UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, IRVINE Pathopolitics: Feminist Performance Art, Biopolitics, and Affect in 1970s America DISSERTATION submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in Visual Studies by Jason M. Huber Dissertation Committee: Professor Cécile Whiting, Chair Associate Professor Bridget R. Cooks Associate Professor Lucas Hilderbrand 2017 © 2017 Jason Matthew Huber DEDICATION To my father, for all the thanks I have left unsaid, my inner circle, whose rituals have helped keep the flame inside me alive and the memory of my mother, who may be gone but burns still through me My contemplation is an excruciation only because it is also a joy. Simone de Beauvoir The Ethics of Ambiguity I must feel the fire of my soul so my intellectual blues can set others on fire. Cornel West Brother West: Living and Loving Out Loud, a Memoir ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS iv CURRICULUM VITAE v ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION vi INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER 1: Blood, Fire, Death: Ana Mendieta’s Rape Scenes as Sympathetic Magick 16 CHAPTER 2: Casus Luciferi: Rationality, Identity, and Affect in the Early Performance Art of Adrian Piper 92 CHAPTER 3: Abrahadabra: Performing the Social Interface of Mental Illness in Lynn Hershman’s Roberta Breitmore Series 175 CHAPTER 4: Reflections and Conclusion 280 BIBLIOGRAPHY 286 APPENDIX: On the Transcendental Subject in Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason 297 iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS My deepest thanks go to my committee chair, Professor Cécile Whiting, whose patience is surpassed by only her brilliance and insight. I still struggle to fathom how she did not give up hope on me or my project even after I had. I owe this accomplishment to the subtlety and precision of her mentorship, and any wisdom that may be found in these pages can be attributed to her unfaltering persistence in helping me hone my thoughts for so many years. I am profoundly grateful for the support and guidance of my committee members, Associate Professor Bridget Cooks and Associate Professor Lucas Hilderbrand, who stoked my intellectual curiosity all these years and kept me convinced that there is a light at the end of this tunnel. Without Associate Professor Hilderbrand, I would never have come to understand the rich tradition and history of cultural studies and cultural theory that have come to inform all of my work. And without Associate Professor Cooks, I may have forgotten that a profound intellect and a steadfast commitment to critical scholarship do not necessitate the sacrifice of kindness and warmth. Additionally, my thanks go to the Visual Studies faculty who accepted me with open arms and shaped my mind into what it is today, and the staff of the Art History and Film and Media Studies offices for their friendship and help throughout my years here. iv CURRICULUM VITAE Jason M. Huber 2009 B.A. with Honors in Art History, Philosophy, and Women’s & Gender Studies, Summa cum Laude, Case Western Reserve University 2017 Ph.D. in Visual Studies, with Graduate Feminist Emphasis University of California, Irvine RESEARCH INTERESTS American contemporary art of the 1960s and 1970s; feminist art movements and theory; identity politics and antiwar politics; countercultures as visual cultures; performance art and the everyday; phenomenology and affect in popular culture; taste and/as class; disability studies. PUBLICATION “Rethinking the Binary of Pure Objectivity and Relativistic Chaos.” Stance: An International Undergraduate Philosophy Journal Vol. 2 (April 2009): 26-34. CONFERENCE AND PANEL PRESENTATIONS “Painting with ‘Something on High’: Van Gogh’s Religious-Spiritual Views and His Art.” Presentation at the annual Undergraduate Art History Symposium, Case Western Reserve University. March 2008. “Meaning’s Ambiguity: The Multivalent Discourse of Primitivism in the Polynesian Art of Paul Gauguin.” Presentation at the Case Western Reserve University SOURCE Conference. April 2009. “Melancholia and Ethical Commitment: Reeling, Dealing, Healing, and Feeling in Mona Hatoum’s Measures of Distance (1988).” Presentation at Commitment: The Graduate Conference in Comparative Literature at University of California, Irvine, 29 April 2011. Panelist, “Body Parts: An Open Forum Presented by IMAGE: Defying Society’s Standards of Beauty,” University of California, Irvine, 14 May 2014. v ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Pathopolitics: Feminist Performance Art, Biopolitics, and Affect in 1970s America By Jason M. Huber Doctor of Philosophy in Visual Studies University of California, Irvine, 2017 Professor Cécile Whiting, Chair This dissertation brings affect theory (the study of the political dimensions of emotion and feeling in