STAGING REVOLT:

FEMINIST PERFORMANCES OF THE ABJECT BODY

A Thesis

Presented to

The Faculty of Graduate Studies

of

The University of Guelph

by

AMANDA McCOY

In partial fulfilment of requirements

for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

December, 2009

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•+• Canada ABSTRACT

STAGING REVOLT: FEMINIST PERFORMANCES OF THE ABJECT BODY

Amanda McCoy Advisor: University of Guelph, 2009 Dr. Ann Wilson

In the last quarter of the twentieth century, some of the most controversial performances by women have represented the female body as unruly, unbounded, and out of control.

This dissertation considers four such examples in detail: Annie Sprinkle's cervical display in the "Public Cervix Announcement", Katy Dierlam's turn as a Fat Lady in

Helen Melon at the Sideshow, Orlan's surgical transformations in La reincarnation de

Sainte-Orlan and Sarah Kane's psychotic stream-of-consciousness in 4.48 Psychosis. I argue that these performances are "revolting" in the dual sense that they are both disgusting and politically challenging; while situating the female body as abject, grotesque, or out-of-bounds may not initially appear transformative—and may at times seem to bolster a tradition of misogynist representations of women—I see subversive possibilities in a body that lacks containment. Feminist performances of abjection can destabilize the concept of corporeal identity as an essential, fixed feature of the material body; exaggerated, parodic performances of female uncontrollability, contagion, and spillage underscore the extent to which language constructs the meaning(s) we attach to any given body. I draw on the discourses of disability studies to argue that the abject body acts particularly as a counter-discourse to the seemingly-objective language of medicine, which has historically tended to objectify and pathologize women's bodies in ways that deny their corporeal self-knowledge and self-ownership. Medical constructions of the body from the nineteenth century circulate as a subtext throughout this work: I discuss the invention of the speculum, freak shows, vivisection, the anatomical theatre, and female hysteria in order to map shifting historical and cultural concepts of corporeal identity. While this dissertation is largely devoted to a consideration of how revolting feminist performances rearticulate the relationship between the material body and its culture, I also problematize the physical and emotional harm practitioners knowingly impose upon themselves in the process, and I ask whether the ethical issues signaled by this self-imposed risk make it impossible to champion revolting feminist performances without some deep reservations. Acknowledgments

I wish to express my sincere thanks to my advisor, Ann Wilson, for her ongoing support and encouragement throughout this process, and for her patience with the considerable challenges of undertaking long-distance advisory duties. Thanks also to my committee members, Maria DiCenzo and Jennifer Schacker, for providing detailed and thoughtful feedback on earlier drafts of this work, and to Nancy Copeland for serving as my external examiner. I am also grateful to those who have provided guidance, suggestions, and coffee throughout my graduate studies, especially Ric Knowles, Harry Lane, and Paul

Mulholland.

Jo Jo and George Rideout at Bishop's were instrumental in convincing me to go to university at all, let alone to work towards a PhD. Thank you both for seeing my potential and for helping me to realize it. My families have also been truly supportive throughout this process, each in their own way: Madeline and George Marcotte never asked when I intended to graduate, and Patricia and Brian McCoy called every week to see if I was finished yet.

Finally, my thanks to Daniel—you are the most patient, kind, level-headed human being I have ever known. It goes without saying that this is your project too. Je t'aime.

i Table of Contents

Chapter 1. Cultural Contexts of the Revolting Female Body in Performance 1

Chapter 2. Just Another Day at the Orifice: Annie Sprinkle's "Public Cervix Announcement" 35

Chapter 3. "Born on the First, Second, AND Third of August!": Discourses of Fatness in Katy Dierlam's Helen Melon at the Sideshow 73

Chapter 4. God Has Given You One Face and You Make Yourselves (an)Other:Transformations in La reincarnation de Sainte-Orlan 113

Chapter 5. It Is Myself I Have Never Met: Documenting Mental Illness in Sarah Kane's 4.48 Psychosis 152

Chapter 6. Conclusion: Implications, Complications, and Directions for Further Inquiry 199

Works Cited 223

ii Chapter 1. Cultural Contexts of the Revolting Female Body in Performance

It is precisely at the legislative frontier between what can be represented and what

cannot that the postmodern operation is being staged—not in order to transcend

representation, but in order to expose that system of power that authorizes certain

representations while blocking, prohibiting, or invalidating others.

Craig Owens, The Discourse of Others (168)

Something very different is afoot when a work does not symbolically depict a

subject of social degradation, but actually is that degradation, terrorizing the

sacrosanct divide between the symbolic and the literal.

Rebecca Schneider, The Explicit Body in Performance (28)

In the last quarter of the twentieth century, some of the most controversial performances by women have involved "images of bodily eruption" (189), to borrow a term from

Bordo. This dissertation considers performances that transgress the boundaries of

"normal" or "natural" corporeity by staging bodies that are strange, abject, unrestrained, and risky, or—in a word—revolting. In the following chapters, I read the female body through various lenses: as sex worker in Annie Sprinkle's "Public Cervix

Announcement", as sideshow freak in Katy Dierlam's Helen Melon at the Sideshow, as surgical patient in Orlan's La reincarnation de Sainte-Orlan, and as psychiatric patient in

Sarah Kane's 4.48 Psychosis. Each performance forces an encounter with the abject in order to unsettle comfortable patterns of experiencing and considering performances by and about women. Following LeBesco, my analysis is mindful of the dual meaning of

1 "revolting"; while the word connotes disgust and abhorrence, it also contains within its meaning the potential for rebellion, overthrow, and ultimately change ("Queering" 75).

What possibilities are opened up by artists and spectators who are willing to interrogate disgust? What identities can be (re)constructed and (re)negotiated through performance when the symbolic boundaries between purity and defilement are prodded, exposed, or even violated?

Critical to this study is the idea that performers can deliberately stage—and thus to some extent choreograph—what Thomson refers to as a "staring encounter", a visual interchange between a starer and a staree. Staring, Thomson argues, is an attempt to make sense of bodily difference: "We stare when ordinary seeing fails, when we want to know more. So staring is an interrogative gesture that asks what's going on and demands the story. The eyes hang on, working to recognize what seems illegible, order what seems unruly, know what seems strange" (Staring 3). A staring encounter that takes place in a performance context can heighten the dynamics of the interchange: the starer is invited to gaze openly rather than furtively at the visually arresting body, since staring at the performing body does not violate social conventions about how we look at each other.

For the performer who deliberately places her unusual body on display, the staring encounter provides an opportunity to openly acknowledge the stare, to stare back at her onlooker(s) (either physically or, as I will argue Kane does, through the text of a performance), and to verbally express the nuances of her identity beyond the visual cues provided by her body's surfaces. While at times I question a performer's ability to fully control the terms of such performances, I nevertheless emphasize that the act of staging abjection opens up a dialogue about how corporeal difference has become conflated with

2 corporeal failure. Such performances have the potential to unveil the ways in which such seemingly-objective terms as "normal" and "healthy" have in fact become prescriptive categories according to which bodies are categorized and assigned cultural value.

Given that the works I discuss are deeply invested in prodding "the legislative frontiers between what can be represented and what cannot" (Owens 168), my study shifts its focus away from commercial theatrical productions. The works by Sprinkle and

Orlan are both performance art, and while Dierlam and Kane's plays are scripted, they are nonetheless similarly engaged in performative representations of corporeal difference, as opposed to conventional realist narratives. My definition of performance art comes from Carlson, who acknowledges that the term is "essentially contested" (68) but nevertheless attempts to define it within the particular semantic context of theatrical representation. His delineation of the ways in which performance art diverges from traditional theatre is particularly relevant to this study:

[Performance art's] practitioners, almost by definition, do not base their

work upon characters previously created by other artists, but upon their

own bodies, their own autobiographies, their own specific experiences in a

culture or the world, made performative by their consciousness of them

and the process of displaying them for audiences. Since the emphasis is

upon the performance, and on how the body or self is articulated through

performance, the individual body remains at the center of such

presentations! (71)

While postmodernism's characteristics of parody and intertextuality may complicate Carlson's claim that performance art does not draw on "characters previously

3 created by other artists" (and here I think particularly of the pastiche of canonical artworks underlying Orlan's surgical project), Carlson's definition nevertheless provides a helpful framework for considering the differences between performance art and theatre.

Pertinent to this project is the idea that performers do not disappear into characters, but rather perform a semi-fictionalized version of themselves and their own personal, individual stories. Without a fixed, static text or actors playing characters, performances avoid constructing the seemingly-objective, seemingly-neutral reflection of life that buries the ideological positioning of traditional realist drama. Put another way, these performers acknowledge their own embodiment, recognizing that their particular perspectives on the world are necessarily subjective since they are always seen through the filter of the material body—and through corporeal identity markers of gender, class, race, sexual preference, and so on. Performances do not seek to construct a timeless, universal "truth" about human life, but instead represent one specific body and one set of experiences situated within a particular historical moment. While these stories certainly have implications extending beyond the performance (bearing in mind Hanisch's well- worn phrase "the personal is political"), the works I discuss are not invested in articulating a monolithic, essential, homogenous identity, but engage instead in an ongoing discursive negotiation as they fundamentally grapple with the question of how to represent. The struggle to create authentic self-representations through performance ultimately raises major ideological questions, among them "what it means to be postmodern, the quest for a contemporary subjectivity and identity, the relation of art to structures of power, [and] the varying challenges of gender, race, and ethnicity" (Carlson

71). Performances look through the individual body at the world—trading realist drama's

4 attempt to accurately stage "things as they really are" for a postmodern, post-structural

attempt to stage "things as they are to me".1

A Brief History of Feminist Performance Practices

My research is provoked by Russo's argument in The Female Grotesque that

while feminism in the 1990s "stood increasingly for and with the normal," less

institutionalized, less homogenous articulations of feminism might be more politically

effective, "not so easily recognized or disavowed" (vii). The performances I consider in

the following pages, all of them roughly contemporary with Russo's work, are

unquestionably on the margins of mainstream feminism(s) and thereby have the potential

to represent the less institutionalized, less homogenous articulations of feminism that

Russo calls for. By no means apolitical, they nonetheless fail at times to express a clearly

defined, coherent feminist standpoint or to engage in prescriptive modes of representation

that principally aim to resignify the female body. In grappling with corporeal

representation, these performances sometimes lack internal consistency, and

consequently have moments of reiterating sexist constructions of the body. And of

course, given that the female body in these performances is framed as abject, spilling

over, its boundaries uncertain, inevitably the question arises whether these performers'

self-representations as disgusting and uncontrollable are genuinely disruptive or whether

1 A phenomenological account of performance will point out that a performer can never precisely communicate her embodied, subjective experiences to a spectator. Far from rendering performance irrelevant or ineffectual, though, the impossibility of objective representation allows performers to explore the effects that different performative modes and contexts have on the ways their bodies are read by spectators. 2Russo's criticism is clearly directed at liberal feminism, which seeks equality for women within current social structures and institutions. The mainstream appeal of liberal feminism—and its general tendency towards less confrontational, less radical demands on the male-dominated status quo—leaves it open to criticism as a watered-down form of feminism.

5 they simply reinforce the status quo. In short, in spite of their clear engagement with feminist discourse, these performances can be deeply ambivalent and ambiguous as they inquire into cultural constructions of the female body; their departure from mainstream

1990s feminism means that audiences are asked to negotiate less familiar terrain, which I argue encourages a more active, engaged spectator position. While I hesitate to unequivocally celebrate these revolting performances, for reasons I explore at length in the following chapters, I nonetheless contend that they have the potential to articulate subjectivity beyond prevailing norms and stereotypes of the female body.3 Revolting female performers challenge spectators to suspend their habitual resistance to the disgusting—to accept an encounter with discomfort or shock—and thereby walk away with a deeper understanding of the dominant discourses that assign cultural and corporeal inferiority to female bodies.

The performances elaborated in the following chapters are rooted in a longstanding concern about how to adequately express female identity on and beyond the stage. Historically coded as problematic, the female body communicates a multitude of meanings even before a performer opens her mouth to speak. How, then, can we keep our bodies from being read against our intentions? How do we adequately represent female identity in performance? Is there even such thing as a "female identity" in the sense of a common set of experiences or traits shared by those whose bodies are culturally marked as female? How do we find an authentic expression of self against a deeply ingrained cultural tradition of misrepresentation or exclusion? To even begin to address these

31 deliberately use the word "potential" here to acknowledge the idealism of my claim that disgust disrupts conventional representations of the body. As Jones points out, and as I explore throughout this study, the effects of a performance largely depend on who sees them and in what context (203).

6 complex questions in the following chapters requires a brief overview of the ways in

which growth and change within the feminist movement from the 1960s onward has

impacted theatre and performance practices in the West. In what follows, I map some of

the major historical shifts in representational strategies that ultimately helped to shape the

works I discuss in the coming chapters.

1990s performance art is clearly indebted to the Body Art surge of the 1960s and

70s and to the female performers and conceptual artists of the period, including Carolee

Schneemann, Gina Pane, Marina Abramovic, Yoko Ono, Charlotte Moorman, VALIE

EXPORT, Shigeko Kubota, Hannah Wilke, Ana Mendieta, Linda Montano, Eleanor

Antin, Yayoi Kusama, and Kathy Acker. These performers in turn owed their roots to

various modern art movements such as Dadaism and Futurism, and many of them worked

along the periphery of the Fluxus movement in the 1950s and 60s, although there was a

shared sentiment that Fluxus was an "Art Stud Club" (Schneemann 52) that marginalized

and dismissed its female practitioners. Body Art's convergence with the second-wave

feminist movement meant that performances by women had a tendency towards what

Schneider calls "blatant feminist activism" (38); female artists used their body-centric work to confront sexism, obj edification, and the erasure of female pleasure and bodily functions. Schneemann's Interior Scroll and Kubota's Vaginal Painting insisted on the

specificity of the female body as performing artist rather than simply as passive art object; Ono's Cut Piece and Abramovic's Rhythm 0 made spectators complicit in the sexualization and victimization of the performing body; and EXPORT'S Touch Cinema,

Wilke's S.O.S.—Starification Object Series and Moorman's performance in Nam June

Paik's Opera Sextronique challenged social conventions surrounding nudity, sexuality,

7 and the pornographic. Additionally, many of these artworks demonstrated an interest in provoking disgust through a deliberate engagement with pain, decay, and sexual aggression: Pane's barefoot climb up a razor-blade studded ladder in Non-aestheticized

Climbing, the intermingling of nudity and raw, decaying animal flesh in Schneemann's

Meat Joy, and EXPORT'S Action Pants: Genital Panic, in which the artist brandished a gun and exposed her genitals to the cliental in a porn theatre, for instance, offer clear precursors to the performances I discuss in the following chapters.

While this period generated a substantial number of provocative artworks by women, they were not without their limitations. Dolan identifies the politics of 1960s and

70s performance art as cultural feminism, which "posits the female body as a radical site of opposition to male models" (83). Cultural feminists aimed to produce good, positive, true representations of women (or to explicitly counter bad, negative, false representations) in order to adequately express the "female experience" as a phenomenon fundamentally different from the "male experience" (Schneider 41), whether that experience was conceptually rooted in women's reproductive abilities, their intuition, their spirituality, or their greater connection with the natural world (Dolan 6-7). Such representations greatly increased the visibility of women in performance settings, but in hindsight their essentialism created the problematic assumption that all women share certain inherent similarities; this line of thinking inevitably silences or excludes some women regardless of the particular parameters used to define the "female experience".

A notable shift in thinking occurred from the mid-70s to the 1980s, when feminism intersected with poststructuralist theories (Schneider 41) and performers explored the concept of gender (and, increasingly, other markers of identity) as a social

8 construction rather than as some essential, fixed feature of the biologically-sexed body.

How and why, they asked, is the idea of "femininity" produced by a culture, and whom

does it serve? Dolan, writing in 1988, saw particular promise for tackling these questions

in a theatre practice founded in materialist feminism, which "focuses on the construction

of ideology in social formations influenced by gender, race, class, and categories of

sexual preference. It views the power base in relationships dialectically, as capable of

change" (16). Dolan's description alludes to a foundation in socialism or Marxism, and

indeed materialist feminist performances are particularly interested in how the female

body is commodified and objectified (literally "made into a thing") within a capitalist

system. Caryl Churchill's work with the Joint Stock Theatre Company (especially her

1979 play Cloud Nine) and later with the Monstrous Regiment are the most commonly-

cited examples of materialist-feminist theatre, but Dolan's The Feminist Spectator as

Critic also includes a discussion of Helene Cixous' 1979 play Portrait of Dora, Simone

Benmussa's 1978 play The Singular Life of Albert Nobbs, the work of Maria Irene

Fornes, the Native American Spiderwoman Theatre collective, and lesbian performances

by Split Britches and practitioners associated with the WOW Cafe (101).

In seeking a theatrical mode with explicit ideology that would acknowledge, as

Diamond puts it, that "seeing is never a neutral act" (261), materialist feminists turned particularly towards the techniques of Brechtian "epic theatre" to inform their

representational strategies. Brecht rejected the idea of an illusionist theatre that kept

audiences passively entertained, allowing them to "listen rather than hear" (187). Instead he called for a representational mode of acting and production that encouraged the

spectator to remain critically and intellectually engaged in the question of how a play tells

9 its story, but emotionally detached from the story itself (see Brecht, A Short Organumfor the Theatre). Dolan describes the ideal effects of Brechtian performance techniques on the spectator:

Ideology circulates through a text as a meaning effect which can be

deciphered by a spectator freed from the dreamlike state of passive

receptivity. If the representational status is ideologically marked, its

material aspects must be brought into full view and denaturalized for the

spectator's inspection. The mystification of social arrangements is

exposed and the spectator is presented with the possibility of change.

(107)

In short, materialist feminist theatre practitioners focused on representational strategies that could reveal the socially-constructed nature of identity. They shifted the focus of feminist theatre practice away from finding the "right" way to articulate the female body on the stage, instead exposing how conventional representational frameworks—including the typical arrangement of theatrical space itself—were complicit in the construction of seemingly-objective, apparently neutral representations of women.

By keeping the audience at a reflective distance, these practitioners attempted to resist the capitalist structure of the conventional theatre that objectified their performing bodies.

While the performances I discuss in this dissertation do not strictly adhere to

Brechtian techniques (particularly since spectators are not held at a constant reflective distance), they are nevertheless clearly indebted to the Brechtian performance practices developed by materialist feminists. Sprinkle, Dierlam, and Orlan address their audiences directly, thereby calling attention to the political implications involved in the act of

10 spectating itself. Sprinkle and Dierlam invite audiences to have a good long look at what they've paid admission to see, while Orlan sells off bits of her own flesh for money; these acts underscore the ways in which female artists are commodified and objectified in performance. And while Kane's work is perhaps the least Brechtian performance I discuss, 4.48 Psychosis nevertheless emphasizes its own role as a representation of the speaker's embodied reality rather than as a portrait of reality itself. Overall, these works shift away from dramatic realism towards a self-reflexive performative mode that calls attention to its own construction, and consequently to its own ideological investments.

Interestingly, Jones claims that as Brechtian performances and questions about

"strategies of production" (29) became central to feminist theatre practitioners of the

1980s, body-centered performance art simultaneously fell out of favour (24). The confessional mode, the frequent nudity, and the very intimacy of performance art does not maintain the critical, reflective distance so central to the materialist feminist's ideal spectator position. Furthermore, the presence of the female body-on-display may not be able to categorically repudiate the viewer's pleasure—particularly when that body corresponds to conventional notions of beauty, like Schneemann, Kusama, and Wilke's young, healthy4 bodies did—and consequently such a display might construct the female body as commodity or object, in addition to amplifying its difference from the idealized male (and hence "real" artist's) body. Jones explains:

4 Although a detailed discussion is beyond my scope here, Wilke's self-portraits of her fatal struggle with lymphoma are shocking when viewed alongside images of her young, healthy body; her willingness to document her body's disintegration resists facile readings of her nude body in her earlier work as a mere object of male pleasure.

11 The negative attitude toward body art on the part of many feminists [...]

seems to have stemmed from a well-founded concern about the ease with

which women's bodies have, in both commercial and "artistic" domains,

been constructed as objects of the gaze. It also often stemmed in part from

an anxiety about the dangers of the artist (especially the female artist)

exposing her own embodiment (her own supposed "lack") and thus

compromising her authority. (24)

Is the female body to be left out of representation, then, except where the work is

explicitly ideological? Even Brechtian techniques and other strategies that focus on how

to represent have their limits; Jones points out that there is no guarantee that "spectators

will necessarily react or participate in a predictable way" when viewing any given

performance (25). Nothing ultimately prevents a spectator from experiencing desire or

any other emotion during a performance, even if he "misses the point" in so doing.

Consequently, while more recent feminist theatre practices retain the idea that illusionist

theatre naturalizes and consequently bolsters a male-centric worldview, the need to

maintain a constant reflective distance has become less pressing for performers who

instead use eye contact, direct address, and even audience participation to make

spectators recognize their own accountability in constructing the meaning of a

performance.

In the 1990s, the convergence of a number of influential schools of thought

resulted in a renewed interest in discourses of the body, and consequently in body-

centered performance itself. Third-wave feminism, in an attempt to redress the exclusion and essentialism of earlier feminist thought, expanded its concerns to inquire not just into

12 gender categories, but also into racialized and colonized bodies, queerness, transgender, aging, disability, sex work, and even into post-human and cyborg bodies. Additionally, the precise delineation between "natural" biological sex and "nurtured" gender traits became less pressing as scholars realized the impossibility of uncovering what Grosz describes as a "precultural, presocial, or prelinguistic pure body"; instead the body was framed as a "social and discursive object [...] bound up in the order of desire, signification, and power" (Grosz 18-19). Post-structuralist thinkers continued to argue that no material reality exists beyond embodied human perceptions and language, and that subjects are shaped not only by their historically-specific cultures and practices, but also by what they exclude as Other. Postmodern aesthetics of pastiche and genre-blurring, textual instability, multiplicity, and self-reflexivity were increasingly incorporated into performances. These complex theoretical fields all intersected with the recognition that language does not need to adequately describe reality; language constructs reality and can be consequently employed to shift and change it in various ways. Thus, the concern for representing women the "right" way on the stage, or within the "right" performance framework, while still central to some theatre practices, gave way in performance art to explorations of how subjects are created by, and excluded by, discourse. While an exhaustive list of practitioners is impossible, particularly since the field of performance art has become increasingly diverse as its aims have expanded, some notable artists whose careers spanned the 1990s include Karen Finley, Laurie Anderson, Maureen

Connor, Holly Hughes, Lydia Lunch, Diamanda Galas, Kate Bornstein, Vanessa

Beecroft, Jennifer Miller, Rachel Rosenthal, Tracey Emin, Angela Ellsworth, Terry

Galloway, Siglinde Kallnbach, Lois Weaver, Peggy Shaw, and Coco Fusco.

