Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 2002. Vol. 8. Eger Journal of American Studies.(Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 28)

Studies - Enikő Bollobás: (De-) Gendering and (De-) Sexualizing Famale Subjectivities: Woman-Hating and Its Revisions in Literature and Painting

Up goes her hand, and off she slips The Bolsters that supply her Hips. With gentlest Touch, she next explores Her Shankers, Issues, running Sores, Effects of many a sad Disaster; And then to each applies a Plaister. But must, before she goes to Bed, Rub off the Dawbs of White and Red; And smooth the Furrows in her Front, With greasy Paper stuck upon't. [-.] The Nymph, tho' in this mangled Plight, Must ev'ry Morn her Limbs unite. But how shall I describe her Arts To recollect the scatter'd Parts? Or shew the Anguish, Toil, and Pain, Of gath'ring up herself again? The bashful Muse will never bear In such a Scene to interfere. Corinna in the Morning dizen'd, Who sees, will spew; who smells, be poison'd. When the text is controlled by a misogynist, the woman becomes a monster. She is without substance; her gendered self is that which is being constructed again and again through the ritual of assembling of its rather vulgar artificial parts. The reader gets a full view of the underside of what Judith Butler calls the "theatricality of gender" (232): the woman wears a wig, her eyes are removable, her eyebrows are mouse hair, her round cheeks are stuffed, her teeth are false, her breasts are raised by rags, her figure is the work of a corset, her skin is smoothed by grease

—her whole feminine body is created daily by much "Anguish, Toil, and Pain." Femininity is here portrayed as the result of an elaborate performance, albeit in its negative aspect: through the performance when femininity is being de-created into its supposedly real substance: absence, void, nothingness. Indeed, that there is nothing beneath the de-created image but repulsive vulgarity is what Swift's distancing and alienating irony suggests (and didactically explicates in the last line). The misogyny conveyed in these texts seems to be part and parcel of sexism, while sexism has proved to be the direct product of heterocentric gender culture, the rigid institutionalized heterosexual 110