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Themesicon: navigation pathCyborg Bodiesicon: navigation pathUnruly Bodies
 
 
 
 
 

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» The next shot shows a cool blonde wearing black sunglasses who is driving a van. A patrol car is chasing her and she has an accident as a result. The policeman draws his gun and breaks the window, then we see her run and hide. When the policeman comes near her, she beats him up in a violent and cruel way one would hardly ever expect from a woman. She has spit dribble out of her mouth and sucks it back in, a picture we know from biology follows, showing the act of impregnation, sperms moving around, an almond-shaped ovum, a cyborglike body, then she spits and we see a policeman being placed in an ambulance, his face horribly disfigured. After this, «The Devil Inside Me» starts, the story of her procreation and life.

White Trash Girl owes her existence to several acts of violence which not only made her tough enough to face the cruelty of life, but actually make her the legitimate bastard of a‹dirty› society. To use Donna Haraway's words, she literally came «from the belly of the monster,» from the underground (in both senses of the word), the abyss and outhouse of this city, and hence she can never be innocent, even though her kind-hearted foster mother had her christened

 

«Angel.» Procreation through rape by a male family member is a literary topos of underground literature, found, for instance, in Jean Genet or Kathy Acker; it clearly identifies violence in the oedipal system, the constant feeling of insecurity and discomfort women are faced with, especially in the home. For this reason, White Trash Girl's true home is a rather dystopic urban landscape. Again and again, we see her wearing miniskirts, either shocking pink or glistening, cowboy boots—in the second part of the trilogy, «Law of Desire,» she sometimes also sports a cowboy hat—as she walks through the streets and over debris and garbage in her resolute gait. With her tall and strong build, monumentally, she poses on a heap of stone, a beauty and super heroine of a different kind. If someone pinches her behind, she turns into a railing «shrew,» in case of other acts of sexual transgression, she spits ropy liquids or mercilessly beats up the perpetrators.

The ghetto-like city is her realm, her body is part of it, city and body are inseparable. This is not only evoked by Trash Girl's origin in the sewer and sludge but also by the opening credits where the picture of

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