My friend: Womb
Tangible Issue No. 3
Pearl Tang Xiaow Jun, ‘Womb Teapot’, 30 May 2022
“My own survival depends upon a complex process filled with strangers and strangeness”
The womb is a strange creature.
A fleshy plant that grows…maybe even glows in the darkness. It has eggs, ovum, a tiny self-preserving sun that appears in a river of red every month. The cervix – or a neck in Latin – from which it makes its demands or its desires known perhaps. And the vagina, naturally, with its undulating folds like the dunes of the Vermillion Cliffs under the rosy light of the evening. Any woman can tell tales of the bloody chamber… the little red room of their own. I find it intriguing how the womb (and in this writing, I shall loosely refer to all its parts and appendages under the name Womb unless specifically mentioned) is a mixture of contradictions. Quiet but Noisy. Invisible but present. An interior that could manifest itself externally. Private and public. It also defines its own time…when it bleeds, when it desires, when it dies. My personal experiences of it makes me think about my womb as a friend. Knowable and unknowable all at the same time.
One often thinks of friends as people who are familiar. People who are welcomed into a space or life. They probably know of one’s birthday, their preferences (E.g. no mayonnaise, shrooms are evil, etc.), and one’s vulnerabilities…or at least a degree of it, since one chooses what to narrate…what to frame. Yet, it is safe to say… that one barely knows them…one can also look at the reverse and question if one fully understands oneself. The same could be applied to the womb. Though intimately dwelling in the abyss of my interior body, I seem not to have a clue about what it is trying to tell me. I use the term, ‘dwell’, which has ties to old European languages connoting ideas of deception and going astray. So, strangeness and the movement into the unfamiliar…to spaces and time beyond what is known, what is familiar, what can be immediately perceived.
In ‘Of Hospitality’, Jacques Derrida invites the reader to question the figure of host and guests and the relationship that is articulated in the processes, experiences, and difficulties of negotiating what is hospitable. Society tends to depict the foreigner, the xenos, as the other which is absolutely excluded and heterogeneous (Derrida, 2000). The foreigner is conventionally defined and also regulated through three angles: the figure of the state, the notion of territory, and the people (who in themselves embody heterogeneity). A similar attempt at defining and controlling the womb can also be applied due to the mysticism and taboo that surrounds it since days of old. Take for example, the witch trial in 1593 where a poor woman was convicted of being a witch just because some dumb men had never seen (maybe never thought much of) a clitoris before (Ensler, 2018). The power of the devil’s teat is to be feared!
Not to mention, the role of religion in shaping ideas of sex and chastity also creates a distance between/within body. Chastity, a word derived from the Latin term castitatem and castus meaning to cut off, to be separated. The womb, the hymen in particular, seem to be kept cloistered under the halo of purity…So once it acts out of the ‘norm’, as in the case of Hysteria in the nineteenth Century, this vile appendage must be removed. So strange and fearsome it is that the practice of isolating in menstrual huts and female circumcision persist to this very day. All in the attempts at governing the strangeness that is bodies and wombs.
Pearl Tang Xiaow Jun, ‘Plum Teapot’, 30 May 2022
Pearl Tang Xiaow Jun, ‘Tiger Teapot’, 30 May 2022
The omnipresent Big Brother does not just define who is foreign but what could be foreign even within oneself. In their eyes, the female body is mobilised for reproduction as could be identified through baby bonuses, subsidies, and fulfilling the criteria of nuclear families in order to purchase a Build-To-Order apartments (BTO sounds strangely military…). As for territory, medical authorities (like doctors, nurses, and surgeons, gynaecologists, TCM practitioners, midwives) attempt to define the physicality of the womb and its constituent parts through medicine, science, technology. And technology as an extension to which territories are claimed as in the form of drones, satellites, SpaceX, and wands stuck up vaginas to get grainy ultrasound scans, hormonal tests and their jargon of what-nots-and-what-is in effort to understand the womb. On a side note, could someone please come up with more ergonomic speculum so that vaginas do not have to suffer the blunt force of a rocket stuffed up them?
There are other facets to how spaces defined, especially if one is looking at how places embodied with gestures and acts. In the Thai horror movie, ‘The Medium’, Nim functions as (you guessed it) the medium to the goddess Bayan. Through her gestures of exorcising malevolent spirits and curing the ill afflicted by evil, Nim possesses the powers and, as a result, embodies the will and spirit of the goddess herself. Likewise, in the case of womb, gestures of caring for it, regulating it, and claiming it, is almost like an attempt to integrate the uterus into the larger body for it to function. To do one’s bidding. Tonics to strengthen the womb, pads and moon cups to contain blood, when is the peak ovulation period to conceive une bébé, etcetera, etcetera… The body becomes similar to a host in its supposed mastery over the interior of which the womb is part of. A woman can decide when to bleed by taking contraception pills. The reverse is the same with emergency contraceptives to induce bleeding. These actions suggest a control over the body which in itself encapsulates space (a sacred space within the interior of the body) and time (of desires and when they can(not) be enacted) … or so it seems.
