“I ASK THIS ONE THING: LET ME GO MAD IN MY OWN WAY”

But nobody ever does.

ELIZA MONDEGREEN – 13 June 2022 – gender:hacked

I’ve been reading Anne Carson’s translation of the Oresteia, which captures that pathological strain of rejection that so many young women live out in some form or another:

At one point, the implacable Elektra says:

I need one food:
I must not violate Elektra.

In response to a chorus that cajoles her to wear her suffering more lightly, Elektra protests: “I ask this one thing: let me go mad in my own way.”

But, of course, it’s a rare young woman who goes mad in her own way.

Even and especially our most intimate self-understandings aren’t really ours. Even our desperate escape routes are predetermined, mapped out. Even in rejection, we act out in sensible, legible ways. Cultural recruitment, medical shaping, and the unconscious search for a symptom presentation that will be taken seriously all play a role in the way distress manifests.

Again—and again—and again—throughout the dark history of medicine—medical providers and young female patients alike converge on diagnoses and ‘treatments’ that pathologize and discipline the female body.

In both anorexia and gender dysphoria, the patient dissociates mind and body, then submits the body ruthlessly to the mind’s will. Forget Merleau-Ponty’s body-subjects. Forget Beauvoir’s “first radiation of subjectivity.” For anorexics and gender-dysphorics, the mind rules over the body like a brutal despot, beating the body—whittled by starvation or surgery, sacked and pillaged—into submission.

Medical providers tend to frame anorexia as the pathological pursuit of an (objectified) female form. I tend to see it as the opposite: a pathological rejection of objectification and sexual development. The fear isn’t becoming fat so much as becoming flesh. The anorexic persecutes the body that betrays ‘the self’ by its very existence: by its femaleness, by its soft curves and dark secrets, by blood, by the reproductive potential written into female flesh and by the things society writes on that flesh. Anorexics aspire to be pure spirit, pure intellect. They need only one food: not to violate the ‘self’ by becoming flesh.

Transition, too, scapegoats the body for its failure to faithfully represent ‘the self.’ Gender-dysphoric people talk about feeling like a ‘brain in a jar’ or a gender identity stuck in a ‘meat vehicle’ or ‘flesh suit.’ Major surgeries are spoken about with cool disregard, as though they were minor home-remodeling projects…