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Oral Sensual

The claim that the body of a woman is obliged to verbally express the cruelty that she has been put under is a negation in itself. While self-expression through language can be pleasurable, it can also be repressive, despiteful and heinous. And the silence, free of humor and judgment:is what is love.

Tongue is the member that not only inhabits the oral cavity but also is a primary participant in the production of speech, the experience of taste, and the consumption of food.

Representations of the tongue encode crises of logic, of language, and of sense . Ambivalent organ, good and bad, always seeming to pull in two directions at once

Tongue (like the Latin “Lingua” and the Greek “Glossa”) also means “Language”, the very invocation of the word encodes a relation between word and flesh, tenor and vehicle, matter and meaning.

Thomas Adams’s “The Taming of the Tongue”(1619), a sermon on the abuses of the speech, similarly imagines the tongues, the “Wild Member” to be independent and isolated.

“Oh necessary tongue!” exclaims Adams, speaking to the organ of speech, “How many hearts would burst, if thou had not given them vent!”.

The member that gives “vent” to voice and subjectivity, that bridges the individual and collective, is also imagined to be a potentially autonomous and separate part of the self, a member that is always already dismembered.

Leonor Mendoza