DAY 20, FEMINISM AND FITNESS - DIANA ARTERIAN

Swimming at the Y

Diana Arterian

Probably the most surprising thing at the pool is the bodies. This is not because they are remarkable so much so as they are the bodies we rarely see. The media gives them little attention, except, possibly, to shame them. Our eyes rarely come upon them, unless one is a healer of some kind. While we are in close proximity to them, they are hidden. Under clothes that make us uncertain of what, exactly, is underneath.[1]

“The young lady is here!” an East Asian man says as I approach a lane. I introduce myself. Now, when I arrive early in the morning, he cups his hands to his mouth and calls out “Di-yah-nah!”

The women’s forms interest me, yet they offer few revelations. The old to the elderly – it is generally what one would expect. I have been in enough Korean spas and gym bathrooms to no longer be surprised.

I am undoubtedly the youngest person here. There is one thirty-ish Anglo man who wears fancy tight trunks and a cap, but I know he doesn’t know much about swimming, keeping his fingers spread as he plunges through the water.[2]

The tiles surrounding the pool are the ugly near-cream and brown that hide scum. It is indoors. The chlorine smell is intense, and hard to scrub off. I thought the water clean and blue, until one day they replaced it and I could see through the full 25 meters clearly. It looked crystal, the murk from bodies absent.

I always take the locker on the second tier, right above one with a sign that reads, “This locker is for Bittersweet Wojtyla. Please DO NOT remove lock.” I love that name. I try saying it in my head, with the “j” and without. I whisper it.[3]

The surprise is really with the older male body – specifically the male gut. It protrudes, pulls the skin quite taut. It looks as if it were filled with air. Nearly like a pregnant body. The men of course leave them uncovered, swim a few feet away from me. This is what makes the experience different from swimming at the beach. It is their proximity and their baring their bodies to the world (our eyes) that makes them remarkable to me.

The lock is the common round lock, with a pink dial, nipple-like.

I catch glances while underwater, my curiosity getting the best of me. I am trying to acclimate, to normalize, the normally covered parts of male bodies.

I am at the locker removing some things when a woman calls to me in a friendly gruff voice, “Oh no we’re right on top of each other!” I turn to an elderly white woman with no towel, and immediately see she has had a total double mastectomy.[4] Two scars from long ago. I smile and tell her I don’t mind waiting, grab my comb, and move to a nearby bench.

She begins small talk, tells me she’s eighty-three, has had knee surgery recently.[5] I ask her how she hurt her knee. “Skiing. And the worst of it was, I wasn’t even moving! Someone crashed into me!” She’s having her other knee is replaced this summer. I ask what happened with that one. “Basketball,” she says. “Sounds like you like to get into trouble,” I say. She smiles. She tells me she used to be a P.E. teacher and, really, a dancer[6].

She works on an adult diaper, carefully, her back to me, continuing to chat about the next surgery – then no more pain in the knee that is still whole.

I comb my hair. She takes her time to dress.

“I told my doctor I just want to be able to walk, swim, and drive.”

“Seems pretty reasonable.”

She slides into her shoes, and carefully stands up, arms out at her sides just in case.

I think about her getting diagnosed with cancer and then her surgery while teaching middle schoolers forty years ago. How now mastectomies often involve implants and tattooed nipples.[7] She has two deep scars.[8]

“I live in an assisted living place. When I get back I’ll have breakfast waiting for me!”

I think about how when I dip slowly into the water I clench my teeth when it hits my nipples and that she must feel nothing. Or, something else.

---

[1] I think of this as a similar practice to razzle dazzle camouflage – when WWI ships were painted with different colors and stripes so enemies had a hard time figuring out where, exactly, they ended and began.

[2] “What does a better job of catching soup, a fork or a spoon?” my swim coach would ask.

[3] The Internet tells me it is Polish: “voy-tih-wah.” I wasn’t even close. The Internet also tells me it is the same surname as Pope John Paul II.

[4] μαστός + ἐκτομή (“breast” + “cutting out”)

[5]

  




 
[6] “Those days are gone.”

[7]

[8] I have heard one woman say, “they used to really gouge you.” After her friend’s breast was cut from her, artist Lee Miller smuggled it out of the hospital on a plate, under a napkin. She set the plate on a table and put a knife and fork next to it, and photographed it: “Untitled [Severed Breast from Radical Mastectomy]” (1930).

