Women’s Bodies Have Always Been Political Objects
“I heard say the executioner was very good, and I have a little neck.” — Anne Boleyn, 1536.
“If it’s a legitimate rape the female body has ways to shut that whole thing down.” — Todd Aikin, former Missouri Congressman, 2012.
Women’s bodies have always been political tender: social currency subject to scrutiny, fear, ridicule — reverence, even. Despite the current tipping point, this is a bi-partisan fact of history: our bodies have been used by the left and the right, extremists and liberals, imperialists and abolitionists, reformers and reactionaries. From the Dark Ages until now, the female form is an object on to which current social, political or religious mores are projected.
The photograph of Dr Ford preparing to give testimony before a panel of mostly men, hand raised, eyes closed, has become iconic. Overnight it spread across the wires. An instantly historic image of a woman whose body and demeanor has become a totem for a political moment. This week an artist’s rendering of the photograph will be the cover of Time magazine. Her words are written out and shaped into the image of her face by the artist John Mavroudis.
“I made a list of impactful quotes and started placing them where I thought they belonged,” Mavroudis tells The Washington Post. “The ‘seared into my memory’ and ‘the laughter,’ which she talked so powerfully [about], belonged on her forehead. The ‘I tried to yell for help’ belonged on her lips. But I eventually moved the word ‘help’ to a more lonely, but striking part: her white teeth surrounded by black.” The image is stark and powerful. Ford’s words of testimony about what happened to her body inscribed onto her face, neck, chest and raised hand.
When Ford sat down before the Senate Judiciary Committee last week, she joined a centuries-long line of women who have had to defend their bodies in the face of political and public scrutiny, and who also became an image of a movement. Women dressed as Margaret Atwood’s handmaids, in white bonnets and flowing red cloaks silently protested in the halls before Kavanaugh gave his testimony.
Atwood has said of her novel The Handmaid’s Tale, now a #metoo literary touchstone, “I made sure that every horrific detail in the book had happened at sometime, somewhere.”
Atwood reached back almost five centuries to the fate of Anne Boleyn, charged with adultery, incest and treason; suspected of witchcraft and beheaded in 1536 for some of her novel’s material. Boleyn is perhaps, in popular culture now and then, the canary in the coal mine for how history captures the moment a woman becomes just a body.
Historians widely accept that if Boleyn’s body had been able to produce a male heir (she miscarried a boy five months before her execution), she would not have lost the crown, or her life. Atwood says: “And for centuries and centuries, that’s what people thought. [That infertility, or failure to produce a male heir] was the woman’s fault…That’s why Anne Boleyn knew she was doomed when she had that miscarriage.”
Boleyn’s pale skin, her thin neck, her supposed infertility, her rumored deformities — six fingers on one hand, it was said, and a mark of the devil on her throat — have become mythic.
Nicholas Sanders was a Catholic propagandist of the Tudor era. Think of him as the David Brock of the time; Brock, the now atoned writer who was tasked with portraying Professor Anita Hill as “a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty” in 1991. Sanders wrote of Boleyn in a book following her execution:
“Anne Boleyn was rather tall of stature, with black hair, and an oval face of a sallow complexion as if troubled with jaundice. She had a projecting tooth under the upper lip, and on her right hand six fingers. There was a large wen under her chin, and therefore to hide its ugliness she wore a high dress covering her throat. …”
Boleyn’s fate is so terrifyingly medieval. Atwood might suggest it’s so terribly modern. A rudimentary poll amongst peers this week, in which I asked why so much has been written about Atwood’s novel returned dozens of answers something like this: “It seems just a hair’s breadth too close for comfort.” That a futuristic, dystopian world, in which fertile women are systematically raped by a state sponsored procreation program, seems a little bit too much like it could happen, is how many women feel in 2018.
“We as women all feel that this could be our future, but more than that is the fact that it is happening across the world right now,” says Blakeley Lowry, founder of Changing Winds Consultancy, a global women’s health advocacy group, specializing in maternal mental health in post conflict countries. “Whether it be in the form of female genital mutilation, sex trafficking, or the Taliban’s attempted assassination of Malala — all of these intentionally strip away a woman’s dignity, ghost their bodies and silence their voices in the name of the patriarchy.”
Compare for example: “Even if I am a girl, even if people think I can’t do it, I can’t lose hope,” Malala Yousafzai (spoken in 2017), with, “I know I have the body but of a weak and feeble woman; but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and of a king of England too,” Elizabeth I (spoken in1588).
The Atlantic Slave Trade, growing by the end of Elizabeth I’s rule, lasted three hundred years, and yet there is not one single narrative or testimony from an enslaved woman in the archives. Instead, in the Library of Congress, and the British Museum there are copies of what could be considered a viral image of an enslaved woman, used by abolitionists in 1792 to argue for the end of the trade in human bodies. The image above became infamous at the time. The captain of a slave ship, the Recovery, was tried for murder. Reports then said the woman was hoisted above the deck after refusing to dance for the captain and his shipmates. She was beaten and starved for three days before dying. William Wilberforce, an English politician and anti-slavery crusader, used the image of this murder, drawn by Isaac Cruikshank, to exemplify the brutality and immorality of the slave trade. The image shows not only the body of a woman hoisted up on deck by her feet but the captain of the ship laughing. (“Indelible in the hippocampus is the laughter,” said Ford last week, when she testified about her alleged assault.) Captain Kimber was acquitted of murder.
Women’s bodies are carriers of history. Anne Boleyn’s neck, Monica Lewinsky and her dress, The Iron Lady, The Blonde Bombshell, The Vamp, The Virgin Queen, The Hottentot Venus, Malala, Dr Ford’s closed eyes and raised hand. Women’s bodies become symbols of political intent, purveyors of current political climates. A line can be drawn through time citing myriad examples of these moments; how little has changed. The more we examine these moments and connect the dots, the more we understand that the current use of women as political objects brings us closer to the past, not the future.
