ACCOZZAGLIA

Prepared 24 November 2008 for Prof. Deborah Leslie (GGR337H1F, University of Toronto).

————— —— —————

In this paper:

Introduction
“The Land”
Fielding’s body-as-depth versus body-as-surface
Conclusion
References

Introduction

Every August, hundreds of women journey to a remote, rural campground nearby Lake Michigan to celebrate in a festival of female spirituality, female sexuality, and “woman-oriented” music performances. Now in its fourth decade, this celebration, the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, traces its genesis to the apex of “second wave radical feminism,” when myths of unified gendered experiences, in the United States particularly, helped to mobilize action on women’s reproductive rights; countering domestic violence; and highlighting disparities in gendered divisions of labour (Kinser 2004, 129; Nelson and Seager 2005, 4). The campground is woman-owned; the event is maintained, and staffed entirely by women. This being a woman-oriented event, every attendee is female. Sort of. Other female attendees, meanwhile, are simply persona non grata.

Unlike other woman-oriented music festivals — Ladyfest or Lilith Fair, for example — the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, whose majority demographic is lesbian women, is unique in that its organizers enforce a strict policy which challenges not only the politics of claiming and sanctioning geographical space as gendered, essential, or sacred, but also the politics of body spacing itself and who is permitted to define, be defined by, and govern that corporeal space (Leonard 2007, 164; Fielding 1997, 4).

This essay shall touch upon two spatial problematics: first, an examination of the festival’s transgressive, carnivalesque milieu within a designated space to challenge socio-political conventions beyond its boundaries, while second, using the found power within that asserted space to remove others; this latter area hopes to factor the context of a body-as-surface versus a body-as-depth in the perception of women who want to participate in this festival.

“The Land”

The Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival (known colloquially as MWMF, “the Fest”, or by the metonym “Michigan”) is an annual outdoor music event situated inside rural northern Michigan’s Manistee National Forest; the 1.6km-squared campground is woman-owned (Birdsell 2001, 18). The Fest has been held every year since 1976 (Collas 2006, 163).

The MWMF continues a long-venerated European-rooted tradition of the carnivalesque: a sanctioned, spatial-temporal event which consciously transgresses those social norms enforced by a hegemony of power beyond that space — “a second world and a second life outside officialdom” (Bakhtin 1968 [1984], 6). In this case, the hegemonic is defined as heterosexism, misogyny, and patriarchy which “shape gendered and sexual identities” (Collas 2006, 157).

The Fest’s carnivalesque structure was founded to foster safe discourses on misogynist oppressions experienced beyond the spatial-temporal sanctuary of “The Land” (n.b., shorthand for the campground); it demarcated a sanctioned space within which themes of resistance and reproductions of the “sexual aspects of the dominant culture”, transgression, and challenging patriarchal discourse could be safely explored (Collas 2004, 157). It was a space — both geographically and as a sense of place — where lesbian women could safely explore a communal living environment completely sanitized from men or patriarchal systems of dominance (ibid., 1).

Stallybrass and White (1986, 191) note how “differentiation . . . is dependent upon disgust . . . [that] the division of the social into high and low, the polite and the vulgar, simultaneously maps out divisions between the civilized and the grotesque body, between author and hack, between social purity and social hybridization.” In this case, the high civilized culture of The Fest was opposed by the vulgar and grotesque of men, misogyny, heterosexism, and patriarchy.

The Fest’s distinction of the low continues. The Fest organizers further erected a spatial restriction to allow only “womyn-born womyn” onto The Land; this was a prerequisite to recognize only those women “who were born and who have lived their entire life experience as female — and who currently identify as a womon” (Mantilla 2000, 8). By advancing this new policy of exclusion, the organizers fashioned a disconnect between a “false image of homogeneity” they were trying to downplay and “voicing a desire for diversity, while simultaneously expressing the importance of maintaining a collective identity” (Birdsell 2001, 21). This new policy wasn’t created to exclude men, since this was explicitly established from the festival’s founding.

Before continuing this discussion, it is instructive to consider Serano’s (2007, 12) introduction of cissexual — that is, signifying those “people who are not transsexual and who have only ever experienced their subconscious and physical sexes as being aligned.” Viewed through this lens, an oppositional relationship is established between cissexual and non-cissexual people — or in Michigan’s case, the bodies of cissexual women and non-cissexual women (n.b., to maintain currency and clarity for this argument, non-cissexual will be used in lieu of transsexual for this essay’s discussion, since the former does not necessarily qualify the latter). MWMF’s entrance policy excluded the bodies of both non-cissexual women and non-cissexual men (some of whom articulated themselves as lesbian women for decades before coming out) (Birdsell 2001, 116; Collas 2006, 1).