Diana Arterian was born and raised in Arizona. She currently resides in Los Angeles where she is pursuing her PhD in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Southern California. She holds an MFA in poetry from CalArts, where she was a Beutner Fellow. Diana is a Poetry Editor at Noemi Press, and a Managing Editor and founding member of Ricochet. She has recently been honored with residencies and scholarships from Caldera Arts Center and Vermont Studio Center. Her chapbook, Death Centos, was published by Ugly Duckling Presse, and her writing and translation have appeared in Aufgabe, Black Warrior Review, DIAGRAM, Eleven Eleven, Salt Hill, Two Serious Ladies, and The Volta, among others.

DAY 15, FEMINISM AND FITNESS - COURTNEY SZTO

Wrestling with Gender Norms: The Fighting Cholitas of Bolivia 
Courtney Szto

"Men ate the cake and left us the crumbs, but now we are united and advancing.  The idea is to show that women can do this on their own." - Carmen Rosa

Hidden away in South America’s poorest country is a vibrant example of female empowerment through physical culture.  The cholitas luchadoras, known in English as “The Fighting Cholitas,” are professional women wrestlers who have carved out a new space for women’s liberation in Bolivia.  The entertainment-sport of lucha libre is a form of freestyle wresting that is derived from both Mexican lucha libre and American entertainment wrestling such as WWE (World Wrestling Entertainment); however, the common tourist assumption is that lucha libre exemplifies Bolivian tradition and culture rather than the global popularity of wrestling itself.  As Caroll and Schipani (2008) from The Guardian point out, “This macho sport in this macho country, South America’s most impoverished and conservative, has been flipped into an unlikely feminist phenomenon.”

In an attempt to boost attendance for this traditionally male dominated sporting event, organizers added women’s matches and fighting dwarves in 2001.  I don’t know how the dwarves were received, but the women quickly became synonymous with the sport.  The luchadoras fight in outfits resembling the clothing of rural Bolivians and women who work in the market, known as cholas.  Despite the vibrancy of the large colourful petticoat-type dresses, cholas are symbolic of an oppressed underclass and strong patriarchy; they are the indigenous women who have historically been silenced.  But with the popularity of women in lucha libre there has been “a resurgence of pride in the skirt” (Carroll & Schipani, 2008).  The Fighting Cholitas represent a unique opportunity for female empowerment to challenge the abuse, humiliation, and oppression generally associated with women in Bolivia.  By fighting their way off the ropes in the ring, they are also moving away from the margins of Bolivian society.

Even though the money earned from wrestling does not equal a full time job, cholitas are able to supplement their regular jobs with anywhere from $4-$30 USD per event.  This encourages some of the husbands to accept their wives’ participation in this non-gender conforming activity. Furthermore, what The Fighting Cholitas lack in economic income they gain in social mobility.  The popularity of the sport, and women such as Carmen Rosa (aka The Champion), has enabled these women to travel the world fighting in Japan, Europe, and other areas of South America.  These women are celebrities in La Paz where, literally, everyone knows their names.  Carmen Rosa has even had a documentary made about her (Mamachas del Ring [2009]), which she has expressed as her proudest achievement. When these women are featured in media ranging from local papers to National Geographic they make it hard for the world to forget about them.

Wrestling in their pollera skirts is an interesting contradiction because the pollera itself is a symbol of oppression and a traditional construction of femininity but wrestling in these outfits represents a rejection of passivity.  What I find particularly intriguing about the luchadoras is that they have appropriated the pollera skirt to challenge not only gender norms but also cultural stereotypes often associated with countries of the Global South.  Most tourists who attend a lucha libre event assume that this form of wrestling is to Bolivia what baseball is to America, and hockey is to Canada. We, as tourists, often have preconceived notions of what other cultures look, sound, and smell like in our imaginations and the cholitas use this to their advantage.  The luchadoras use their iconic skirts to attract tourists because they know that is what is expected. They capitalize on our desires as tourists for “authentic” experiences for their own economic gain. 

The Fighting Cholitas have come to symbolize the strength that exists in Bolivian women. They have found a way to empower themselves and change their local context.  Even though the fighting is dramatized, the effects on the local community (and injuries) are very real. What began as a novelty and a sideshow has now become the main attraction.  What other women’s sport can make that same claim? Certainly neither women’s mixed martial arts nor women’s soccer can make this claim. Women’s tennis and golf may be able to claim equal billing on certain occasions but even they cannot contend that they are the main draw.  Western feminism often positions itself as the benchmark of success and achievement but perhaps we should look South of the equator more often to find examples of women who have created space and agency for themselves in a world that generally considers them universally disempowered.  In a world where opportunities for resistance seem increasingly few and far in between, the cholitas demonstrate that power is a constant struggle and that opportunities can arise in surprising arenas.  So if you are ever in Bolivia and looking to take in some “culture,” consider attending a lucha libre match.  The cholitas will be waiting for you.

