"SHAPE CHANGE": STORIES OF POSSESSION, RESISTANCE, & TRANSFORMATION OF THE BODY POLITIC
By Jaime Harker, Theresa Starkey, and Elizabeth Venell
This year’s Isom Center theme is the body politic, a rich concept that can help us think through multiple metaphors of the body. First, the body politic is often used to talk about the ways bodily autonomy is defined and politicized: in other words, how politics shape our embodied experiences, and vice versa. But the other dimension of the body politic addresses how we imagine people of a nation through body metaphors in the first place. Are we a unified body, with all systems working in harmony? Do we have fractures? Can we heal? The metaphors invoked by the body politic help us engage these multiple levels at once, showing how embodiment, personhood, and “the people” are intertwined concepts.
The Body Politic in the Current Moment
Writing in the summer of 2024, we are in a cultural moment when certain folks are NOT imagined as part of the body politic, a deliberate amputation. Depending on whom you talk to, this group includes: immigrants; liberals; Democrats; prisoners; felons; the homeless; residents of certain cities, counties or states; people of color; members of the LGBTQ+ community; feminists; and all women. We never imagined that we would hear political representatives calling for the repeal of the 14th, 19th, and 26th amendments, all of which deliberately and explicitly remove folks from the body politic (birthright citizenship, women’s suffrage, and universal suffrage at 18 years old, respectively). Nor did we imagine that representatives and senators might embrace the critique that the United States is not or should not aspire to the principles of a democracy.
One chilling aspect of this moment is the re-emergence of historic laws, showing how the long-past can force its way back into contemporary consciousness. In the spring of 2024, for example, the Arizona Supreme Court agreed to revert to a Civil War-era law relating to the prohibition on abortion. Just a few years ago, the idea that Roe v. Wade could be overturned and there would be a return to prohibition on abortion was more like an irrepressible specter, a haunting fear. Now, the specter has materialized. In the cover story on embodiment for The Isom Report two years ago, Jaime and Theresa reflected on this feeling of the past asserting itself in the present, examining ways that feminist activism of the 1960s and 1970s becomes urgent again as bodily rights are eroded. They wrote, “we are in another moment of restrictions of possibilities and choices and knowledge, and now abortion itself, made illegal” (10). It is easy to feel that we are trapped watching history’s reruns, as politicians attempt to repeal environmental regulations while enacting regulations on medical procedures, pregnancy, and fertility technologies. But our present isn’t simply a retread of our past.
Parables for a New Era
In January 2024, Elizabeth taught Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower in Introduction to Gender Studies. The speculative fiction novel, the first in Butler’s two-book Earthseed series, is set in a dystopian American future. “God is change. Shape God,” advises Lauren Olamina, protagonist of Parable of the Sower. She refers to a non-theistic god, literally the force of change, so the imperative condenses into “shape change.” Lauren describes the world through her journal entries, first dated January 2024. (One can see why this text was destined to be used in last spring’s class!) As an exercise, Elizabeth asked students to imagine a few decades into America’s future, as Butler had done when writing the book in the 1990s. Butler had even imagined a character (who appears in the second book of the series) who wants to “make America great again,” which poses a bitter irony for many contemporary readers. Prior to reading the novel, students overwhelmingly predicted worse civil discord and environmental degradation were to come in America’s future. In a sense, their pessimistic visions mirrored Butler’s foretelling. Yet Butler’s work is speculative fiction, and the students were asked to make straightforward predictions. In contrast with previous experience, it appeared, Elizabeth had students who did not imagine the world would inevitably improve as time passed. In her first years teaching feminist and queer history, Elizabeth felt herself resisting students’ tendency to believe that history is a progress narrative toward justice. She always thought that masked the work of changemakers to enshrine freedom and expand rights and protections. In January, Elizabeth recognized a shift from historical optimism to a new presentist or future-gazing pessimism. How do we teach not only to complicate a sense of history, but also to inspire a more hopeful vision of the future?
We want to suggest a different way to consider the moment in which we find ourselves, not only through political activism (something we discussed at length two years ago) but also through the ways cultural texts have represented the understanding that, as Jaime and Theresa wrote in The Isom Report, “in a fundamental way, your body is not understood to be yours. It is for others to regulate” (10). Puberty, reproduction, birthing, and even motherhood seem to make one especially vulnerable to regulation, possibly because that is the moment where the individual plays a part in reproducing the body politic. Fears about one’s body being controlled by others, and the horrific consequences of such possession, have long animated dystopian and horror narratives.
Cultural production reveals the latent fears and anxieties of an age, and sometimes it also reveals the means to resistance and transformation. By considering what popular forms reveal about the structure of feeling in previous eras, and then our own current moment, we might imagine other possibilities than a horrific site of endless return.
