Margie Ferguson on the Hymen: UCD Lecture 4

Abraham Cowley on the hymen, 1656. “The worst estate even of the sex that's worst ... Slight, outward Curtain to the Nuptial Bed!”

It's an imaginary point, that does not exist until one imagines it as a threshold or barrier. A doorway, a case, a false front of a building. Or a hidden essence, a magnetic center.

To say that the hymen doesn't exist as a stable single thing, separate from imagination, is not to say that it isn't important. The phenomenon named as if it were substance has the power to drive action and empirical practices.

Cowley: to find the hymen is an alchemical art...maiden is to chastity as porter is to door...a guardian but not the thing itself. Invisible, an aporia or crux. Must be thought as open and closed at once.

Cowley's poem offers crafted resistance to those who want the hymen to exist as a thing that one can simply purchase or be punished for lacking. Apostrophe to the hymen. A theatrical curtain or a magician, monk, alchemist. “A point imaginary.”

Spivak: the point of humanist critical thinking is to aim at “the uncoercive rearranging of desires.”