Ignorance
It has been almost three years since the first installment of “Homing,” written from the makeshift desk my husband built in a corner of our bedroom during COVID lockdown. That desk, with its sometimes fraught but intimate relation to the domestic spaces around it, still stands, although now I take my writing, unmasked, to a variety of public spaces. My laptop is once again itinerant, catching when it can a whiff of the internet under the trees on the Rice campus, or locking into place as part of my office furniture. The surface of the desk “back home” is now mostly covered with books for other projects, among them what I hope will be a brief history of, and a series of meditations on, gynophobia.
Unlike the word “homing” which has served as the title and key term of the blog so far, the word “gynophobia” may not be a familiar one. My project in “Homing” was, in fact, defamiliarization. I wanted to take a word and a concept ensconced at the center of our most positive feelings about ourselves and our world, and to show the cracks in its façade.
Gynophobia takes me in another direction—if I am to write about it I must familiarize a term for fear of and disgust for women that seems clunky, overly-medicalized, archaic in its form and etymology, and give it a place, a home, on the page—and most immediately in my blog. From now on, this blog will have two themes or threads: one a continuation of my thoughts on homing and the other a series of vignettes about moments in recent and less recent culture that I have collected under the term Gynophobia. Although occasionally these two threads might come together, for example in Victorian honeymoon stories or in a piece for which I only have the title “Nudity, Domesticated,” for the most part I will hold them separate and respect their differences. The opening vignette for Gynophobia follows.
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Every project has an origin story, even if you have to make it up. I think, actually, that this one is true, that there was indeed a moment when I reached for a word and found it to be one I had not uttered for a long time: gynophobia. I will talk in future posts more generally about that term, what it has meant, what it means for me, and how it might still be necessary when we have recourse to the more familiar “sexism” patriarchy” and misogyny.” For now, I will start with a simple statement and then an example: gynophobia is a feeling of disgust and contempt for the female body, and especially for the parts of bodies our culture has marked as definitional for women.
I hope, over the course of time and several posts to elaborate on this definition: to explain, for example, why “feeling” is an important but insufficient part of a definition that emphasizes disgust not just on the level of an individual but of a society. For now, I will start with a moment from almost a decade ago, and with a relatively obscure, now-deceased, Republican Senator from Missouri, Todd Akin.
In 2014, Akin was interviewed about his thoughts on abortion, and in particular whether he thought an exception to anti-abortion legislation should be made in the case of rape. In this first, infamous, comment, he chose to minimize the problem:
From what I understand from doctors, that's really rare. If it's a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that down. But let’s assume that maybe that didn’t work or something. I think there should be some punishment, but the punishment ought to be on the rapist and not attacking the child.
Most commentary on this statement focusses understandably on the term “legitimate rape,” and its implication that some rapes are “illegitimate,” in the sense that women report them falsely. When journalists and activists questioned Akin’s use of the phrase, he maintained that he was using an abbreviation of a legal term, used, he said, by police. Police departments across the country denied that this was a term they ever used.
What I focused on when I first heard the comment was not so much the dismissive phrase, but the place of the “female body” in his comments and indeed in his world view. The body Akin imagines has an almost mystical power to distinguish legitimate rape from its illegitimate form, the power in other words, to self-police. How does he know this? He “understands” it from “doctors.” Neither the powers (the “ways”) of the female body nor the names of the doctors are specified. Akin does not cite a particular physician or set of physicians. He does not refer to medical studies or articles. He does not name an organ, a process, or a system in that abstracted and singular “female body” that is responsible for “shut [ing] that down.” He speaks in euphemisms and uses pronouns, especially the dehumanizing “that.” “That’s really rare “; “shut that down.” He may as well have said “down there.”
It seems, however, that the female body does not always do what it is supposed to do. Pregnancy after rape is, according to Akin, or to the doctors he consults without naming, “rare” but not impossible. With relentless vagueness he posits the failure of the very self-policing magic on which he has relied: “But let’s assume that maybe that didn’t work or something.” Later, in defending his position, he will refer to a “number of people in my campaign” who, as children of rape, thank him for valuing their existence. Journalists at the time were unable to trace any of these people, but their very presence—fictive, wishful, or real—attests to the very real possibility of something going wrong. These triumphant examples, these embodiments of anti-abortion discourse, would not exist if women’s bodies shut them selves down there) after rape. The female body, according to Akin is both magical and underperforming; it has ways, but there are no guarantees that its ways will work.
In another paradox, Akins’ comments both assert knowledge and refuse to specify sources for or details about that knowledge. If we read, as it were, backwards from the end of the passage I quoted, his knowledge recedes from us: results are iffy, bodily functions unidentified, doctors generalized, his own understanding at second hand. This s not simply Akin hedging his bets, although there is a lot of hedging. Akin is actually asserting his own authority through ignorance: this is a man with vast institutional power over the lives of his constituents. This is a man content to use euphemism, to recoil from detail, to distance himself from his own asserted facts. Akins’s purposive vagueness, is not just a refusal to say. It is a refusal to know and a deliberately cultivated and disseminated ignorance.
This highly politicized use of ignorance is what theorists of knowledge refer to as “agnology.” Sharing the “ag” prefix with words like agnostic and aggressive, the word indicates a state of active opposition to knowledge. When we think about the word we might see more clearly the “ignore” in ignorance. Agnology is purposeful, instrumental even; it stands in the way of learning. Ironically (perhaps), one of the first to use the word, social scientist Joannes Keppler, describes agnology as a mother who must be killed in order for science to be born.
For those who would literally sacrifice a mother’s life—or is that sacrifice a literal mother’s life?—science is often the enemy. Think, for example of the 2019 attempt in the Ohio legislature to mandate that eggs taken from ectopic pregnancies be “re-implanted” in women so they can carry their fetuses to term. The proponents of the bill were undaunted by the testimony of doctors that this could not be done. Although the bill never passed, and has now given way to other antiabortion bills, other forms of agnology, the substitution of fantasy for the scientifically or medically possible remains a popular strategy for “pro-life” groups. Most recently, of course, we have seen this strategy at work in the ruling by U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk suspending FDA approval of the abortion-inducing drug, mifepristone. Kacsmaryk, unlike Akin, referred to “medical studies” in support of his position; like Akin, he eschewed specifics. Like Aikin, this man without scientific or medical expertise, fantasized a female body both too weak and too powerful. His opinion, predictably, was cast as an effort to protect women from a drug that has proven, over the last 20 years of its use, to be extremely safe, even safer than penicillin—or Viagra. Like Akin, Kacsmaryk gestured towards science to override its conclusions. Like Akin, he turned to and weaponized agnology.
Willful ignorance is a powerful form of gynophobia. I have repeatedly used the term “fantasy” above to signal the delusional quality of some ideas about the female body. But I am also using fantasy in another sense—the sense of desire, perhaps even sexual desire. The female body many antiabortionists imagine is one that is, finally, sexually compliant, a convenient vehicle for the enactment of male desire.