Popular Culture, Horror, and Projections
Octavia Butler’s fin-de-siècle Parable series envisions a dangerous and devastated United States as it teeters on both environmental and civil collapse, much like the fatalistic environmental films of the 1970s. While activism was roiling the political sphere in the 1960s and 1970s, cinema was representing a lack of bodily autonomy in a number of popular culture forms. This is especially true of cinema, which was experiencing its own turmoil with the decline of the studio system and rise of independent film. For filmmakers working inside and outside the studio system, the inequities and questioning of the moment were central to their vision. Horror, as emotional depiction and as metaphor, expressed these concerns.
One has only to look at Roman Polanski’s 1968 film Rosemary’s Baby to see how a nightmare vision of motherhood was materializing on screen and in the American psyche. Rosemary, an expectant mother and housewife, has her fertility and conception supervised by others. She is not in control of her body. No one listens to her when she tries to tell others that there is something wrong with her pregnancy. The realization that she is not in control comes too late for Rosemary–as does her recognition that her neighbors and husband are part of a Satanic cabal that wants her to birth the son of Satan. Rosemary’s personal dispossession results in a larger societal disruption.The film’s metaphors are heavy-handed and powerful: women’s disempowerment becomes Satan’s empowerment. No women’s liberation protest went nearly so far in its argument for the importance of bodily autonomy.
The dismissal of a mother's/woman’s/girl’s anxiety is a thread that runs through a number of other 1970s horror films. In The Exorcist, no one believes Chris MacNeill when she tells doctors that there is something wrong with her twelve-year-old daughter, Regan. Regan is not in control of her own body due to a nefarious supernatural force. In the movie Carrie, a young teenage girl can’t control her telekinesis powers. This is unsettling and frightening, but there is a more basic horror in the film - suppressed knowledge. This plagues Carrie. She doesn’t understand how the body functions. Her first menses happens in the shower of the girl’s locker room at school. Carrie’s fear and lack of understanding are dismissed by the other girls around her who jeer and laugh at her traumatic experience. Bullying and shaming transform what could be a superpower into a malevolent force.
In the film The Stepford Wives, women’s bodies are literally not their own. Housewives in the picturesque community of Stepford are slowly replaced with automaton versions of themselves who love to shop for groceries, clean their homes with Olympic mania, and never age or gain weight. The newly arrived Joanna and her friend Bobby recognize that something is wrong in Stepford. For the Men’s Association of Stepford, their automaton creations are an idealized version of womanhood. The Association’s taste for a tainted gender ideology is the toxic problem for the town; the Men’s Association members long for a bygone twilight time when women were programmed to know their place. The film continues to be a cultural touchstone of sorts, articulating the horror of gender policing and the enforced prison of femininity–achievable only by the replacement of actual women with pliable bots.
Even if one didn’t know about the history of feminist activism during this period, cultural productions like horror movies revealed something deeply wrong with the larger culture in its rejection of bodily autonomy and agency and its schizophrenic enforcement of gender norms. The unrest of the period is reflected in the artistic metaphors of its popular culture, which created haunting images that served as allegories for a culture struggling to articulate and reimagine the moment in which they found themselves.
Contemporary Horror and Dystopian Narratives
So what do our cultural productions tell us about our current popular moment? In retrospect, our insatiable appetite for dystopian stories, most famously the Hunger Games trilogy, should have been a warning sign. 2017’s Get Out, a revival of the horror tradition, told another story of bodily dispossession, providing a haunting metaphor of the legacy of slavery in a WASP family’s theft of black bodies to satisfy their own delusions of grandeur and immortality. Don’t Worry, Darling, which premiered in fall 2022, appears to be set in a fantasy of mid-century America, where the men are engaged in important company work and women’s days are filled with leisure, a fantasy of traditional gender roles. Yet the facade cracks under the increasing curiosity of Alice (aptly named), who pursues information about her strange setting down a rabbit hole, so to speak, until its truth is revealed: the company town is a simulation. Her unsuccessful partner has taken possession of her body and entered them both into a virtual reality possibly as sinister as the world of The Stepford Wives. The 21st century twist is that the simulation also dispossesses the husband, who spends his days with other men toiling in the service of the company architect/patriarch (vaguely a men’s rights activist). Prescriptive gender roles hurt everyone, the movie suggests, including the men who think an anti-feminist message will return them to glory.
And yet, unlike the ambiguous, fatalistic or doomed endings of the 1970s horror movies, films from the past decade seem to offer counter narratives, feminist resolution, or ways out of the horror. Katniss topples the evil regime of The Hunger Games and returns home. Chris escapes his ghoulish captors at the end of Get Out. And, in a significant departure from the bleak ending of The Stepford Wives, Alice regains control of herself at the end of Don’t Worry, Darling, activating other women and triggering the defeat of the patriarch. Is this dystopian tale of dispossession an empowerment narrative for the 21st century? There is something that can be mobilized in a narrative of re-self-possession.
