Disability and nudity: Can all womyn find comfort at the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival?

Off Our Backs, Nov/Dec 2002 by Groves, Pat

women and disability

can all womyn find comfort at the Michigan Wonyn's Music Festival?

Mainstream society has created a market commodity of sexuality and womyn's bodies. Womyn's bodies continue to be exploited for male pleasure. Youthful, physically attractive bodies honed to perfection display the image we are expected to achieve. The disabled body, the aging body, and the large body are expected to be altered by market commodities including drugs and surgical procedures sold by the medical professions. The result of these market strategies is the exploitation of womyn and the intensification of womyn's negative attitudes toward the female body in its natural form.

For the past 27 years, the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival has provided a space for the development of positive images of the natural female body. Because the Festival organizers have paid attention to issues of accessibility for womyn with disabilities, there are increasing numbers of womyn with disabilities who brave the primitive conditions offered by the only marginally altered natural environment of the Festival. These womyn, along with womyn whose bodies show the effects of aging, size, mastectomy, or injury are able to join into community with a group of womyn from all over the globe who wish to celebrate the natural diversity of the female body.

For the past two years, we have attempted to put together the stories of Festival participants who identify with disabled communities. While much has been written about the social construction of womyn's bodies, Michigan has created the opportunity to examine the intersection of the feminine and the disabled body. One of the important pieces of these disability stories is the issue of nudity at the Festival and the impact it has on participants whose bodies do not conform to culturally imposed standards of femininity.

Lisa Vogel, Boo (Barbara) Price, and a womyn's collective gave birth to the idea of the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival in 1976. Lesbian/feminist culture had created audiences for music written by and for womyn. The producers of the first Festival had no idea that their event would bring over 3500 womyn together from all over the North American continent. From the beginning, there were efforts to address the diverse needs of womyn, including disability. At the first gathering, sign language interpreters were provided on stage, and efforts were made to incorporate womyn with physical disabilities on unimproved land.

When one arrives at the Michigan Festival, it is immediately apparent that, as a group, the participants have, at least for the duration of the Festival, transgressed the boundaries of the cultural prescription for the feminine body. Make-up, clothing, shoes, and even posture and prescribed movements are shed. Bodies of large size are everywhere and their owners interact comfortably, not hiding their size under socially prescribed clothing. The female body, not the socially constructed feminine form, is everywhere. Many womyn express the unique pleasure of feeling comfortable in their bodies as a result of the Festival experience.

It is not that nudity is required at the Festival. Clothing, as much or as little as the Festival participant desires, is optional. One woman associated nudity with a sense of coming home:

"I love being naked. And at the same time, yeah! I love seeing womyn naked. And love ... To me it is not all a sexual thing. It feels like home to me. It feels really loving. It feels like a lot of love for us to walk around naked. ... I used to feel uncomfortable wearing that (support-belt). I used to feel uncomfortable with womyn seeing my back (which) is pretty twisted and stuff and when I had to wear other supports on other joints, but I got to see you know, womyn don't really pay attention to that. This year I have taken to decorating my belt when I have worn it. I have this little sunflower that my friend, the one with cancer, she gave it to me at the beginning of Festival. I have a sunflower pin. I haven't put it on yet today. But I was walking around one day at Festival before you got here with just my belt on and that's all I had on."

Other participants were more cautious in their statements about Festival nudity. These womyn responded to the social messages received outside the Festival that relate to bodily exposure. One admitted to being uncomfortable with her own nudity and said that the Festival experience was moving her in a direction of comfort.

Given that these quotations come from womyn with visible physical disabilities, their experiences at the Festival seem to confirm what Rosemarie Garland Thomson describes in her 1997 classic book, Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature, that, "the meanings attributed to extraordinary bodies resides not in inherent physical flaws, but in the social relationships in which one group is legitimated by possessing valued physical characteristics." The Festival enables womyn to be affirmed for the simple physicality of being female regardless of age, ability, or beauty-to be treasured as extraordinary simply for being a womon. According to womyn interviewed about their Festival experiences, the celebration of female nudity at the Festival is embraced by most of the Festival participants, able-bodied or not, and quirky or not. The Festival provides a space for all womyn, disabled or otherwise, to feel comfortable in their bodies. The dynamics of relationships are not based on age, size, breasts, thighs, or other physical features. For womyn who expressed discomfort with nudity, it seems that this discomfort is more a reflection of the cultural messages we receive as womyn about showing our bodies, in raw form, in public, rather than a fear of receiving a label for having displayed a less than perfect body in the cultural context of the Festival.