Reservoir Bitches by Dahlia De La Cerda is a collection of short stories full of grit, violence, and rage. These women are angry, and rightfully so. They frequently only matter when they are a prize to be won, or the daughter of a well-off man. Otherwise, they are poor, struggling, criticized, and might as well be dead. Putting on a performance is how many of them have learned to camouflage and survive.

These voices belong to women who have been hardened by a world and culture where they are pawns and tools and only worth something until a man decides they aren't. While the voices are strong and individualized, I do wish I got to spend more time with the women. They tell us about the horrors they've gone through and go through so casually. The casualness adds to the understanding that these environments aren't new to these women, but the casualness also keeps us from sitting with the women as they go through these things, and I wanted to be there with them. For them. Come on Dahlia De La Cerda, let me stay!

The last story, La Huesera, does invite us to sit with the narrator much longer, and it was (in my opinion) by far the best story for that. Strong as a story because of the imagery, metaphors, emotions, and ending, but also strong as an ending to the collection as it does a great job summarizing the other stories. This is definitely a story I will return to.

The story uses women's bodies frequently. Both as the camouflage for survival like I previously mentioned, but also as something to violate and destroy, and this is one of the ways these stories are transgressive. I'd argue that the way the women push back, and even sometimes carelessly hurt each other, are other ways these stories are transgressive.

If you're interested in a quick read, full of angry, restless women who continue to fight for themselves and the women they love, then this is definitely a book for you.

This past Wednesday, I made a post about Bodies and Permissions: Breaking Rules & Conduct. In that post, I introduce the use/abuse of the body in transgressive fiction and why it makes sense. In this post, I briefly talk more about how bodies can be used to break boundaries and create social commentary in transgressive fiction, and provide some specific plot points and statistics that could be used in creating a story that uses the body as a tool.

Coco D’Hont (2020) discusses Chuck Palahniuk’s deviation from the term transgressive fiction, and his comment on how it is no longer received well or exists post America’s 9/11. D’Hont thinks transgressive fiction is still alive though and she critically explores transgression “As a philosophical concept, moving beyond simplistic definitions of the concept as an umbrella term for any type of shocking or socially unacceptable behaviour, or fictional renderings of this. Instead, transgression is explored as a mechanism which (re)develops central social ideologies” (D’Hont, 2020, p. 8).

I agree that transgressive fiction isn’t, or shouldn’t be, shocking for pure shock value. I suppose someone could write those stories, but I believe they’re way stronger when they have purpose behind them. What message is the author trying to send to a reader through this imagery?

And that’s where craft comes in. D’Hont (2020) explores a variety of craft choices that five transgressive novels employ. One that she discusses frequently is seen across the five texts: the use of the body. Like, she specifically calls out the body as a craft choice. As I mentioned earlier this week, body violation is common in transgressive literature — but it makes sense; it is one of the only things that we will permanently own during our lifetime and the act of violating our body disrupts that. This act can symbolize multiple forms of loss that are relevant to a variety of American ideals making it a strong example of transgression.

The interesting thing, though, is that even the other craft choices she identifies in transgressive fiction still revolve around the body.

She also explores constructed hierarchies through the use of an “other”.
In the novel Hogg, for example, she describes the character Hogg who is portrayed as physically filthy and running a rape business (which relates back to what I discussed in my post on Wednesday regarding the IBM layout of hierarchy).

Then, she discusses the ways in which the novels explore societal complexities.
This includes Beloved’s redevelopment of the perception of race and gender.

The body keeps coming up. It’s used to create pictures, meaning, and messages.

(Side note: D’Hont argues that these three craft choices demonstrate transgression’s role in shaping society, and how it calls attention to situations by creating exaggerated, aesthetic systems where the authors reveal, destruct, interrogate, and reform “the ideological structures of their extra-textual content” (p. 16) but that it doesn’t create change. The research I do considers how to use techniques like these three in combination with others to write stories that can create/impact social change. I haven’t yet discussed it on my blog — I will soon!)

In the meantime, here are some ideas for destroying/harming the body to get you started writing a transgressive story. As I offer plot points and statistics below, I do it in hopes that you may incorporate them into a broader discussion, rather than just a dark story for dark story’s sake. BUT I also recognize you’re your own author and can do whatever you’d like.