13 The performances I discuss in the following pages are situated at the crossroads of

this interest in the body, identity politics*, and postmodern cultural production. My

particular focus on disgust and the abject body arises from an interest in performances

that construct female corporeity as a potentially dangerous, unsettling Other rather than

as a same-but-different counterpart to the male body. Instead of simply reproducing

corporeal hierarchies with a slightly different ordering (women as equal-but-different,

women as superior to men), these performances exaggerate the threat of female

difference to the point of ridicule—as when Annie Sprinkle shows her vaginal cavity to

spectators—consequently unsettling the dominance of the idealized "normal" (male)

body. While these performances are sometimes explicitly political, they are also

ambivalent, complex, and even contradictory, as when the unnamed psychiatric patient in

4.48 Psychosis insistently claims her agency by refusing to take medication so that her depression deepens to the point of her becoming suicidal. The lines between practitioner and stage persona are blurred and the apparent veracity of the confessional mode is called into question; while Annie Sprinkle, Helen Melon, Orlan, and 4.48' s speaker seem to offer intimate glimpses into their personal lives, the "real" selves of the practitioners—

Ellen Steinberg, Katy Dierlam, Mireille Porte, and Sarah Kane—remain elusive, always just out of reach. The performances espouse feminist thought, but might deliberately solicit a pleasurable gaze nonetheless; Helen Melon tells her audience to "take a good, long look. This is all here for you, just for today. Five hundred pounds of soft, round, delicious female" (211), thereby inviting spectators to acknowledge the financial transaction involved in theatrical spectatorship rather than creating the detached, critical distance promoted in Brechtian practice. These performances can also quite suddenly

14 become revolting, deliberately evoking discomfort or visceral disgust reactions as they

transgress the boundaries of acceptable representation, sometimes even putting the

performer's own well-being at risk. Orlan's work is the most prominent example: her

body may attract a pleasurable gaze as she lies nude on the operating table, but once she

is surgically opened up, audiences turn away in disgust as she risks injury and even death

in order to artistically reconstruct her facial features. In short, these difficult

performances represent ongoing discursive negotiations that construct, dismantle, and

reconstruct female identity in an ongoing attempt to articulate the relationship between

the material body and its culture.

This work draws on previous studies of radical, transgressive feminist performances, particularly on Schneider's The Explicit Body in Performance, Jones's

Body Art/Performing the Subject, and on essays about Annie Sprinkle (Fuchs, Kauffman,

Williams) and Orlan (Augsburg, O'Bryan). I am particularly indebted to these works for their consideration of how certain forms of representation might dismantle the conventional desiring gaze directed at the female body-on-display. Concurrently, studies of feminist performance art are not always attentive to the potential harm practitioners impose on themselves as they write and perform such works. While I argue, drawing on

Butler and Douglas, that the disgusting body is a discursive construction rather than an immutable material fact, I nonetheless emphasize that performers who engage with representations of bodily difference undertake very real physical and emotional risks in the process. The performances in this dissertation share a deep ambivalence about the particular status of the body-in-performance; at times, the question arises whether practitioners are in fact undermining the underlying politics of their own work by making

15 a spectacle of their bodily difference. I explore this issue at length in the following

chapters.

Disgust and the Abject Body

Having contextualized my project within the major concerns of contemporary

feminist performance practices, I now step back to provide a more detailed explanation of

disgust, the abject, and the grotesque as interrelated terms that are critical to this study. A

closer look at the theoretical basis of disgust can help to illuminate some of the ways in

which its deliberate invocation in performance can unsettle conventional representations

of the female body. Anthropologist Mary Douglas's 1966 book Purity and Danger is

generally cited as the first extensive study of the culturally-constructed nature of disgust.

Taking an anthropological view of disgust, she closely examines the rituals specifically

devoted to maintaining a clean and proper body, since she argues that bodies act as a microcosm for the social order as a whole (115). Douglas emphasizes that categorizing certain things as disgusting creates a sense of order where the boundaries between purity and pollution might not otherwise be so well-defined: "I believe that ideas about

separating, purifying, demarcating and punishing transgressions have as their main function to impose system on an inherently untidy experience. It is only by exaggerating the difference between with and without, above and below, male and female, with and against, that a semblance of order is created" (4, my emphasis).

Douglas highlights the close relationship that the female body has had with categories of Otherness ("without", "below", "against") in a Western philosophical tradition that has tended, since Aristotle, to organize things into hierarchical binary pairs

16 (Wilshire 92). Of particular interest to my study is Douglas's suggestion that these binaries impose systematic differences between the conceptual pairs—that their differences are, to put it in contemporary terms, discursively constructed rather than representative of any fixed material reality. Douglas's assertion that disgust is a cultural construct means that the boundaries between the clean and the disgusting are—at least to some extent—unstable, mutable, and subjective and might thus be called into question specifically through a performative encounter with the disgusting.

Given her thesis that disgust arises from a violation of social boundaries, Douglas goes on to argue that nothing is inherently disgusting; dirt and pollution are simply

"matter out of place" (40), rendered disgusting by virtue of their context rather than any intrinsic qualities. In Powers of Horror, Kristeva concurs with Douglas that filth is "not a quality in itself, but it applies only to what relates to a boundary, and, more particularly, represents the object jettisoned out of that boundary, its other side, a margin" (69, original emphasis). Douglas and Kristeva relate "matter out of place" to bodily fluids in particular; while saliva, blood, urine, and semen are not disgusting so long as they inhabit their proper places within the body's interiors—the mouth, veins, arteries, uterus, penis— they become disgusting once they cross the boundaries (or threaten to cross the boundaries) to the outside of the body.5 Once body matter is separated from its proper place, once it becomes "of the body but no longer part of the body, it enters the realm

Kristeva designates as the abject, the most horrific example of which is the corpse. The

5 This concern with the body's boundaries and fluids bring to mind the controversies surrounding the National Endowment for the Arts' use of public tax dollars to support "obscene" artists such as Robert Mapplethorpe, Holly Hughes, Karen Finley, and others whose work explores the body's orifices and emissions. Serrano's Piss Christ in particular, a controversial photo which depicts a plastic crucifix submerged in a glass of Serrano's urine, illustrates the hostility that can be provoked through works of art that deliberately violate the boundaries between purity and defilement.

17 fear of bodily wastes (and the body as waste, in the case of the corpse) means that bodies which appear unwilling or unable to contain their leakages within socially-sanctioned boundaries, separate and distinct from the clean, the pure, the unambiguously alive, are a particular source of fear. My chapter on the "Public Cervix Announcement" argues that a fear of bodily discharge is responsible for much of the anxiety generated by Sprinkle's cervical display; does the sex worker's body adhere to social conventions of cleanliness and order, or is there a chance that in looking into her body, one might encounter abject substances? The fear of bodily fluids has an even more unsettling effect in Orlan's work, as spectators can actually watch fluids transgress the boundaries of the artist's body during her surgeries; as I explore at length in Chapter Four, Orlan's bodily spillage in fact evokes the autopsy as she fashions herself as a corpse on the operating table.

The uneasiness surrounding these unbounded bodies resonates deeply with the figure of the carnivalesque grotesque in Bakhtin's Rabelais and His World. While

Bakhtin situates the grotesque body as an integral part of the licensed transgression of carnival, the abject body arguably exceeds the boundaries of licensed transgression and consequently represents a greater threat to the social order. Nonetheless, Bakhtin's work describes many of the corporeal features that continue to generate disgust in contemporary performances. Bakhtin's description of the grotesque body, which he contrasts with "classic images of the finished, completed man" (25) circulates around issues of bodily boundaries and fluids that resonate with Douglas's and Kristeva's works:

Contrary to modern canons, the grotesque body is not separated from the

rest of the world. It is not a closed, completed unit; it is unfinished,

outgrows itself, transgresses its own limits: The stress is laid on those parts

18 of the body that are open to the outside world, that is, the parts through

which the world enters the body or emerges from it, or through which the

body itself goes out to meet the world. This means the emphasis is on the

apertures or convexities, or on various ramifications and offshoots: the

open mouth, the genital organs, the breasts, the phallus, the potbelly, the

nose. (26)

Of note here is the particular role of orifices as a marginal site; while the body

depends on its entrances and exits to sustain life, they nonetheless represent certain points

of vulnerability for maintaining cleanliness and social order. Douglas displays a similar

concern for orifices, since "matter issuing from them is marginal stuff of the most

obvious kind. Spittle, blood, milk, urine, feces or tears by simply issuing forth have traversed the boundary of the body" (121). While Bakhtin refers to the phallus and both

Douglas and Kristeva consider semen a potentially polluting substance, for the most part the grotesque body and its menacing orifices are more readily female: in addition to producing saliva, sweat, urine, and feces, women also (ostensibly) menstruate, become pregnant, and give birth, and are portrayed in fatness, old age, and sexual excitement as exceeding their boundaries far more frequently than men.6 Over and above these representations is the Western philosophical tradition I cited earlier, in which the body itself is systematically gendered as female in contrast to the mind, spirit, or rationality, which are gendered male. If women are the body, they are also all the body's attendant

6A colourful example of the grotesque female can be found in Rabelais's description of Gargantua's birth, where Gargamelle is even pictured as having eaten abject substances. A group of midwives, groping Gargamelle's extremities, "found some fleshy excrescences, which stank, and they were sure this was the baby. But in fact it was her asshole, which was falling off, because the right intestine (which people call the ass gut) had gone slack, from too much guzzling of tripe" (21).

19 problems: its needs, its appetites, its wastes, its emotional instabilities, and its inevitable

processes of degeneration and death.

The abject body's borderline social position is precisely what makes it a site of

danger to cultural norms. In fact, there is a pressing need to pay attention to images of

bodily spillage given their deep associations with the body marked as female. Grosz

argues that while Freudian psychoanalytical discourse has dominated feminist inquiries

into unequal gender relations, a closer look at the "association of femininity with

contagion and disorder" (203) might more effectively expose oppressive representations

of women. Menninghaus, drawing on Freud's concept of the Uncanny, also points out that the disgusting can "exert a subconscious attraction or even an open fascination" (6)

in addition to creating repulsion; consequently the promise of a prurient spectacle— whether that spectacle involves looking inside a sex worker's body, staring unabashedly at a scantily-clad five hundred pound woman, watching surgical tools separate facial skin from muscle, or observing a woman's psychotic breakdown—potentially attracts an audience to radical and transgressive feminist performances which might otherwise seem too political or pedantic to draw a crowd. While producing representations of the female body as abject, grotesque, or disgusting may not be categorically transformative, I see subversive potential in a body that lacks containment. As Douglas points out, "margins are dangerous. If they are pulled this way or that the shape of fundamental experience is altered. Any structure of ideas is vulnerable at its margins" (121).

20 Leaving Normal

The disgusting body offers a potential site of resistance to cultural constructions of the idealized "beautiful" female body that, as feminists have long argued, can act as a widespread tool of social regulation and containment (see, for instance, Wolf; Brumberg;

Bordo). The idea of disgust is, of course, contingent on the idea of beauty: The disgusting is not a fixed, static category but instead represents what lies beyond the parameters of the beautiful in a given time and place. Since the material body is subject to decay and death and cannot be suspended indefinitely in a "perfected" state—Botox injections notwithstanding—all bodies are culturally constructed as disgusting at one time or another. Menninghaus describes the close relationship between the beautiful and the disgusting in a passage that bears extensive quotation, for it suggests the ease with which the aesthetically pleasing body can slide into the revolting body:

The idea of the beautiful—the classical statue and human body in

general—is subject, from head to toe, to a topography and chronography

of "disgust." Disgusting zones, disgusting moments are the strategic entry

points of the beautiful body's construction. Folds, wrinkles, warts,

"excessive softness," visible or overly large bodily openings, discharge of

bodily fluids (nasal mucous, pus, blood), and old age are registered, on the

criminal index of aesthetics, as "disgusting." The positive requirements of

the aesthetically pleasing body—elastic and slender contour without

incursions of fat, flawless youthful firmness and unbroken skin without

folds or openings, removal of bodily hair and plucked eyebrows forming a

21 fine line, flat belly and "trim" behind, and so on—are at the same time

prescriptions for the avoidance of disgust. (7)

Menninghaus indicates that the avoidance of disgust demands constant vigilance,

a form of corporeal self-policing that results in failure particularly for female bodies, as

reproduction, illness, and aging inevitably drive the body beyond the boundaries of

current conceptions of the beautiful. I argue that the narrow parameters of the beautiful

body can be mined by feminist performers, whose insistent staging of their

"unacceptable" (whether too naked, fat, surgically-altered, or out-of-control) bodies

reinserts them into representation and discourse as threats to the status quo. While images

of the female body as unruly, unbounded, and spilling over may initially seem to

undermine feminist politics, I see affirmative possibilities in the refusal to keep the

female body contained or in its "proper" place.

There is a striking similarity between the ways in which bodies are socially

constructed as disgusting and the ways in which they are socially constructed as disabled;

my argument that bodies cannot remain indefinitely "beautiful" because they are subject

to decay and death is echoed in Thomson's argument that bodies cannot remain

indefinitely "able" for the same reasons:

Disabilities come to us unbidden as we move through a world that wears

us down even while it sustains us. [...] Each one of us ineluctably acquires

one or more disabilities—naming them variably as illness, disease, injury,

7 Avoiding disgust, I would add, clearly demands a high level of participation in consumer culture in order to maintain this slender, muscular, hairless, clear-skinned, youthful-looking body. Paradoxically, this consumption needs to be largely inconspicuous, to appear "natural" and effortless, in order to meet with social approval (See Bordo 199-202).

22 old age, failure, dysfunction, or dependence. This inconvenient truth

nudges most of us who think of ourselves as able-bodied toward

imagining disability as an uncommon visitation that mostly happens to

someone else, as a fate somehow elective rather than inevitable. (Staring

19)

If virtually everyone becomes disabled, then the able body, like the beautiful body, can be

conceived of as a manifestation of our desires and aspirations rather than as a factual

representation of the average physical body.

While this dissertation does not deal explicitly with performers who self-identify

as disabled, I draw extensively on disability theory (particularly on works by Thomson,

Kuppers, and LeBesco) in order to map the tensions between notions of the "good",

"beautiful", or "normal" body and the body that is culturally marked as "abnormal" or, in the extreme, "disgusting". Any work that discusses the body-in-performance inevitably raises a question that is central to disability studies: how do we represent bodily difference in a performative setting? My working definition of disability throughout this

study comes from Thomson's Extraordinary Bodies, where she defines the term as "the attribution of corporeal deviance—not so much a property of bodies as a product of cultural rules about what bodies should be or do" (6). Put another way, disability is about the perception of bodily difference rather than the fact of bodily difference: While bodies do have certain physical, material differences from one another, and sometimes those differences are manifested as impairments of one kind or another, disability is a function of the idea that these differences are unfortunate anomalies that can and should be corrected (generally through medical interventions of some kind). The identity politics

23 surrounding deafness are a prominent example: the clinically-defined inability to perceive

sounds can be considered a simple variation in embodied experience, particularly since

there exists a thriving Deaf culture that typically communicates via signed languages.

When deafness is instead conceptualized as a disability, it becomes a physical obstacle

that needs to be overcome through lip reading, cochlear implants, and other techniques

designed to teach the deaf person to communicate "normally".8

With marginality comes a degree of uncertainty about how to adequately

represent that which has been excluded from discourse. Disability theorists argue that

there is a pressing need for representations of corporeal difference that resist stigmatizing

the impaired body as defective, victimized, unfortunate, or incomplete. Some disability

performances are founded in activism and, like materialist feminist performances, are

mainly concerned with strategies of production; for instance, Johnston describes the

Toronto Workman Theatre Project's attempts to construct a collaborative performance

about depression as follows: "On one level, this was an artistic challenge, to perform

depression in a way that captivated an audience; on the other it was a political challenge,

to perform depression in a way that reclaimed it from stigma, ignorance, and the limits of

medical and popular discourse" (207). Other disability performers choose to deliberately

exaggerate their corporeal difference and to provoke uncomfortable spectatorship as a means of presiding over the staring encounter as it unfolds on the stage. For example,

Mat Fraser, a performer with phocomelic arms, has performed as "Sealboy" in Scotland's

Degenerate Festival, as a Coney Island sideshow freak, and in a touring show entitled

8 Not all deaf people use signed languages, of course, and some certainly do self-identify as disabled, but the distinction between "deaf as an impairment and "Deaf as a linguistic culture was one of the earliest and most active expressions of disability activism. For a more detailed account of the politics of Deaf culture, see Padden and Humphries, Inside Deaf Culture.

24 Thalidomide!! A Musical. Fraser's performances are deliberately politically incorrect,

what Sierz would call "in-yer-face", and they generally seem intended to restore to Fraser

a sense of control and ownership over his own body. A question that looms over Fraser's

performances, and over the performances I discuss throughout this study, is whether self-

display as a freak or as some other manifestation of the out-of-bounds body is an

exploitative spectacle of corporeal difference or whether it has genuinely transformative

possibilities.

Bakhtin emphasizes that the grotesque body is an ambivalent body, a body that

"reflects a phenomenon in transformation, an as of yet unfinished metamorphosis, of

death and birth, growth and becoming" (24). While this body can be perceived as

threatening in its instability, it also embodies the possibility for transformation, in

contrast to the closed, static, classical body that acts as a cultural ideal. I consequently

view the ambivalence of these performances as necessary to their potential for

transformation, even while I recognize the complexities of unveiling the political

investments of such shifting and uncertain work—to return to Dierlam as an example, an

unsettling and ambivalent performance of excessive fatness at the very least begins an

important conversation about how to represent the fat body, rather than simply excluding

it from discourse and erasing it from representation. Following Probyn (125) and

Meagher (38), I conceive of disgust as an aesthetic category that resists the tendencies in mainstream cultural feminism and some forms of contemporary identity politics to seek

out politically correct representations and to repudiate those that do not celebrate the body as beautiful and valuable in all its iterations. While I do not wish to diminish the extent to which identity politics and activism have made what Butler refers to as

25 "unliveable" identities {Bodies 3) more conceivable, acceptable, and tolerable, I

nevertheless want to emphasize that the focus on producing purely positive

representations oversimplifies the experience of living in a discursively or materially

difficult body. In some cases, the insistence on positive representations can silence

dissident opinions and can prevent a dialogue from taking place even within a

marginalized group. Furthermore, while an increase in positive representations might

provide inroads for those previously stigmatized by their body's difference, it may also

push those bodies that remain "unliveable" into further abjection.9

Concurrently, as I mentioned earlier, I hesitate to unequivocally celebrate the

revolting female body in performance. A critical part of this study is the recognition that

the disgusting is difficult terrain to negotiate and particularly to inhabit; while I consider

the transformative possibilities of the abject body throughout this dissertation, I also

acknowledge that such representations can exact a high personal cost from performers

and even rob them of their agency. As such, I question whether performers are potentially

exploited or physically harmed by their work, and consider these risks as serious

obstacles to championing such work as an ideal model for feminist performance practices. Often the performances that provoke the most debate are the ones that are painful or difficult for their performers, and as such I remain mindful of the dangers of self-destruction for the sake of art. This question is particularly relevant in a discussion of

Kane; her suicide a few short days after she completed 4.48 Psychosis raises worrisome questions about how she may have prioritized the completion of her final work of art

9 In Revolting Bodies, LeBesco uses the example of fat people who claim they should not be stigmatized because they exercise regularly and eat sensibly (112). While the attention and praise given to the idea of "health at every size" in recent years seems like a step forward for the fat acceptance movement, it may ultimately bolster discrimination against fat people who do not have exemplary diets or exercise regimens.

26 above her own personal wellness. A critical question woven throughout this work is:

How can feminist performers most effectively unsettle current constructions of the body

without doing any harm to themselves in the process? The unbounded, dangerous, or out-

of-control body needs to be a. performance that is staged within a relatively safe theatrical

context, not a literal exhibition of Otherness that harms or exploits its performers. In

other words, the performer needs to consciously construct a revolting body for her

spectators, who must in turn receive the performance as an act of conscious

representation. Throughout this work, I ask how the body can be represented as abject,

not forced into genuine abjection. While there is sometimes a fine distinction between

these positions—and once again, the spectator will be largely responsible for interpreting

a performance—I hope to locate some viable sites of resistance to the status quo that

nevertheless preserve the well-being of the performer.

Given the current critical interest in the body as a "hinge" between nature and

culture (Jones 13), the performances I discuss in the following pages circulate largely

around medical constructions (and re-constructions) of the female body: as gynecological

subject in Sprinkle, as the cliched "walking heart attack" in Dierlam, as surgical patient in

Orlan, and as psychiatric patient in Kane. In particular, these performances map the uncertain terrain between scientific "knowledge" and the cultural biases that masquerade beneath the credibility of medical authority, and as such, they once again overlap with the major concerns of disability theory. In spite of its apparent objectivity, Thomson points out, medicine is an elite practice: "A form of institutional vision, medical scientific looking can be wielded only by those with appropriate authority and credentials" {Staring

29). Like Diamond's argument about performances, the privileged position of medical

27 practitioners means that medical seeing "is never a neutral act" (Diamond 261). Kuppers points out that medicine also struggles against the body's more unknowable, abject places, and that "the history of anatomy and of its correlating visualization techniques is tied to the desire to find secure knowledges, to find stable referents in relation to the messiness of human bodies" (Scar 33). This search for a "knowable" material body throughout history has centered specifically on the male body; to what extent, then, is the female body systematically pathologized and disabled by virtue of its difference, its supposed "lack"? How are diagnoses of pathology (much like the once-common diagnoses of female hysteria) used to discredit out-of-bounds female bodies and deny their self-ownership and self-knowledge? While contemporary medicine occupies a central role in maintaining a woman's quality of life, the medical gaze also objectifies the body as anatomical specimen, raising questions about female subjectivity similar to those leveled at the gaze in pornography and the fine arts. Augsburg further argues that while clinics ostensibly provide women with some measure of agency by asking them to sign forms consenting to medical treatments, the institution of medicine itself largely frames women as incapable of making informed choices about their own bodies:

Biology, medicine, gynecology, obstetrics, psychiatry, psychoanalysis,

and more recently, cosmetic surgery: the imbrication of these sciences and

disciplines continues to constitute women as inferior beings dependent on

doctors. Women's informed consent is phantasmagoric at best since they

have the additional burden of having their bodies, bodily processes, and

emotions not only medicalized but pathologized. To put it differently, the

difficulties in theorizing women as medical subjects, let alone as feminist

28 medical subjects, are to be found in the extent to which women have been

constituted by modern science and medicine. (286)

Augsburg sees in contemporary body-based performance art an opportunity to

challenge this tradition of misogyny in medicine, and to re-imagine women as active and

necessary participants in their own medical care. As the feminist movement—and by

extension, feminist performance practices—increasingly reject essentialist discourse, the

certainties once attached to female biology and to scientific accounts of the inevitability

of female Otherness are called into question. Throughout this project I discuss

performances that grapple with the idea that medicine claims a privileged knowledge of

the body above and beyond the knowledge of the embodied subject herself. Additionally,

I ask how medicine intersects with other discursive modes of representing the female

body: with sex work in Sprinkle's case, with religion in Orlan's work, and with beauty in

both Orlan and Dierlam's performances. My chapter on Kane considers the ways in

which medical discourse can even intersect with critical evaluations of a playwright's

work, as I explore how reviewers decried Kane as mentally ill in order to account for her

failure to capitulate to cultural biases about what constitutes appropriate subject matter

for "women's writing".

