I’ve never seen the more recent musical film version because I love the original so much, but I’d be interested to hear what BadReppers think of it. If you’ve not seen the real thing, here’s the trailer:

Made in 1988 by the incomparable John Waters, it’s set in 1962 Baltimore. IMDb says:

‘Pleasantly Plump’ teenager Tracy Turnblad achieves her dream of becoming a regular on the Corny Collins Dance Show. Now a teen hero, she starts using her fame to speak out for the causes she believes in, most of all integration. In doing so, she earns the wrath of the show’s former star, Amber Von Tussle, as well as Amber’s manipulative, pro-segregation parents. The rivalry comes to a head as Amber and Tracy vie for the title of Miss Auto Show 1963.

But that doesn’t really cover it. It’s a delirious, high-camp, queer, irreverent and satirical version of the early 60s that shows Dirty Dancing up as the insipid whitewashed pap that it is. (Sorry, but you know I’m speaking the truth.) Tracy Turnblad, played by Ricki Lake, is a heroine and a half. Big, happy, confident, working class Tracy has a lot of soul and a keen sense of justice. She wins the day, the guy, and the hearts of the town because she can dance, because she’s nice and because she stands up for what she believes in. In this case: civil rights.

What is so refreshing to see even now (perhaps especially now) is a large teenage female character who radiates energy and self-confidence. She’s not a sidekick, she’s the star through and through, and the Elvis-a-like heartthrob falls head over heels for her, as does everyone else. When she dances in triumph with her chain of friends at the end of the film I DEFY YOU not to be cheering her on.

I love her for some of the same reasons I love Mae West in, well, all her films (she basically plays the same character every time). She’s larger and older than her counterpart spindly 1930s starlets, but in every film the men follow her around with their jaws bumping on the floor. It simultaneously surprises me and makes me think ‘why the hell not?’ She wrote the scripts, anyway – why not cast herself as a sex symbol? She was a sex symbol. We’re faced with such a tidal wave of body propaganda it’s easy to internalise it. Here’s a gratuitous embed of the trailer to West’s 1933 film I’m No Angel:

Anyway, back to the 80s/60s/whatever planet John Waters comes from. Another thing I love about Hairspray is the fabulous supporting cast of characters. Divine as Tracy’s mother Edna steals every scene she’s in, but I also love Tracy’s best friend Penny (Leslie Ann Powers) who seems pretty drippy until she meets kind, dishy Seaweed, son of local soul queen Motormouth Mabel. It’s actually quiet Penny Pingleton that starts shouting ‘segregation never, integration now!’ outside the Corny Collins Show. Penny and Tracy are touchingly devoted to each other too, encouraging each other and enjoying each other’s happiness. Plus bitchy Amber von Tussle and her snobbish, racist parents (her mother is played by Debbie Harry) are deliciously hateable.

The film is not without its flaws and it definitely won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, but I love it. It’s the only film (I think…) that I’ve ever watched and put on again straight away, though admittedly that’s partly because of the superb soundtrack, which features Lesley Gore’s irresistible anthem You Don’t Own Me. Here it is!

OVARY

Oh! Darling.

Ovary hopped onto the semantic stage around 1658 meaning ‘the female organ of reproduction in animals, in which ova or eggs are produced’ (ova being the Latin plural form of ovum = egg). Eggs, of course, are now generally recognised as a crucial part of reproduction in all species (a chicken ovulates every day, fact fans), making the ovary rather important for the construction of little’uns. Straightforwardly, the word derives from ovarium: ‘ovum’ + ‘-arium’ (aquarium, oceanarium, planetarium, toastarium). Consistency: it’s helpful. But hold! 1658? Really? What about before? Was there some mass genital evolution in the late seventeenth century that made early modern cisgendered Woman so drastically different from her medieval sisters?

Hartsoeker's drawings of 'homunculi', or 'little humans' inside sperm. (1695)

Well no, but there was an evolution in what Scientists considered “Woman” to be. For hundreds of thousands of years previous, the established thinking had been that they were simply men ‘turned outside-in’: female genitals were held ‘up there’ by a colder body temperature than their male counterparts, and, thus, sex differences were a matter of degree. Women were men who hadn’t quite unfurled properly.

Oh My God

With this thinking, the vagina became an inverted penis, the labia a foreskin, the uterus a scrotum, and the ovaries testicles – and all these now-familiar gynecological terms date from the same period: the oft-maligned vagina (= ‘sheath’) is faux-Latin from 1680, labia (= ‘lip’) slightly earlier (1630s) and uterus the earliest, from 1610 (although, as already mentioned in these pixellated pages, it was conflated with the gender-neutral ‘womb’ or ‘belly’, its original Latinate meaning). Pre-seventeenth century ovaries were consequently referred to as ‘female testicles’ or ‘stones’, and the synonymity was so literal as to accept the possibility that if a girl got too hot through strenuous exercise, her entire reproductive system could accidentally pop out and turn her into a boy.