References

Carroll, R. & Schipani, A.  (2008, August 30).  Bolivia: Welcome to lucha libre – the sport for men making heroes of women.  The Guardian.  Retrieved from http://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/aug/30/bolivia.gender

Courtney Szto is a PhD student in the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada.  Her doctoral research focuses on issues of citizenship, ethnicity, and immigration as they manifest in ice hockey.  She writes for Hockey in Society, Interrupt Magazine, and her own blog, The Rabbit Hole.  Courtney also runs Offside Plays, a social media campaign working to expose everyday racism, sexism, homophobia, and other forms of discrimination that take place in sport and physical activity (@offsideplays).

DAY 14, FEMINISM AND FITNESS - ANALISA RAYA-FLORES

BORN TO RUN (TOPLESS)
Analisa Raya-Flores

There’s this music video.  It begins and ends in the high desert, among wheel-shaped cactuses and cartoonish tumbleweeds.  It’s either sunrise or sunset, and you’d make that call on account of being a glass half-full or glass half-empty kind of soul.  I’m half-full, myself, so the yellow near the horizon looks young, and go-getterish—with some upward mobility.  It could just as easily be tired and apologetic, taking its last tour of the office before it retires.  Like I said, it all depends on your glass.  There are a few houses off in the distance, all similar in color and shape, distinguished only by how far they’ve sunk into the earth.  None of the windows or doors face one another, which seems intentional.  They are siblings in a sandbox, back to back, showing but not telling you they are similar, but not the same. 

The backdrop never changes, and when you first see a figure running toward the camera, she’s a backlit silhouette.  If I were being a responsible, gender queer academic I’d say, the person, not she.  But a. I’m not in a classroom, and b. the person is me.  But as I’ve been told, it doesn’t look like me.  Or even a person.  In the first thirty seconds, it’s just a sprinting shadow with ropey limbs, accented with splashes of hot pink at its crown and below its middle.  After a few frames, this creature emerges from behind a shrub into the daylight.  That’s when it’s clear that it’s just a running lady wearing a crown of lit smoke bombs, an electric pink bikini bottom, and nothing else.  And this topless, literally smoking lady runs at this pace for another two minutes; so, not long.

It’s worth mentioning, at this point, that I do not self-identify as an actress, model or quote unquote video girl.  I even hesitate to say “self-identify,” because I don’t think anyone with working eyeballs would identify me as such, either.  I do, however, identify as a runner.  And since I was fairly self-deprecating about my statuesque beauty, I’m going to be fairly immodest about my athletic prowess.  When I say I am a runner, I don’t mean I jog about the local reservoir or take my dog for a neighborhood loop.  I run marathon plus distances in mountainous terrain.  Some call this Ultra Running, and others call it Fucking Bonkers—the latter of two being more accurate.  After all, it’s not entirely sane to spend hours running up and down hills for the sole reward of a diverse, inner-shoe rock collection.

Several famous writers have written about running, and some pretty famous runners have dabbled in writing about, well, running.  It makes sense.  Both are solitary endeavors, sometimes in a liberating way (I answer to no one!), and other times in a crushing, black hole of loneliness kind of way (can anybody hear me?).  Anyone who spends time writing, trail running, or both will tell you it is a constant pendulum swing between sincere gratitude (what a privilege, to be in this body use its gifts!) and self-loathing (why even bother taking another step, you plodding, shitty butthole—just lay down and never get back up!)

Running wasn’t always something I enjoyed or even wanted to talk about.  I understood what it was, where it was done, and how people did it.  I just couldn’t piece together the why.  I disliked it on a personal level, and in a wider scope, had disdain for it.  Regardless of context, it always seemed like a punishment: something coaches inflicted upon children during P.E. class; something housewives did midday in the place of lunch, between tennis lessons and charity meetings; something retirees took up on their spouse’s or doctors advice, or maybe because it helped them mark the passing of time.  And if the physical repercussions weren’t enough, it had to be psychologically damaging, to trick yourself into a harried fight or flight mode.  I imagined the brain working the body into a frenzy, rallying the muscles and bones—convincing them what they were about to do was not only necessary, but valorous; troops into a doomed, suicidal battle.  A run wasn’t just unpleasant.  It was Gettysburg, from the South’s point of view. I can’t pinpoint the exact moment it changed, when the would-you-rather scale of running vs. anal cavity search tipped from the latter to the former.  I’d like to think it required a bit of personal growth or profound realization of mortality, but it probably only required getting older, and wanting to feel better in and about my body.