Overview of Chapters

Chapter Two begins to unravel the discourses of the disgusting body through a reading of Annie Sprinkle's "Public Cervix Announcement", in which she inserts a

speculum into her vagina and invites audience members onstage to look at her cervix. I

argued earlier that Body Art performers incorporated nudity and even exposed their

genitals in their work in order to insist upon the material reality of the female body, and

29 Sprinkle's work takes this to the extreme as she shifts away from representations of herself as a conventional pornographic commodity, providing spectators with a close-up view of her bodily insides. Sprinkle was not the first sex worker to turn to performance as a means of self-expression, and her Post-Porn performance is firmly grounded in the feminist consciousness-raising of the 1970s and the sex trade activism of the 1980s, but she remains the only performer who has used the speculum on stage in an entertainment setting. Drawing on the works of Douglas and Kristeva, I argue that the controversy generated by Sprinkle's performance, particularly her association with the NEA's funding practices, arises from her violation of the boundaries demarcating the inside from the outside of the body. Given the history of the speculum and the profound importance of the cervical self-examination to the women's self-help health movement, I consider

Sprinkle's act as an articulation of feminist politics. At the same time, given the discourses of conventional, heterosexual pornography that circulate throughout her performance, I suggest that Sprinkle panders to male audience members in a way that diminishes the transgressive possibilities of her work. Drawing on her lengthy career as a sex worker, Sprinkle's stage persona is coy, permissive, and eager to please; while

Sprinkle invites a desiring gaze in part to mitigate any anxiety caused by her performance, she also potentially alienates spectators by positioning them as pornographic consumers. Finally, I map some of the varied critical reactions to the

"Public Cervix Announcement" in order to suggest that the ambivalence and complexity of the cervical display ultimately allows spectators to assign their own meanings to the work, and consequently I suggest that Sprinkle's performance cannot be read as categorically disruptive.

30 Chapter Three shifts to a more specific discussion of how to represent highly visible forms of corporeal difference in performance, a question that I approach through a reading of the postmodern sideshow. In particular, my chapter discusses Katy Dierlam's

Helen Melon at the Sideshow, a performance in which Dierlam, a five hundred pound actress, takes the stage as a Fat Lady at Coney Island. While more scholarship has been devoted to other sideshow performers such as Jennifer Miller, whose hirsutism led her to a career as a Bearded Lady with Circus Amok, my chapter discusses Dierlam in particular because I argue that the fat body is constructed in current discourse as the most extreme manifestation of corporeal failure. Dierlam's size places her at the extreme end of the spectrum of out-of-bounds bodies, and this chapter asks how Dierlam might potentially manage the stares her body attracts by deliberately displaying her body in a performance setting. As part playful send-up and part homage to the history of sideshow freaks, Helen Melon is deeply complicated, particularly in terms of whether or not

Dierlam exploits her out-of-bounds body by calling attention to her Otherness in such a public forum. Reading the performance through the discourses of disability studies and against an exploitive tradition of exhibiting bodily difference, I suggest that the ambivalence and uncertainty generated by the piece are a deliberate choice on Dierlam's part to inscribe the fat body with meanings beyond its current simplistic constructions as

"ugly", "unhealthy", and "out-of-control". In my final pages I argue that the play's apparent failure to re-signify the fat body comes from the temptation to read Dierlam's work as an expression of fat activism, and I consider the performance instead as a work of camp, which is more interested in engaging with playful polarities and multivalent meanings than in constructing a clearly articulated political standpoint. Finally, I ask

31 what sorts of roles are available to other fat performers whose mobility is not an issue, in order to consider the uncertain boundaries between genuine health concerns and the cultural disdain for fatness.

Chapter Four considers the radical challenge to corporeal boundaries and identities posed by the surgical performances of French artist Orlan. In a series entitled

La reincarnation de Sainte-Orlan, the artist has her facial features surgically reconstructed using canonical works of Western art as her models. Orlan takes Judith

Butler's contention that identity is performative to the extreme as she surgically reconfigures the markers of identity on her face and body, altering some while exaggerating others, allowing her skin's outer surfaces to perform her internal sense of shifting, hybridized identity. While Orlan is only one of a number of performers whose work tests the physical body's limitations—including Stelarc, Gina Pane, Maria

Abramovic, Ron Athey, and Franko B.—she is the first artist to use surgery as her medium ("Intervention" 324) and her work is a clear precursor to more recent surgery- based artworks such as Yang Zhichao's experiments with sub-dermal implants and

Regina Jose Galindo's documentation of her hymenoplasty operation. Orlan remains conscious during the surgeries, accepting only a local anesthetic in order to remain lucid and involved in the surgical process. While the operations are broadcast live to spectators who wish to watch Orlan's transformations, the violent images of surgical instruments literally "disfiguring" Orlan invariably provoke a visceral disgust reaction that causes audiences to turn away from the spectacle of the artist's opened, uncontained body.

While Orlan champions elective plastic surgery as a means of self-transformation and self-realization, I argue that her public performances of the surgical process and her

32 striking resemblance to a vivisected animal or a corpse on the operating table are in fact

intended to evoke horror in her spectators. While post-capitalist culture has an

unrestrained desire for transformation, Orlan's work is a reminder that genuine

transformation is a lengthy, painful, laborious process. While I see in her work a truly

transgressive iteration of body politics, the risks of mutilation and death posed by the

operations strike me as deeply problematic since they put Orlan's artwork before her own

life. I also consider whether her disavowal of the pain she undoubtedly feels as a result of

these operations might inadvertently read as a manifestation of some form of mental

illness. As such, I question whether Orlan's work can really provide a reproducible model

for feminist performance practices.

Chapter Five expands on my concerns that representations of bodily spillage carry

the risk that spectators and critics will read a willingness to embrace the abject as an

indication of mental illness, and that performers will who engage in such representations

will consequently lose their ability to produce meaning. These questions are raised in

relation to British playwright Sarah Kane's final play, 4.48 Psychosis, which documents the internal experience of a psychotic breakdown. Mental illness is an extremely common

subject in the theatre, from Hamlet to A Streetcar Named Desire, 'night Mother, Proof, and arguably even Happy Days, but my reasons for looking at 4.48 are twofold: First, the play's unstructured, stream-of-consciousness dialogue, its indeterminate number of characters, and its pseudo-biographical content distinguish it considerably from conventional theatrical productions, and as such I consider the work as an outgrowth of the 1990s performance art I discuss in earlier chapters. Secondly, the play is the last work

Kane completed before she took her own life in 1999, and its similarities to Kane's own

33 struggles with clinical depression have led numerous critics to consider the work as a

suicide note. My analysis of 4.48 Psychosis suggest that the work was in fact carefully

crafted over a long period of time, and that it reveals a substantial amount of critical

reflection on Kane's part about how the mentally ill are silenced by the treatment process.

In particular, I read the play as a feminist response to psychoanalysis. My chapter goes

on to explore how discourses of mental illness were used to silence and discredit Kane's

work as a playwright, and ultimately I engage in a wider discussion of how madwomen, hysterics, and the mentally ill—although seemingly figures of feminist rebellion and refusal—are ultimately silenced and socially disempowered by their disabilities. This chapter underscores the risks of championing revolting feminist performances without acknowledging their potential harm to performers, as it underscores the serious distress women have endured as they try to live along the boundaries of what is deemed appropriately feminine behaviour.

My final chapter summarizes what I see as the most productive aspects of these performances and what I perceive as their serious limitations. I consider whether performers can produce images of bodily spillage while simultaneously reducing the potential for self-harm, and I draw on Linda Hutcheon's work to consider the obstacles presented by the fact that the successful communication of irony is largely a matter of the spectator's interpretation rather than the performer's intention. I ask how performances can clearly distinguish themselves as representations of the abject body rather than as spectacles of abjection itself, and thereby remain productive sites of resistance. I also consider how images of bodily spillage persist in current works of art and point to some future directions for my research.

34 Chapter 2. Just Another Day at the Orifice: Annie Sprinkle's "Public Cervix Announcement"

I knew I was attracted to the sugar in the sprinkles on ice cream cones (I'm a

sugarholic). I was also attracted to the sound of wetness—I like waterfalls, piss,

vaginal fluid, sweat, cum—anything wet. I love rain and I practically grew up in a

swimming pool. So "Annie Sprinkle" seemed perfect!

Annie Sprinkle in conversation with

Andrea Juno, Angry Women (27)

Lap dancing's the ultimate nightmare of man—it's porn that can see you.

Steve Taylor, Coupling

In Chapter One, I outlined the intersections between feminist performance practices and the aesthetics of disgust. This chapter begins to look more closely at the implications of revolting performances by examining the work of Annie Sprinkle, particularly her show

Post-Post-Porn Modernist and its most (in)famous act, the "Public Cervix

Announcement". As a sex worker (Sprinkle never definitively qualifies the term with

"former" or "current") Sprinkle is uniquely poised to explore competing discourses of the female body as both desirable and disgusting. The figure of the sex worker1 is culturally constructed as the embodiment of innumerable binaries: she is marginalized but ubiquitous; desirable but defiled; powerless but dangerous. Her porous body—open to

1 This presupposes a female-identified sex worker, but there are of course male and trans sex workers who are socially marginalized even further, particularly since the emergence of HIV/AIDS and the fear of contamination linked to non-heterosexual sex practices. See Aggleton, ed. Men who Sell Sex. Schneider also points out that all sex workers are systematically feminized as commodity objects (201).

35 penetration, open to deviance, open to pleasure—also threatens corporeal closure in the form of sexually transmitted infections, non-reproductive sex, and debased morals. In the following pages I ask how these dominant representations of the sex worker are both invoked and undermined by Sprinkle's performance art.

Sprinkle is part of a generation of writers and performers who are associated with sex-positive feminism (in contrast to anti-pornography feminism), many of whom have participated in the sex industry in one form or another; her contemporaries include

Veronica Vera, Susie Bright, Betty Dodson, Penny Arcade, Gayle Rubin, Nina Hartley,

Jennifer Blowdryer, Scarlot Harlot, Kathy Acker, and Candida Royalle. Sprinkle's performances draw heavily on the dialogue that was taking place amongst sex-positive feminists in the 1980s and 1990s, and while much of Post-Porn is devoted to an exploration of the joys of sex and pornography, Sprinkle's work is also founded in the sex trade activism and feminist consciousness-raising of her wider community. My reasons for isolating Sprinkle's work in particular in this chapter have to do with her use of the speculum on the stage: while the speculum played a significant role in the women's self-help health movement, which I will discuss, Sprinkle is responsible for bringing the tool into a performance setting and for using it before mixed-gender audiences. Most critical reflections of Post-Porn are devoted to the question of whether

Sprinkle's work is a genuine celebration or a parody of pornography; I see the "Public

Cervix Announcement" as the critical moment in which Sprinkle's performance puts aside questions of sexual pleasure in order to signal a clear feminist stance. The speculum has absolutely no place in mainstream pornographic displays, and I argue that the unimpeded view of the cervix provided by Sprinkle's act—as well as her eye contact

36 throughout—disrupts the conventional desiring gaze at Sprinkle's body. Paradoxically,

the "Public Cervix Announcement" was cited during the National Endowment for the

Arts controversy of the early 1990s as the premier example of the types of "obscene" art

that were receiving public funding; the singular moment in which Sprinkle takes

ownership of her body, insisting that she is a subject rather than an object, is the moment

that bolstered conservative arguments about the rampant misuse of tax dollars to fund

pornographic artworks.

This chapter considers why the idea of exposing the cervix in a theatrical setting

seems so shocking, and I discuss Sprinkle's involvement in the NEA controversy within

the context of cultural constructions of disgust and the abject body. Next, I explore the

ways in which Sprinkle's performance initially diffuses the fear of her body by

mimicking the conventional language of pornography, a move which might set some of

her male spectators at ease but may cause distress for women in the audience who are

uncomfortable with pornographic displays and resistant to objectifying Sprinkle's body.

Finally, I read the "Public Cervix Announcement" alongside the history of the pelvic

exam and the women's self-help health movement in order to demonstrate that Sprinkle's performance is actually intended for her female spectators in particular, despite

appearances to the contrary. My final section traces a number of critical responses to

Sprinkle's performance and suggests that its ambivalence and complexity invites varying interpretations and multiple meanings, but also leaves it open to failure as a serious feminist intervention. Sprinkle is often championed by feminist critics for giving a voice to sex workers in her performances. As Bell argues:

37 Performance is one of the most effective means for those who have been

constructed by others as objects of desire and undesirable objects to enter

into discourse and create an immediate subject position from which to

address the social. Those, such as prostitutes, previously coded as merely

"obscene" and contained as carnivalesque transgression can reconstitute

themselves in the performance medium as living embodiments of

resistance, remapping, redefining, and reclaiming the deviant body, the

body of the sexual outsider and social outcast. (138)

While I concur with Bell that performance art can provide a space for dismantling

dominant cultural stereotypes of sex workers, I also argue that Sprinkle's self-

representations are complex and ambivalent to a degree that prevents them from being

read as categorically disruptive. Sprinkle's act does—to some extent—remap, redefine,

and reclaim her body, but this chapter also argues that Sprinkle refuses to construct

unambiguously "positive" feminist representations or to fully repudiate constructions of

her body as a saleable commodity. Furthermore, the complex relationship between reality

and representation in Sprinkle's work hinders the spectator's ability to discern the performer beneath the stage persona and, as such, the distinction between Sprinkle-as- object and Sprinkle-as-subject remains uncertain—perhaps even insignificant. In spite of these complications, Sprinkle's work ultimately represents a striking example of how the discourses of disgust and desire intermingle as the female body takes the stage, and as such, her work serves as a point of departure for this dissertation.

38 Nurse Sprinkle Plays Doctor

In the early 1980s (Kapsalis 116), Annie Sprinkle—prostitute, porn star, and

sexual Jill-of-all-trades—performed as part of the New York sex worker variety show

Smut Fest. Her most recent occupation leading up to Smut Fest was as a stripper at a

burlesque theatre, where she played a naughty nurse who allowed the all-male audience

to examine and touch various parts of her body as she slowly undressed herself (Sprinkle,

PPMSl-2). Sprinkle's Smut Fest performance took the metaphor of "playing doctor" that

she had developed to titillate her strip show audiences to the extreme:

Adopting the manner of a teacher, I present a chart of the female

reproductive system, pointing to the ovaries, uterus, fallopian tubes, and

cervix. (I learned to say "cervix" in seven languages!) I open my legs,

insert a metal speculum into my vaginal canal, and screw it open, joking:

"Hmmm, still so tight after all these years." I explain why I'm showing

my cervix, then invite the members of the audience to come up and take a

look with the aid of a flashlight. A line quickly forms, like worshippers at

communion or kids waiting in line to see Santa. As each person looks

inside me, I point a microphone to their mouth and encourage them to

share their impressions. (PPM 165)

As Sprinkle made contacts in the theatre world and slowly began to transition her work into more "legitimate" artistic venues, she continued to perform her cervical display. Her spectators shifted from heterosexual males to audiences of mixed gender and

2 This is the timeframe provided by Kapsalis. While Sprinkle herself is uncertain of the exact year she first performed the "Public Cervix Announcement", she was definitely performing the act by 1989, when theatre critic C. Carr coined its title in a review for the Village Voice.

39 mixed sexual orientation, some of them decidedly unaccustomed to encountering

anything approaching a pornographic display in the theatre. Sprinkle continued to

perform her act, which became known as the "Public Cervix Announcement" (PCA), as

part of her one-woman show Post-Porn Modernist1 and its revival Post-Post-Porn

Modernist, which toured the U.S., Canada, Europe, and Australia from 1990 to 1996.

Sprinkle estimates that twenty-five thousand people have seen her cervix during her live

performances (PPM 166), while countless others have been able to access images of

Sprinkle's cervix on video, in photos, and on her website. While her Post-Porn

performances included graphic slideshows and oral sex demonstrations, offered the sale

of "Tits On Your Head" Polaroids during intermission, and ended with Sprinkle

masturbating herself to orgasm on stage, the PCA was nonetheless the part of Sprinkle's

performance that garnered the most attention; Sprinkle was forbidden to perform her

cervical display in certain venues even where the rest of the show remained uncensored.

While Sprinkle's exposure of her cervix on the stage is admittedly

unconventional, the question arises why such a display seems so obviously shocking and

transgressive. Sprinkle, in fact, encountered considerably more resistance to the idea of

her cervical display than to the PCA itself; her most outspoken critics had not actually

seen the performance, but were nonetheless deeply offended by its subject matter (PPM

174-5). Newspaper reviews of Post-Porn were overwhelmingly positive, describing the

show as educational arid entertaining rather than shocking or uncomfortable (see

3 Sprinkle also uses the term "post-porn modernism" to describe her work as a whole. She defines it as "a new genre of sexually explicit material that is perhaps more visually experimental, political, humorous, 'arty', and eclectic than the rest" (PPM 160). Thus, while Sprinkle's work contains obscene/pornographic material, it also draws on postmodern aesthetics of self-awareness, parody, deconstruction, and the blurring of distinction between "high" and "low" cultural production.

40 Breslauer; Everett-Green; Lamey; Obejas; Szatmary). Of course, spectators were not

always thrilled with Sprinkle's permissive stage persona, particularly in the early days

when they did not know what to expect from her performances, as I will discuss further

in terms of Fuchs's response to the Prometheus Project. The bulk of the controversy

surrounding Post-Porn, however, arose not from hostile spectators but from journalists

and politicians who situated Sprinkle's work at the center of a debate about public

funding for "obscene" artists. In early 1990, just as Sprinkle closed a twelve-performance

run at The Kitchen, the conservative New York City Tribune published a front-page

article decrying the use of public tax dollars to fund what investigative journalist Walter

Skold described as Sprinkle's "live sex shows" (see "Cesspool of'Art' Filth"). The

series of events which followed are well-known: the article made its way to Senator Jesse

Helms, who used Sprinkle's performance as further fuel in his campaign against what he

perceived as obscene artworks receiving National Endowment for the Arts grants. Helms,

who had spent the previous year leveling attacks against Andres Serrano and Robert

Mapplethorpe in particular, now turned his attention to Post-Porn, which he described as

"a sewer of fetishism, depravity and pornography" (qtd. Levinson 156). Later that year,

the NEA's budget was substantially reduced, restrictions were placed on what types of work could receive funding, and individual artists became ineligible for grants.4 The

Kitchen itself was informed that future grant money was conditional on the NEA receiving detailed information in advance about any artists booked to perform at the theatre.

4 See Houchin for an extended discussion of changes made to NEA policies in the 1990s as a result of conservative opposition to artworks funded by the agency.

41 That Sprinkle came to represent the supposed degeneracy of NEA-funded artists is the product of deliberate misrepresentation on the part of her critics; Sprinkle had never received any grant money—she funded her shows with the proceeds of her sex work

(Levinson 157)—and while The Kitchen had an NEA grant, they denied that any part of it had been used to fund Sprinkle's show (PPM 161). The publicity generated by the

NEA controversy undoubtedly helped with ticket sales, but Sprinkle" also claims that many theatres in the U.S. became hesitant to book her show for fear of losing their own funding (PPM 161). Sprinkle then left the U.S. to tour Canada, but found that a number of the books and videos she planned to sell at her shows were confiscated as she crossed the border (Everett-Green). Sprinkle encountered more resistance to her work in Toronto, where she found her performance venue surrounded by police cars and chose to self- censor rather than to risk arrest (Lamey). Later in Australia, Sprinkle agreed to an interview with an extremely hostile radio host, who expressed his disgust with her sexuality, her feminism, and her Jewish heritage, wondering aloud, "Where's Hitler when we need him?" (Levinson 158). Ultimately, while Sprinkle found spectators at her shows were largely receptive to her work—and to her cervical display in particular—she also encountered substantial resistance from those who found the idea of attending such a show unthinkable. A year after the final Post-Porn show, Sprinkle reflected on the polarizing nature of her work:

If you share your life on the performance art stage, you put yourself in a

position to be seriously judged as a good person or a bad person. At times

I was worshiped as a goddess—art lovers lavished me with gifts, shared

their beautiful tears, gave me their blessings, sprinkled me with their love

42 and adoration. At other times I was hated, protested against, screamed at,

threatened with arrest, constantly censored, stalked. I even had neo-Nazis

wanting to "get rid of me. ("Retrospect" 69-70)

While this chapter focuses largely on the content of the performance and on the responses of those who actually witnessed the show, it must be emphasized that Sprinkle had her fair share of detractors beyond the spaces of "licensed transgression" offered by the performance venues themselves. As a result, critical responses to Sprinkle's performance invariably reflect, at least to some degree, how the performance itself did or did not live up to its political hype.