So if sex was a false distinction to make, how did male and female manage to breed? Seventeenth-century scientists approached this question firstly through Aristotle and his theory of epigenesis (= ‘origin through growth’). Aristotle reckoned male semen gave the embryo its form, and female menstrual blood supplied the raw materials.¹ The ‘soul’ enters the embryo at the moment the mother first feels the baby kick.

However, by suggesting new people can spring into being organically, epigenesis risks dispensing with divine involvement. Not cool. So a much more palatable alternative, for seventeenth-century scientists, was preformation (the idea that the parents’ seed already contained a miniature adult, so all the embryo has to do is increase in size). Bit creepy, right? Nicolaas Hartsoeker (1656-1725) was well into this idea and even claimed he could see these ‘homunculi’ through the microscope (above, right).

But once this had been agreed, there came the inevitable Swiftian debate about how you like your eggs, with scientists divided into ‘aminalculists’ and ‘ovists’: those who were with Hartsoeker in believing the ‘germ’ of life to be in the sperm, and those who preferred the ‘egg’ (= ‘the female’). Arguing in favour of the latter was the (understandable) confusion about why God would be so wasteful as to create thousands of Hartsoekerean sperm-germs to be lost on every egg-ward excursion for the sake of one single fertilization: from the outside, the female looked a bit more efficient.

Oh! You Pretty Things

But clearly, all this Knowledge was better on the subject of males than females (and even the women themselves were hard pressed to explain menstruation or recognise pregnancy): ova were still shrouded in mystery, and ovulation a great unknown – it was not even certain whether human females could conceive without orgasm, or if they were more like cats, rabbits, llamas (now known as ‘induced ovulators’) and, er, men. Official advice erred on the side of caution and recommended that both man and wife reach orgasm during procreation – as a side-effect, a rapist could get off scott-free if his victim fell pregnant, since, until the nineteenth century, the law worked backwards and considered conception to imply enjoyment and, therefore, consent.

It is William Harvey (1578-1657), most famous for ‘discovering’ the circulation of the blood, who is commonly credited with realising the importance of an ovary-thing, and the frontispiece to his treatise on the subject blazons the tag ‘ex ovo omnia‘ (‘everything from the egg’). But he was thinking less of a modern day ‘egg cell‘ and more of a ‘spirit’: an egg was the mother’s ‘idea’ of a fetus which was ‘ignited’ in her womb during sex. It was a general generative catalyst, not technical anatomy – as is clear from the image (below, left).

Can of worms... The frontispiece to Harvey's Treatise on Generation (detail). Image from http://www.hps.cam.ac.uk/visibleembryos/

Oh My Gosh

After kicking around for just over a century, ovary suddenly became enshrined in anatomy books as an independent organ that somehow encapsulated ‘woman’: in 1844 Achille Chereau declared that ‘it is only because of the ovary that woman is what she is’ (oh dear). In part, this was to do with a retreat from the previous centuries’ idea that women and men were anatomically the same and an advance towards the notion that sex equalled gender (a surprisingly modern invention, if you listen to Thomas Laqueur). With this came an increasing focus on specifically ‘women’s’ problems via hysteria (= ‘womb trouble’), and, neatly (if disturbingly) a favourite cure for this pre-Freud was the bilateral ovariotomy, also dubbed ‘female castration’: removing a patient’s healthy ovaries to man them up a bit (just as men become ‘feminized’ through removal of the testicles). The ovariotomy would thus, it was believed, act not just as a cure for hysteria, but also for behavioural pathologies including nymphomania, and even general aches and pains. Of course, it also stopped menstruation, rendered women infertile and carried risks endemic to c19th surgery methods. WE DON’T KNOW WHAT THIS DOES, SO LET’S JUST TAKE IT OUT.

It was not until the 1930s that scientists got near a hormonal understanding of ovulation, how it worked and how it could be controlled. Here we really should give a nod to that symbol of 1960s sexual liberation: the combined oral contraceptive pill, a great source of division between parents and children, as epitomised in the backstory to the seminal Beatles song She’s Leaving Home (1967). See, children of the 1920s and 30s must have found the idea of their daughters silently and imperceptibly controlling their ovulation terrifying, whereas the children of the 1960s saw such control as simple empowerment. In miniature, this gives us the whole history of ovary and its linguistic cognates: what cannot be seen is inevitably free for appropriation by a host of meanings. Meaningarium.

Further Reading:

• Making Visible Embryos – an ‘online exhibition’ from the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge. And Thomas Laqueur, of course (as linked).

NEXT WEEK: P is for Pussy

1. Yes, menstrual blood.