"A woman's body is like a foreign country":
Thinking about national and bodily sovereignty
 
Nauru, a tiny island in the remote reaches of the Pacific, is on the brink of total economic and ecological collapse. After nearly a century of selling off the island's phosphorus-rich soil for use as fertilizer in the West -- first under colonial duress, later as a desperate attempt to survive in the global economy -- Nauru is left with nothing more that it can produce or sell. "The people have dug up and sold off the interior of their homeland," as writer Jack Hitt puts it, leaving that interior gutted and barren, a gaping lifeless pit.
Here Hitt describes his first view of "Topside," the abandoned mining range that now occupies all but the narrow shoreline encircling Nauru:
Brian [his driver, a native Nauruan] turns up a dirt road. Right away, as we slip behind the outer scrim of trees, shrubs, and ground cover, all things green disappear to reveal a sight both terrible and spellbinding. The road itself becomes a kind of levee laid atop an expanse of pure ruination. . . . The small atoll has essentially been tonsured. The sickly collection of water-starved vegetation on the periphery . . . mask[s] the horror that lies just on the inside of that ring of trees and scrub: The entire interior has been cut down, and the underbed of phosphate strip-mined so deep that the only things remnant are the coral bones of the atoll as it might have existed a million years ago. It's a haunting landscape of dug-out stone channels. With all the topsoil and phosphate gone, what's left are sinuous canals marked by sunbleached limestone towers and coral outcroppings. . . . Old filthy trash blows around this blistering desert, the shredded plastic bags snagging on a bit of coral, the weightier garbage eventually sinking into the ruts where the rot managed to service the root system of a few brave weeds. If there is a speck of nutrient to be found there, it is hunted by the feral dogs that long ago fled the domesticated life on the shore for a brutal Phillip K. Dick existence in the coral channels. . . .
We sit in a hissing silence for a while. There is no breeze, just fine talc, airborne and stagnant like particularate suspended in the stillness of a laboratory vacuum. It seems to crackle and pop in the heavy birdless air. The emotional sensation of just standing there is one of intense, primal fear, like I could be murdered. . . . Brian sits still and stares straight ahead . . . as if his chiseled profile is part of the tour: an expression of shame I have never before seen. (330-32)
 
With what was once lush tropical forest now gutted and despoiled, utterly incapable of producing or sustaining life, Nauru must import everything its citizens need¤even water. As their desperation grows, the Nauruans consider their dwindling options for economic survival: from extracting "residual phosphate" from the limestone pinnacles of Topside, to slicing up and polishing those pinnacles and selling them toWesterners as coffee tables, to selling the country's phone code to be used for phone sex lines. (330-332)
Nuaru, in essence, has nothing left to sell -- except, Hitt observes, "its very sovereignty." After a mere thirty-plus years of independence from a succession of colonial powers, Nauru
has no choice but to root through the last valuable trinkets of their independence -- a UN seat, a batch of "embassies," a passport stamp, bank regulations, a vote on certain international councils. And Nauru trades them with the same brutal, hard-core capitalist spirit that they learned at the knee of their teachers -- the factory managers at the phosphate plant. (343)
 
 
 
