This is a repost of a piece from my BDSMlr page. It’s one of my personal favorite pieces of writing I’ve ever done. Enjoy.
“I write woman: woman must write woman. And man, man.” (877)
—Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa”
And bimbo, bimbo.
Bimbo is not woman; neither a type nor a catchall. A bimbo may also be a woman, but bimbo is a performance, a text, a state of being entirely apart from “woman”. I will explore the writing of bimbo: a text, an action, a performance of unexpected queerness. Bimbo is written as text on the body; bimbo is all body and no mind. To write bimbo is to write self in a radically decontextualized fashion. It is obliterative, the creation of an un-self, an illogic, an unintelligence.
“[W]riting is precisely the very possibility of change, the space that can serve as a springboard for subversive thought, the precursory movement of a transformation of social and cultural structures.” (879)
—Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa”
When you are a bimbo, your dehumanization and domination has a semi-stable referent: patriarchal female subjugation. I say semi-stable because, despite the preexistence and familiarity of that referent, its stability is always in question: it is tenuous at best. It requires the constant maintenance of both parties to avoid breaking down.
The closest reference point to bimbo is femme. To be bimbo is largely to be femme in a butch-femme dichotomy that resembles the kind of overtly queer butch-femme roles that can be found in queer women’s subcultures. Rather than shore up the gender binary or patriarchal norms by reiterating classical heterosexual/patriarchal dynamics, butch-femme is a deconstructive iteration that breaks down the boundaries it imitates. Butch-femme is fundamentally queer because it exaggerates those referents and proves their constructedness. This is what makes bimbo camp in the sense that Susan Sontag suggests “the essence of Camp is its love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration” (275). In suggesting bimbo as camp, we admit it has a “seriousness that fails”, in Sontag’s words (283); that is, in reiterating bimbo as a modern trope, we acknowledge the failure of the traditional stereotypical gender roles it imitates.
Bimbo is one half of a dynamically queer performance with Daddy or Master or Dom or whatever he might drive her to call him. This, like lesbian butch-femme roles, breaks down rather than shores up patriarchal modes and norms by revealing their intrinsic constructedness: they are fictions, written on the body, that such performances prove by writing them. Judith Butler famously called gender “a kind of imitation for which there is no original” (21); to those invested in a real patriarchal value system (who have perhaps stopped reading this long ago), the myth is that bimbo is a copy of some stable, natural woman. Instead, bimbo is but a mutated copy of femme, which is itself a mutated copy of woman, which is itself a copy without an original. Each iteration degrades the original such that bimbo, by the time it reaches the body, it no longer refers to anything close to concrete reality. Bimbo is the end result of a series of Cronenbergian mutations that produces something entirely new.
Writing bimbo is thus to write the dissolution of gender, sexuality, of category itself: to un-write.
“Write your self. Your body must be heard. Only then will the immense resources of the unconscious spring forth.”
—Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa” (880)
The paradox of this piece is that bimbo cannot be written in words; it is purely anti-literary, libidinal, corporeal. This text, in itself, cannot write bimbo. It can only serve as a kind of arrow pointing to its iterations and performances elsewhere. Bimbo is corporeal fiction; it is a narrative that can be staged but not truly written in words, because bimbo herself is beyond words.
Bimbo is likewise beyond mind yet steeped in the arenas of the mind in which such iterative fictions play out. Mindlessness is true yet perhaps something of a misnomer; the bimbo is both deeply connected to parts of the mind (libido, sexuality) and yet divorced from others (logic, reason).
“Her libido will produce far more radical effects of political and social change than some might like to think.” (882)
—Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa”
If we maintain that the bimbo is less an act of reassuring patriarchal gender norms than one of dissolving them, playing with them in such a way that diminishes their power, then true bimbo potential can be revealed as part of a spectrum of queerness, one with the potential to resist hetero-patriarchal capitalist imperatives of love and procreation. The joke of the whole performance is on everyone else; the bimbo giggles idly yet also at the world’s expense.
“If woman has always functioned ‘within’ the discourse of man, a signifier that has always referred back to the opposite signifier, which annihilates its specific energy and diminishes or stifles its very different sounds, it is time for her to dislocate this ‘within,’ to explode it, turn it around, and seize it; to make it hers, containing it, taking it in her own mouth, biting that tongue with her very own teeth to invent for herself a language to get inside of. And you’ll see with what ease she will spring forth from that ‘within’—the ‘within’ where once she so drowsily crouched—to overflow at the lips she will cover the foam.” (887)
—Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa”
*giggle*
with all apologies to Hélène Cixous and anyone else not happy to be quoted here
Sources
Butler, Judith. “Imitation and Gender Insubordination”. In Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories, edited by Diana Fuss. New York: Routledge, 1991.
Cixous, Hélène. “The Laugh of the Medusa”. Translated by Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen. Signs 1.4 (Summer 1976), pp. 875-893. www.jstor.org/stable/3173239, accessed January 02, 2017.
Sontag, Susan. “Notes on ‘Camp'”. In Against Interpretation and other Essays. New York: Picador.