Disgust and the Female Body

The conservative backlash against the "Public Cervix Announcement" can be situated within the framework of Mary Douglas's theory of disgust and Julia Kristeva's corresponding analysis of the abject. While I explore disgust and the abject at length in my previous chapter, a brief recap situates these terms in particular relation to Sprinkle's work: Douglas and Kristeva maintain that nothing is inherently disgusting, but that disgust is a reaction to "matter out of place"(Douglas 40), that which cannot be easily categorized or contained within its conventional boundaries. In this case that "matter out of place" is the body—the vaginal cavity, to be specific—of the sex worker, which is on display in a theatrical setting whereas it would normally be hidden from mainstream view. While Sprinkle's customers might see her external genital area in certain contexts, only a medical doctor would ever be expected to have such an unfettered view of her cervix. Douglas argues that the fear of the disgusting, unbounded, or uncontained body is fundamentally rooted in a fear of social and cultural collapse, since the body is a

43 microcosm for society itself (115). A clean, contained, orderly body implies a clean,

contained, orderly society. Kipnis, in a discussion of the subversive power of Hustler

magazine—which is heavily devoted to pornographic depictions of bodily functions and

excreta—concurs with Douglas that the realm of the disgusting threatens the social order:

The power of grossness is very simply its opposition to high culture and

official culture, which feels the need to protect itself against the

debasements of the lower (the lower classes, low culture, the lower

body...) When the social and the bodily are put side by side, it becomes

apparent how grossness and erupting bodies manage to suggest ongoing

jeopardy (to those in power) and ongoing uncertainty for a social

hierarchy only tenuously held in place through symbolic (and real)

policing of threats posed by rebellious bodies: by the unruly classes, by

angry mobs. And apparently by at least some forms of pornography. (137)

The protests leveled against Sprinkle's performances before they had even opened were a means of policing her rebellious body before she had a chance to disrupt

officially-sanctioned culture. Given the deep connection between bodies and the social order, the mere threat of a body lacking containment can provoke hostility, even before any social boundaries have actually been violated. Of course, the fear of bodily spillage combined with persistent constructions of female bodies as lacking containment means that the female body is always threatening to the social order to some degree, particularly on display in a performative setting. The female body is the locus of anxieties surrounding disgust and spillage: Existing along the margins of representation, with a traditionally "unliveable" identity by virtue of not being male (Butler, Bodies 3), the

44 female body constantly threatens to become even more abject, "too fat, too mouthy, too

dirty, too pregnant, too sexual (or not sexual enough) for the norms of gender

representation" (Rowe 410-11). Sprinkle's body can be read as doubly-marginalized by

her sex work; her body is not merely constructed as disgusting, but is marked as a source

of both moral and physical contagion. Do spectators risk becoming somehow polluted by

Sprinkle as they approach the stage to gaze into her body?

In a further disruption to the social order, the PCA blurs the distinction between

the desiring, pornographic gaze directed at the sex worker and the (ostensibly) detached,

objective, scientific gaze directed at the anatomical specimen. Sprinkle goes beyond

conventional displays of the female body as she allows the audience's gaze to penetrate5

that which is normally out of sight for anyone without the proper medical credentials. In

so doing, Sprinkle reveals that women's material bodies are even more unbounded and

uncertain than meets the eye. The vagina is a particularly problematic organ as it exists

on the boundary between the inside and outside of the body, without any clear delineation between the two. The site of the abject, according to Kristeva, is "the in-between, the ambiguous, [and] the composite" (4), and indeed the vagina "sports moist, textured tissues like bodily insides while it is accessible from the body's outside without an incision" (Kapsalis 19). Davis points out that the labia can also be seen as a "gateway" tissue "that is somewhat indeterminate in texture and hue, yielding slowly from outer to inner and blurring the boundary between the fetishized gloss of the outer dermis and the wet, mushy darkness of the inside" ("Loose Lips" 15). Sprinkle's performance goes even

5In an interview with Kapsalis, Sprinkle refers to the moment of having her cervix gazed upon as an "eye fuck" (118). The pun in this turn of phrase summarizes the PCA quite succinctly: who exactly is "fucking" whom?

45 beyond exposure of the ambiguous tissues of the labia and the vagina: she draws her spectators' attention to the os—the cervical opening that acts as the external orifice of the uterus—and as such she makes visible the ultimate border between the orderly and the abject, the final division between the visible "composite" flesh of the vagina and the body's internal reproductive organs.

While these ambiguous tissues are marginal and dangerous, the concern about maintaining corporeal boundaries manifests itself even more significantly in a fear of bodily fluids, which become abject, no longer part of the "self, as they travel from inside to outside of the body. As Douglas points out, "we should expect the orifices of the body to symbolise its specially vulnerable points. Matter issuing from them is marginal stuff of the most obvious kind. Spittle, blood, milk, urine, feces or tears by simply issuing forth have traversed the boundary of the body" (121). Sprinkle counters that bodily boundaries, functions, and fluids become less disgusting with exposure, which is one of the many reasons she performs the PC A:

People need to be reminded of the fact that we are animals, with bodies

that sweat, pee, bleed, get wet, squirt, smell, writhe, hump, and quiver.

These "uncivilized" acts are part of what makes us beautiful. I felt it was

important for people to look at genitalia in order to get over the shame and

disgust so many of us felt about our own bodies. (PPM 34, original

emphasis)

46 Since Sprinkle's very name celebrates "piss, vaginal fluid, sweat, cum—anything

wet", the spectator's act of approaching the stage to examine her cervix carries with it

the risk of an encounter with the abject: will there be blood, vaginal discharge, odours,

residual ejaculate? Can the sex worker's body, culturally constituted as the ultimate

symbol of female defilement, really serve as an educational model for the female

anatomy in general? Finally, will the sex worker's vagina (a porous boundary constantly

"violated" for economic gain) conform to cultural ideals of cleanliness, health, and

normalcy?

In spite of these risks, substantial numbers of spectators queued up to see

Sprinkle's cervix at any given performance. Menninghaus points out in his theory of

disgust that fear of the disgusting tends to be paired with a certain attraction or curiosity

to the Other in question (6), and consequently, the disgusting has the potential to draw in

spectators even as it repels them. Sprinkle argues that the intermingled fear and curiosity

provoked by her body are empowering, as they free her from her more conventional role

as pornographic commodity: "In some ways the Public Cervix Announcement is a 'fuck

you' to guys who came to see pussy. 'You want to see pussy, I'll show you pussy.' I want

to gross them out" (qtd Kapsalis 131). The inherent threat posed by Sprinkle's unruly

body is ultimately what resists the comfortable and entitled spectatorship associated with more conventional displays of female nudity, pornographic or otherwise.

6 More accurately, her name is a pun that simultaneously refers to festive candy sprinkles on ice cream cones and to wetness. Since this is the name Ellen Steinberg adopted to begin her pornography career, though, I also assume the name is intended to evoke sexual arousal, "golden showers", and/or female ejaculation. Sprinkle did devote part of her pornographic career to what she calls "piss art", and she and Veronica Vera sold their urine in vials through a mail-order business (see Post-Porn 57).

47 "Would You Like That?"

In spite of the myriad ways in which Sprinkle represents a challenge to the culturally idealized body—her femaleness, her sex work, her revelation of her bodily insides and possibly her bodily fluids, and her collapsing of the desiring, fetishistic gaze into the objective medical gaze—Sprinkle's work is not as overtly confrontational as might be expected. While on the surface, Post-Porn seems as though it will be critical of at least some aspects of sex work, the majority of the play has a celebratory tone.

Sprinkle's accommodating, flirtatious stage persona coupled with her appropriation of the conventional language of pornography open her work to criticism as a too-soft parody, one that fails to truly dismantle the mechanisms of the pornographic gaze. Sprinkle's performance is particularly challenging because, in spite of some clearly feminist underpinnings, she does not categorically repudiate constructions of her body as a sexual object. This aspect of Sprinkle's performance can be deeply problematic for some spectators, especially for women who are unaccustomed to voluntarily positioning themselves as enthusiastic consumers of pornography.

Carr describes Sprinkle's onstage personality as "sweet, [and] sometimes coy.

There's a part of her persona she can't or won't drop—the part there for men. She who drops it, after all, risks monstrosity by embodying a female energy that men fear or hate"

(255). Unlike performance artists who seek to trigger a visceral disgust reaction to their body-centric work— Karen Finley, Carolee Schneemann, Gina Paine, and Marina

Abramovic are prominent examples—Sprinkle projects a certain cheerful naivete as she addresses the audience, as though she is there purely for fun and any controversy she provokes will be genuinely surprising to her. In some ways this performance initially

48 reads as the polar opposite of feminist works like VALIE EXPORT'S 1969 guerilla

performance Action Pants: Genital Panic, which I discussed in the previous chapter;

Sprinkle's stage persona shows no aggression, and while she will eventually expose her

genitals—thereby drawing attention to the difference between pornographic fantasy and

her "real" material body—at the beginning of the show, the spectator's comfort is her

priority.

Sprinkle has a breathy, girlish voice and a gap in her teeth that makes her appear

almost child-like, and these physical features feed into a carefully crafted stage persona that neutralizes the apparent threat of Sprinkle's work. Sprinkle's confessional mode in

Post-Porn further suggests that the performance is nothing more than a vehicle for stories about her sexy, adventurous life, which may help to justify Sprinkle's inclusion of pornographic photos, sex toys, and stage nudity. Her initial greeting to the audience is almost laughably misleading, considering the graphic show-and-tell to come, but at the same time it puts the audience at ease: "What I'd like to do tonight is very simple. All

I'm going to do is tell you a little bit about my life. I'm not planning to do anything more than that and I'm not planning to do anything less than that" (Shiftier l).7 By framing the work as a confidential peek into her own life, Sprinkle essentially legitimizes the performance as a work of art—this is not a "live sex show", as Skold and Helms claimed, but a (very) personal exchange with one specific woman who recounts her experiences and allows spectators a peek behind the scenes of the sex trade.

7 Sprinkle has not published a script for Post-Post-Porn Modernist but several versions are currently available online courtesy of the Robert J. Shiftier Foundation. These and all subsequent lines from the show are taken from an unpublished 1994 version of the script: .

49 An unfortunate byproduct of Sprinkle's permissive, all-in-good-fun tone is that it

hardly seems confrontational enough; while Schneider reads Sprinkle's work as

"postmodern parody" (60) and Williams calls Post-Porn a "parodic show-and-tell of

[Sprinkle's] life as a sexual performer" (302), I argue that Sprinkle's performance does

not always clearly signal itself as parody and is consequently indistinguishable, at times,

from intentional pandering to male voyeurism. While feminist critics are understandably

eager to emphasize Sprinkle's ironic tone, the performance's successful communication of that irony is largely dependent on the spectator's perception; as Hutcheon points out,

"there is no guarantee that the interpreter will 'get' irony the same way that it was intended" (11). Sprinkle speaks the language of the sex trade, and although that language might be intended as a send-up, it nonetheless replicates the encoding of the female body as an object of male pleasure and fantasy-fulfilment. This can be problematic for feminist spectators who maintain an uneasy relationship with conventional (heterosexual male- oriented) pornography.

Sprinkle's willingness to freely draw upon the imagery and language of pornography is rooted in her sex-positive feminism, which I mentioned briefly in this chapter's opening. Post-Porn emerged at the end of a decade that saw extensive debates taking place between feminists about whether the production and consumption of pornography fueled violence against women. In addition to calls for censorship, anti- pornography feminists argued that sex workers themselves would ultimately benefit from stricter laws regulating their activities. Cornell explains the reasoning behind such legislation: "Prostitutes and pornography workers exemplify women who had been 'had' in the most tragic sense. By ending porno work and prostitution, the state saves them

50 from themselves" (46). Sprinkle's performance opposes the attitude that sexual

expression should be regulated, and rejects the idea that she somehow needs "saving"

from her sex work because she is unaware of her complicity in her own oppression. The

show is an implicit response to concerns that Sprinkle is exploited by her work (an idea I

will revisit with regards to Dierlam in the next chapter), and Sprinkle emphasizes

throughout the performance that sex work represents her own pursuit of pleasure rather

than some form of victimhood. In fact, as a producer of pornography—as a woman who

controls the means of production, to put it in Marxist terms—Sprinkle has the power to

represent desires that are not part of a "fixed, male-owned commodity" (Dolan 80). She

often presents an over-the-top, exaggerated persona that seems designed to persuade

spectators that pornographic depictions are frivolous, fake, and relatively harmless. They

exist for pleasure, and Sprinkle, the sex-positive feminist, sees pleasure as normal,

natural, and good. The challenge with Sprinkle's performance is that she wants the

audience—men and women both—to experience and share in this pleasure, but of course

not all spectators take pleasure from the same types of representation, and in some cases

the pleasure of one spectator comes at the expense of another.

For instance, for a performance intended as a "fuck you to guys who came to see

[her] pussy" (Kapsalis 131), the play goes to great lengths to accommodate a sexualized,

male-centered gaze at Sprinkle's body. Posters advertising the event encouraged

spectators to bring cameras to the show, and the act of paying to see Sprinkle's performance and to capture it on camera mirrors the financial transaction between hooker and John. Throughout the performance, Sprinkle encourages audience participation—a

sort of "come get what you paid for" hustle—as when she offers to pose for erotic photos:

51 I think of the camera as a kind of sex toy because cameras and sex just go

together so well. I thought maybe we could do a little photo shoot for

those of you who brought your cameras. I could do some special poses.

Would you like that? Come on up here. Get closer. I'll run through some

of the more popular poses. (Shiftier 4)

Kauffman cites this willingness to pose for photos as an instance of Sprinkle

reversing the power dynamic of the conventional pornographic gaze. When Kauffman

saw Sprinkle's show, she was seated next to a spectator she describes as a "dirty old

man" with a camera. She writes: "Sprinkle singled him out when she came onstage,

spreading her legs and amiably inviting him to come closer; he demurred. By cheerfully

giving him permission, Sprinkle deftly deflated the spectacle's prurience" {Bad 57).

While I find Kauffman's reading persuasive, I would argue that Sprinkle's actions were

designed to encourage the "dirty old man" to become part of the performance—to openly demonstrate his excitement for the benefit of the other spectators—rather than to discourage his photography in any way. Sprinkle's readiness to do a photo shoot for her

spectators suggests to me that this performance is shaped by what the audience wants to

see rather than simply unfolding in a way that is dictated by Sprinkle herself. Once again, the role of the sex worker is mirrored as the paying customer determines what particular form the performance will take, directing Sprinkle's poses and recording her image for his later consumption.

52 While it might be tempting to argue that the pleasurable gaze encouraged by

o

Sprinkle is not strictly heterosexual, and that it consequently resists the objection leveled

at conventional pornographic displays that they are male-centered objectifications of

female bodies that are demeaning to women, Sprinkle's performance nonetheless remains

problematic in its assumption that female spectators are comfortable being cast in the role

of clients/consumers. The act of spectatorship in this performance implies an

endorsement of at least some types of pornography, just as it erases specific objections or

concerns spectators might have about the sex trade itself. Furthermore, spectators who

identify with Sprinkle as a female are bound to wonder how her performance reflects

back onto their own bodies—does Sprinkle's permissiveness encourage male spectators

to objectify their bodies too? Sprinkle's confessional narrative asserts that "there's a lot

of you in every porn star" (Shiftier 5), but are female spectators really that similar to

Sprinkle? Does some measure of distance or detachment need to be maintained in order to objectively listen to Sprinkle discuss a lifestyle choice that the vast majority of her female audience presumably would not make? Fuchs raises a number of these concerns as she recounts the profound anger she experienced watching Sprinkle perform her naughty nurse act as part of Richard Scheduler's Prometheus Project (1985). Although the work predates the "Public Cervix Announcement", Sprinkle's fondness for framing her work as educational show-and-tell is in evidence here, and her invitation to individual spectators to scrutinize and describe her nude body for the rest of the audience is a precursor to her later performance:

8 Sprinkle has female sexual partners in both her work and her private life, and may thus situate herself as a gender-neutral object of desire. It's worth noting, though, that Sprinkle's performance during the Prometheus Project was "framed by an onstage audience of four [male] masturbators in trenchcoats, hands in pockets" (Fuchs 43), which suggests that Sprinkle's early work acknowledged the potential sexual arousal of its male spectators, but not its female spectators.

53 This is a moment I won't easily forget in the theater: Sprinkle's smiling

face and robust, cooing voice, her very white and soft body largely

exposed, encouraging a spectator to scrutinize and describe her labia. I

shrink back from the spectacle in my seat, filled with rage at Richard

Schechner, who is submitting me and other women to this assault on our

bodies via this alien medium, this... who is she? Is she a woman like me?

Does she smile because she enjoys this or smile because she is encoded by

pornography to convince men she "enjoys" this? The act becomes more

threatening still when Sprinkle offers to "give a little demonstration of

cock sucking." By now blind to objective critical judgment, whatever that

might be in such a case, I feel violated and furious at my entrapment here.

(43, original emphasis)

The anger Fuchs expresses at Sprinkle's show and at her own inability to leave9 are essentially rooted in the issues I outline above: Fuchs experiences an aversion to what looks and feels like a conventional pornographic display of the female body, she resists the role of consumer/client, and she wonders how Sprinkle's self-representation might objectify her own female body against her will. Of note is the fact that Fuchs holds

Schechner responsible for Sprinkle's display; Fuchs's own discomfort is coupled with a concern about Sprinkle's exploitation.

9 Fuchs later explains that, due to the design of the theatre, she would have to cross the playing space to walk out. Ann Wilson has suggested to me that Fuchs's feelings of entrapment owe more to middle class values about how to behave in the theatre than to any genuine inability to walk out. This suggests that performances have the unique potential to force an encounter with the disgusting that might not be tolerated in other situations where spectators' responses are not so visible to others.

54 Sprinkle does, to a certain extent, provide answers to all of these questions

through her performance. Although the pleasure of the male spectator is in danger of

overshadowing the other discourses of Sprinkle's work, Straayer rightly points out that

for Sprinkle, the "aim to please the client is not in conflict with her other sexual aims"

(161). In the following pages, I explore the possibility that, in spite of all appearances to

the contrary, the Post-Porn show and particularly the "Public Cervix Announcement" are

in fact specifically directed at Sprinkle's female spectators. Sprinkle describes her sense

of fulfilment with her sex work and her feeling that women who make other career

choices are exploited more than she is. Sprinkle also shifts gears later in the show to

represent herself as a sort of sexual teacher and healer who can help women to claim

ownership over their own bodies, and her act consequently invites a reading of the work

as a corrective against the history of mistreatment of women's bodies at the hands of the

medical community in particular. While the Post-Porn show initially fails to

fundamentally challenge the spectator's ability to objectify Sprinkle's performing body, the "Public Cervix Announcement" itself reverses the gaze as spectators become part of the show, cast in the role of exploratory sexual and educational partners rather than as paying customers who can dictate the terms of Sprinkle's performance.

The Accidental Hooker

Given the various ways in which Sprinkle invites a pornographic gaze at her body, Sprinkle's performance is unquestionably pleasurable for some of the audience. As

Campbell points out, Sprinkle's show offers an attractive alternative to the conventional sex industry, in the form of "sexual transgression without the guilt and without an unsettling political dimension, a post-porn live experience in which the gaze is not so

55 much subverted as encouraged" (66). What ultimately prevents this performance from

mirroring conventional prostitute/client transactions is Sprinkle's insistence that the show

brings her a sort of exhibitionistic pleasure as well—an argument underscored by the

"Sex Magic Masturbation Ritual" at the end of Post-Porn.10 Sprinkle has always

maintained that she enjoys "performing" sexually as much as her clients or audiences

enjoy watching her, an assertion which may somewhat appease female spectators

concerned about Sprinkle's exploitation. Even Sprinkle's introduction into the sex

industry, which might be expected to unravel as a stereotypical hard luck tale, is instead

presented (albeit disingenuously) as a happy accident:

I was working in a massage parlor. For [three] months I worked and didn't

even know I was a hooker—I was having such a good time! The men I

saw were referred to as "clients" or "massages." But finally, after about

[three] months one woman used the word "trick" and I realized,

"Ohmigod—they're tricksl Oh shit—I'm a hookerV {Angry 24, original

emphasis)

While I am deeply skeptical of Sprinkle's assertion that she didn't know she was a prostitute, and that the sex was something she "threw in for fun" {Angry 26)—if nothing

else, surely the financial remuneration reflected the true nature of her work?—her story of finding her career path nonetheless underscores her enthusiasm for sex and her insistence that she herself experiences as much pleasure as she doles out. Even spectators

10 Although to be fair, even the pleasure of this particular moment does not belong entirely to Sprinkle; Geraldine Harris, who saw the show in Glasgow, recounts how an unknown man seated next to her group of friendsmasturbate d along with Sprinkle during the ritual (161-62). Given the blurry lines between art and pornography in Sprinkle's shows, it seems fairly likely this happened on more than one occasion, once again suggesting that some spectators' pleasure was experienced at the expense of others.

56 who have political objections to the sex industry can sympathize with Sprinkle's desire to

engage in personally fulfilling, meaningful work. Why not get paid to do what she

loves?11

And that is precisely what Sprinkle does. She insists on being read not as a victim,

but as a self-made businesswoman who leverages her talents, takes control of her own

life, and makes her own decisions. While she would willingly provide sexual services for

free, she decides to profit financially from the behaviour she would engage in anyhow.

Her performance points out the irony that, as a sex worker, she is exploited less than the

average working woman:

The average American woman makes approximately [two hundred and

forty-three dollars] per week at her job. As a porn star in burlesque, for

example, I could make about [four thousand dollars] per week. That same

average American woman works about [forty] hours per week at her job.

That's her job outside the home. I only had to work about [seventeen]

hours per week. That gave me plenty of time to do other things I really

enjoyed, such as travel, take classes and workshops, and spend all that

money. (Shiffler 5) n

11 One way of reading Sprinkle, which I alluded to earlier, is to assume that she is either lying or has internalized her own oppression when she claims to find her career pleasurable. This line of inquiry quickly leads to a dead end, though: since Sprinkle is always performing, asking whether what she says is "true" or "correct" is not terribly productive. More important is the question of why she chooses to present herself in this particular way. 12 Sprinkle is trying to explain the appeal of sex work, but her comments raise the question of why other kinds of "pink collar" work are not accorded more value and compensation. Is the sex trade really the only lucrative career option for women? Doesn't that imply that all female labour is exploited, just in different ways?

57 Given the compensation Sprinkle receives for very few hours of work, and her decision

to live an alternative lifestyle beyond the strictures of the nuclear family and reproductive

sex, she is able to learn more about herself and to expand her horizons in ways many

other women cannot. In spite of the social disdain for her career choice, then, Sprinkle

finds herself quite pleased with her work and her life as a whole.

Sprinkle's Post-Porn show is a testament to the happiness she has found in the

sex industry, and although she never denies that some of her experiences were less than

ideal, she dismisses those incidents as minor misfortunes in an otherwise satisfying

career: "Life goes on, and it's good. I believe I came out a winner" (Shiffler 7).

Sprinkle's performance fondly recalls the various jobs she's had, explores her myriad

reasons for working in the sex trade, and presents her life experience as overwhelmingly

positive, perhaps a surprise for those who might assume that no one would ever choose to

be a sex worker, given any viable alternatives. Ultimately Fuchs herself comes to the

conclusion that Sprinkle "made a pretty good bargain in life" (47), and she points out that

Sprinkle's transition from sex trade venues into performance spaces is a continuation of. that good bargain: "Porn magazines edited and published by Sprinkle were displayed at the ticket desk as one entered, evidence of Sprinkle's enterprise in extending her product to a new market" (47). Harris mentions Sprinkle's souvenirs as well, calling them the

"natural extension of a performance that constituted a classic narrative of the American dream [...] based on the virtues of individual enterprise, self-determination, and self- discovery" (159). While the decision to market one's body as a commodity represents an

58 ethical grey area, there are undeniable feminist values beneath Sprinkle's determination to assert her identity, to find fulfilment in her work, and to become a self-reliant businesswoman.

