Freud’s wet dream & Compulsory heteronormativity

            Women of sexual prowess negotiate overtly sexualized rituals while maintaining the notion of modesty does seem quite irresolvable in our culture however the women in the Pacific islands do attempt to walk that line. From a critical cultural perspective it becomes imperative to analyze the ways in which joking relationships become culturally acceptable. I negotiate the joking relationship through a Freudian lens in conjunction with heteronormativity. Freud looked at women as sexualized objects that inherently perform the motherly role. As Barlow analyzed, the women of the Pacific islands discipline their male cohorts by inserting their breasts in the mouths of those who speak out of turn. Further the women even spew their breast milk as a means of disciplining behavior which is overtly a Freudian Oedipus complex methodology of ritual punishment. While culturally the insertion of a nude breast in the mouth is seen as ‘slap-stick’ comedy is a cultural acceptable method humor. I find it ironic that Barlow continuously notes the modesty in the women and their role as a negotiated stance of power and subordinate. While the females strive for modesty, humor arises from their lack of subordinate positions as females. The women’s role is a negation between empowerment juxtaposed against subordination. The Pacific islands are distinctly masculine in that they are patriarchical. The joking relationship of males with young females creates an interesting dichotomy. Young women learn to cover their genitals by older men joking with them, which is a Freudian wet dream and Susan Bordo’s lost rhetorical artifact. Young nude females performing for the male gaze for cultural social sanctions of discipline becomes an odd overtly sexual practice/ritual that hides beneath the notion of humor to remove the sexual under/overtones. The mask is not always literal, like in shadow puppetry and Greek theatre, the mask allows the performer to engage in socially unacceptable behavior behind the ‘mask’ of humor which carves out a different space for women to perform outside of their socially prescribed roles. The overt sexual ritual of women’s breasts in men’s mouths as discipline is a Freudian wet dream because culturally these women are both mother, subordinate, and sexual.

            Another interesting component of the Pacific island culture is compulsory heteronormativity. Michael Kimmel in his book The Gendered Society observes cultural phenomena that address gender performativity. He argued all societies studied by sociologist, anthropologist, and (I argue) communication scholars are all inherently patriarchical. Barlow’s piece really addresses compulsory heteronormativity in a subverted way. Initially, the role of male/female dichotomy only seeks to maintain heteronormative hegemonic power and privilege. While performing clowning rituals the women still are subordinate performers for the socio-cultural male gaze. Men get to view the nude female body (at all ages) in sexualized positions but because ‘humor’ is involved the spaces women occupy while clowning is not necessarily sexualized. I am a bit disappointed that Barlow approached this paper from a western, hegemonic, mindset because Kimmel observed gender performativity from a cross-cultural perspective. Haas (2004) argued, “for instance, within small communities in the Dominican Republic and Papua New Guinea, there is a hereditary intersex condition known as 5-alpha reductase deficiency that occurs with a relatively high frequency. This condition causes male children to be born with very small or unrecognizable penises. During puberty, the children's male hormones cause their penises to grow and other secondary male sexual characteristics to develop. Most of these children are raised as girls and begin living as men when they reach puberty.” Further, Native American cultures have the role of the berdache which is a term to describe a man (or less often a female) whose identity is not in conjunction with the imperialist notion of male & female. In fact the role of a berdache (intersexed body) has been discovered not only in Native American cultures but in pacific island cultures as well as Siberia, Tahiti, India, and Bali, to name a few. The gender performativity positions of power are dramatically under analyzed and the role of clowning for women is represented without societal context of how women function in the socio cultural context.

            -Travis L Williams