Protest Class

The Gendered Body and the Abject in "Wind of Fury - Songs of Fury" by Oksana Vasyakina

In our last class meeting, one of the questions that was posed was “how is the gendered body produced in Oksana Vasyakina’s poetry?” This question comes to the forefront when reading Vasyakina’s poetry as many of the selections in “Wind of Fury - Songs of Fury” are bodily in a visceral way. Even in the first poem, perhaps the least violent piece in the collection, is very body focused. The narrator speaks of an intimate moment shared with a lover and this woman is described by her physical attributes: her black brow, her eyes that seem like butterflies, her sharp teeth in her strong mouth, her small hard fingers. The body here is arguably un-gendered, in a way. Culturally, there are certain qualities attributed to specific genders, but nothing here particularly fits in with what we might culturally ascribe to a woman’s body. Perhaps her small fingers denote a feminine quality, but their hardness of them contradicts expectation. Vasyakina’s poetry, in many ways, challenges expectations of gendered bodies.
 
In their book Gender Trouble, Judith Butler, while drawing on Mary Douglas writes “any discourse that establishes the boundaries of the body serves the purpose of instating and naturalizing certain taboos regarding the appropriate limits, postures, and modes of exchange tat define what it is that constitutes bodies” (Butler 131). Vasyakina’s first poem challenges the idea of bodily boundaries as she writes “I can’t see where your body ends/ I can’t see where your small hard fingers end” (Vasyakina 35). In this moment, the narrator’s gender is unknown, but if it can be read that Vasyakina is the voice speaking, the act of queer affection or even queer sex between two women expands the boundaries of the body, creating a connection between two bodies where the ending and beginning of one or the other is unknown, challenging that discourse that establishes boundaries.

The theme of touch and the trouble of boundaries is reflected when the narrator outlines unwanted touch. “The one who dared to touch me/ my white body/ my tender white body/ star-strewn with birthmarks/ the one who dared touch me/ my fury will sing in your throat/ I will walk with heavy iron steps  across your fingers that dared to touch me  and sow crowds of gnawing worms in your eyes and in all your parts still defecating and slowly moving  I will hack them off and feed them to a dog gone mad from your foul meat” (Vasyakina 38). Perhaps even unwanted touch can trouble the boundary of the body, but here Vasyakina’s narrator is willing to take extreme measures to reassert the boundary of their body. It is not enough to acknowledge their own body, but they also want to hack off parts of the offender’s body. 

This rejection of the offender’s body parts after being non-consensually touched echos Butler’s discussion of the abject. Butler writes “The “abject designates that which has been expelled from the body, discharged as excrement, literally rendered “Other.” This appears as an expulsion. The construction of the “not-me” as the abject established the boundaries of the body which are also the first contours of the subject” (Butler 133). The hacking of the offender’s body parts designated a clear distinction between the two bodies, but the abjection goes further. “And women will come/ To urinate on your body/ To spit upon your breast/ To comfort themselves” (Vaskyakina 38). Here, an unnumbered multitude of women will discharge things from their body onto the corpse of the offender in order to establish or even strengthen the boundaries of their own bodies and they take comfort in that. 

I personally find Vasyakina’s poetry interesting in its physicality and its brutality. In many ways, the violence presents a challenge to expectation of feminist poetry, but I do think of Utkin’s introduction to his article on queer vulnerability. He writes “This focus on violence highlights the strength of oppressive political structures and emphasizes the victimhood of queer Russians in ways that ignore strategies of queer resistance to the homophobic and heterosexist state” (Utkin 78). By no means do I mean to erase Vasyakina’s queerness, nor is this an exact statement against Vasyakina’s poetry as she seems to address women broadly, not only queer women, but I do wonder what the effect of focusing on the violence against women has. I think much of Vasyakina’s writing feels like a powerful way to regain bodily autonomy and a path to reestablishing the boundaries of the bodies on one’s own term, especially since most of the violence in the poetry is against someone who would or who has harmed women, but the threat of violence or the history of it against the women in the poems feels present. With the ongoing theme of the class, I have to wonder if this kind of writing falls into the resistance trap. Much of the power of Vasyakina’s poetry is because it has something to resist. Additionally, I cannot help but wonder if committing violence in response to violence can ever be liberatory from system misogyny or queerphobia, or does it just change who takes on the role of the offender? I do not have an answer to this question, because I do not wish to diminish anyone’s response to violation, but I am troubled by these thoughts.  
 

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  1. Dear Dana, thank you for such a comprehensive analysis of Vasyakina. I find it very convincing, and thinking about the boundaries of a body, I wonder what role nature plays in this cycle of poems. The female body seems to be often described in conjunction with the images of earth, wind, trees, or animals. Probably, Vasyakina shows the impossibility of overcoming or sustaining the fury which emerges in the women, because it is like a natural disaster against which a human cannot stand. But what do you think about it? Your final question about the violence reminds me of the discussion with Butler we attended a couple of weeks ago. Vasyakina in one of her poems writes that “we can’t stop it we can’t respond with violence we can’t do anything at all.” Is it really so? I am not sure that she believes in it, and her text indeed can be an act of resistance in this case. It feels as if with the power of the word she wants to make the male body vulnerable - I just imagine the reaction of the male readership to this text, and I think that a lot of them would be shocked and hurt for different reasons. Their negative criticism, though, would be the proof of this.