My Body, Myself

Sprinkle's self-avowed satisfaction in her career as a sex worker raises the question: why did she leave it all to become a performance artist? The answer, I think, gets to the heart of my assertion that the Post-Porn show ultimately addresses its female spectators. While Sprinkle-as-businesswoman uses the show as a sales hustle for her pornographic media output, she also promotes herself as a sexual teacher, healer, and therapist. Sprinkle's fundamental belief that there is a legitimate social need for her work is perhaps the biggest reason she transitioned into more conventional artistic spaces; her sex-themed performances were suddenly available to audiences who may not have encountered her elsewhere, or who may not have been receptive to her message without the credibility she gained from performing in venues with artistic cachet. Additionally,

Sprinkle's early performances of the PC A and her consciousness-raising activities with

COYOTE and other sex worker advocacy groups created in her an interest in exploring the body and sexuality beyond what would be considered "sexy" in her typical work setting. As she tells Levinson, "I started telling my truths and sharing about my kind of sexuality [...] I could never have gotten away with showing my cervix in a strip club, but

I could show it at The Kitchen" (151, original emphasis). By the time Sprinkle was performing the Post-Porn show, she was free to combine what she'd learned giving

13This question is not just limited to the sex trade—see Chapter Three for a discussion of the ethical implications of the sideshow freak as marketable commodity.

59 conventionally sexy performances with her newfound sense of her roles as teacher,

healer, and therapist.

Shrage claims that a number of prostitutes conceive of their work as a kind of sex

therapy, a professional service like any other provided to a paying customer (37).I4 The

clientele one might imagine for that service would be typically male, someone either

seeking a sexual partner in general or looking to have certain sexual proclivities fulfilled

within the context of a financial transaction rather than a romantic relationship. While

Sprinkle's performance is always, as I argued earlier, eager to provide sexual pleasure to

its spectators, Sprinkle also situates herself as a sex therapist especially for women. While

earlier parts of the Post-Porn show encourage a desiring, sexualized gaze, the PC A

encourages an educational, anatomical gaze—albeit one is fundamentally different from

the medical gaze of conventional pelvic exams, as it situates the woman as an active and

necessary participant in the process. The "Public Cervix Announcement" might be

considered particularly radical in light of the history of the speculum itself and of pelvic

exams more generally as tools of subjugation. Kapsalis argues that the speculum has a

reputation as "a tool that signifies fear and discomfort" (120) for many women, in part

due to the history of its usage. I turn briefly to two significant historical examples that

help to situate Sprinkle's cervical self-exams as a definitively feminist act: first, to 1840s

America and the origins of the pelvic exam as it exists today, and then to 1860s Britain as

an example of medical (mis)treatments of the prostitute's body in particular.

14 Shrage goes on to argue that prostitutes might be accorded more social recognition as sex therapists if they were encouraged to earn professional credentials to add to their work experience (359). Sprinkle did just that, earning a PhD in Human Sexuality from San Francisco's Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality in 2002.

60 Kapsalis writes that J. Marion Sims, often trumpeted as the father of gynecology,

invented the speculum in its modern form in 1840s Alabama during a series of

experimental, unanesthetized operations on the vaginal fistulas of slave women (see

Kapsalis 31-60). Often the product of protracted childbirth (but sometimes caused by

rape or abuse), fistulas are tears between the vaginal walls and the urinary tract or rectum

that can cause the involuntary evacuation of bodily wastes. While fistulas did not prevent

slave women from working, they did prevent them from "breeding" future slave labour,

and they also resulted in bodily spillage that provoked disgust in white owners who

would otherwise use these women for their own sexual gratification (Kapsalis 35-6).

Sims's invention allowed him, for the first time, to have an unimpeded view—and

consequently, unimpeded access—to the vaginal walls and the cervix. The women Sims

operated on undoubtedly suffered unimaginable pain. Clear associations between the

medical gaze and male-dominated constructions of the "clean" and "proper" female body

are evident in Sims's project: The speculum became a tool of triumph over the slave

woman's heretofore unchartered body, a way to declare further ownership by viewing her

body in a way that she herself could not, and ultimately it allowed Sims to restore his patient to working order as the sexual and reproductive property of her owner.

While the regrettable history of the speculum's use in American history might resonate even more deeply were Sprinkle a black performer, her own personal history as a sex worker echoes yet another significant historical instance where the subjugation of women was practiced under the guise of medical care: In the 1860s, just twenty years after Sims's experiments in America, the British Parliament passed a series of Contagious

Diseases Acts designed to stop the spread of venereal disease in the armed forces. While

61 both men and women were spreading venereal disease through sexual contact, the Acts were specifically designed to protect men from potentially contagious women.15

Prostitutes were singled out as the cause of the epidemic, rounded up by police posing as potential customers, and forced to submit to mandatory (and frequent) examinations, medical treatment, and sometimes to forcible confinement. Given the rather vague, class- inflected definition of the word "prostitute", the acts became an instrument of control over unruly female behaviour, as Spender points out: "The onus was on women to prove they were not prostitutes by behaving in a manner which found approval among men... any behaviour to the contrary could be sufficient evidence that a woman no longer warranted male protection" (473). Women who stepped out of line were "inspected with a State Penis", to borrow an evocative phrase from Watts (154), subjected to humiliating and unsanitary16 pelvic examinations by speculum—to put it strongly, unruly women were effectively raped using surgical instruments. Again, a relationship between the medical gaze and the control of female behaviour is in evidence: The Contagious

Diseases Acts located women as a source of contagion, opened their bodies to forceful inspection, and attempted to create not only standards of cleanliness but also of containment; the pelvic exam in 1860s England was at its core a systematic, government- sanctioned punishment for the failure to escape male attention.

To return to the idea of Sprinkle as a women's health advocate, I see a notable shift in her performance during the "Public Cervix Announcement", where Sprinkle

15 The refUsal to give men medical examinations meant that the Acts were essentially futile; men could spread diseases amongst themselves through homosexual contact, and they could re-infect prostitutes who had already been treated for VD. Given the unsanitary conditions of the hospitals (Watts 154), disease may have also been spread to previously uninfected women during the pelvic exams themselves. 16 The link between microbes and the spread of disease was not made until 1876; consequently, surgical instruments were not routinely sterilized until well into the 1880s.

62 appropriates the traditional tool of social regulation of women and uses it as a tool of self-

knowledge and self-ownership. Sprinkle does not explicitly cite the extensive history of

pelvic exams as a form of subjugation, but her performance does solicit a different kind

of gaze at her body than her sexual provocations earlier in the show. Sprinkle claims that

women typically become nervous and uncomfortable when she first reveals the speculum

(Kapsalis 120), and so the show shifts to a tone designed to ease the tension and set

female spectators at ease. Carr describes the PCA as a kind of "supernakedness that

transcends sexuality: body interiors aren't sexy" (176),17 and as such this is the only part

of Sprinkle's performance that really surmounts the sex kitten persona to focus on

women's ownership of their bodies. Although Sprinkle jokes that she'll show her male

spectators that "there are no teeth inside there" (PPM 166), her other reasons for

performing the PCA are largely directed at female spectators:

I felt I was fixing taboos that were not in our best interest, like using a

speculum without a medical degree and looking at our genitals in bright

light and in public. I wanted to exemplify vaginal pride. Shame about

one's own vagina is totally unnecessary. Most people go through their

entire lives without the opportunity to view a cervix, and I wanted to give

them that opportunity. {PPM 166)

As both Kapsalis (123) and Carr (176) point out, learning to do a cervical self-exam— which Sprinkle's performance positions as both educational and "a great party trick"

(anniesprinkle.org)—was considered a deeply empowering political act during the early

17 Baudrillard makes a similar argument in his essay "Stereo-Porno" when he claims that the extreme close- up shots of genitals in pornography are grotesque rather than sexy because they present an "excess of reality" (29), a viewing position of the sex act that simply reveals too much.

63 days of the women's self-help health movement. While gynecologists occupied an

important role in ensuring the ongoing health and wellness of women, self-exams were

seen as a way of familiarizing a woman with her own body. Furthermore, while

gynecologists are trained to look for pathology and are largely presented with images of

illness and disease during their training, the self-exam movement provided women with a

greater awareness of the various cycles and secretions of a healthy and normal

reproductive system. Sprinkle's language mirrors the discourses of the movement; her

assertion that she "felt it was important for people to look at genitalia in order to get over

the shame and disgust so many of us felt about our own bodies" (PPM 34) echoes the

preface to the very first edition of Our Bodies, Ourselves, published in 1973: "ignorance,

uncertainty—even, at worst, shame—about our physical selves create in us an alienation

from ourselves that keeps us from being the whole people that we could be" (Boston

Women's Health Book Collective 3). Ultimately, the act of viewing parts of the body that

are widely considered the domain of (traditionally male) health providers, and yet are

crucial to a woman's reproductive and sexual health, is a way of claiming agency and the

1 R right to self-knowledge.

Once again, though, Sprinkle is careful to mitigate the possibility of a disgust

reaction particularly from her male spectators, which dampens the transgressive possibilities of her performance. She certainly gives the audience "more pussy than you'll

ever want to see" (PPM 166), but she douches over a working toilet on the stage

18 As a fascinating aside, Kapsalis reveals that medical students were once trained to conduct pelvic exams by practicing on sex workers, since educators believed that "only a prostitute would voluntarily submit to exams repeatedly and for non-diagnostic purposes" (67). I wonder if this belief carries over to Sprinkle's performance: can we imagine anyone who is not a prostitute repeatedly and voluntarily exposing herself in such an intimate and vulnerable way? Does it take a certain "type" of woman to show her cervix to more than twenty-five thousand people?

64 beforehand to remove any offending bodily discharge or odours. Healthcare providers

largely recommend against douching because it disrupts the body's natural bacterial

balance and can make women more prone to vaginal infections, and as such the act

contradicts the discourses of women's health that Sprinkle draws on as she performs her

cervical display. Additionally, Sprinkle's actions might inadvertently suggest that the

vagina is inherently unclean and needs to be sanitized. Kapsalis points out that the

douche might be a necessary concession if it encourages audience members not to fear

Sprinkle's cervical display (124), but nonetheless the act is problematic as it replicates

the hooker/john relationship, situating Sprinkle's body as a commodity that must be

prepared for consumption. In fact, Sprinkle claims she learned the practice of douching

from her sex work, since a lot of customers wanted her "clean and shiny" and "you have to be what they want you to be" (Kapsalis 124). For a moment that seems so invested in celebrating and demystifying women's bodies, Sprinkle's continued concern for the comfort of her (male) spectators implies that even during the show's most empowering moments the audience is somehow entitled to dictate the terms of Sprinkle's performance.

Whose Cervix is it Anyway?

While Sprinkle's politics consequently read as somewhat ambivalent during the

PCA, the act nevertheless does engage the audience in a fascinating reversal of roles: as I mention at the beginning of this chapter, each person that files by to look at Sprinkle is handed a microphone and asked to provide a spontaneous response to the cervical display. Sprinkle assumes a form of control over the performance in spite of her nude

65 body, as suddenly her spectators are exposed, prompted to reveal their private thoughts and feelings. While Sprinkle has thus far improvised some of her act to satisfy the audience's desires, she firmly establishes that during this act she is the one in charge. In addition to soliciting responses from her spectators, Sprinkle maintains what Schneider calls a "counter-gaze" (55), making eye contact with each person, watching them as they look at her cervix. Again, this situates the PCA as a definitive departure from the come- hither patter earlier in the performance. Mahon writes that conventional pornography

"relies on the illusion that the viewer is not present in the scenario but is a witness to performers who do not acknowledge them" (Mahon 242-3); in a similar vein, Dolan argues that male spectators who pay to watch a stripper "buy control over the gaze" and that "their power lies in controlling the illusion that the stripper is performing for them"

(65). By contrast, Sprinkle acknowledges the gaze of her spectators and gazes back at them, and while she performs for her spectators earlier in the show, they now perform for her as well. Sprinkle's counter-gaze means that she is no longer an object (of art or pornography or anatomical interest) to be passively gazed at upon the stage, but that the performance is a negotiation of meanings—a conversation, really—between this stripped- down performer and the audience members who gaze into her body. If earlier in the show

Sprinkle was commodified or objectified by the audience, she now engages with each spectator as a sort of sexual partner as they enter the playing space.

19 Again, middle class values about how to behave in the theatre come into play; while Sprinkle's act suggests a shocking display of vulnerability and she admits to initial fears that someone might pull the speculum out of her or force it in farther (Kapsalis 120), Sprinkle claims that her display is safe and comfortable and she has had no altercations with her spectators during a show.

66 What is the meaning of the performance ultimately negotiated between Sprinkle and her spectators? Unsurprisingly, this question is resistant to a definitive answer, although I have attempted to outline a number of possibilities above. Sprinkle undergoes incessant transformation and re-invention in her professional life, and her comment that she has to be what her clients want her to be suggests an ongoing performance from which the "real" Annie Sprinkle—and consequently her personal identity politics—are difficult to discern. In some ways there actually is no "Annie Sprinkle" at all. Her performance is a constructed version of her persona, a persona that is itself a willful fabrication, as Sprinkle points out right from the top of her show:

I was born Ellen Steinberg. But I didn't like being Ellen Steinberg very

much, so I simply invented Annie Sprinkle. Ellen was excruciatingly shy.

Annie was an exhibitionist. Ellen was fat and ugly, and no one seemed to

want her. Annie was voluptuous and sexy, and everyone seemed to want

her. Ellen desperately needed attention. Annie got it. (Shiffler 1)

The Post-Porn performance continually reminds its audience that "Annie Sprinkle" is a performance, a "sham made of lipstick, mascara, fake beauty marks, and black lace"

(Schneider 58). The lines between fantasy and reality are unstable, and while Sprinkle sometimes lulls audiences into the impression that her over-the-top, outrageous, sexy persona is the "real" her, she never denies that beneath it all there is a shy, quiet, awkward woman who would never dream of doing the things Annie Sprinkle does.

Sprinkle's constant reminder that this is a performance raises what may seem like a rather odd question about the PCA itself: whose cervix are we looking at, exactly? Who is this woman boldly looking back, smiling encouragingly, urging a response to her display? If

67 Ellen Steinberg would never do this, is it Annie Sprinkle's body we gaze into? Is what

we're seeing "real", even if Sprinkle herself is a fabrication? For a moment in the show

that seems utterly stripped bare, as it were, of performance, the realization that this

intimate act still does not precisely show "things as they really are" is unsettling. Can a

woman be so exposed and yet still at such a remove from her audience?

Given that Sprinkle's identity is so mutable throughout this performance

(representing, once again, the instability of the out-of-bounds body), the show inevitably

becomes about spectatorship itself, as Schneider points out: "the cervix itself was hardly

any more of a show than the showing was a show" (55). Given the extensive publicity

Sprinkle received as a result of the NEA controversies, her cervical display probably

proved a bit underwhelming to some spectators. In any case, Post-Porn draws on such a

variety of discourses and invites such a variety of readings that it ultimately has no fixed

meaning beyond a desire to explore that which is normally hidden from view. Sprinkle

claims that the predominant reaction to her cervical display is that "people are shocked

that they aren't shocked" (Juno 34). On the contrary, critical reflections on the PCA

reveal a much broader set of reactions, covering a wide range of interpretations that can

be brought to bear on Sprinkle's work as a whole. In Carr's review of a very early version

of the PCA, she expresses irritation at the machismo of male audience members who

"each contributed a dumb wisecrack after peering through the speculum on hands and knees" (176), a reaction which reflects concerns about the ways in which Sprinkle's act might pander to male voyeurism and alienate the female spectator. Schneider recounts how Richard Schechner, who had worked with Sprinkle in the past, remained in his seat during the PCA "because of the complex repercussions involved in choosing to look"

68 (55), which notes resistance from a male spectator to appear sexually excited by

Sprinkle's act or to willingly step into the role of the customer. Schneider confesses that she still doesn't know what it means that she did look (56), although she likens it to a religious experience, echoing Sprinkle's description of the queue to see her cervix as

"worshippers at communion" {PPM 165). Harris, in contrast, recounts how she and her companions eagerly jumped up ("like kids waiting in line to see Santa") to view

Sprinkle's cervix—she quips that "you don't go to the fairground if you are not going to go on the rides" (158)—but she also points out that her group was familiar with the show's subject matter and eagerly anticipated this part of the performance (141-42). This suggests a kind of devoted fandom that is less concerned with the problematic subtext of the performance than with its playful, campy tone. Kapsalis reports that female audience members gave a collective gasp when Sprinkle first revealed the speculum (120), which suggests, as I argued earlier, a shared history of awkward or even painful doctor's visits and a genuine need for feminist self-help health interventions. Kapsalis also reports that while most people who filed by to look at Sprinkle's cervix said "thank you" or "it's beautiful" (127), some gave a cursory glance and hurried off the stage, while others seemed disappointed that the actual spectacle of the cervix was not, somehow, more exciting (129). Where was the "live sex show" that Jesse Helms had promised? Finally, in a reading that closely resembles my own analysis of the PC A, Bell interprets

Sprinkle's piece as essentially transforming her from an erotic object, a mere "pussy", into an erotic subject, "Annie": "Objectifying eroticism is stripped away and in its place is eroticism of the whole female sexual organ that belongs to the subject: Annie" (152).

This wide range of reactions—entitlement, resistance, reverence, excitement, fear,

69 gratitude, disappointment, and empowerment—again underscores Sprinkle's assertion that she is whatever her clients want her to be. As spectators gaze into Sprinkle's body, they see whatever they want to see; to draw on Irigaray's etymological play on the word

"speculum", spectators look deep inside Annie Sprinkle, at her "clean and shiny" cervix, and ultimately see themselves reflected back.

The instability and slipperiness of Sprinkle's work means that it cannot entirely unravel dominant cultural discourses of the female body; nor, as I argue above, does

Sprinkle really wish to do so, having built the early stages of her career on servicing the male spectator's gaze in one form or another. The political and educational value of her performance is also limited by its instabilities; the show ultimately cannot fully function as both an entertaining autobiographical piece delivered by Sprinkle's wide-eyed, kittenish persona and as a serious spectacle of female empowerment and a self-help health intervention. Sprinkle's unwillingness to demonstrate any anger or to be confrontational in her performance keeps her tone playful and makes the feminist politics of the piece read more as airy suggestion than imperative. While numerous feminist critics are understandably inclined to champion the PCA for demystifying the female body, I hesitate to follow suit since the performance can so easily be shaped to correspond to the (particularly male) spectator's values and worldview. Further research is warranted to identify a mode of performance that is more explicitly feminist and that can aggressively challenge a position of entitled spectatorship without alienating its audience completely; while Sprinkle's exploration of sexuality and the female body might be more audience-friendly than the work of her performance art predecessors, her accessibility comes at the expense of some of the more subversive potential of her work.

70 What Sprinkle does successfully manage throughout the myriad readings of her

performance is to uncover that which is normally kept hidden, and to insist that fear and

disgust can be conquered through a deliberate and thoughtful encounter with the abject,

whether that abjection represents the sex worker's "defiled" body or the female body in

general. Despite its complications and ambivalences, the "Public Cervix Announcement"

is an insistent reminder that sex workers—and all women—are staring back at their

onlookers as people and not simply as body parts.

Fost-Post-Porn

Sprinkle stopped showing her cervix onstage in 1996, but the "Public Cervix

Announcement" remains her best-known act. In the years since the Post-Porn shows,

Sprinkle has continued to perform multi-media "herstories" of her life as a sex worker

and of her evolving work in the pornographic film industry in particular. She also

continues to give workshops, produce instructional videos, and lecture in more informal,

interactive settings. Most recently, Sprinkle has devoted her time to the Love Art

Laboratory, an artistic exploration of her romantic relationship with her partner Elizabeth

Stephens. Since 2005, the couple has publicly performed five of an intended seven yearly wedding ceremonies, one of which was a legal same-sex marriage performed in Calgary in 2007. At the outset of the project, Sprinkle was also diagnosed with breast cancer, and her treatments and recovery are documented as part of the art project, with both Sprinkle and Stephens reflecting on the ways in which illness strengthened their commitment to one another.

71 The work taken up by Sprinkle and her contemporaries has informed a new

generation of sex workers who produce visual and performance art that reflects on their

experiences as well. The most prominent example is the Sex Workers' Art Show, an

annual traveling cabaret-style show that features "girls, boys, and transpeople who work

or have worked as prostitutes, dancers, peep show performers, phone sex operators, [and]

dominatrixes" (Vogel 496). The show, which celebrated its eleventh year in 2009, is an

attempt to bring multiple voices and experiences to the identity of the sex worker: "the

performances offer a wide range of perspectives on sex work, from celebration of

prostitutes' rights and sex-positivity to views from the darker side of the industry [...] It

smashes traditional stereotypes and moves beyond 'positive' and 'negative' into a fuller

articulation of the complicated ways sex workers experience their jobs and their lives"

(sexworkersartshow.com). While it is difficult to imagine that any one performance will be able to capture the public's attention to the same extent as the "Public Cervix

Announcement", projects such as the Sex Workers' Art Show promise to bring a level of nuance and a more complex story to the reflections on sex work that Sprinkle shared in her early performances.

72 Chapter 3. "Born on the First, Second AND Third of August!": Discourses of Fatness in Katy Dierlam's Helen Melon at the Sideshow

I feel my spine tingle and my heart leap as I relive the wonder of seeing for the

first time my most private nightmares on public display out there.

Leslie Fiedler, Freaks: Myths and Images of the Secret Self (22)

You know, honey, everyone laughs at you now. Don't you think it would be a

good idea to make them pay for their fun?

Jolly Pearl Stanley, qtd in Geyer,

Diet or Die: The Dolly Dimples Weight Reducing Plan (102)

Katy Dierlam performed as a Fat Lady in Helen Melon at the Sideshow, which was part

of the Coney Island Circus Sideshow in the summer of 1992. The play offers a number of insights into the difficulties of staging the fat body, particularly where it converges with the figure of the sideshow freak.1 At five hundred pounds (at least according to

Dierlam's stage persona, Helen Melon), Dierlam's body is one rarely seen on the stage— possibly even rarely seen in public, given her limited mobility—and as such her appearance in the sideshow allows a truly marginalized performer to "take up space" and to construct her own identity before an audience. At the same time, given the overwhelmingly negative attitude towards fat bodies in late capitalist society, Dierlam's performance may not successfully destabilize the fictions of her body's difference so

1 Although the term "freak" is sometimes contested due to its historically pejorative meaning, it has experienced a resurgence in contemporary discourse. In current usage, the term describes the performative construction of corporeal difference rather than the physical properties of bodies themselves. As Robert Bogdan puts it, "being extremely tall is a matter of physiology—being a giant involves something more"(24).

