has lost its form and integrity’ (Creed, p. 11). The monster in Possession is a perfect example of this, as it presents as a male-female hybrid in its formlessness. It nestles within the folds of a bed or a wall resembling a vagina, yet has a protruding phallic head that can elongate at will. It resembles living, pulsating flesh as it appears to breathe and lactate with virulent life force, but also resembles mottled dead skin in its pale coloration and rotting appearance. It simultaneously looks like a baby being born as it is covered in natal fluids, yet it also resembles the fleshly interior of the womb turned out to the viewer’s eye. Anna’s possession by the monster causes her to replicate some of these features, thus transferring monstrous qualities to the female body. However, this visual effect reinstates how certain abject qualities of femininity and maternity are ‘naturally’ monstrous by layering the functions of bleeding and lactating onto the horrifying creature. Creed notes that because of the relation between the feminine and the menstrual, women have an insuperable relation to the abject, and this is borne out by Anna’s body which bleeds and lactates profusely.

Anna’s sexual attraction to the monster seems incomprehensible given its horrific and hybrid nature. However, this sexual union is important in order to ensure that Anna is invested in the destruction of anything that threatens reproductive capability within the narrative. The monster commands her to eliminate any threats to the nuclear family model and in doing so, replaces not only the husband and father, but also engenders itself as a protective mother that instils heteronormative order within the plot. The first two characters that Anna murders by the monster’s command are the detective who uncovers Anna’s affair with the creature and his male partner Zimmermann; those whom threaten the heterosocial order by virtue of their homosexuality. The next is the Anna’s previous adulterous lover Heinreich, thus eliminating the threat to the homogenous family unit. Anna then slits the throat of her friend Margie, who originally attempted to help Anna cover up her affair with Heinreich, and who has threatened the social order of the family unit by sleeping with her husband. The murders all feature abject fluids, for instance, Zimmermann is beaten to death with a jar of milk, and Margie dramatically bleeds to death. The film relies heavily on the use of abject fluids to inspire horror and fear, which is then focused back on Anna’s maternal body. The way Anna excretes these fluids throughout the film constructs a clear image of the monstrous-feminine by associating her body with death, destruction and lust.

The colours associated with Anna’s clothing throughout Possession are mirrored in the fabrics and lighting of Puncture. Whiteness symbolises innocence and virginity, blue symbolises motherhood and Marian imagery, and red symbolises blood and the disorder that ensues when the female body transitions from virginity into motherhood. In Puncture we are unable to ascertain what is blood and what is milk on blue and red-lit fabric. Images of blood, milk and tears mix with one another and excrete from female eyes and mouths in a variety of film clips, bringing with them their own red, white and blue fluid associations. The films clips are juxtaposed with images from Rogier Van Der Weyden’s Descent from the Cross (c.1435) portraying the open vaginal wound in Christ’s hand and the Virgin Mary weeping in her blue dress. The comparisons show how colour associations from late medieval paintings retain their meanings when transferred to contemporary contexts.

The colour scheme of Anna’s clothing within Possession demonstrates the monstrous contradictions that exist within the mother, particularly in the figure of the Virgin Mary. In Possession Anna always wears a blue dress which contrasts with her pale white skin and bright red blood. Anna’s blue dress produces Marian echoes, signifying her status as primary maternal figure. Her character struggles between the polar extremes of being the Virgin Mary and the monstrous female. The mixture of red, white and blue perfectly expresses the contradictions in this Marian representation; if Anna is a mother and a virgin and a lover, the fluids her body produces are at odds. She must menstruate and produce milk while still maintaining virginity and purity against this fluid disorder.

Puncture foregrounds the virgin-lover contradiction by focusing on film stills taken from Argento’s Suspiria. Early in the film, a young girl, Pat Hingle, is stabbed to death while wearing a white gown; her white flesh punctured by shards of blue glass that contrast starkly with her flowing red blood. The colour contrasts symbolically associate whiteness with innocence and virginity. Hingle’s murder symbolically changes her representational role from that of being a virgin into a monstrous object of unspeakable feminine horror. The violent stabbing scene is metaphorically reminiscent of the loss of virginity. The intense focus on the opening of her chest reveals a bloodied wound and a pulsating heart which looks not only like a vagina, but also like the pulsating monster in Possession. For both Anna and Pat, what makes them monstrous is a proximity to a pulsating dark interior wound, and to a metaphorical loss of virginity which threatens the boundaries of social order. Hingle is penetrated by blue shards of glass; the institution of motherhood visually penetrating her white flesh in symbolic association with the colour blue. These colour schemes recur repeatedly across time and show how feminine monstrosity is depicted as an awkward juxtaposition of roles; it is impossible to be a virgin, a lover and a mother simultaneously in one body. The horror of this plays out in the mixing of the abject fluids of breastmilk and blood staining Anna’s blue gown in Possession.