“I, too, overflow; my desires have invented new desires, my body knows of unheard-of songs.”
The ‘taming’ of the uterus inversely suggests that it could act on its own and that while intimate, it is still beyond our comprehension and control. It contests efforts at regulating it and subjects one to its effects. In the words of Max Weber, power is the ability to exercise one’s will over the others and make them subscribe to one’s ideas and beliefs (2016). So how does a little organ influence one to act in accordance to its wishes? Well, I do believe that Womb speaks through hormones, through the feelings of menstrual cramps, through cravings for strawberry shortcake. Maybe, we just have not learnt to listen to its language. There is also the debate on the syncing of the menstrual cycle by women who live in close proximity with each other. A uterine telepathy innately and collectively felt? Perhaps, it is wombs conversing. Besides it speaking, the womb is powerful enough to directs how one acts or feels and it is powerful enough to structure a woman’s time and the space she she can be in. Taking a day off and staying home because of menstrual pain. Having to stay in a menstrual hut outside sanctioned spaces, outside the regular flow of time. By acquiescing, out of pain or out of desire, a woman (and sometimes men because they have to buy chocolates and pads) subscribes to the wishes of the womb.
Moreover, attempts to divorce oneself from its influence is sometimes futile as made evident in the case of cancer. The introduction of technology produces a new frontier to which society tries to understand and in turn, regulate bodies. Take for instance, Dr. Bernadette Tynan who had been misdiagnosed multiple times before receiving treatment for terminal endometrial cancer (2021). In the course of time, her cervix and uterus grew strange and malignant and Dr. Bernadette eventually succumbs to the disease. Despite the promises of medical technology and medical knowledge, wombs and bodies challenge what is known and unfailing. My womb, too, became strange to me. Early last year, after a pang of pain so horrible I decided it was worth checking, a Pap smear has shown abnormal cells on my cervix. Thankfully, after a battery of tests and a colposcopy — where they punched out the growth for a biopsy — it is considered benign. However, in between yearly Pap smears, my womb waits in the dark; away from being seen and known. I will still have to live with an ambiguity, a possible threat, a strangeness….and it reminds me of its insidious presence through the calendar and sms-reminders. In other words, the womb evades one’s attempts at limiting it; of making it sterile and knowable. It is like a Hydra where it grows in ways beyond one’s comprehension.
Pearl Tang Xiaow Jun, ‘Teacups’, 30 May 2022
To complicate matters, there is the existence of artificial wombs which introduces the prism of morality. In her article for The Guardian, Jenny Kleeman writes of artificial wombs and the implications surrounding them. One quote by Dr. Anna Smajor, stood out to me, “women become almost ectogenetic gestators themselves, their whole function about maximising what’s good for the baby” (Kleeman, 2020). It may seem like a rather dystopian perspective of how women are walking vessels, but this artificial womb brings to the table another element to the womb: its morality. In the Republic of Gilead, Handmaids who fail to produce a child are sent to the colonies to die a gruesome death. In this rather extreme example, the innate failure to conceive or bring a child to term is akin to an innate and immoral act of betrayal committed by the womb.
The artificial interior…artificial from the word artifex…meaning craftsman, artist, master of art. It is a mistress of its domain. The womb defines its own time, its own desires, its own function and wills it onto the bearer, onto people who depend on it…whether it is ‘real’ or ‘artificial’. While a uterus that is ‘artificial’ may be more malleable, it still controls scientists and investors in terms of morality. It becomes a space where ethnics can be incited and politicised. It evokes discussions of right or/ and wrong (‘and’ because one is never a hundred percent good nor bad). No longer is it measurable space for it is made ambiguous with meanings and disagreements. It does not just exist for a singular purpose that can be clearly defined and regulated. Womb continues to defy who determines her for she can determine herself.
“The guest, the invited hostage, becomes the one who invites the one who invites, the master of the host. The guest becomes the host’s host.”
This train of thought (more like a tangle of thoughts to be honest) brings me to discuss the blurring of the dichotomy between host (me, body) and guest (womb). Derrida explains that in the process of opening up a space within one’s self to accommodate another, both host and guest imply and exclude each other… incorporate one another at the moment of excluding one another… they disassociate at the movement of enveloping one another…and is hospitable inasmuch as inhospitable (Derrida, 2000). Both my womb and I are separate entities capable of independent thought and either of us are communicating through gestures and blood which in itself carries hormones that triggers certain reactions and responses. I do suppose that this strange séance with my womb - where I watched myself undergoing the colposcopy - made palpable this blur of positions.