73 much as it simply exhibits that difference before the audience's gaze. While my previous chapter explored the intermingling of disgust and desire in Annie Sprinkle's self- described "post-porn modernist" performances, the following pages consider the implications of a performing body that is culturally positioned as categorically disgusting, its desirability conceivable only as an expression of sexual deviance. While Sprinkle's body-on-display elicits excitement and pleasure for some members of her audience,

Dierlam is poised to encounter a more hostile and resistant group of spectators. Given that fat is inscribed with its own set of cultural meanings, many of them circulating around the abject, the stigmatized, and the disgusting, the question arises how a fat performer can take the stage without sacrificing her agency in some way, especially within the deeply ambivalent context of the freak performance. Fat itself, as a highly visible sign of corporeal difference, produces meaning above and beyond the identity constructed by the performer, functioning, as Kuppers puts it, as "the master sign that determines the body and rules all discourses" ("Fatties" 282). This chapter outlines some of the unique approaches Dierlam takes to performing her own body—and her own identity—in Helen Melon, in order to suggest an alternate reading of fat to her spectators.

1 also signal the ethical questions that arise in the intersections between bodies, performance, and discourses of difference in order to ask whether Dierlam is always in control of her performance or whether she risks potential harm as a result of her exhibition. In the final section, I read Helen Melon as a work of camp in order to explore

2 That the fat body is even more marginalized than the sex worker's body becomes clear when one imagines Dierlam performing the "Public Cervix Announcement" rather than Sprinkle; such a spectacle of difference is practically unthinkable since Dierlam's entire body is socially coded as pathological. Interestingly enough, Dierlam earned part of her income as a phone sex operator; presumably her body size and her lack of mobility limited her options for engaging in sex work just as they limited Dierlam's range of theatrical roles.

74 the extent to which exaggeration, artifice, and play might work to destabilize cultural

constructions of fat.

What is Fat?

Fundamental to an understanding of the anxieties generated by Dierlam's

performance is a brief overview of the ideology of fat. Fat is currently constructed as a

feature of the non-normative body in a curiously insistent way, given that large bodies are

increasingly common in North America. While contemporary scientific and medical

discourses situate fatness as a disease of epidemic proportions, the social valuation of fat

as an illness or pathology is neither trans-historical nor universal, and current conceptions

of ideal body size are informed by deeply-ingrained ideological biases in spite of their

frequent claims to scientific objectivity.4 That fatness is not purely a health concern

becomes especially apparent where health is anchored to a particular body size rather

than to the habits of "lifestyle", and larger bodies are encouraged to undertake weight

loss methods that can actually result in illness and disease, such as gastric bypass

surgeries, insufficiently tested drugs, nutritionally deficient diets, and so on. The fat/thin

paradigm is not a purely scientific measurement of healthy and unhealthy bodies, but is

instead produced in the shifting and unstable intersections between medicine, the

insurance industry, the fashion industry, food manufacturing, and diet, fitness and weight

loss programs. In short, while fat bodies sometimes are unhealthy bodies, the concept of

fat generates capital by marketing products and services to the greatest possible number

3 For instance, see the World Health Organization's "Obesity: Preventing and Managing the Global Epidemic." 4 See Gaesser, Campos (Diet Myth), and Oliver, who all argue that body fat is relatively benign, and that "weight problems" have been largely invented by the industries that profit from their treatment.

75 of people regardless of the severity of their "weight problems". A detailed refutation of

the scientific and medical discourse upholding anti-fat rhetoric is beyond the scope of this

chapter; having said that, what I wish to emphasize is that the deeply judgmental,

moralizing undercurrent of that discourse points to a cultural anxiety about fatness that

exists far beyond a concern for public health and longevity, and rests instead on an

individual's ability to successfully consume the right products in the right ways in order

to inhabit the culturally idealized body, which circulates as the standard of the healthy

body.

The language of disability studies helps to elucidate this culturally-based

understanding of fatness. While some fat activists are understandably reluctant to call

fatness a disability (for fear the term suggests that fat people might be less capable of

performing certain tasks than "normal" sized people), I use "disability" to describe the perception of bodily difference rather than One fact of bodily difference. Thomson defines

disability as "the attribution of corporeal deviance—not so much a property of bodies as a

product of cultural rules about what bodies should be or do" {Extraordinary 6). The size-

deviant body is the body that does not—nor can—follow cultural rules delineating the

parameters of a "normal" body. Fatness is often framed as either a treatable medical

condition or a voluntary lifestyle choice, and the resulting assumption that larger bodies

can and should be "normalized" creates hostility towards bodies that do not conform to

cultural ideals. Corpulent bodies, even bodies that are not physically disabled by their

environments, are socially disabled insofar as they face prejudice based on their physical

difference from so-called normal bodies. Thomson and other disability scholars

emphasize that the disabled body is not a defective body that needs to be fixed; what

76 needs to be fixed is the widespread assumption that all bodies are alike. Nevertheless, anxiety is generated by the appearance of these Othered bodies particularly where they highlight the unstable and shifting boundaries separating the disabled body from the culturally idealized body—thereby reminding onlookers that their own corporeal ascendancy is tenuous. Put another way, the fear and disgust directed at the fat body is in fact a manifestation of fear about self-management: What are the boundaries of my body, and how can I prevent myself from spilling over them? How do I prevent myself from becoming that body?

Constructing the Freak

Thomson's understanding of disability provides the framework for this chapter's discussion of the fat body, just as it helps to locate the corporeal difference of the freak's body. She writes that disability is realized when:

[0]ne group is legitimized by possessing valued physical characteristics

and maintains its ascendancy and its self-identity by systematically

imposing the role of cultural or corporeal inferiority on others.

Representation thus simultaneously buttresses an embodied version of

normative identity and shapes a narrative of corporeal difference that

excludes those whose bodies and behaviors do not conform.

(Extraordinary 7)

Such a power structure is clearly discernible in the relationship between spectators and performers in the nineteenth-century freak show. Bodies on display in the freak show represented specimens of racial, ethnic, and corporeal Otherness, their

77 identities partially or wholly invented by a talker whose role was to discursively

transform the unusual into the freakish, thereby drawing in a curious crowd of onlookers

(Bogdan 27). Representations of freakishness thus became a means of bolstering the

audience's self-identity and of confirming its normalcy in comparison to those who were

exhibited on the stage. At the same time, the division between freak and "norm" carried

the added frisson of instability, the threat of slippage; given the physical demands of

nineteenth-century life and the limited scope of medical treatment, a normal body could

quite suddenly and unexpectedly become an abnormal body. Adams claims that part of

the appeal of the freak show came from audience members anxiously wondering just how

different their bodies really were from those of the freaks, and what misfortunes might

occur to render their own bodies a spectacle of difference (7). Freakishness can therefore

be conceived as a means to separate and demarcate physical bodies into clear divisions

between normal and abnormal that might not otherwise be so well defined.

These questions of instability and slippage are fundamental to contemporary

iterations of the freak show, where performers demonstrate the degree to which their

identities are discursive social constructions rather than rigid, essential categories of

corporeal difference that irrevocably separate the freaks from their spectators. By re­

engaging with a performative tradition that created and legitimized corporeal hierarchies, the contemporary freak show attempts to question those hierarchies, to call attention to the oppressive discourses through which bodily difference is understood both within and beyond the sideshow. As Stephens writes:

Sideshows are sites in which norms of the body, its limits and capabilities

are theatricalized and transformed into spectacle, but in which, for this

78 very reason, they can also be effectively contested. Non-normative bodies

are not simply exhibited or put on display on the sideshow stage but are

rather performed as the unstable—indeed destabilizing—product of the

dynamic interrelationship between performer, audience and theatrical

space, in an ongoing process of un/fixing competing ideas about

ab/normal corporeity. (486)

Stephens's description of the postmodern sideshow aptly summarizes what

Dierlam herself tries to accomplish in Helen Melon. The degree to which Dierlam's

performance successfully disrupts cultural ideas about fatness is arguable; however, by

bringing constructions of the fat body, the disabled body, and the freakish body to the

forefront of her performance, Dierlam is able to play an active role in the production of

meanings surrounding her body. Performing as the Fat Lady undoubtedly represents a tremendous emotional risk for Dierlam, since she might be openly ridiculed and verbally

abused by spectators who are not receptive to her performance; at the same time, it

affords her the opportunity to reject the discourses that construct her as physically and mentally ill, and to expose the fear and disgust that underlie contemporary constructions of fatness. In embodying the character of the Fat Lady, one of the dominant cultural stereotypes of the fat female, Dierlam implicitly promises to validate the fictions of the fat body, to account for its deviation from cultural ideals. What ultimately unfolds on the stage, however, is a far more complex, contradictory, and ambivalent portrait of

Dierlam's (semi-fictionalized) life—the simple visual reading of Dierlam's body as excessive is only one of the competing ideas that spectators can read as they interpret the performance's overall meaning.

79 In spite of its troubled history, then, the sideshow suggests a productive site in which to explore what it means to be different; sideshow freaks are performative representations of difference itself. Thomson emphasizes in her theories of disability that corporeal difference has more to do with the representation of bodies than the physical properties of bodies themselves. This by no means suggests that fatness—or any other bodily difference—is a purely discursive fabrication with no basis in material reality, but it does point to some flexibility in the meanings we attach to bodies. Butler's assertion that gender is socially constructed is analogous: Corporeal difference is not simply a fixed, essential feature of the physical body, but is constructed in part through the repetition of performative and discursive acts that, over time, construct what appears to be a seamless identity (see Gender Trouble 141). Both Thomson and Butler's arguments highlight the fundamental significance of the Fat Lady sideshow: Identities are not fixed, but can be played with, exaggerated, and possibly even overturned in performance. Over time an accumulation of such performances might change the ways that Othered bodies and identities are understood.

Coney Island, Redux

A few notes on Coney Island's history5 and on the resurgence of freak sideshows in the area during the mid 1980s can help to give context to Dierlam's performance.

Situated at the southernmost point of Brooklyn, with a beach bordering on the Atlantic

Ocean, Coney Island was a booming resort during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Kasson argues that its location on the fringes of New York meant that the area

5 See Kasson's Amusing the Million and Denson's Coney Island: Lost and Found for more comprehensive histories of the area.

80 offered an air of carnivalesque permissiveness where "visitors were temporarily freed from normative demands" (41). In addition to the beaches and luxury hotels, and to the horse racetracks, casinos, and brothels that vied for tourist dollars, Coney Island had three major amusement parks: Steeplechase, Luna Park, and Dreamland. Substantial communities of freak performers sprung up in and around these amusement parks—

Dennett describes "Lilliputia", a municipality of midgets living in a fully-functional, scaled-down town at the heart of Dreamland (319)—and the existence of a permanent midway also made Coney Island a mandatory stop for touring performers. Coney Island began to decline in popularity after World War II, and when Steeplechase finally closed in 1964 the neighbourhood fell into disrepair, its buildings either abandoned or transformed into public housing.

There have been various attempts to revitalize Coney Island over the last few decades, including the establishment of the Coney Island Circus Sideshow.6 The sideshow opened in 1982 with funding from an NEA grant (Adams 215), which was dropped in the 1990s during the cutbacks I discuss in the previous chapter. The sideshow survived these cuts to its funding, however, and it continues to run each summer as a revival of the traditional ten-in-one; that is, spectators pay one admission to see ten sequential acts on the stage. The rotating cast of contemporary freak performers at the

Circus Sideshow features human displays which push the boundaries of political correctness, among them Matt Fraser, a man with phocomelic arms who performs as

6 Although Coney Island is frequently victim to massive development projects that invariably fall through (including New York's unsuccessful bid for the 2012 Olympics), the revitalization attempts appear to be working for the time being. In addition to the annual Mermaid Parade and to several smaller sideshows that have popped up alongside the Circus Sideshow, the Ringling Bros. Barnum & Bailey circus is in negotiation with the city of New York to begin seasonal performances in the area (Bagli).

81 "Sealboy", an intersex performer who plays a "half-man/half-woman", and a disabled

man with dwarfism who performs as "Koko the Killer Clown" (Stephens 486). While

Adams (215) and Stephens (490) both emphasize that this postmodern freak show tries to

break away from the more objectionable aspects of traditional sideshows, Stephens points

out that the audience nonetheless has a tendency to respond to the works as though they

are part of a conventional nineteenth-century freak show (490), and Adams experiences

revulsion watching Koko's performance when she feels that "some line between

individual agency and exploitation has been crossed" (216). That spectators can largely

"miss the point" of the Circus Sideshows, and that the shows themselves can at times

collapse into the problematic forms of representation of centuries past are aspects of the

freak show that I will discuss further in terms of Dierlam's own performance.

The slightly seedy, faded glory of Coney Island, with its slowly re-emerging

sideshow tradition, formed the backdrop against which Dierlam performed Helen Melon

from April to September of 1992. Her performance took place alongside nine other acts,

including the display of a "totally tattooed man" and a performer who "drives nails

through his tongue" (Martin "Rebrith"). Mazer writes that the Circus Sideshow's artistic

director, Dick Zigun, who had seen Dierlam acting in various productions with the

Ridiculous Theatrical Company (which I discuss later), "made several unsuccessful

attempts to coax Dierlam into the Fat Lady role before she finally, and with

understandable trepidation, accepted his offer and the challenge" (263). Armed with research on historical Fat Ladies and her husband's copy of the Dolly Dimples biography,

Dierlam began constructing Helen Melon at the Sideshow.

82 The fact that Dierlam needed to be persuaded to perform as the Fat Lady is interesting given that her performance frames her exhibition entirely as a personal choice, and by extension suggests that it was also Dierlam's own idea to situate her performing body within the dominant representational framework of the fat female. Also interesting is the fact that Helen Melon seems to have drawn very little critical reflection apart from

Mazer's essay. Reviews of the Circus Sideshow from the summer of 1992 tend to mention Dierlam only in passing as the "fat lady" (Martin "Rebirth") or the "feminist fat lady" (Paran), devoting their attention largely to Zigun himself and to his vision of a revitalized Coney Island. Managers of past sideshows often claimed ownership of their performers,7 and the traces of that ownership persist in the tendency to turn Zigun into the spokesperson for all of "his" Circus Sideshow performers. In the absence of Dierlam's own reflections on Helen Melon, I am largely left to speculate throughout this chapter on what she was trying to accomplish through her performance. The postmodern freak sideshow attempts to be ethical and self-aware, but in some ways—as when performers' voices get lost—it cannot escape its own past. I will return to this idea in order to evaluate the impact of Helen Melon, but first I discuss the contents of the performance itself in order to try to position Dierlam with regards to the work.

Helen Melon Takes the Stage

Bogdan describes the exhibition of fat people in a traditional nineteenth-century freak show context as follows: "The presentation of extremely obese exhibits came

7 P.T. Barnum in particular acquired many of his most famous "human curiosities" by purchasing them from their caretakers, including "What is It?" (William Henry Johnson), a developmentally delayed person billed as the missing link between ape and man, General Tom Thumb (Charles Stratton), a child with dwarfism, and Joice Heth, an elderly slave woman who was exhibited as George Washington's 161 year- old nursemaid (Cook 141; Gerber 51).

83 closest to a purely mocking mode. People who weighed over five hundred pounds took

on such names as 'Tiny Brown', 'Baby Ruth', 'Alpine', 'Jolly Trixie', and 'Dolly

Dimples'. Huge women wore dainty, little girl's outfits, danced the soft-shoe, and

chuckled" (114). Helen Melon initially offers little evidence that the play deviates from

freak shows of the past. At the play's opening, Dierlam, as Helen Melon, appears on

stage dressed in a baby doll costume, the traditional garb of Fat Ladies that infantilizes

the corpulent performer for comic effect (thus neutralizing the sexual threat of a "whole

lotta woman") while also exposing enough flesh to convince audiences that the excessive

body before them is not a hoax. Melon sits with her back to the audience while the voice

of a male talker draws in spectators with the conventional exaggerations of the Fat Lady's

tremendous size, his comments reminiscent of schoolyard taunts: "It takes four men to

hug her and a box car to lug her! She is SO fat she was born on the first, second, AND

third of August!" (Dierlam 210). After this brief introductory bit, Melon turns to face

the audience and delivers her performance as a direct address that is a partially scripted

monologue and partially improvised. By directly addressing and engaging with her

audience, Dierlam disrupts the usual structure of public interactions in which she is

subjected to the stares and whispered comments of others but is unable to speak up.

Q

Thomson refers to this performance technique as "staring back" at the audience, an

alternative to the "stare-and-tell" show that would require Dierlam to simply explain why her body deviates from the norm {Staring Back 337). The stage literally becomes a platform for her to explore how others receive her body in the routine social interactions of daily life, and to respond to the cultural rules that dictate what her body should be and 8 This idea of "staring back" echoes the "counter-gaze" that Schneider identifies in Annie Sprinkle's "Public Cervix Announcement" (55): by acknowledging the gaze, both Dierlam and Sprinkle insist that spectators remain aware of the political implications of looking.

84 do. In one of the opening lines, she encourages the audience to "take a good, long look" at her body since they've paid admission to the show, "This is all here for you, just for today. Five hundred pounds of soft, round, delicious female" (211). By drawing attention to the financial transaction that takes place, Melon reminds her spectators that they look with her permission, that she is (seemingly) in charge of how the event plays out, an implicit assertion of control which she does not usually enjoy in her daily encounters with those whom she does not know as social intimates. While the Fat Lady is expecting the stares (furtive or otherwise) that her body routinely attracts, she will not be silently inscribed with meaning by the audience's gaze but will instead take a primary role in the construction of her identity, thereby asserting her agency as a social subject and not the passive object of stares.

Dierlam's performance is playful but at the same time it is unquestionably confrontational. While she validates the audience's curiosity and allows them to gaze openly at her body, she also "comes out" as a fat woman through her performance (Moon and Sedgwick 305) and refuses to be the silent object of prurient stares. This process does not involve announcing the fact that she is fat—since, unlike sexual preference, fat is constantly visible on the body—but instead requires the fat woman to acknowledge an awareness that her body is fat, to confirm that she sees what others see. "Coming out" as a fat woman is a way of demanding a reading of one's body as something more than excessive or out-of-control. As Moon and Sedgwick argue:

Denomination of oneself as a fat woman is a way in the first place of

making clear to the people around one that their cultural meanings will be,

and will be heard as, assaultive and diminishing to the degree that they are

85 not fat-affirmative. In the second place [...] it is a way of staking one's

claim to insist on, and participate actively in, a renegotiation of the

representational contract between one's body and one's world. (306,

original emphasis)

While the performance never settles on one overarching narrative that can fully

articulate Melon's experience, it plainly rejects the typical jabs directed at her body's

difference:

I've heard it ten thousand times before, so let's get it over with right now.

"Oh my god, look at her!" "Yo, there's your girlfriend, Leroy!" (Into the

mike, miming mockery of herself walking past) "Baboom, baaboom,

baboom, baaboom." "Thar she blows." They yell it out from passing cars

and trucks. Women come up to me like I was public property and say,

"You should be ashamed of yourself." (211-12)

In repeating the abusive comments she endures, Dierlam rejects their ability to define her

body, and she rejects the public act of shaming which dictates that she should pretend not

to hear or understand the jokes made at her expense. This opens up a space for her to put

aside stereotypical reactions to her body and introduce the narratives that she finds

meaningful and interesting.

While Dierlam carefully sets up her resistance to dominant cultural readings of her body at the play's opening, she also performs Melon mainly as an archetype of

fatness: the laughing carnivalesque grotesque, or what Rowe refers to as the "unruly woman" (31). Dierlam as Melon takes up a lot of space, both physically and verbally, rejecting traditional feminine ideals. Rowe describes the unruly woman's body as

86 "excessive or fat, suggesting her unwillingness or inability to control her physical appetites" (31), and this is indeed the narrative offered by Dierlam as Melon, who refuses to absolve herself of responsibility for her size by blaming her fatness on a slow metabolism or big bones: "I weighed five pounds six ounces at birth. And it's not glandular, either. It seldom is" (212). Instead, she attributes her fat body to a lifelong love of food, the description of which is, in itself, excessive: "apples with sugar and butter, strawberry dacquoise, mushrooms in rivers of cream—I adore the basic food groups"

(212). She even threatens to consume the audience, saying "you all look so good out there I could eat you with a big soup spoon" (212), a coy gesture to her equally voracious sexual appetite that is somewhat tempered since, as Dierlam as Melon puts it, "this is a family show. We have standards" (213). Her unwillingness to control her appetite drives a later series of jokes about how she has to be on "constant guard against dwindling"

(213), an allusion to the Fat Ladies of the past who were fed more or less continuously throughout the day to keep their bodies as large as possible.

The other dominant—and competing—narrative of Helen Melon is the pseudo- confessional current that runs through the play, which appears from the very first line,

"Hi, there. I'm Helen Melon, and I am fat" (211), which evokes the stereotype of the self- help group. While the figure of the unruly woman places Dierlam as Melon firmly within the conventions of a traditional Fat Lady sideshow, the pseudo-confessional mode woven throughout the piece corresponds more closely with the postmodern discourses of contemporary freak shows, as it provides glimpses of the "real" woman behind the freak.

In some sense the show becomes Melon's (or perhaps Dierlam's) life story in brief, an account of how she goes from a childhood spent stealing change from her mother's purse

87 for the ice cream truck (212) to joining the ranks of sideshow Fat Ladies throughout

history. This aspect of the show is clearly indebted to Diet or Die: The Dolly Dimples

Weight Reducing Plan,9 Celesta "Dolly Dimples" Geyer's similar account of growing up

to become a world-famous Fat Lady. Dierlam as Melon refers to Dolly Dimples a number

of times in her monologue: "My husband read Dolly's book when he was ten years old,

and—get this—he fell in love with her 'before' pictures!" (212). The combination of

theatricality and biography complicates the discourse of this piece; it's never clear if the

speaker is Dierlam or her fictionalized persona, or if the play shifts between the two,

between the real person—the real body—and the theatricalized representation. Adams

identifies freaks as "creatures who lurk in the unsteady seams where corporeal matter

meets with fantasy, drama, and promotional hype" (6); this shifting uncertainty of the

freak performance allows Dierlam to introduce numerous narratives of the fat body, to

embody and discard various identities, and ultimately to reveal a rich life beyond (but not

in spite of) her immediate physical appearance. Helen Melon shifts continuously between

carnival and confession, between the joyous "appetite outlaw with wild, wild ways and a

baaaaad attitude" (212) and the woman who tells her audience with a sigh that it's hard to

be fat because "everyone is out to reform you" (213). This continuous shift between

exaggerated performance and private confidences helps to reveal the extent to which fat

identities are created through language—that the same body on the stage can change

characterizations so drastically from one moment to the next indicates that the concept of

fat is about more than a visible difference in body size.