In Possession, one of the expressions of Anna’s bodily transgression of gendered boundaries occurs in relation to Christ’s iconography. In a church scene, there are explicit visual links drawn between Anna and a carved wooden figure of Christ. The composition of the film depicts her with the same flowing hair as the Christ figure in a shot-reverse-shot sequence. Standing beneath the carving, Anna makes near animalistic sounds. In this moment she resembles the male Christ depicted on the cross. However, her animalistic sounds also resemble the grieving virgin Mary who is unable to annunciate pain and suffering. This scene of gender transgression where Christ’s male body is layered over Anna’s female body precedes a scene of complete psychological and symbolic collapse in the passenger tunnel beneath a subway station. Anna breaks down in a screaming miscarriage of milk and blood moments after she has left the church. This horrific scene resulted in a ban on the film’s screening in many European cities and in the UK.15 It was rendered so disturbing not only by virtue of Isabelle Adjani’s striking improvised performance, but by the extreme use of fluids. Anna screams and writhes, beating her body against the walls of the subway tunnel. There is a veritable effluence of blood and milk that seeps from concealed bags attached to Anna’s body which burst all over her blue gown and flood from between her legs. The sheer excess of the scene confronts misogynistic fears concerning maternal bodies; that there is something truly and horrifyingly abject about a body that can produce such a volume of fluid.

Kristeva argues that the abject is necessary to establish order in the subject’s world as it embeds a fear of collapsed subject-object boundaries and, ultimately, of death. Abjection provides a crucial moment of dis-identification with the mother that signals an entry into the symbolic order for the subject. However, the abject repels using the same gesture by which it attracts. Childhood abject associations are relics left in the psyche that later invite eroticised horror at any of the symbols associated with motherhood and femininity. As Creed writes, ‘although the subject must exclude the abject, the abject must, nevertheless, be tolerated for that which threatens to destroy life also helps to define life.’ (Creed, p. 9) This is an attempt to explain our fascination with and attraction to scenes of maternal abjection; a fascination that has symbolically played out for hundreds of years in terms of visual art and metaphorical language. Abject fluids feature often in the symbolism of theological imagery as Christ’s blood is shed, flowing like mother’s milk to cleanse all sins. The abject plays a role in medieval Christian imagery and narratives as much as it does in contemporary horror movies where the bleeding, lactating body is both a reminder of our maternal origins and a depiction of a body that is imbued with eroticism by means of pushing the boundary limits between the internal and external.

The associations between vomit, blood, bile, faeces, urine, sweat, tears and semen point to one another as fungible materials, and they highlight the exchangeable orifices of the body, particularly in terms of the feminine-monstrous. The representational appearance of these substances makes monstrous the body issuing them. The film essay Puncture provides clear visual comparison between medieval images and images from modern horror films to support Barbara Creed’s claim that ‘all human societies have a conception of the monstrous-feminine’ (Creed, 1993, p. 1). In the case of mother’s milk and menstrual blood, the mother’s body is historically inscribed with the features of the monstrous feminine by production of abject fluids. The images in Puncture aestheticise a particular moment in film history where the disembodied and suppurating parts of the female body were intently focused upon to evoke a particularly horrific construction of maternity. This moment had historical precedent in the medieval. The theoretical application of abjection to medieval materials and comparative visual analysis demonstrates that this misogynous monstrosity is by no means an isolated creation of modernity but has far farther reaches in the historical imaginary concerning maternity that can be brought to light by creative means.

Mother’s Milk and Menstrual Blood in Puncture: The Monstrous Feminine in Contemporary Horror Films and Late Medieval Imagery . By Rachel Frances Sharpe, (video) Sophie Sexon (essay).  Studies in the Maternal , August 1, 2018.