I've been avoiding it as one of those events that unequivocally locate me as a woman, that anchor me within the sexual binary as the carrier of natural womanhood. The meaning of that designation has been very stifling, and even nowadays (centuries after Mary Wollstonecraft) I see it contains primarily child-bearing, nurture, woman-the-gatherer, 'connection with Nature', flowers, rainbow... whatever...

Some time during your adolescence, people start calling you that name. Just when I thought I was a Being-of-a-Thousand-Beings, they started calling me woman, without me having much say in what that word means. Most of my life I felt I was a free member of a Gender degree Zero limbo, a cyborg, a nomad, an anything-I'd-dare-to-imagine, with an endlessly elusive body that had no Centre that would be the ultimate sign of sexual belonging. I've come to realize, though, that on some occasions there's no escape from naming. You are a Woman, and your passages are: growth of your breasts, first menstruation, first vaginal penetration, first child, menopause. Oh, and annual Pap Tests, of course.

Could we conceive of a world in which there are more than two sexes/genders? How about five, or ten? What are the occasions in which you're sexualized as a Woman (or a Man, for that matter), in which you're named, or you feel like, for better or worse, a natural woman? (Aretha Franklin lives!) Why are breasts so highly sexualized? (Why not those flashes of skin between the glove and the sleeve, the shoes and the trousers, the space where the shirt ends and the neck skin opens? Why not ears, elbows, nose, anything 'far away' from reproductive organs?) And could we imagine a different anthropology, the one without the sexual binary, the one more complex, cyborgian, the one that would allow different categories to reach the status of 'naturalness'?

Are you thinking about those times when we feel that some kind of "femininity" is being imposed on us from the outside, Tres? My sense of that happening to me has ebbed and flowed through my life, I realize. Oddly enough, some of the experiences you mention I associate not with having femininity imposed on me but with being medicalized, which I really hate deeply.

(The moment I write that, I feel I should add a warning: A friend of mine died of cervical cancer at the age of 52, one of the worst losses I've ever experienced, partly because it was unnecessary. She hadn't had a Pap smear for about ten years. No woman in Canada -- well, no woman anywhere, for that matter -- should be dying that way any more. Alienating though so much of modern medicine may be, some of it, and that one test in particular, we have to defend, hoping all the time that it may be superseded as soon as possible.)

I know this is an odd thing to say, and maybe it's because I never had children, but I honestly don't think of my body as especially feminine, not in the sense you're discussing here. When I think both of what I consider to be genuine feminine strengths and of the femininity that others have tried to impose on me and that I haven't liked, I'm probably usually thinking of the psycho-social. I don't think that automatically makes me alienated from my body (although there've been times ...); but I honestly don't think of it as the site of femininity.

But it's interesting to learn how natural femaleness comes into being through medical gaze. There's been a vast array of feminist critiques of biology and medical sciences - names like Anne Fausto-Sterling, Ruth Hubbard, Donna Haraway, Emily Martin have documented instances in which genetical, hormonal, anatomical, primatological and zoological researchers have used highly gendered (and often racialized) meanings to describe their observations or to form their objects of study, and it's both entertaining and unnerving to read those accounts. I have come to believe that every scientific research into biological basis for sexual difference is always political and ideological to a certain degree. Since the language that the researchers use is always already gendered ('neutral observation language' is quite an outdated hope), in a way gender is older than sex -- and the conventional wisdom would have it that no, sex is primary and firm, and gender is to sex what 'culture' is to 'nature.' I find that this twist opens many possibilities. (I was hoping not to get embroiled in the referencing and book rummaging for this, so here's just a link to an interesting interview with Ruth Hubbard: Exploding the Gene Myth).

All this was just an intro to the following issue, though. We live in an age in which the most important political struggles concern the body. Multi-national food industry, intensive farming, water exports, genetically modified foods, gene patenting and gene therapy, stem-cell research and cloning, xenotransplantation: all these issues are related to bodily integrity, health, basic survival. Maybe we'll be lucky enough to witness the birth of a new corpus of human rights, a universal declaration of rights and duties related to autonomy and dignity of human body. Yet the tough part, in my view, will be to avoid going back to the rhetoric of the natural body (and, some would add, to religious concepts of humanity). You know, we mustn't mess with genetic manipulation because we would be interfering with the natural body. That's just not good enough. We have always been cyborgs: hygiene is unnatural, curing disease is unnatural, human extensions are unnatural, language is unnatural, not giving birth to children is unnatural.