Defiant stories of resistance, it turns out, are as ubiquitous as dystopian hellscapes. Queer television is undergoing a renaissance right now. The Tales of the City reboot imagined a coalition of San Francisco citizens saving the home of pioneering trans character Mrs. Madigral from evil corporate developers. The Queer as Folk reboot, set in New Orleans, takes on the traumatic legacy of the Pulse shooting to imagine a truly inclusive queer and trans community, one that embraces polyamory, disability, and liberation from fixed gender and sexual roles. Cultural texts that kept queerness in the shadows, like A League of Our Own and Interview With a Vampire, now foreground queerness in ways previously unimaginable.
Feminist, queer, and trans young adult (YA) fiction may perform some of the most radical critiques and reimaginings of any cultural texts, which explains why censorship of such books in libraries and classrooms has become a cultural obsession in recent years. Kalynn Bayron’s Cinderella is Dead, for example, reimagines the Cinderella legacy as a brutally misogynist patriarchy in which young women’s only future is chosen in a bizarre reenactment of the original “handsome prince” trope; its heroine destroys the evil at the heart of this hateful kingdom and liberates the women of the city.
Young people trapped in the horrific creations of adults is a common trope in these dystopian tales. Gearbreakers, by Zoe Hana Mikuta, imagines a world in which young people are incorporated in killing machines, hunting the few spaces of resistance left. Heather Walter’s Malice duology reimagines Sleeping Beauty, while making Aurora, the princess, fall in love with a sorceress, Alyce, in a world of such violence, retribution, and evil that none can escape its tainted legacy without a radical reform from monarchy to true representative democracy.
Perhaps most devastating is the trans YA dystopian novel Hell Followed With Us, which imagines an America in which an extremist religious group has intentionally released a devastating virus, meant to cause Armageddon. It uses religious language to describe the monstrous creatures that emerge as a result of this act of terrorism, and features a trans character, Benji, who has been drafted by the group to be its avenging angel. Benji’s escape from the group and partnership with a small band of queer and trans youth results, ultimately, in the demise of the group that caused such chaos. And the book’s embrace of the monstrous makes it one of the most incisive critiques of contemporary society in queer and trans dystopian YA. It builds on Octavia Butler’s legacy, and like that legacy, it reaches beyond mainstream culture to genre fiction on the margins.
The vision of the world that these books display is morbidly stark, yet they end with bands of young people resisting, defeating, and vanquishing the forces of destruction. Jaime has been reading these books for many years (as part of a larger scholarly project) and she can say, definitively, that if you want to understand Gen Z and their vision for the future, read these YA novels.
What these feminist, queer, and trans YA novelists understand is that the stories we tell ourselves provide the limit of what’s possible. In the words of feminist critic Rachel Blau DuPlessis, we need books that write beyond the ending and beyond the limitations of our current sense of the possible to stories that envision different endings and fantastic possibilities.
Imagine Otherwise: Utopian Dreaming
What these recent cultural texts suggest is the power of utopian dreaming. When we have freedom to investigate our past, we gain models for resistance. But we are not limited to the actions of the past. When we imagine our present in new forms, we move toward dreaming of what might be, what could be, what should be: what people really need to thrive. What kind of world do we want? How do we get there? Imagining the world we want, instead of just surviving the one we have, is essential to the work ahead of us.
It can start small. Jaime has spent the past few years working on a book on 21st century Sapphic writing; fanfiction communities have become central to this story. That beginning was so small as to seem almost trivial: what if my two favorite female characters were really a couple? What if I didn’t have to wait for the mainstream media to catch on and wrote the story myself? Looking at the awkwardly designed fan sites of the 1990s, with slash fiction in every conceivable genre, you would not have thought this would become anything but a cautionary tale for participants, a source of embarrassment. But when you look at the explosion of queer young adult fiction, the incredible worlds young people can inhabit imaginatively for thousands of pages, and the influence these stories have, you can see that an often maligned moment of utopian dreaming has had a huge effect. And it hasn’t just stayed in fan forums; the multiple genders and sexualities envisioned in forums on Tumblr have become mainstream in ways no one would have believed possible. Utopian dreaming is essential to both surviving and thriving.
Jose Muñoz may have said it best in his book Cruising Utopia: “Queerness is not yet here. Queerness is an ideality. Put another way, we are not yet queer, but we can feel it as the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality. We have never been queer, yet queerness exists for us as an ideality that can be distilled from the past and used to imagine a future. The future is queerness’s domain” (1).
The future is our domain, too. In this moment of backlash and despair, imagine the world you would like to live in, and then dream about how to remake the world the way you think it should be. How do we resist despair? Partly through reading cultural texts and the current movements not just for an expression of our anxieties but as a model for utopian dreaming. Octavia Butler’s powerful parables are important models here. She imagined not just the divisive rhetoric that dominates our political moment, but also the means for transformation in a broken world, through the power of communities working hard together to shape change. The present isn’t simply a retread, and no future is inevitable. Through utopian dreaming, we can create more feminist and queer futures.