song of the day

Ani DiFranco’s “Out of Habit”

This song came up on my itunes shuffle as I was studying for my comps today and even though I’ve heard this song over a hundred times, there was a line that really struck me today. Granted, I don’t often pay very close attention to lyrics, but when DiFranco sings “my cunt is built like a wound that won’t heal” it really struck me. My first reaction was how striking the word “cunt” sounds in DiFranco’s melodic voice and framed by the upbeat guitar. It also really reminded me of Erika Fricke’s article “In Pursuit of a Feminine Vulgarity,” where Fricke discusses how the language of profanity is intrinsically male and that women need to take it into their own hands and create an empowered language. GI Jane shouldn’t have to yell “suck my dick.” Instead she should find a language that represents her own strength and could be screaming “lick my clit” instead.

The other thing that this line immediately brought to mind was the  Braun and Wilkinson’s paper “Socio-cultural Representations of the Vagina” that I spent a lot of time talking about in the Teeth paper.  What does it mean to us that DiFranco is invoking this socio-cultural representation of the vagina as a gash?  Although the authors did not come up with the theory (I’m pretty sure it is Freudian),  Braun and Wilkinson discuss the image of the gash being a wound left behind from castration of the female’s symbolic penis.  Because the penis represents power, the female is left with not only an absence of a penis and thus an absence of power, but is also left wounded.  

What is striking when you think about the lyrics through the lens of Braun, Wilkinson, and Freud is  that not is DiFranco talking about a “cunt” that is “wounded” but rather one that it won’t heal.  The fact that she considers the wound one that will not heal, as if that were the goal, really speaks to idea of the power struggle that is still very relevant for women today. 

click the jump to check out the lyrics to the song!