The spew of frenetic brushstrokes does agree with Bataille's and Deleuze's theories of the formless and abject, in which bodily boundaries are transgressed.
What is close to the body is indeed directly relevant for the self and yet outside bodily boundaries.
It seems that the awareness of bodily boundaries that is given by bodily experiences can only guarantee that the boundaries are true only of one's body, but this is different from the sense of bodily ownership.
Finding that Jess experiences emotions as bodily boundaries and metaphorical geographies, I draw from the work of Sara Ahmed to argue that Jess's decision at the novel's end not to pass as female or male is a choice to push back at the gendered norms of hir world through a body and politics shaped by emotion.
These accounts draw on broader cultural discourse about sexual embodiment and illness, wherein breaches of bodily boundaries through leakage of fluid, surgical scarring, or the use of medical interventions such as a colostomy bag, signify disgust and decay, the anathema of sexual attractiveness or desire [ 112, 113].
One may also believe that the bodily self has clear boundaries, boundaries that are those of one's body.
This perceptual image of coherent bodily contours and boundaries is at odds with the infant's motor incapacity and the "turbulent movements" or fragmented drives that animate its own body and processes.
Intrusion: Transgressing an actor's bodily or personal boundaries.
Also, studies by van der Geest (1998, 2007, 2008), Stallybrass and White (1986), Laporte (2000), Enzensberger (1972) and Miller (1997) offer useful theoretical perspectives on dirt and 'disgust'; especially regarding bodily substances that transgress boundaries in relation to social morality, inequality and taboo.
We're not talking about your run-of-the-mill sexy housewife looks, either, the kind that push bodily attributes rather than fashion boundaries.