In orger to fight against corporate genetics and state violation of privacy through genetic profiling, for instance, we would need a notion of bodily autonomy that would not be tied to any concept of 'naturalness.' We would need a clearer political and ethical distinction between good and bad cyborgs. I want to be a cyborg at ease with the world, and I want to be the one to call the shots in my own production . I'll OK the speculum for now, but I may not OK corporate gene patenting -- if I ever get a chance to be asked, that is.

It so classifies you. Get your womanly parts checked, assesed and passed like a car. I guess the same goes for guys with prostate and testicular cancer goes. Stamped, male, healthy, NEXT!

GOOD that you're going, what skadl said is so true, women should not be dying at the rate they are from this horrid disease. Same goes for breast cancer. My mother in law has not been to a doctor since her last child was born, 21 years ago... and that scares the heck out of me. Cervical cancer is very treatable if caught early, and if you get your little donut o'muscle checked every year, then it will always be caught "early."

Though, I'm not sure what else could be designed to open the vagina in order to access the cervix.

At Airport Gate, A Cyborg Unplugged

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STEVE MANN, an engineering professor at the University of Toronto, has lived as a cyborg for more than 20 years, wearing a web of wires, computers and electronic sensors that are designed to augment his memory, enhance his vision and keep tabs on his vital signs. Although his wearable computer system sometimes elicited stares, he never encountered any problems going through the security gates at airports.

Last month that changed. Before boarding a Toronto-bound plane at St. John's International Airport in Newfoundland, Dr. Mann says, he went through a three-day ordeal in which he was ultimately strip-searched and injured by security personnel. During the incident, he said, $56,800 worth of his $500,000 equipment was lost or damaged beyond repair, including the eyeglasses that serve as his display screen.

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(and I was hoping that it would not be Tommy Paine, ahem)

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You rang, Madame?

I can't even pretend to know anything about pap smears, except that my daughter had one a while back, it was unpleasent for her, but it was a good thing.

As for the sexualization of various parts of the female anatomy, who knows?

The most erotic thing I've seen in public in the last few years happened to be an Amish woman applying sunscreen to her calves-- the only thing left uncovered by her neck high thin cotton sundress. Was it the bare calves or the smile she gave me when she saw me blush when she caught me watching? I dunno.

On the other hand, about a year ago I was downtown and saw a hairdresser taking a break outside an exclusive downtown hair place. She was tripped out in what constitues fetish gear for me, tight black (ultra tight) short dress, unsensible very high heels (the ankle strap kind) make up done in a profoundly professional way, you get the picture.

She spit on the sidewalk. An astoundingly unattractive thing to do.

Sexuality, gender, these things are situational to a larger extent than what we think on the surface.

During medical exams, of most types, it's best to leave your dignity with the receptionist for you to pick up on your way out, 'cause you won't be needing it where your going.

Pap smears? What am I going to do with my sexuality when I go for my first prostrate exam?

I think I'm going to have a nice candle lit bath before I go, a glass of wine, and think warm sexy thoughts.

I can't say I really enjoy doing the internal exam/pap smear each year, but it doesn't bother me. It just goes along with checking my blood pressure, heart, lungs, eyes and ears. When I first became sexually active, it freaked me out, having my hoo-hoo hanging out in front of a virtual stranger, but after delivering the first baby, personal modesty pretty much went down the crapper.

It's my body...some days I love it, some days it annoys me with its pains, aches and inefficiencies. It's tied up with my both my gender identity and my non-biological identity in complex ways. It's the source of an enormous amount of pleasure and some disappointment.

Anyone who owns a kimono will note that there is a v-shaped cut on the back, at the top. It is there to expose the uppermost knob of a cervical verteba (bend your head forward and you can feel it yourself, if you are not cyborgian there).

TLM and I went to the same GP in Vancouver, whom I'll call B. Woman in her early 30s, funny, irreverent. Looking for some more practical gear for doing Pap smears and internal exams, she goes to Mountain Equipment Co-op and started checking out the headlamps used by climbers and cave-explorers and the like.

Along comes one of the usual pink-cheeked, fresh-faced young sales lads to offer his assistance. She expresses her interest in the headlamps. What will you be using it for, he asks. She tells him, matter-of-factly and even absently, not remembering he's a civilian. He turns several remarkable colours in his embarrassment.

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There is something to that famous philosophical one-liner that "real feminist revolution won't begin until men start talking about their bodies."

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I was about to day, maybe it's begun then, judging by the number of magazines on the stands aimed at men and all about their bodies.

Hearing men (say, philosophers? historians?)really speak about their bodies would mean they concede "locatedness", finiteness, particularity, awereness of one's boundaries.