9 Also known in another edition as The World's Greatest Diet, a book devoted far more to Geyer's biography than either title suggests. While Geyer ultimately dieted her approximately five hundred and fifty pound body down to one hundred and twenty two pounds (subsiding on an alarming eight hundred calories per day), only the last thirty pages of her biography are devoted to this period in her life.

88 Overall, the confessional mode of the piece appears to be more real or authentic

than the characterization of the unruly woman, given its departure from the narratives of

the traditional Fat Lady sideshow, and Dierlam's play suggests this particular reading of

her body is closer to the truth of her actual experiences. Even though the play

continuously underscores the difference between the audience and Melon (a difference

that is at least physically undeniable, given the performer's size), the details of the

persona's childhood and her domestic life diminish that difference, and in a sense even

normalize her as daughter and wife, a woman with family values.10 In her final moments

on the stage, Melon even reminds the audience that they're perhaps not so different from

her when they revel in the pleasures that food can bring, particularly when they indulge in

the foods forbidden to dieters everywhere:

And when you leave, walk around the fair and help yourself to the spun

sugar candy, giant hot dogs with mustard and sauerkraut, honey-coated

roasted peanuts, chocolate fudge ice cream, and an extra large helping of

those crispy deep-fried potatoes. Enjoy your lives. {Mae Westish) But save

a morsel for me. (213)

What does separate Melon from her audience is that at five hundred pounds her body fat

reads as a visible sign of the pleasure she derives from eating (and presumably, as an

"unruly woman", from sex). Bordo writes that life in a consumer capitalist society is a

constant struggle to negotiate between the desires created by the marketplace and the

social pressure to mask overindulgence (199); Dierlam's play is a reminder that everyone

struggles to find a balance between having a "normal" body and enjoying the pleasures

10 Mary Douglas argues in Purity and Danger that the unbounded body is a threat to social order; Melon might diffuse some of this anxiety in her performance as she claims to share the audience's family values.

89 that life has to offer. Why should bodies be punished for failing to negotiate the

competing desires generated by capitalism? Helen Melon certainly suggests that there is

an inhabitable identity beyond the vigilant discipline required by most in the West to

maintain a thin, fit body; Dierlam as Melon opts out of the world that would dwindle her

body. She has decided to be fat (Mazer 264), to indulge in the pleasures of life, and she

refuses to apologize or to render herself invisible. Thus, while Helen Melon never denies

the physical difference of the body on stage, the play does reject the notion that a larger

body is in any way inferior to a smaller body. Size, here, is a matter of choice, not a

means by which to categorize and assign value to various bodies.

Will the Real Katy Dierlam Please Stand Up?

In spite of these important issues, this performance presents some challenges to

interpretation. Ultimately, Dierlam's decision to couch her personal story in the context

of the Fat Lady sideshow appears to create a considerable contradiction. Can the audience

be expected to look beyond the material reality of the body when the play is structured precisely as a spectacle of bodily difference? Where is the "real" Katy Dierlam in this performance?11 Which parts of the show are serious and which parts are a playful send- up? Is this story exclusively Dierlam's or can the role be played by any fat woman? The competing discourses of this play resist any definitive reading of Dierlam's body at all. Is the fat body thus unknowable? By the play's end the only certainty is the challenge of finding the right language to adequately convey Dierlam's experiences without lapsing into well-worn stereotypes. For a performance that seems at least superficially concerned

11 For a similar discussion, see Mark Fortier's thoughts on the work of Spalding Grey in Theory/Theatre 62-65.

90 with retheorizing cultural conceptions of fat, this instability is in danger of further marginalizing the fat body by underscoring how difficult it is to dismantle anti-fat rhetoric, particularly on the stage. At points the show also seems somewhat dishonest in its portrayal of life as a fat woman; while Dierlam undoubtedly does take great joy in some aspects of her life, she only gestures towards the verbal abuse and emotional difficulties that come with being considered "morbidly obese". She also completely omits a discussion of how her mobility or health are affected by her size, although they undoubtedly are; two years after her performance as Helen Melon, in an interview with

Bob Morris, Dierlam confessed that her New Year's resolution was to diet since her size was preventing her from engaging in everyday activities: "At this point, I'm so big I can't do any chores, like shopping, so [my husband] would like me to lose some weight"

("Enormity"). While Dierlam's personal and biographical revelations suggest that the play is a confidential peek into the life of a five hundred pound woman, the very trappings of the freak show demand a reading of her performance as show business, an exaggerated, fabricated version of Dierlam's identity that turns her from a fat lady into a

Fat Lady and glosses over the less agreeable aspects of her everyday life.

Further problems arise with regards to the meanings and practices of the freak show itself, which fell largely out of public favour in its traditional form because of the ethical issues raised by the exhibition of human difference for financial gain (Adams

211). Bogdan claims that freak performers were not exploited because they often played a key role in the construction of their characters and the terms of their performance.

Bogdan's argument, according to Gerber, aims to "empower disabled people by establishing their agency and removing them from the category of victims. As he has

91 said, too many people wish, patronizingly, to speak for the disabled and not allow them to have their own voice" (39). Gerber counters Bogdan, however, by pointing out that the moral crux of the freak show does not hinge on the performer's consent: "If an individual consents, by virtue of what appears to be acts of free choice, to being degraded, exploited, or oppressed, does the act of consent end the moral problem that his or her situation seems to constitute?" (38). While contemporary freak performers have more control than ever over the terms of their performances—especially, as I suggested earlier, since their exhibitions are not necessarily financially profitable for another individual acting as manager—they nevertheless face the same types of questions we might direct, for instance, to sex workers: is this a voluntary choice made from a "significant range of meaningful choices" (Gerber 42) or is it a choice that arises out of desperation, a lack of security, or an absence of viable alternatives? Gerber problematizes the perception that willful participation necessarily precludes exploitation, pointing out that those who agreed to perform in traditional freak shows often perceived themselves as having limited employment options, and often felt they may as well make a profit from the public's incessant gaze at their bodies (47). As an excessively large performer with compromised mobility, Dierlam is severely constrained by the number of roles available to her on the stage; possibly she cannot perform in any role without performing freakishness. Given that most roles available to performers, whether male or female, require some measure of mobility, Dierlam's suitability to play most roles within the canon of dramatic literature is limited. Should she give up her career as an actor if it means protecting her emotional wellness, given that when she was cast, she was often consigned to roles where she verged on being a living element of the scenic design rather than an actor as

92 conventionally understood? How can Dierlam claim agency as a subject when her body is read within dominant cultural constructions as disgusting, shameful, and out of control regardless of what she does or says on the stage? In choosing to trade the furtive looks she receives in public for the candidly open gaze of a paying audience, Dierlam raises deeply problematic questions about the extent to which she participates in her own exploitation.

Dierlam became particularly embroiled in debates about agency and exploitation through her work with Charles Ludlam's Ridiculous Theatrical Company (see Kaufman,

422-24). Reviewers who attended these performances invariably mentioned her size: over a ten-year period, the New York Times theatre reviews alone refer to Dierlam as

"voluminous" (Rich "Medea"), "enormous" (Rich "Legacy"), and "lumbering around"

(Morris "Enormity"), as well as "the weightiest person performing on a New York stage"

(Gussow "Fervid"). Gussow even includes an anecdote about Dierlam nearly crouching down on stage before Ethyl Eichelberger warns her—breaking character in front of the audience—not to kneel or she'd never be able to get up ("Fervid"). Interestingly, reviewer Bob Morris saw another side of Dierlam when he went to visit her backstage after a show and discovered that she was quite graceful and attractive in person

("Enormity"). Morris's surprise at meeting the "real" Dierlam strongly suggests that her size and her disability were somehow exaggerated or amplified by her appearances on the stage.

Dierlam's size-^and her vast physical difference from other actors on the stage— raises the question of whether Ludlam's productions exploited and objectified her (often nude) body by amplifying its grotesqueness for the audience. Critics were particularly

93 \ offended by Dierlam's role as the leprous General Hanno in a 1986 production of

Salammbo, which Roemer describes at length in Charles Ludlam and the Ridiculous

Theatrical Company:

The sight of this massively overweight, half-naked body sitting on the

stage, his/her body covered with oozing sores and a bloody bandage

covering the stump on his right arm where a hand should be, was startling.

The actress wore a bald cap and thick, bushy eyebrows and was swathed

in what could best be described as extra-extra large diapers. She was

surrounded by the musclemen, fanning her and feeding her flamingo lips

and peacock tongues. At one point in the scene, her other hand falls off

and she nonchalantly tosses it over her shoulder as she continues

decadently stuffing her face. (151)

Roemer goes on to state that negative reviews of this performance were rooted in fat phobia and a resistance to the visual challenge posed by Dierlam's exposure of her non- normative body (151-52). While this may be the case, the excessive grotesqueness of this performance undoubtedly also had critics and audiences considering the ethical implications of their own spectator positions—that is, their reactions, like those of Fuchs and Schechner as they watched Sprinkle's performance, and Adams as she watched Koko the Killer Clown (216), were driven particularly by a rejection of their perceived complicity in Dierlam's exploitation. Ludlam's work is generally situated as camp

(Senelick 427-32) and might thus be interpreted as "good because it's awful" (Sontag

65), which I will address later in the chapter; without an insider's knowing wink, though,

94 Salammbo would undoubtedly seem in poor taste and would raise concerns about the vulnerability of its performers.

Dierlam herself rejected the notion that this or any of her other performances were exploitative. She was quick to spring to Ludlam's defence when the Village Voice's Erika

Munk suggested the director was a mean-spirited misogynist for his use of Dierlam on the stage. Dierlam insisted that her participation in Salammbo was her own choice, stating, "There is no one to blame but myself. I asked to play this role." She went on to suggest that Munk was imposing her own ideas about how women should look on the performance, and assured the Voice's readers that "fat is not so horrible as Erika Munk thinks it is" (qtd. Kaufman 423). In spite of Dierlam's assurances, the fact remains that her performances can be justifiably read as exploitative, and in Helen Melon, as with

Ludlam's plays, the ethical uneasiness of the traditional freak show looms over the performance. Why does the audience pay money to come in for a look at the Fat Lady?

Are there spectators who just come in to stare and jeer, to feel disgusted by her appearance, but leave failing to reflect on their attitudes to, and curiosity in, the spectacle of freakishness? Are audiences there to bolster their own sense of normalcy, "bound together by their purchased assurance that they [are] not freaks" (Thomson, Freakery

10)? Is Dierlam always in control? Dierlam's celebration of her body in this performance is troubled by the possibility that she is degraded in some way by appearing onstage as a freak, particularly on Coney Island—an area which is, as I mentioned earlier, steeped in the history of an oppressive tradition; ultimately, Dierlam as Melon may not have full control of the terms of her exhibition or the ways in which her body is perceived.

95 Along similar lines, Dierlam creates deeply complicated and competing discourses surrounding the sexual desirability of her body. This problem arises in part from the eroticism encoded into any display of the female body, but in this performance that eroticism is encouraged by Dierlam as Melon, who shakes her breasts and buttocks and touches her body, calling it "delicious" (211). Like Sprinkle, Dierlam is comfortable with a form of self-staging that potentially sexualizes her body. She offers Melon up as a fantasy object and encourages spectators to get their money's worth. The audience—or at least some of its members—may very well find Melon sexually desirable: "If our culture demands svelte, toned, bulgeless bodies, does it immediately follow that everyone's sexual preferences fall obediently into line?" (Kipnis 95). At the same time, Dierlam performs her sexuality teasingly, in a way that mocks pay-per-view displays of the normative female body such as the striptease; she mines the comedy of performing sexiness with a conventionally wrcsexy body. Since the audience has paid to see Melon's body (or has at least paid admission to see some bodies in the ten-in-one sideshow, if not

Melon's specifically), the act of watching as she touches herself and shakes and sings can be construed as a sort of pornographic gaze, an exchange of money for visual pleasure.

Again, Dierlam's work resembles Sprinkle's in that she positions her relationship to spectators as a sort of transaction between hooker and John. As I mention above, the urge to eat the audience up "with a big soup spoon" (212) also encourages an eroticized gaze as it provides further evidence of an unruly and monstrous sexual appetite. While

Sprinkle reassures male spectators that there are no teeth inside her vagina, thereby assuaging the fear of devouring, destructive female sexuality, Dierlam's performance hints at the possibility—both titillating and terrifying—that her genitals are as insatiable

96 as her mouth. In constructing herself as a transgressive figure, Melon implies that sexual

desire for her body would be equally transgressive. Concurrently, Melon brings in details

of her happy marriage (thus making her desirability conceivable within a domestic

relationship) and shares her hopes that her husband's initial attraction was not based on

sexual deviance: "See, there are these chubby chasers and I didn't want to be anyone's

fetish" (213).12 How is the audience meant to read these conflicting ideas? Once again,

the interplay between the confessional and the carnivalesque creates a discursive bind.

Melon is at once available and unavailable, sexy and disgusting, healthy and monstrous

in her appetite. She suggests on the one hand that she is pleased with her body and finds

pleasure in her marital relations, while at the same time she implies that her sexuality is

insatiable, excessive, and devouring, thus relegating fat desire to the realm of sexual

perversion.

Fat Camp

As this chapter outlines the parameters of Dierlam's discursively difficult body, it

becomes increasingly apparent that queer performance theory might offer a lens through,

which to gain an understanding of Dierlam's performance. Dierlam's work with Charles

Ludlam and Ethyl Eichelberger exposed her to queer performances, to camp, and to

performers who were working to "renegotiate the representational contract" between their

bodies and the world (Moon and Sedgwick 306). Helen Melon similarly challenges

traditional notions of gender, desire, and even performance itself. Negative cultural

12 This is further complicated by the fact that Dierlam's real-life husband, Ned Sonntag, is a cartoonist who draws hyper-sexualized images of very large women for various fat admirer publications. Is Dierlam arguing that Sonntag's cartoons are not fetishistic? Is she trying to normalize fat desire? Is she specifically resisting the terms of a stereotypical feeder/gainer relationship? Or is Melon describing an entirely fictional husband here?

97 constructions of the queer body are analogous to those of the fat body in a striking

number of ways: with "homosexuality" constructed as a mental illness well into

contemporary discourse, the queer lifestyle framed as decadent and, particularly in the

early days of HIV/AIDS, also stigmatized as a source of disease (Landau-Stanton and

Clements 5), and with queer sexuality constructed as deviant desire, there are numerous

parallels between the struggles to represent the queer body and the fat body outside of

oppressive dominant discourses.

Additionally, the theoretical foundations of both disability and freak shows are

connected in fundamental ways to questions concerning how queer identities are created,

negotiated, and mediated. Central to all of these disciplines in current discourse is the

poststructuralist, anti-essentialist argument that identity is socially constructed and that

the "normal" or "natural" body is a cultural fabrication that has no objective reality. In

The Politics and Poetics of Camp, Meyer draws on Butler to define "queer" within a

social constructionist framework, rather than as a homogenous identity unified by non-

heterosexual desire, stating that queerness is "a concept of the Self as performative,

improvisational, discontinuous, and processually constituted by stylized acts" (3).

Situating Dierlam's identity within this same context strikes me as a particularly

constructive way to unravel some of the complex discourses of Helen Melon. As I have

explored throughout this chapter, performance can offer some tactics to break apart

essentialist understandings of the fat self—and the queer self—by reminding audiences that identities are not fixed, static, objective realities which language must attempt to

13For more on the convergence of the queer body and the fat body, see Moon and Sedgwick's discussion of Divine and the work of John Waters in "Divinity: A Dossier, a Performance Piece, a Little-Understood Emotion". As an interesting aside, Dierlam was asked to perform in a role intended as an homage to Divine in Eichelberger's 1988 production of Fiasco (Gussow "Fervid").

98 describe, but are in fact constructed through language itself, and as such, "speaking builds subjects" (LeBesco, Revolting 4). As a camp performance, Helen Melon ultimately asks what kinds of speech/performance/repetition can adequately construct an inhabitable identity for the fat subject.

The terms "queer" and "camp" are not synonymous, but they are intimately related and somewhat difficult to disentangle. While theorists are divided on the question of whether camp is queer by definition, camp's devotion to denaturalization, subversion, and playfulness has made it a primary mode for expressing queer identities in performance. A number of theorists would dispute my positioning Helen Melon as camp on the grounds that Dierlam does not identify as a lesbian or transgendered person (see

Morrill 112-13; Meyer 3; Case 287-88). Dierlam's work arguably did take place in a queer context, however, given her theatrical background and sustained connection as a performer in Ludlam's work, which—given its pastiche of high and low cultural allusions, its exaggerated, over-the-top performance style, and its interest in cross- dressing and drag—is indisputably camp. Furthermore, while Meyer bases his argument that camp is always queer on the assertion that "un-queer appropriations interpret Camp within the context of compulsory reproductive heterosexuality" (1), even if Dierlam is categorically defined as "un-queer" on the basis of her heterosexual marriage, her shifting identity does not even remotely read as "compulsory reproductive heterosexuality".

Given her various transgressive identities, both fictive and real—excessively fat, grotesque, monstrously feminine, child-free, a sex worker, quite possibly participating in a sexually deviant, fetishistic relationship—Dierlam is not, in spite of what she attributes to Melon, part of the family show. Dierlam is certainly queer in the sense argued by

99 Robertson: "'queer' refers to a variety of discourses that have grown up in opposition to or at variance with the dominant, straight, symbolic order. This sense of queerness includes gay-and-lesbian specific positions as well as non-gay and non-lesbian ones"

(271). If nothing else, Dierlam's body, in failing to measure up to what Bordo terms the

"tightly managed self'(189-91), embodies a resistance to the normalizing configurations of the heterosexual feminine body.

In any case, whether Dierlam is queer enough to be campy (and the wider debates over whether "real" camp is exclusively gay and lesbian) overlooks a more critical question: how does reading Helen Melon as a work of camp open up the performance in new ways? A perceptual shift takes place when Dierlam's work is framed within the context of theatricality, artifice, and play, rather than as a work of activism which seeks to remove fat bodies from the realm of the abject. Contemporary efforts to dismantle social anxieties about fatness tend to focus on political activism, which, in order to effectively make demands for the recognition and rights of fat subjects, must to a certain extent articulate a unified (essential) Fat Experience. Dierlam's identity is particularly complicated in Helen Melon since her performance never seems to construct one single, unified subject; throughout the duration of the play her identity shifts and changes, asserts and then contradicts, discloses and then conceals, the complexities of her experience.

These shifts I have signaled through my conscious identification of the persona in Helen

Melon as "Dierlam as Melon". Put another way, she not only avoids asserting a Fat

Experience beyond dominant cultural discourses, but she also fails to articulate a fixed version of her own experience. Dierlam's approach to performing fatness as multi-faceted and contradictory is difficult because it does not celebrate the fat body singularly and

100 without contradiction, does not offer its raison d'etre, and does not pin down a specific set of actions that will remove Dierlam's identity from the abject or the stigmatized.

While Dierlam's very personal emotional risks in performing this role and her "staring back" at the audience initially suggest that the work be read as an expression of fat activism, this assumption makes the ambivalence of the play and its intertwining of the confessional and the carnivalesque deeply problematic, as I argue earlier. From the perspective of fat activism, this performance is more or less a failure, except to the extent that it makes visible the most paradoxically invisible of bodies.

On the other hand, within a queer reading of Dierlam's work, Helen Melon remains deeply (if implicitly) political even as it engages in the "representational excess"

(Cleto 3) that characterizes camp performances. A performance explicitly dedicated to fat activism might alienate spectators, particularly if that activism manifested itself within a sideshow at Coney Island, which "draws crowds by promising lurid spectacles, not critiques of patriarchy, capitalism, or the sex-gender system" (Adams 223). Helen Melon functions in a more playful, insidious way to unravel the meanings attached to Dierlam's body, and as such it might reach audience members who would otherwise be hostile to the social critiques that are nonetheless present beneath the "lurid spectacle" of the five hundred pound woman on the stage. While the play is openly critical of social constructions of fat, as a camp performance it is not bound by the need to dismantle those constructions one by one and replace them with fat-positive discourse.

While the term "camp" is notoriously resistant to definition and is a site of critical debate, the general terms laid out by Bergman serve as a helpful overview as they shadow, in rather interesting ways, the content of Helen Melon itself:

101 First, everyone agrees that camp is a style (whether of objects or the way

objects are perceived is debated) that favors "exaggeration", "artifice",

and "extremity". Second, camp exists in a tension with popular culture,

commercial culture, or consumerist culture. Third, the person who can

recognize camp, or see things as campy, or who can camp is a person

outside the cultural mainstream. Fourth, camp is affiliated with

homosexual culture, or at least with a self-conscious eroticism that throws

into question the naturalization of desire. (4-5)

On the basis of Bergman's parameters, Dierlam is clearly a camp performer: a woman whose body places her outside the mainstream, and whose work asserts an inhabitable identity beyond the idealized feminine body peddled by popular, commercial, and consumerist culture. Her performance exaggerates the fat body, turns it into an unruly and disobedient spectacle of difference even as it asserts its sameness to the bodies of her audience members. While Dierlam's work isn't precisely "homosexual", she does raise the question of what types of desire are "natural" when she displays herself before the gaze of a paying audience, shakes her body, flirts, and coyly refers to her active sex life. LeBesco points out that fat activists frequently limit themselves by participating in the very rhetoric used to subjugate their bodies—particularly by engaging in arguments that insist on their bodies' health and the naturalness of fat (Revolting 115). Dierlam instead makes her body so unnatural that its characterization becomes ridiculous, theatricalized, and ultimately impossible: "You look awfully sweet. Could I have you for dinner tonight? Watch out! (A mock lunge) The fat lady will get you!" (212). Melon's

102 playful suggestion that her appetite extends to cannibalism raises the question of what

other assumptions and fears about fat bodies have no basis in reality.