 
I am in the process of creating, with two other feminist scholars, a new educational slideshow on pornography. Thus, regrettably, I must spend time surfing and culling images from internet pornography -- surveying its vast, dizzying landscape of splayed, shaved, sullied, mocked and, above all, multiply and aggressively penetrated female bodies.
Here a man pushes four fingers deep into a woman's mouth, to distend and stretch it. (On other sites, dental instruments are used.) Here a penis is shoved into a woman's mouth sideways, pushing out her cheek in a distorted and seemingly painful manner. Her eyes look puzzled and afraid.
The genre known as "gag factor" is enormously popular. A site called "Gag on my cock" promises "fresh new gag victims" weekly, and boasts that "we fuck them in the face ‘til they cry!" A few young women are shown wearing "gag on my cock" t-shirts and smiling; the accompanying text reads, "Can these fuck toys be any dumber? They think the t-shirts are a fucking joke . . . stupid hoes, the joke's on them!" The images of fellatio on the front page show men holding women by the throat, yanking their heads back by their hair, and even holding the women's noses so that they can't breathe. The image that's front and center on the page shows a young woman with a penis in her mouth and a man's hand pushing her head back so that she's looking straight at the camera. She is crying, her mascara running down her face.
A fascination with multiple penetration is pervasive. It's not uncommon to see a woman fellating one man while two others simultaneously penetrate her vaginally and anally. (In the lingo of the business, this is known as "airtight.") When the penetrations are not simultaneous, they are sequential: oral, vaginal, anal, performed by one or more men while they call her abusive names and declare that she loves it. At the scene's end, all the men ejaculate in the woman's face or on her breasts, leaving her soaked in semen.
On the front page of the "Altered Assholes" site, women's stretched and inflamed anuses are displayed, in some cases with a man's hands roughly pulling the woman's buttocks apart, to ensure that the camera captures the full extent of the damage. The promotional copy for a DVD called "Anally Ripped Whores" reads, "We at Pure Filth know exactly what you want . . . chicks being ass-fucked till their sphincters are pink, puffy and totally blown out. Adult diapers just might be in store for these whores when their work is done."
This is the world of contemporary, mainstream "gonzo" pornography. In this world, women have no boundaries and no privacy: no part of any female body is off limits to male inspection, evaluation, use, and abuse. What is fetishized is penetration not merely as border crossing, not even as forceful border crossing, but as border obliteration -- the kind of bodily invasion that permanently alters the body, so that what was formerly an effective boundary to the body no longer is. That women's bodies have an interior realm, one that is sometimes inaccessible and that is clearly distinguishable from their exterior, is treated as an intolerable affront. Foreign objects are introduced into women's bodies, while repeated violent penetration brings what's inside out: women gag, vomit, lose bowel control. Having spent a bit of time in this world, I start to suspect that if men could turn women inside out entirely, they would.
After looking at pornography for a while, I want to hide -- to cover myself, tuck myself away. Although I believe that porn produces (and reproduces) bodily and sexual shame in women, such shame is not what motivates my desire to hide. Rather, I want to hide because I've seen that someone is after me: my own privacy and internality as a woman are under a massive, all-fronts assault. It's a stealth assault -- hidden in plain view, as it were, and often called something else, like "freedom" or "sex." The pornographic images themselves are invasive; as much as I hate them, they stay with me, inside my head, inside me.
 
In her eloquent essay defending abortion rights, Marjorie Reiley Maguire offers the following comparison:
[E]ven if the fetus is a person and thus has the right to bodily integrity, the fetus is beyond the protection of the law. The fetus can be compared to a citizen of a totalitarian state whose freedom is taken away by the government. . . . a woman's body is like the borders of a foreign country. There is a sovereign immunity to a person's body that the law transgresses to the nation's detriment. The end cannot justify the means of such an invasion.
 
This provocative analogy has much to recommend it. Maguire's strategy recalls, of course, Judith Thomson's famous argument that abortion may be within a woman's rights regardless of our conclusions about fetal moral status: whether or not fetuses are persons, a woman has the right to control the uses of her own body. Maguire suggests that, just as a nation's sovereignty imposes limits on what others may do to promote the welfare of those living in that nation, so too does a woman's bodily sovereignty impose limits on what may be done for anyone else who may reside within her sovereign territory.
Abortion opponents will quickly object that this approach rather leaves the fetus in the lurch, and if we grant for argument's sake their powerful and controversial assumptions about fetal personhood, we can see their point. It is, in fact, a point strikingly parallel to common justifications of "humanitarian intervention": sovereignty is all very well, but at a certain point, basic human rights must trump considerations of sovereignty. Just as there are limits on state sovereignty -- namely those which prevent or put a stop to egregious harms against the defenseless citizens of an errant state -- so too must there be limits on women's bodily sovereignty, specifically those that prevent a woman from injuring or killing a defenseless fetal "citizen" residing within her borders.