So here you go. Just a *few* examples of ways the body can be damaged or crossed to demonstrate transgression.

Examples/Plot Points

• Self-immolation or ‘necklacing’ — placing a petrol-soaked tire around a victim and setting it alight — (the individual is fully conscious and gas inhalation does not decrease the level of consciousness)
• Getting skinned alive (and then sell the skin on Ebay?!)
• A body being ripped in half by a rope
• ‘Sitting in the tub’ — laying a person in a wooden tub with only their head sticking out. Their faces would be painted with milk and honey and soon flies would begin to feed on them. Historically, the victim was also fed regularly and would end up swimming in their excrement. After a few days, maggots and worms would devour their body as they decayed alive
• Dissolved with sulfuric acid
• A woman filming herself in sexual videos with her infant daughter on her cellphone and sharing the videos online
• Cold aerosol burns (‘frosties’) are self-inflicted or peer-inflicted injuries sustained from the spraying of aerosol onto the skin. A frostbite injury occurs because of subsequent freezing of the tissues, commencing at approximately –2˚C to –10˚C and despite short exposure periods, these injuries are often severe. Cluster injuries occur as the result of a mutual ‘test of courage’.

Some Relevant Statistics

from RAINN:

• Every 68 seconds another American is sexually assaulted.
• 1 out of every 6 American women has been the victim of an attempted or completed rape in her lifetime (14.8% completed, 2.8% attempted).
• About 3% of American men — or 1 in 33 — have experienced an attempted or completed rape in their lifetime.
• From 2009–2013, Child Protective Services agencies substantiated, or found strong evidence to indicate that, 63,000 children a year were victims of sexual abuse.
• A majority of child victims are 12–17. Of victims under the age of 18: 34% of victims of sexual assault and rape are under age 12, and 66% of victims of sexual assault and rape are age 12–17.
• 48% were sleeping, or performing another activity at home
• 29% were traveling to and from work or school, or traveling to shop or run errands
• 12% were working
• 7% were attending school
• 5% were doing an unknown or other activity

(Visit the site for more statistics)

From NCADV:

• On average, nearly 20 people per minute are physically abused by an intimate partner in the United States. During one year, this equates to more than 10 million women and men.1
• 1 in 4 women and 1 in 9 men experience severe intimate partner physical violence, intimate partner contact sexual violence, and/or intimate partner stalking with impacts such as injury, fearfulness, post-traumatic stress disorder, use of victim services, contraction of sexually transmitted diseases, etc.2
• 1 in 3 women and 1 in 4 men have experienced some form of physical violence by an intimate partner. This includes a range of behaviors (e.g. slapping, shoving, pushing) and in some cases might not be considered “domestic violence.” 1
• 1 in 7 women and 1 in 25 men have been injured by an intimate partner.1
• 1 in 10 women have been raped by an intimate partner. Data is unavailable on male victims.1
• 1 in 4 women and 1 in 7 men have been victims of severe physical violence (e.g. beating, burning, strangling) by an intimate partner in their lifetime.1
• 1 in 7 women and 1 in 18 men have been stalked by an intimate partner during their lifetime to the point in which they felt very fearful or believed that they or someone close to them would be harmed or killed.1
• On a typical day, there are more than 20,000 phone calls placed to domestic violence hotlines nationwide.9
• The presence of a gun in a domestic violence situation increases the risk of homicide by 500%.10
• Intimate partner violence accounts for 15% of all violent crime.2
• Women between the ages of 18–24 are most commonly abused by an intimate partner.2
• 19% of domestic violence involves a weapon.2
• Domestic victimization is correlated with a higher rate of depression and suicidal behavior.2
• Only 34% of people who are injured by intimate partners receive medical care for their injuries.2
• A study of intimate partner homicides found that 20% of victims were not the intimate partners themselves, but family members, friends, neighbors, persons who intervened, law enforcement responders, or bystanders.3
• 72% of all murder-suicides involve an intimate partner; 94% of the victims of these murder suicides are female.8
• 1 in 15 children are exposed to intimate partner violence each year, and 90% of these children are eyewitnesses to this violence.5
• The cost of intimate partner violence exceeds $8.3 billion per year.6
• Between 21–60% of victims of intimate partner violence lose their jobs due to reasons stemming from the abuse.6
• Between 2003 and 2008, 142 women were murdered in their workplace by their abuser, 78% of women killed in the workplace during this timeframe.4
• Women abused by their intimate partners are more vulnerable to contracting HIV or other STI’s due to forced intercourse or prolonged exposure to stress.7

