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THE LAST SEX: FEMINISM and OUTLAW BODIES 1 Arthur and Marilouise Kroker

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THE LAST SEX: FEMINISM and OUTLAW BODIES 1 Arthur and Marilouise Kroker The Last Sex feminism and outlaw bodies CultureTexts Arthur and Marilouise Kroker General Editors CultureTexts is a series of creative explorations of the theory, politics and culture of postmodem society. Thematically focussed around kky theoreti- cal debates in areas ranging from feminism and technology to,social and political thought CultureTexts books represent the forward breaking-edge of contempory theory and prac:tice. Titles The Last Sex: Feminism and Outlnw Bodies edited and introduced by Arthur and Marilouise Kroker Spasm: Virtual Reality, Android Music and Electric Flesh Arthur Kroker Seduction Jean Baudrillard Death cE.tthe Parasite Cafe Stephen Pfohl The Possessed Individual: Technology and the French Postmodern Arthur Kroker The Postmodern Scene: Excremental Culture and Hyper-Aesthetics Arthur Kroker and David Cook The Hysterical Mule: New Feminist Theory edited and introduced by Arthur-and Marilouise Kroker Ideology and Power in the Age of Lenin in Ruins edited and introduced by Arthur and Marilouise Kroker , Panic Encyclopedia Arthur Kroker, Maril.ouise Kroker and David Cook Life After Postmodernism: Essays on Value and Culture edited and intloduced by John Fekete Body Invaders edited and introduced by Arthur and Marilouise Kroker THE LAST SEX feminism and outlaw bodies Edited with an introduction by Arthur and Marilouise Kroker New World Perspectives CultureTexts Series Mont&al @ Copyright 1993 New World Perspectives CultureTexts Series All rights reserved. No part of this publication may he reproduced, stored in o retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without prior permission of New World Perspectives. New World Perspectives 3652 Avenue Lava1 Montreal, Canada H2X 3C9 ISBN O-920393-37-3 Published simultaneously in the U.S.A. by St. Martin’s Press and in Britain by Macmillan. Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data Main entry under tide: The last sex : feminism and outlaw bodies (CultureTexts series) ISBN O-920393-37-3 1. Feminist theory. 2. Feminist criticism. 3. Postmodemism I. Kroker, Arthur, 1945 . II. Kroker, Marilouise, 1945 . III. Series. HQ119O.L38 1993 305.42’01 C93-090381-1 Printed and bound in Canada. Dedicated to resisters against the will to purity, the current manifestation of cultural fascism Acknowledgements The artist Elsbeth Rodger’s work is reproduced with the permission of the Diane Farris Gallery,Vancouver. Against Ordinary Language: The Language of the Body by Kathy Acker is reprinted by permission of the William Morris Agency, on behalf of the author 0 1992 by Kathy Acker. All Rights Reserved. Losing It by Shar Rednour. An earlier version appeared in On Our Backs, San Francisco. Disuppearing by Dianne Rothleder was first published in Philosophy Today. The Excess by Sue Golding will also be published iti the UK by New Formations. Personal Needs by Linda Dawn Hammond. All photographs 0 Linda Dawn Hammond. All Rights Reserved. The quotation from Coldness and Cruelty reprinted by permission of Zone Books. Wedding Woes by Gwen Bartleman was first published in XTRA, Toronto. CONTENTS I PREFACE 1. THE LAST SEX: FEMINISM AND OUTLAW BODIES 1 Arthur and Marilouise Kroker 2. AGAINST ORDINARY LANGUAGE: 20 THE LANGUAGE OF THE BODY Kathy Acker II 3. VIOLENCE AGAINST VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN 28 Dianne Chisholm III PERFORMING (FEMINIST) THEORY 4. STORIES FROM THE BLOODHUT 67 Cynthia Meier, Kim Lowry, Lori Scheer,Jamie Lantz, Rhonda Hallquist, and Audrey Joy 5. FINDING THE MALE WITHIN AND TAKING 91 HIM CRUISING: DRAG KING-FOR-A-DAY Shannon Bell 6. LOSING IT 98 S har Rednour 7. KATE BORNSTEIN: A TRANSGENDER, 104 TRANSEXUAL POSTMODERN TIRESIAS Shannon Bell (Interview) IV SEXUAL DOUBLINGS 8. GAY LIFE/QUEER ART 121 Fredrick Corey 9. DISAPPEARING 133 Dianne Rothleder 10. THE EXCESS 144 Sue Golding 11. WEDDING WOES 153 Gwen Bartleman 12. PERSONAL NEEDS 156 Linda Dawn Hammond V ORGANS WITHOUT BODIES 13. ELECTRONICALLY YOURS, ETERNALLY ELVIS 160 Ken Hollings 14. VENUS IN MICROSOFT 184 Stephen Pfohl 15. FROM FALSE CONSCIOUSNESS TO VIRAL 198 CONSCIOUSNESS Dianne Rothleder 16. ELECTRONIC DISTURBANCES 208 Critical Art Ensemble 17. DOMINATING PETER GREENAWAY 220 Care1 Rowe 18. POST-COMMUNIST SEX 241 Marika Pruska-Carroll CONTRIBUTORS a 248 SCENES FROM THE LAST SEX Feminism and Outlaw Bodies Arthur and Marilouise Kroker Forensic Feminism Elsbeth Rodger is the painter ofthe history ofwomen as the last sex. The artist, that is, of women as remainder, their bodies a site of cancellation and loss, of what’s left over from a great subtraction forced by the enclosures within which they are confined. In Rodger’s artistic produc- tions, the warmth and suppleness of women’s bodies are always framed by hard-line enclosures: sometimes a cloister, a curiosity chest, a sea- equivalent of an autopsy table, a persian rug, a suitcase, an elevator, a