Some serious swabbing business going on here…
and searching for cysts…
During that lucid haze of an examination, the apparition of Womb manifests through the screen as the cold metallic speculum that enters me and opens up what is so intimate and dark. I lay there - with my legs spread out - for close to forty minutes (perhaps an hour, maybe half, I cannot remember). All the while, Womb clenches in resistance to these unwelcomed intruders investigating it, flooding it with bright lights and cameras, swabbing at it. It sends shivers down my body as though resisting its restraints. I willed my self to remain calm by watching the hands of the clock. Tick…tick…tick... I count the seconds. We talked. I talked to drown out my fears and the cries from my womb. Coughed as was the procedure to obtain the cell sample – as though to mask the metallic echo of a puncture. And my cervix was left with a bleeding hole to which a pale yellow paste was smothered onto it. Silencing it. You’ll not feel a thing, the gynae reassured me smiling before adding that there are no nerves on my cervix. However, I was left with a lingering dull pain that lasted till the following day…as though my womb is weeping, complaining, and questioning the cruelty of my hospitable intentions to nurse it, cure it. Heavy with absence and light with relief, I collapsed into myself…more aware of my aching Womb.
In this violence that is hospitality, there is the blurring between host and guest. As host, I place my body at the risk of an invasion… Of abnormal cells, of cancer, of transgressions in the dark, of a procedure. And in the case of invasions, one has limited power to curb its progress except to call upon and wait for external help – like surgery – which, in itself, is also an invasion in the form of removing, cutting, altering what was once intact. The host in turn becomes hostage to the whims of the intruder who overstayed their welcome. Conversely, in expressing hospitality, one could smother a guest with excessively good intentions and, in the process, become a figure of a kidnapper bending the guest against her will. Take mothers and aunts who worried about the womb and demands one drinks this and eats that. All in the effort to make sure that the womb listens and cooperates. Pretty much like how in my attempts at curing Womb, where I had to act against her will and traumatise her with a puncture and a lingering scar.
Perhaps then, it might be better to just be friends with my womb. That is to accept the ambiguity of what it is. In explaining Socrates and love, Jeremy states how friendship or philia is the two-way relationship that one can never claim to fully know another, whilst being open to the possibility of the other which is unknown, potentially unknown, and unknowable. Like the times I forget about my womb while it dwells within me. Pregnant with words not spoken; this invisible space that sings. One does not fully comprehend what one’s friends think, might think, have yet to think, but we still share time and space that interrupts the regular flow of individual time …as in the case of wombs. Like cramps that come and go. Like cravings. Like Pap smears. These moments akin to when friends come together, to talk, to be reassured, to know the other is there. Where one knows one exists through an exchange of words, vulnerabilities, and gestures… and to also be reminded that one’s friends are possibly unknowable.
Just like me and my strange friend: Womb.
Pearl Tang Xiaow Jun, ‘My Strange Friend: Womb’, 4 Mar 2022
If you’d like a little piece of art in your home…the teapots and teacup prints are on sale in my shop ~
Bibliography
Cixous, H. (1975). The laugh of the Medusa. Feminisms, 347–362. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-14428-0_21
Derrida, J., & Dufourmantelle, A. (2000). Of hospitality: Anne Dufourmantelle invites Jacques Derrida to respond (2nd ed.). Stanford University Press.
Fernando, J. (2018, August 28). The risk of friendship ... queenmobs.com. Retrieved April 22, 2022, from https://queenmobs.com/2018/08/the-risk-of-friendship/
Kleeman, J. (2020, June 27). 'parents can look at their foetus in Real time': Are artificial wombs the future? The Guardian. Retrieved April 21, 2022, from https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2020/jun/27/parents-can-look-foetus-real-time-artificial-wombs-future
University of Minnesota Libraries Publishing edition, 2016. This edition adapted from a work originally produced in 2010 by a publisher who has requested that it not receive attribution. (2016, April 8). Power and authority. Introduction to Sociology Understanding and Changing the Social World. Retrieved April 21, 2022, from https://pressbooks.howardcc.edu/soci101/chapter/14-1-power-and-authority/#:~:text=Many%20scholars%20adopt%20the%20definition,%2C%20professional%20organizations%2C%20and%20governments
RealWomen/ RealStories. (2021, November). Endometrial cancer: "I'm actually dying of ... - youtube.com. Endometrial cancer: "I'm actually dying of starvation" (REST IN PEACE). Retrieved April 21, 2022, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pVjoJjW3KYE