In April of 2013, I completed my first Ultra Marathon, a 50 mile race through the Pacific Coast Trail.  In May of that same year, it was time to shoot the music video.  It was perfect timing, really.  I was basking the glow of my hard-fought accomplishment, proud of my body for its tenacity and resilience.  Running all those miles had, of course, affected what I saw when I looked in the mirror.  More significantly, perhaps, was that I was forgetting to look in the mirror at all.  It seems obvious, now, that a sport known for its grit—for facial salt deposits, blackened toenails, and shit-smeared running shorts—would grant me a departure from vanity.

It’s worth mentioning that long before the opportunity arose, I had always dreamt of running naked, or almost naked.  I say almost naked because my primordial roleplay fantasy has always included a loincloth, or at least a pair of moisture-wicking underwear.  I had and have no desire to expose my vital orifices to the dangers of stinging nettles, poison oak, or industrious snakes with the desire and curiosity to delve into uncharted, warm holes.

It’s also worth mentioning that I’ve never felt particularly attached to my breasts.  In the dinner party of all my body parts, they would be the boring couple from work—coordinated outfits from an mid-range, new England style catalogue—solid colors and boat shoes.  Their conversation would never veer far from the daily pettiness of bad traffic or injustices at the office—can you believe they took away the microwave?  All because so and so claimed it could make people sterile.  They would be sterile.  Their sole contribution to the evening would be a sparkling wine—usually the same brand unless another next to it had a slightly less decorous label.  They’d want to seem sophisticated, but know that they weren’t.  If they were to suddenly stop attending group outings, you wouldn’t miss them. 

Aside from the fact that I have them (kinda), there isn’t much to say about my breasts.  They don’t sag, but aren’t perky.  And with the exception of a freckle that is either on the right one or the left (I just looked down my shirt and still can’t remember), the nipples aren’t particularly noteworthy, either.  For all of the above reasons (and a few more), I have never been shy about showing them to people. In junior high school, when truth or dare time inevitably turned into a game of flashing body parts, I had absolutely no compunction about lifting my shirt up.  With new partners over the years, I’ve always peeled my shirt off long before it was expected, or maybe even welcomed (sorry, y’all).  And when I had an idea to go as a spritely, boyish adventurer for Halloween a few years ago, it never occurred to me that wearing a suede vest over pasties would be result in an off-putting pseudo-pedophilic dream.  I spent the entire night shouting, “But that’s what he wears in the movie,” to a room full of slutty ghosts and drunken ghouls. 

It writes itself, really, and in a not so subtle way: exhibitionist history, meet newfound body positivity—cool now that you two know each other, let’s all go run naked through the cactuses.

The first time I saw the video, I was elated.  It’s beautifully shot, artful, emotionally evocative.  All the individual pieces come together in an almost artificial way—as if everything in frame were part of a diorama made for a science fair: crescent shaped pipe-cleaners for cactuses, shredded crepe paper for rainbow plumes of smoke, soap and matchboxes for houses.  Pieces that seemed so isolated at first now show signs of familiarity among them: faint lines emerge from doorways, extending toward other houses, succulent clusters, and the road.  The footpaths all walk toward the horizon, fingertips in search of a crowded handshake.

The one singular element, now, is the running creature.  With everything united behind her, the camera seems less certain of her presence.  She’s oddly incidental, a hair out of place, just waiting for a breeze to blow it back into formation.  At best, she is animalistic: a lean, muscular frame, economical movements, and a completely neutral expression—eyes focused on the middle distance.  Her exposed chest is as vulnerable as it is powerful, an epicenter of potential; here is where things continue to go right, or suddenly and irreparably wrong.

Watching it now, I walk the line between enthusiasm and sadness.  I look swift, graceful, and completely alone. And no amount of body positivity or pride in my abilities can absolve me of this animalistic loneliness.  There is running, sure, but animals run for all sorts of reasons: because they don’t belong to anyone, or because they desperately want to.  I guess it all depends on the fullness of your glass.

Analisa Raya-Flores, like most of her stories, is short. Her work has appeared online in Out of Nothing and in print in Monkeybicycle. She writes about dying, mostly, but for now she is alive in Los Angeles.