I've been thinking about the discussion we attended the week before last about the importance of the bathroom in millennial TV shows about young women. The presenter's argument, as I understood it, was that there has been a reclaiming of bathrooms as sites of feminine sociality, but in a way that foregrounded women and their bodies as vulnerable, messy and naked but not nude. The presenter traced out important differences between the shows: how the women performed vulnerability in Insecure was very different that Girls. Whereas Girls uses Dunham's naked body to trouble a heteronormative gaze (in her reading), Insecure is conscious of the hyper sexualization that black women have lived in visual media. It thus used direct address to a mirror, or moments of private, non-bodily-centric life.
In retrospect, it is a testimony to the rapid acceleration of the world in the last two weeks that no one asked anything around Covid-19. I am feeling now as if the scenes of the messy interior, of families and friends crammed together in spaces that had not been thought of as central to social life, and of the new sets of disciplines and attentions to bodies that we are increasingly called to. The bathroom heterotopia is suddenly both nauseatingly familiar, and completely unrecognizable: one could not invite a friend over to sit in one's bathtub without an itch of discomfort or guilt. What does it mean for the types of intimacies that the shows discovered, and that the author's work treasured, when everyone is a potential vector of illness? I'm sure we will see a generation of TV defined by it. I hope that forms of solidarity beyond the private and interior will be the silver lining.
In retrospect, it is a testimony to the rapid acceleration of the world in the last two weeks that no one asked anything around Covid-19. I am feeling now as if the scenes of the messy interior, of families and friends crammed together in spaces that had not been thought of as central to social life, and of the new sets of disciplines and attentions to bodies that we are increasingly called to. The bathroom heterotopia is suddenly both nauseatingly familiar, and completely unrecognizable: one could not invite a friend over to sit in one's bathtub without an itch of discomfort or guilt. What does it mean for the types of intimacies that the shows discovered, and that the author's work treasured, when everyone is a potential vector of illness? I'm sure we will see a generation of TV defined by it. I hope that forms of solidarity beyond the private and interior will be the silver lining.
Thought-provoking post, Dylan, thanks. I appreciate your designation of the bathroom as heterotopia, though I'd extend this to contemporary public space writ large -- given the wildly sudden recalibration of (again, Foucauldian) regimes of 'care of the self.' The pressurization of discourses of hygiene seems to be going hand-in-hand (heh) with an equal pressurization of virtual, disembodied forms of sociality. This makes me nervous -- when has biopower not worked repressive effects, if not in the immediate present then in the future, 'after' the crisis? -- but I can't put my finger on why. Agamben tried to articulate some of these anxieties; he didn't go a good job for it, and was rightly roasted. Here's his not-so-hot take:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.journal-psychoanalysis.eu/coronavirus-and-philosophers/
Tania, great point! Part of Foucault's insight about biopolitics is that it is a form politics that emerges during the medieval plagues; before that, there was no large-scale administrative concern for the "health" of a population. I wonder if we're now seeing a "yearning for biopolitics" in public spaces, where the absent of a functional state is felt through the deprivation of care, of tracking and testing.
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