culture and everyday life) in contact with the history of American feminist performance art, a fitting yet underexamined overlap. Following Michel Foucault’s theory of biopolitics, my theory pathopolitics scrutinizes the increasingly politicized nature of the cultural representation of emotions in contemporary American culture. I argue that feminist performance artists of the 1970s were particularly attuned to the multifaceted ways the cultural politics of emotion were shifting in their time in popular culture, news media, and capitalistic enterprises, especially advertising and the medical-industrial complex. The politics of feminist art practice across the nation worked to disturb conventional ways of “thinking feeling” that had theretofore hindered political objectives of the feminist movement. To demonstrate this, I turn to three artists representing three geographies across the U.S. Ana Mendieta, a Cuban-American artist working in Iowa, performed horrifyingly realistic Rape Scenes in response to a grisly local murder, overcoming her own fears of violence and radicalizing audiences’ encounter with the subject of rape. Adrian Piper, an African-American artist-philosopher working in New York and most known for her later work in the 1980s and 1990s, utilized a Kantian model of rationality and meditative practice in The Mythic Being and Food for the Spirit to devise a methodology of art vi production that confronts the illogical nature xenophobia in her audiences while forestalling their psychological projection, which could undermine the political efficacy of her work. Finally, Lynn Hershman adopted the depressed persona of Roberta Breitmore, whose experience in her daily life of writing in her diary, working, meeting dates, and going to psychiatrist appointments and support groups testifies to the contemporaneous shift in psychological thought and medical practice to an individualistic, biomedical model of mental illness, leaving many to bear the burden of mental illness alone. Together, these case studies demonstrate a tidal shift in 1970s America in the articulation and contestation of cultural politics through individual affect, attesting to the need to refine our theoretical and historical methodologies in the study of the politics of emotion. vii INTRODUCTION A motivating presupposition of this dissertation is that in 2017, one of the most important tasks for the critical humanities is to refine scholars’ (and students’) skill at analyzing the political mobilization of affect in our shared media landscape. The past several years have seen numerous unsettling developments that can reasonably be tied to the affective intensification of discourses surrounding social identity and politics, enabled and likely exacerbated by televisual, print, and new media. A veritable reactionary male-chauvinist insurgency1 influenced the vitriolic rhetoric and ultimately explosive violence of Elliot Rodger who killed six and injured fourteen in his shooting rampage in Isla Vista, CA the night of 23 May 2014. My home institution, University of California, Irvine, has witnessed numerous heinous acts of racism over my eight years here, including the hanging of nooses throughout university buildings—a kind of racial terrorism encouraged by online communities like Stormfront. And the Stormfront community saw a massive bump in usage during the campaign of Donald Trump, who, upon his disturbing success in utilizing inflammatory, divisive, and deeply problematic sophistry founded on racism, misogyny, White nationalism, and xenophobia, is currently the Forty-Fifth President of the United States.2 It is clear that affect is playing an increasingly significant role in the consideration and debate of social and cultural politics in contemporary America, and critical humanist scholars would do well to strengthen our theoretical finesse in examining such cultural developments. While strictly speaking, affect has always had some relevance to political and social discourse, and every work of cultural carries its own affective valence that is worth analyzing 1 I am referring to such social movements as the so-called Men’s Rights movement, the “Red Pill” movement, and most broadly the sexual and gender entitlement bred by such communities as the Pickup Artists. 2 Ben Schreckinger, “White supremacist groups see Trump bump,” Politico, 10 December 2015. http://www.politico.com/story/2015/12/donald-trump-white-supremacists-216620. 1 and mining, I propose that scholars have a particularly ripe trove of work to draw inspiration from in feminist performance artists of the 1970s, whose work, surprisingly, is seldom examined in explicitly affective ways. Historically, I would argue that the function of affect in media and social discourse was made a self-conscious political battleground with unique intensity and reflexivity