Even so, artefacts of masculinity are not eschewed wholesale from “The Land” (e.g., butch dykes, drag king performance, and consensual BDSM role-playing scenes in designated areas are not prohibited from exploring masculine performativity within the context of a cissexual woman), but the bodies of non-cissexual women, no matter how novel the context of their individual life experiences, may never qualify as “womyn-born womyn” and are consequently excluded (Sandstrom 2002, 164). Curiously, this policy exclusion of non-cissexual-bodied men affirmed a double-standard: those individuals, despite being “womyn-born”, were now men, but non-cissexual women under the same policy were not “womyn”. Stallybrass and White (1986, 200) argue that this Foucauldian concept “is perhaps the most characteristic manoeuvre of bourgeois identity,” adding that this questioning “the liminal position . . . stage[s] a festival of the political unconscious and reveal[s] the repressions and social rejections which formed it.” While no evidence demonstrates that excluding the bodies of all non-cissexual women from “womyn” boundaries will enrich a utopia of shared stories, authenticity of lived experiences, or quality of social transactions, this point is not really relevant; what is relevant is the conscious act by Fest organizers to sanction and enforce those spatial boundaries.

In European history, ritual is a sacred element of the festival or carnival. MWMF is no exception. “Goddess rituals”, opening/closing ceremonies, and “ritual as an expressive form of solidarity” all constitute symbolic complements to The Fest’s unique experience (Morris 2005, 622; Sandstrom 2002, 32–3; Birdsell 2001, 18–9). In such rituals, “the dominant squanders its symbolic capital so as to get in touch with the fields of desire which it denied itself as the price paid for its political power” (Stallybrass and White 1986, 201). After a generation of mobilizing and building every year for The Fest, this ritual space encourages The Fest community to use its political capital in demonstrations to re-discover “the carnivalesque as a radical source of transcendence” (ibid.). That act of re-discovery, they contend, is “constitutive of the very formation of middleclass [sic] identity” (ibid.).

Scholarly research projects produced on MWMF (i.e., dissertations, peer-reviewed essays, etc.) have uniformly sidestepped advancing any academic challenges to (or advocacy for) reviewing the “womyn-born womyn” policy confining women with non-cissexual bodies to outside The Land’s boundaries; if any are singled out while within The Land, they are put in their place and expelled from The Fest (Morris 2005, 623; Collas 2004, 48–9).

This is hardly a revelation: the feminist geographer may explore the festival’s political geography only if her body is cissexual and — given the imperative to co-enforce the festival’s ground policy as a condition of her admission — she also vows to uphold the organizers’ “womon-born womon” policy. By vowing, this would extend that she is declaring herself as a woman with a cissexual body, assigned female at the time of her birth (since the idea that newborns could be “womyn” or “men” at birth is glaringly absurd). Should her body not be cissexual and she then declines to disclose this, she then finds herself entrapped by a fait accompli of even harsher repercussions: her lie of omission only validates the resistance to keep the bodies of non-cissexual women excluded from The Land.

This position is unambiguously articulated by both Morris and Collas, both of whom speak emotionally and, at times, forcefully about the importance of maintaining a cissexist, “womyn-born womyn” policy at the Fest. The personal is indeed very political.

For ideological geographies (of either transgression or conformity), “the environment forces people to relate beliefs to actions” (Cresswell 1996, 16). Consequently, the accrued histories which for decades have strictly excluded the bodies of non-cissexual women have imbued enhanced meanings of “the Land” as (somewhat ironically) a biologically-deterministic space which values the placement of specific groups of cissexual women, particularly those of a “Caucasian, middle-class, lesbian-identified” background (Sandstrom 2002, 14–5). Given aggregated costs of travel, gate admission, and time away from work (if volunteering to help set up the event), this would tend to intersectionally discourage lower-income women and working-class visible minorities (who may be aware that they shall be visible minorities at The Fest). Thus, the sacred spacing of the festival becomes even more privileged — endowed not just by birthright, but also by positioning of class and ethnicity.

Fielding’s body-as-depth versus body-as-surface

Michigan certainly raises the spectre of surface perceptions by Fest attendees, even if they don’t mean to ascribe character valuations based on those superficial appearances. But in an image- obsessed culture, Fielding’s dissertation on advancing a phenomenology of body-as-depth — rather than body-as-surface — attempts to explain the contemporary “propensity to rationalize and systematize all areas of our existence” through perception, meaning, and even articulation of the self (Fielding 1997, 1). She argues that this is an era when two-dimensional modes of communication — computer screens, for example — “complements . . . with the cognitive of the representational plane” [n.b., author emphasis] she describes as the “surface body” (ibid., 3). Fielding raises awareness on how we tend to map body valuations of others based on the images of the people we are seeing, and this is increasingly happening in situations which face-to-face contact occurs: we relate to others spatially in the capacity of “body-as-surface . . . reading, calculating and interpreting their ideas”(ibid., 4). It becomes a kind of cognitive shorthand.

