Marsha Meskimmon:The Monstrous and the Grotesque

Marsha Meskimmon is a Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History and Theory. She finished a PhD on Women Artists and the Neue Sachlichkeit at the University of Leicester in 1992.

In this article, it mentions about a lot of things, that cause deformities in a woman, one part talking about a cancer patient going through medical treatment and, about how a woman’s body changes due to this horrific illness. The writer Jo Spence, also the cancer patient says, that she wrote the word, ‘Monster’ across her chest due the fact that is how she thought of herself as a cancer patient. Simply saying she is monstrous, to the view of other people.

Jo Spence and Rosy Martin who have been mentioned in this article I would say both create works of phototherapy, which often included small texts carefully chosen.  It makes us think that in two different ways; Political and Contemporary. Political meaning, that the culture and specifically our culture emphasizes on the ideal image of female’s body, whereas the contemporary representing the woman within the clinical gaze of the medical establishment.

People been called monsters in two ways, those with particular defects in their body and those with partial or complete doubling of the body, like Rosi Braidotti said, “ Since the nineteenth century, following the classification system of monstrosity by Geoffroy Saint- Hilaire, bodily malformations have been defined in terms of excess, lack or displacement of organs.

Starts going on about how maternity in itself is a monstrous thing because of the ‘produced boundaries between the mother and child and indeed life and death. The way Briadotti thought of childbirth and the deformity of a child was simply by saying, that the woman either had to think of something awful during intercourse or combining something awful she has seen with the child, this would then automatically or as Briadotti says, the power of transmitting that image to the fetus would create both meanings you could get a dog-faced baby, if at the time the woman thought of a dog.

I would say that the reading connects to the week’s theme of, ‘Body’, as it goes on about how the body can be deformed and especially how easily a woman’s body can be deformed and especially that it focuses on the body but the woman’s body in particular.

What I found the most interesting from this reading or at least what I could get from the reading is, not that it only looks into the different side of the human body but also how the body can be changed especially the woman. It’s just really interesting how, the article does not talk about the stereotypical idea of a woman’s body which is usually seen as inviting and sexy, at least in the males point of view, but talks about it as if it was a monster. It outlines the different ways of how a woman’s body can easily be deformed, whether it’s pressing her body against a glass or being pregnant. All these things can cause unexplainable deformities, which are not always very pleasant to see, and this is where the political and advertising side of the argument I guess comes into place. Most women are seen as a role model, especially celebrities for example because of the lies people see through the media but people don’t really think about how the body of some women actually look, especially if ones going through maternity.

" To challenge the dominant discourses which created 'monsters' in and through science, philosophy, aesthetics and history require a revision of the monstrous in its original, wonderful forms.”

I chose the photograph by Diane Arbus. I think this photo fits with the reading, as it is a photograph of two girls/woman who has down syndrome, or at least I think they have down syndrome. The reason why I think this fits is that of their, deformities formed due to the illness, which the reading sort of talks about due to the woman's body being deformed and how people see this, whatever the reason for this deformity is.