trunk. Here, there is no sense of motion, only women’s bodies in melancholic waiting poses. Whether they are dead or alive doesn’t make much difference, since Rodger’s paintings intimate a terrible equivalency between being framed and being dead (both negate identity), and even death is revealed to have its own fetishistic attractions. In all of her 2 The Lust Sex painterly productions, women are presented as desperately .trying to fit into categories that do not work for women. The result: the fatal silence of absence where the hyper-realism of the bodily imagery only heightens the reduction of women to a metonymic gesture in the accompanying frame. In her artistic imagination, women are always framed, literally and aesthetically. What makes Rodger’s work so fascinating is that she has painted the visual topography of a new mode of feminism: forensic feminism. Stripped of romanticism and without the moral relief of the nostalgic gesture, Rodger’s paintings sh.ow women’s bodies at a point’of maximal vulnefability. Indeed, if she can paint women’s bodies with such faithful attention to the most minute forensic detail, it is only to emphasize the absence within: the absence of life (Water Line, Sea Trail, Secret Disorder), the absence of identity Pattern Imposed, Flying Carpet,J, the absence of freedom from the panoptic gaze (Cloister, Stand Clear of the Gate), and the absence of identity (Fetish Doll, Glass Bead Eye). In herwork, women’s bodies are reduced to that fatal remainder left over when the power of the imposed pattern has been subtracted from the governing calculus. Here, we suddenly stumble upon catastrophe scenes that always have about them a doubled sense of melancholic menace: the death scenes themselves, whether real or aesthetically configured, and the invisible power on behalf of which this detritus of bodily remainders is splayed out across the arc of Rodger’s paintings and about which nothing is said, or perhaps can be said. Which is the way it must be because Rodger’s forensic feminism is really a detailed study of the pathology of sacrificial power. Of power, that is, in its last disaccumulative phase where it speaks the language of sacrifice (always women’s bodies), imposes itself by an aesthetics of absence (the haming of the bodies in bathtubs, chests, cloisters), and functions best reducing itsvictims to silence (Rodger’ s paintings are about cancelled identities, that point where the fleshly history of, the face is Fevered by entangling hair, turned away from our gaze as it drowns in the bathtub, or looks the other way into the dead-end space of the cloister or t$e elevator). Forensic feminism is a pathology lab where the silenced Temainders of the excluded are finally recorded in their last spasmodic Outlaw Bodies 3 poses. From Fetish Doll to Sea Trails, Rodger’s workis a dream-like history ofwomen’s deaths at the hands of an invisible power, a deathescape which serves as a reminder ofthe shared complicity of all members ofthe last sex in a common language of suffocation and inertness. Consider the terminal aesthetics of Error in Judgement. Here, the woman’s body is found curled up in the suffocatingly tight space of the trunk. The trunk is open, but its lines form a second frame. In addition, the trunk is framed within the painting. An “error in judgement,” then, because not only is this a death scene, but also a scene of an almost invisible aesthetic cancellation: a three-dimensional frame with the woman’s body as a reminder of the death of identity. In this forensic report, a double death takes place: one biological, the other aesthetic; one a killing-field for woman’s bodies, the other a cancellation of the defining woman’s identity. As to which is the real death, Rodger is perfectly ambivalent. Double Bind, for instance, speaks the double language of framing and death. Might it be possible that Rodger has done that which is most difficult: stripped death of its fatal sovereignty as the last of all the referential illusions, bringing sacrificial violence against women under the sign of a more enduring aesthetic? In this case, we would have to speak about forensic feminism in the language ofthe aesthetics ofapperception. To say, that is, thatwhat is at stake in Rodger’s paintings, what is struggled with and against in each of her painterly gestures is the cancellation of the realityofdeath, and its substitution by a death ofa thousand aesthetic cuts. The close-cropped frames maximize anxiety, and the frames within frames maximize the labyrinthine sense of confinement of the body within the dream-like reversals between the implied violence of the death scenes and the visceral dream-like state of the final body positions. This is not really a painting about death at all, but about sub-death: a permanent, terminal state of cancellation, sometimes biological but always aesthetic, that hard-frames woman’s identities, and on account of which dreams ofescape (Sacred Banquet, Flying Carpet, Secret Disorder) are always played out against the background text of an inhabiting violence.
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