Not surprisingly, we are accustomed to these “surface” displays as we rely more on the “flat” media of Facebook, reality television, and YouTube. Our overarching tendency to view life in “the present and the future based on representations from the past” signifies this cognitive approach, leaving us little in the way to stop and “reflect upon our embodied experiences” (ibid., 9). In a twist, she advocates a return to an essentialism of looking inward, mapping, and experiencing the outward in phenomenological capacities of depth, and of “self disclosure” (ibid., 17). She notes that Arendt argues how “nobody knows whom he reveals when he discloses himself . . . he must be willing to risk the disclosure . . . neither the doer of good works who must . . . preserve anonymity . . . nor the criminal, who must hide himself from others” can foresee what will happen by allowing others to view and be views on this representational — not cognitive — level (Arendt 1958, 180).

So for Michigan, could this impact the way which Fest attendees on the Land interact with and relate to one another? It might, and it is not beyond reason to posit that in isolated circumstances, this body-as-depth representation (and interrelating therefrom) happens. But for something like this to impact how people relate to one another on the Land, it would require having to set aside, even “unlearn” the heavily ingrained cognitive approach. It means that political labels like “womyn-born womyn” and “cissexual” — or even constructed identities of race, dis/abled-bodiedness, size, creed and, yes, body forms (of cissexual/non-cissexual) — must be set aside long enough for women to register the Other as far less foreign than the surface identities would ever permit. This interaction would by necessity, Fielding (1997, 20) notes, be far more “corporeal” then what we might be accustomed to, that such “corporeal essences” would “never become fixed psychological categories.” What isn’t immediately apparent is whether she is articulating the notion of soul, of spirit, of “energy”, or of something else entirely.

It certainly suggests a Utopian ideal, but within a sanctioned carnival space like the Fest — where many of the outside world’s rules are suspended for the duration of the celebration anyway — this Utopian project could conceivably gain some traction. If so, then the next challenge would present the process of unlearning body-as-surface cognition methods and re-learning body-as-depth representations. This would require time, trust, and patience — both in oneself and in others, as one’s mental map of themselves and of those around her would re-arrange entire body geographies.

Conclusion

The Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival continues to thrive as a living subject, as the annual festivals continue apace. Biologically deterministic labels like “womon-born-womon” are beginning to show their age in a post-structural, third-wave feminist context, in which a wider leverage of interpretation as to what “feminist” and “woman” can mean to different people globally is so much more varied than in the largely white, middle-class values which second-wave feminism permitted. Also, as original founders and participants dating from the 1970s begin to pass down as elders their shared knowledge and collective efforts to successive generations — their daughters and granddaughters — the opportunity for self-reflection and reassessment of inherited policy may ultimately adapt to reflect those changing needs and realities.

Still, the presence of a biologically deterministic policy (both from within the Land and the outside world it actually tries to challenge and rally against every August) discourages any near-term hope for comprehension — that a reducible black-and-white approach simply doesn’t work.

References

Arendt, Hannah. 1958. The human condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1968. Rabelais and his world. Translated by Hélène Iswolsky. Bloomington (Ind.): Indiana University Press.

Birdsell, Amanda Helen. 2001. ‘Womyn-born womyn’? Contestations of gendered identity(ies)
(Masters thesis, University of Guelph, 2000). Masters Abstracts International, 39-03: 692.

Collas, Sara F. 2006. Conflict and community in a lesbian feminist space: An autoethnography of Workerville at the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Kansas, 2004). Dissertation Abstracts International, A: The Humanities and Social Sciences, 66(8): 3114-A.

Cresswell, Tim. 1996. In place/out of place: geography, ideology, and transgression. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Fielding, Helen Anne. 1997. Beyond the surface: towards a feminist phenomenology of the body- as-depth (Doctoral dissertation, York University, 1996). Dissertation Abstracts International, June, 57–12A: 5180.

Kinser, Amber E. 2004. Negotiating spaces for/through third-wave feminism. NWSA Journal, 16(3): 124–53.

Leonard, Marion. 2007. Gender in the Music Industry: Rock, Discourse and Girl Power. Surrey (UK): Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.

Mantilla, Karla. 2000. Michigan: transgender controversy; excerpts from Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival’s statements on the transgender issue. Off Our Backs, October, 8–9.

Morris, Bonnie J. 2005. Commentary: valuing woman-only spaces. Feminist Studies, 31(3), 619– 31.

Nelson, Lise and Seager, Joni. 2005. Introduction. In L. Nelson & J. Seager (Eds.), A companion to feminist geography, 1–11. Oxford: Blackwell.

Sandstrom, Boden C. 2002. Performance, ritual and negotiation of identity in the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Maryland). Dissertation Abstracts International, 64–03A: 0716.

Serano, Julia. (2007). Whipping girl: a transsexual woman on sexism and the scapegoating of femininity. Emeryville (Calif.): Seal Press.

Stallybrass, Peter and White, Allon. 1986. The politics and poetics of transgression. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.