Toxic Shock: Gendered Environments and Embodied Knowledge in Don DeLillo’s White Noise and Todd Haynes’s [Safe]

Abstract

Don De Lillo’s 1984 novel White Noise and Todd Haynes’s 1995 film [Safe] both depict “toxic events” which prompt crises of the body and of knowledge: the boundaries between normative and transgressive gendered identities and between legitimate and illicit knowledges are questioned. Moreover, in both texts the body and identity of a woman becomes the focus of this questioning; the ways in which these toxic events are acted out through the bodies of women reveals the implication of discourses of toxicity in discourses of feminine embodiment. Both Babette in White Noise and Carol in [Safe] suffer symptoms without cause, whose meaning the (masculine) discourses of medicine and psychiatry cannot articulate; they are converted from exemplars of normative gendered and sexual identity into deviants whose bodies exhibit a silent protest. In depicting the projection of crises of toxicity onto the body of a woman, these texts illustrate the persistence of cultural narratives which pathologise the female body and hystericize feminine subjectivity; the “authenticity” and “legitimacy” of a woman’s experience of a crisis of embodiment is placed in question by dominant cultural narratives which construct feminine subjectivity as incapable of self-knowledge and female materiality as irrational. By placing the discourse of toxicity in these texts in the context of discourses of feminine embodiment, especially those of consumption (bodily and economic) and of pathology, I intend to explore how these conspiracies of the female body prompt crises of masculine knowledge, discourse and power.