(Visit the site for more statistics)

With about 8% of the American population being blind, the other 92% of people will often first be introduced to other humans through sight. What does this mean? It means when I meet you, I first see what I think your gender is. What your skin color is. What your age is. If you use any assistance for disabilities. How you dress. If you have piercings or tattoos. Your size (relevant to height and weight). The kind of face you’re making (do you look pleasant or angry?) (among other things).

So now that I’ve looked at you, all of these things I just saw connect to previous assumptions I’ve made about people who look like that. This shows how “Human bodies are both biological and social in nature.”

Bodies and Permissions: Breaking Rules & Conduct

Now that I’ve used your body to assign you an identity in my mind, I decide what permission that gives me, and this, folks, is what makes bodies so usable in transgressive fiction.

Transgression is an act that goes against a law, rule, or code of conduct; an offense. If I’ve determined how I should interact with you or what I am allowed to do to you or the ways I can treat you based on your identity (or perceived identity), this may not align with what’s fair to you. This may, in fact, be harmful to you and could be an “offense”, right? It could act against an expected conduct, like the conduct of just being a decent human being who doesn’t hurt others.

But by invading others’ bodies, by showing those bodies damaged or destroyed, in the way that transgressive fiction often does, those stories are sending a message about identity and permissions.

This website talks about identities and permissions with IBM (International Business Machines), a technology company. It’s not talking about humans at all, but it breaks down the definitions and boundaries from a technology standpoint so well that it coincidentally aligns perfectly with what I’m talking about! So even though we’re talking about humans here, I want to look at IBM’s discussion.

We start with roles:

“Role hierarchy --

Roles can be hierarchical. One role might act as a parent role to another role. This role hierarchy is provided by this query subject. It can provide the role details like ID, name, description; and it provides similar details for the parent role.”

And then we talk about how the hierarchy of roles offers details about identities:

“Identity role attachment

This query subject provides details about identities that belong to a role. These roles are associated to a project”

And then we start diving into entitlement and membership qualifiers. With membership qualifiers, they say, “The users, who qualify based on those attributes and values specified in the rule, are part of the role or are associated with that role.” So what happens to those who don’t qualify for the group? This is where using the body to create identities can turn transgressive–

How do people react to others who do not belong to their group?

IBM says that “Permissions are part of or are associated to a role. Permission can exist in a hierarchy.”

And often times, people will decide what permissions they have based on the identity they’ve assigned you.

So as transgressive writers, the body is a perfect tool for exploring the breaking of permissions, of transgressive acts, of autonomy and social structures.

Examples of using the body in transgression include:

Tampa by Alyssa Nutting
Explicit description of sexual acts with an adult woman using a child’s (multiple children’s) body for pleasure. This story makes us consider power, manipulation, and what does or doesn’t count as permission.

American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis
The main character, seemingly put together and doing well (as an investment banker) by American standards, repeatedly brutally murders a variety of people in the novel. The horror of all this isn’t because of what the novel itself writes about, but the society it reflects.

Boy Parts by Eliza Cark
The easily hate-able narrator uses men’s bodies in her photography to flip gender roles and demonstrate her own self-destruction.

Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk
The story shows multiple acts of violating/harming the body: male strangers fighting for the sake of fighting, using lye to create burns in the skin, the threat of death through project mayhem catastrophes… This book considers the body, consumerism, and what is important in life before we die.

Hogg by Samuel R. Delaney
This novel shows multiple characters who participate, graphically, in murder, child molestation, incest, necrophilia and rape among other things. All of which deal with power and permissions (/lack thereof) of harming another’s body.

And so many more.

Violence and sex are often used as tools in creating a transgressive novel because it’s easy to abuse the body. Use someone else’s body to harm them, hurt them, damage them — physically, psychologically, and emotionally. Many laws or social rules of conduct can be broken through these behaviors, which is why oftentimes transgressive fiction employs these acts.

What are other examples of body-violation in transgressive fiction that you can think of?

Check out my follow-up post with graphic ways the body can be used in transgressive fiction.