Political and Medical Language

I very much like the idea of writing from a medical/political standpoint while using a poetic strategy that challenges normative novel writing.  The use of a sex anonymous narrator and blending of language type to generate a new-type of love language is fascinating and informative.  This was a challenge for me, but was well worth the discomfort of confronting my own biases and constructing new thought patterns for myself that in the long run are going to be quite beneficial. 

The female body, roughly speaking, is discussed and is written about in relation to the male vernacular conquering femininity with the female being reduced to sex plunder i.e., “booty calls”    Today it seems like females are urban warfare prizes and most people hold to essentialist thought that women are naturally different than men.  Some essentialists feminist believe that no enculturation can alter female difference.  Unless taught to receive and disseminate diverse language information we will continue to “die from lack of knowledge.”

My question is how do we begin to learn a new construct about sexed bodies?  Our language is something we have grown up with and has been reinforced by our cultural norms, how do we build education around this different construct without squashing the old if it is an individual’s preferred construct?  Is this to be learned in an English class, a Sociology class, or perhaps a Psychology class?  What would a class focus on – literature, mechanical English, speech?  Where would this new learning fit into daily life?  Babies are socialized before birth with pink and blue colors, trucks for little boys, dolls for little girls, and there is a language that goes with each.  Where do we begin?  Is it possible to do someone great harm because we may be insensitive to their request to be treated as sexually ambiguous?

The language of Winterson’s Written On the Body are exquisitely written towards the end of the book, but I wondered why Louise’s lover spoke about her in terms of the flesh, parts,  most women detest being divided into parts.  Why would her lover speak of her in terms of medical science and parts?  Though the article discusses Winterson being at odds with Medical Sciecne’s coldness and failure to treat a person holistically, why would the narrator still depict love this way? 

“Thereafter new cells are formed to replace those which have died.  Nerve cells are a notable exception.  When they die they are not replaced”.  Understanding that this is a slightly twisted truth is fetching.  There are separate nerves that catalog heat, cold, pain, touch and pressure.  The touch nerve is elongated bulb shaped, the cold nerve is a squat bulb, the warmth nerve has twisted threads, deep pressure nerves has an egg shaped ending, and the pain receptors have no protective sheath that once it dies it is not replaced.  There are some people in the world who suffer from HSAN – Hereditary Sensory Automatic Neuropathy, these people’s nerve fibers never develop to detect pain.  I wonder if these metaphoric nerve cells that Winterson writes about have died, or were never truly developed until there was of course, Louise.  There is no cure for HSAN.  Is there a cure for our narrator and this obsession with Louise’s anatomy? 

Perhaps all of this is just the narrator fusing and or achieving a final reconciliation and integration of hermaphroditism, a full essential Oneness.  There is a belief that after death humans must be integrated once more in their original Oneness, of which there is such universal evidence, as accompanied by an overriding need in this world to differentiate completely between the sexes.  This is because, and here the most ancient beliefs are at one with the most modern biological discoveries, no human being is ever born completely polarized sexually.  The Bambara maintain that ‘it is a basic rule of creation that every human being is both physically and in spiritual principles simultaneously male and female’”.

Perhaps this is as Rubinson has stated, this is worship and perhaps at the end of all of this really is where Louise’s story begins.