These features of Dierlam's performance might be self-evident, but placing them within a camp context helps to situate the performance's ambivalence and its internal contradictions. The tension the play maintains between Melon and the "real" actor who portrays her, which I identified earlier as a problematic aspect of the performance, can be seen within a camp context as yet another way to dismantle essentialism. As Dollimore writes, camp's inversions create a "recognition that what seemed like mimetic realism is actually an effect of convention, genre, form, or some other kind of artifice" (225). Camp performances constantly assert and then contradict, moving between "the polarities of seriousness and play, cynicism and affection, (self) mockery and (self) celebration"

(Cleto 25). The shifting, unstable discursive ground can thus be viewed not as a weakness of the play but as a particular aesthetic choice; the difficulty of pinning down a precise identity for the fat body is a way of expressing a multiplicity of performative meanings— while simultaneously revealing the extent to which the performer and audience can negotiate those meanings for themselves. There is no "real" Katy Dierlam outside the language she uses to present herself, whether that language has the trappings of authenticity or whether it is utterly exaggerated. Again, this does not mean that the fat body has no material reality, but rather that the cultural meanings attached to that material reality are themselves not fixed or static.

Nonetheless, while placing Dierlam's work within the context of a camp performance opens the text up to readings of parody and play and accounts for its resistance to solely fat-positive constructions, camp performances themselves can be

103 problematic. While Dierlam makes a conscious decision to work within the confines of the freak show in order to play with and subvert its conventions, she perhaps relies a bit heavily on the audience's sense of irony. As Meyer points out, camp frequently "invokes the specter of dominant ideology within its practice, appearing, in many instances, to actually reinforce the dominant ideology" (Meyer 11). In other words, a camp performance frequently appears to embrace the very same ideology that it works to undermine. Mazer's account of seeing Helen Melon on the stage supports Meyer's assertion: "For myself, every time I see Dierlam perform, I am thrown into a reverie about my own struggles with weight and body, while friends who have accompanied me to her performances insist on beginning diets (together) immediately" (271). What exactly distinguishes self-conscious parody from a reaffirmation of the status quo, when on the surface the two appear to be the same? How can Dierlam's performance encourage the audience to read her work as camp, against dominant (and thus more familiar, more tempting) readings of her show as a spectacle of difference? Mazer's comments inadvertently reveal one of camp's serious limitations—and one of the serious limitations of the revolting feminist performances I discuss throughout this dissertation: In order for irony to be successfully produced within a performance, the performer and the spectator need to share the same discourse community, which Hutcheon defines as a "complex configuration of shared knowledge, beliefs, values, and communicative strategies" (91).

Hutcheon emphasizes that those who do not "get" the irony aren't simply failing to interpret a performance correctly; they may overlook or resist certain meanings, interpreting differently simply because they belong to a different discourse community

(94-5). In a sense, then, the only people who read the irony in a camp performance are the

104 people who are already receptive to its message. Adams describes the camp reception of contemporary sideshows in Utopian terms, as "a mode of spectatorship that combines knowing distance with devoted fandom. Criticism is an integral part of the performance itself, which invites the viewer to become a participant-observer in an encounter no longer invested in drawing firm boundaries between freak and normal" (219). While

Dierlam is always explicit about her performance's dual function as an homage to, and a criticism of, sideshows of the past, the knowing distance and devoted fandom integral to an ironic reading of Dierlam's performance are no guarantee. There is—alarmingly—a perfectly valid way of reading Helen Melon as a straightforward spectacle of a five hundred pound woman exhibiting herself on the stage. Whether the play is about the freak's tremendous difference from "normal" people, or whether it is about the difficulty for all bodies to measure up to normative discourses is ultimately a matter of perception.

Given the predominantly negative social valuations of fat I outline at the beginning of this chapter, it seems likely that the vast majority of the audience will not interpret Helen

Melon as ironic. Dierlam is once again caught in a discursive bind where her ability to control the terms of her exhibition seems doubtful, since the meaning of this and any other performance is ultimately the prerogative of the spectator. How then are we to locate the self-harm than Dierlam potentially engages in by performing as Melon? Is her knowing participation in this performance and her willingness to accept its risks adequate for feminist critics to uncritically celebrate Helen Melon as a transgressive staging of the out-of-bounds body? These questions mirror my reservations about Sprinkle's performance, and I return to them at length in my discussions of Orlan and Kane in the coming chapters.

105 Denouement

On some level, an actor as large as Dierlam is inevitably cast in roles where her

fatness itself becomes the performance, since to ignore her size completely in casting

decisions is to risk the appearance of a visual joke based on the incongruity between the

fat performer's role and cultural expectations of what the fat body can be or do. In the

case of Dierlam, who was morbidly obese (she died in 2006), her size impinged

significantly on her mobility and so, on her ability to secure roles as an actor. At the same

time, to admit such a difficulty in staging the large body suggests that there are only a

few narrow types of characters that "fit" Dierlam, the most obvious of which is the

carnivalesque grotesque. Melon's identity is complex and multi-faceted, but the

overwhelming impression created by her performance is of a jolly, lusty, carnivalesque

figure, a woman with a monstrous appetite whose size can be easily explained away by

an insatiable love of food. As I argued earlier, though, whether that characterization of

the Fat Lady reads as irony ultimately depends on audience reception, and Dierlam's

choice to exhibit her unusual body undoubtedly makes her vulnerable as it mines both her

physical visibility and her cultural invisibility

While I have attempted to map out the various discourses of fatness that Dierlam

engages in Helen Melon, I acknowledge a limitation to this inquiry that opens up avenues

for further research: while this chapter asks what anxieties are generated by an outspoken,

sexually expressive, unapologetic woman, it concurrently asks what anxieties are generated by a body that is a truly extreme example of fatness. Whether Dierlam's reception is the product of normalizing ideals of the feminine body or whether the anxiety she generates stems from a genuine concern for her health and quality of life is ultimately

106 impossible to determine, and as such my discussion of Dierlam reaches a certain barrier

where the cultural distaste for fat becomes inextricable from the undeniable medical

problems that Dierlam experiences as a five hundred pound woman. Would a performer

whose body is culturally considered "overweight" but who has no serious health or

mobility issues garner the same reception on stage? Would she find that a greater variety

of roles are available to her as a performer? Would she be capable of enacting social

change, if she so desired, since audiences might perceive her not-quite-so-extreme body

as more than a "lurid spectacle"?

Fat, it seems, remains a significant barrier to finding roles as an actor. SandhaPs

discussion of the challenges facing disabled actors provides some insight into the

difficulties that fat performers also face, whether they identify as disabled or not. Sandhal

argues that able-bodied actors are often asked to "crip up" (236) to play characters with

disabilities, on the grounds that there are ostensibly not enough professionally trained

disabled actors to choose from during casting.14 A similar trend exists in the number of

actors who are asked to either temporarily gain weight or to don fat suits to play fat

characters. While the fat suit is arguably intended for comedic value in many cases—the

humour arising from the disjunct between a famous actor's real body and their visual appearance as a fat person—it is nonetheless employed in some instances to pad out actors in more serious roles, as it was for the titular character in the Broadway production of Neil LaBute's Fat Pig (Bigsby 166).

14 Most recently, the advocacy group Alliance for Inclusion in the Arts criticized Broadway producer David Richenthal for casting Abigail Breslin (of Little Miss Sunshine fame) as Helen Keller in The Miracle Worker without first auditioning any disabled actors for the role. Richenthal claimed that the decision to cast Breslin was purely economic, since having a star actor would drive ticket sales during a recession (Healy).

107 While able-bodied actors are given disabled roles to play, Sandhal argues that

disabled actors are rarely cast against type:

They are routinely passed over for non-disabled roles because it is

assumed that their impairments will confuse the audience if the

impairment is not explained by the text. After all, audiences are trained by

convention to read disability as metaphor, or meaning-maker, in the play.

If the disability cannot be explained by the script, then the actor's

impairment will be a supposed distraction, or will create meanings

unintended by the playwright or director. (236)

Again, there are striking parallels in Sandhal's argument to the effect produced on the

stage by actors of size whose bodies are incidental rather than pivotal to the meanings of

the play. Dolan argues that the first production of Marsha Norman's 'night, Mother was

ill-received in part due to its reviewers' fat phobic responses to Kathy Bates, whose large

body—by cultural norms "plus-sized", but with a full range of mobility which has

allowed Bates to forge a very successful career in stage and film, and so, realize her

considerable talent as an actor—was conflated with her character's great personal losses

and suicidal depression (30). Dolan situates Kathy Bates's casting in the production as a major reason that Norman's play did not receive the widespread recognition it deserved

(31). Bates's failure to meet cultural expectations of the female body impacted the play's reception to such an extent that critics ultimately remained emotionally detached from its difficult ending:

For 'night, Mother to be a tragedy according to the dominant culture's

criteria, Jessie should have been played by a performer with the body size

108 and appearance of Farrah Fawcett. The death by choice of an

unsuccessful, homely, overweight woman is considered melodrama

because its implications do not resonate enough to be considered tragedy

by the generic male spectator. (33)15

Dolan's discussion of 'night, Mother suggests that even on the less extreme end of the

spectrum, "oversized" performers are constrained by normalizing discourses of body and

gender.

Further research is warranted to explore the ways in which other large performers

find ways to express themselves before an audience, to explore their identities in a meaningful way, and to find a place for themselves beyond the conventions of feminine

attractiveness. Dolan's suggestion that the casting of a fat performer can effectively ruin a play's critical reception provokes a number of vital questions about what sorts of roles are available to marginalized bodies in the performing arts. In recent years, even the opera, which has long held a reputation for featuring performers of size, has felt pressure to cast more conventionally "normal" and "attractive" singers. A highly publicized incident of size discrimination occurred in 2004, when the American soprano Deborah

Voigt claimed that she was replaced in a Covent Garden production when she could not fit into the costume the director felt she should wear ("Svelte Soprano"). Shortly thereafter, Voigt underwent a gastric bypass surgery, a procedure that placed her livelihood at risk because it had the potential to damage her thoracic diaphragm and thus

15Dolan's distinction here between tragedy and melodrama brings to mind the media circus surrounding the death of Anna Nicole Smith in February of 2007. Although in many ways Smith's erratic behaviour and early death are reminiscent of Marilyn Monroe, Smith's extensive weight gain was particularly responsible for turning the former actress/model/P/ay&oy playmate into an object of ridicule in the final years of her life. Much of the media attention Smith generated seems to meet the public's desire for schadenfreude rather than expressing a shared sense of grief at the death of a young celebrity.

109 her ability to sing. Voigt's career appears to have benefited from the publicity caused by her discrimination and from her dramatic weight loss, and she has since played the role she was fired from. Voigt's story has become a cautionary tale for up-and-coming singers: a recent Observer article ran a photo of the soprano at her heaviest weight alongside an article about the remarkable thinness of the rising opera stars featured at the

2009 Salzburg Festival. Australian singer Danielle de Niese offered this explanation for the new crop of svelte performers: "In opera we needed this breath of fresh air. [...] We could not go on being elephants on the stage" ("Slimline Divas").

By contrast, the last two decades have also seen a substantial number of fat activists—fuelled by both anger and joy—willfully representing themselves as "elephants on the stage". Heather MacAllister, Stacy Bias, Marilyn Warm, and Marie Fleischmann, among others, have used performance art, photography, slam poetry, zines, burlesque, synchronized swimming, radical cheerleading, and various acts of civil disobedience to draw attention to the social and political issues facing fat bodies. In the performing arts, fat activism seems to have had the most profound influence on the dance world, with troupes such as Victoria, B.C.'s Big Dance, Cuba's Danza Voluminosa, China's

Overweight Troupe, Russia's Big Ballet and San Francisco's Big Moves and Fat Chance

Belly Dance emphasizing movement and technique over traditional notions of what a dancer's body should look like. While I suggested earlier, drawing on LeBesco

{Revolting), that fat activism (and performances rooted in fat activism) can at times suffer from essentialism and exclusivity, the fat acceptance movement is becoming more polyvocal as it becomes more widespread. The intersections between queer identities and fat identities are a particularly lively site of inquiry at the moment, and the work of

110 activists, academics, and artists in this realm will no doubt generate new approaches to representing fatness on the stage.

What remains uncertain is the status of the body in performances that remain ambivalent about fat embodiment or that deliberately portray fatness as a form of abjection rather than a cause for celebration. Perhaps the work of Nao Bustamante, whose performance art piece America the Beautiful Kupper calls "cringe inducing" ("Fatties"

288), might provide further context for Dierlam's work, while bringing a lesbian-Chicana perspective to the experience of living in a fat body. Bustamante's body is considerably smaller than Dierlam's, but her performances nonetheless situate her own fat as a spectacle of difference, another sign of her body's failure to measure up to the dominant cultural norms of white heterosexual American femininity.

As for Dierlam herself, while Helen Melon cannot single-handedly reframe cultural fictions of fatness, Dierlam's continual shape-shifting (so to speak) does unsettle and deeply complicate those fictions. If, as Kipnis argues, the fat person is a

"transformation waiting to happen, a vast virgin American frontier onto which can be projected the transformation fantasies of the culture at large" (103),16 then Dierlam's most transgressive act by far rests not in her performance itself but in her refusal to play out the culture's transformation fantasies by eradicating her fat. Helen Melon refuses to invest the large body with shame, or to make its desires invisible. LeBesco warns against trying to simply remove fat from categories of the abject, since such actions nevertheless

16 Oprah Winfrey is often celebrated as an example of a successful woman whose body (usually) falls outside of cultural norms; I speculate that her suspended state of "transformation waiting to happen" may be what shields her from public scorn. If Winfrey was unapologetically fat she would no longer be in league with the millions of fans who struggle to lose weight along with her, and she would not generate capital for the vast number of industries and products—many of them promoted on her own show—that exist to treat "weight problems".

Ill sustain the "continued presence of a hierarchy of bodies, with a somewhat different ordering" {Revolting 123). Instead, she suggests that the exploration of identity categories is an end in itself: "In a political climate where the comfort of some is predicated on the silence of others, queer theory encourages us to play with our selves, and to make a joyful noise in the doing" (LeBesco, "Queering" 82). Dierlam's campy performance makes this

"joyful noise"— the question is whether or not her spectators read her multiple, contradictory, ambivalent identities as a theatricalized performance or whether Dierlam simply appears unable to successfully communicate her experiences beyond the familiar terms used to describe the Fat Experience. While Helen Melon ultimately cannot address all the conflicts it brings into play, Dierlam's refusal to let her body stand silently as a sign of failure is of fundamental importance as it reveals an inhabitable identity beyond dominant cultural ideals.

112 Chapter 4. God Has Given You One Face and You Make Yourselves An(Other): Transformations in La reincarnation de Sainte-Orlan

Orlan is not her name. Her face is not her face.

Soon her body will not be her body.

Barbara Rose, "Is it Art?" (82)

There looms, within abjection, one of those violent, dark revolts of being, directed

against a threat that seems to emanate from an exorbitant outside or inside, ejected

beyond the scope of the possible, the tolerable, the thinkable. [...] Apprehensive,

desire turns aside; sickened, it rejects.

Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror (1)

Simone de Beauvoir's familiar dictum that "one is not born a woman, one becomes one" is given new meaning as French artist Orlan undergoes a recurring self-directed surgical transformation of her appearance. Her work, which she refers to as Carnal Art

("Intervention" 318), embodies resistance to the ways in which femininity is produced by the male imaginary in the fine arts, in religious doctrine, and in the operating room.

Orlan's fondness for referring to the body as "obsolete" ("Intervention" 325;

"EXTRActions" 142) points not only to the anti-essentialist framework of her art, but also to her conviction that in the age of technology there are no natural bodies that exist unmediated by science and medicine. Orlan's work anticipates a future in which "bodies will become increasingly insignificant—nothing more than a 'costume' or 'vehicle', something to be changed in our search to 'become who we are'" (Davis, "My Body is my

113 Art" 459). If bodies are to become purely cultural constructions, their material surfaces

altered at will, Orlan's work argues that there are far more imaginative and fulfilling

options for the creation of one's self-designated corporeal identity beyond simply

reproducing and reinforcing conventional notions of the "normal" or "beautiful" body.

Carnal Art is an avant-garde demonstration of the ways in which willful, deliberate, and

continuous acts of self-creation can resist normative constructions of corporeal identity.

Medical technology hasn't quite caught up with Orlan, however, and to situate her

surgical transformations as mere changes of costume is to trivialize the radical nature of

the procedures. While the previous chapters have asked what happens during a

performance that unsettles audiences by exploring corporeal boundaries and identities, it

is difficult to imagine a performance taking up these questions more extremely than

Orlan does in La reincarnation de Sainte-Orlan. The project is conceived as a series of

nine surgical operation/performances with corresponding art installations—eight of

which have been performed to date, spanning from 1990 to 1993. For reasons I discuss

later, it seems unlikely at this stage that the ninth operation, intended to give Orlan the nose of a "pre-Columbian Mayan mask" (Faber 86) will ever take place. Since the beginning of La reincarnation, Orlan has completely transformed her body through extensive liposuction, the reshaping of her eyes, lips, and nose, and implants in her chin, cheeks, and temples.1 Her new face is a composite of Western artworks: her chin taken from Botticelli's Venus, her lips from Moreau's Europa, her eyes from an anonymous

Fontainebleau portrait of Diana, the nose from Gerard's Psyche, and the forehead from

1 Although a number of critics, seemingly beginning with Faber, suggest that Orlan also received breast implants (Faber 86), I suspect this is a misreading of Orlan's commentary about receiving the "largest implants possible" for her anatomy ("Intervention" 323), which actually appears to refer to her silicone- based forehead bumps.

114 Leonardo's Mona Lisa. In a side-by-side comparison, Orlan's individual facial features actually resemble her models quite closely, although Orlan emphasizes that she never intended to mimic the paintings so much as to embody the qualities of their subjects

("Intervention" 319). In fact, Orlan claims to be largely uninterested in the results of her surgeries; instead, her focus is on the surgical spectacle as it unfolds in the operating theatre, and on the ensuing public debate about the status of her modified body.

My previous chapters have argued that Western culture values the classical body, envisioned as whole, self-contained, and orderly, a microcosm for social order itself. It comes as no surprise, then, that Orlan's repeated transformations are met with discomfort, disbelief, and even hostility. Orlan repeatedly violates the perceived sanctity of her body as she is surgically opened and closed again, remade according to her own artistic inclinations in defiance of her "natural" or "God-given" form. She is an (art) object of her own choosing. Significantly, Orlan remains fully conscious during her operations, her pain managed under local anesthetic as she reads aloud from relevant academic theory, gives directions to the surgeons, and answers questions sent into the operating room by her spectators. She also watches herself being operated on, impassively—or sometimes joyfully—taking in the sights that her spectators shrink away from. Orlan likens the vision of her awakened state during surgery to "an autopsied corpse that continues to speak, as if detached from its body" ("Intervention" 321). The figure of the corpse, according to Kristeva, represents the "most sickening of wastes" (3), and Orlan's self-fashioning as a dead body—one who continues to violate boundaries as she talks, reads, and smiles after death—is clearly a spectacle of abjection, intended to provoke disgust in her spectators. Orlan's evocation of the autopsy aligns her artwork

115 with the long tradition of the anatomical gaze at the opened body; at the same time she refuses to perform the role of the "proper" corpse, as she is never a passive subject of the medical gaze or of surgical penetration. In this respect, Orlan's procedures echo Annie

Sprinkle's refusal to perform the role of the "proper" gynecological patient, as Sprinkle uses the speculum to open up her own body and gazes back at her spectators as they examine her "hidden" parts. Also shared with Sprinkle is the insistence on remaining the subject rather than the object of the spectator's gaze: On the operating table, Orlan never becomes the anonymous Everywoman whose body invites detached scientific investigation or an objectifying, sexualized gaze—she is always specifically Orlan, and our gaze is directed at her opened, living, breathing, conscious self.

Kathy Davis argues that the horrified response Orlan's surgical work typically elicits is a deliberate tactic on the part of the artist: "While Orlan begins her performances by apologizing to her audience for causing them pain, this is precisely her intention. As she puts it, art has to be transgressive, disruptive, and unpleasant in order to have a social function" (458). Beyond mere sensationalism, then, or some expression of mental illness that would open her work to critical dismissal, Orlan envisions her surgical performances as a celebratory form of art that can transform the way that we think and talk about embodiment itself. While Orlan chooses to downplay the risks associated with her surgery, and to disavow the pain she experiences during her operations and her recovery,

I argue that these "hidden costs" of her work are critical to an understanding of the horror and revulsion she evokes in her spectators. This chapter takes up the discourses of disgust, pain, and abjection that are woven throughout Orlan's surgical project, considering them in light of Orlan's assertion that her difficult work is an active,

116 deliberate, and rigorous means of self-expression and self-realization. Orlan's project is

deeply invested in dismantling conventional constructions of identity, and as such I

consider her work—and particularly her argument that there is no "natural" body in the

age of technology—alongside Butler's assertion that identity is performative. Orlan's

self-appointment to sainthood is considered within the context of martyrdom, self-

mutilation and ritual in order to further interrogate the discourses of pain in La

reincarnation. The surgeries are then considered specifically as performances for an

audience, and I trace some of the spectators' reactions to Orlan's Artaudian-inspired

staging in order to evaluate the potential for the disgusting to truly alter the discourses of

embodiment. In my final section, I ask whether Orlan's performances might offer some

future directions for feminist work or whether what I perceive as her deeply subversive

treatment of her own body is ultimately too problematic to provide a model for other types of performance.

Disfiguration and Refiguration

Most of the critical attention devoted to Orlan's work focuses on the artist's transformation of her facial features during the 1990s. I emphasize this aspect of her work as well, since it strikes me as far more radical than her liposuction procedures. Like

Eleanor Antin's Carving: A Traditional Sculpture, a 1972 series of photographs that document the artist's body over the course of a month of crash dieting, Orlan's surgical carving of her body is an extreme manifestation of the cultural imperative to maintain a slender body. The work is distinguished by Orlan's insistence that her body tissues be preserved in the manner of saint's relics, which I will address in more detail later; for now, fully clothed and out of an artistic milieu, Orlan's body might simply "pass" as a

117 body that conforms to social norms. The alteration of the artist's face is far more visible

and thus far more consequential. As Favazza points out, the head itself has a special

significance as the "locus of control over the whole body", positioned at its peak and

housing the brain (85). To risk losing control of the head, then, is to risk losing control of

the entire body. Furthermore, Orlan takes a profound risk in deciding to part with her

"natural" face, since facial features are fundamentally linked to identity—particularly, of

course, to the ways in which we are perceived and identified by others, since we only see

our own faces in reflection. Wegenstein explains the importance of faces:

If it is through (the recognition of) faces that human beings encounter each

other, then we can say that the skin surfacing the face plays a very special

role in this interaction. Behind faces we "see" the person. We address

people by facing them. This is also why the facial skin has been

interpreted all along as a mirror to the soul: it reflects the state of the mind,

the degree of well-being of the person "behind" a face. (232)

Wegenstein's emphasis on the connection between the interior (ie. emotional, rational, thinking) self and the surface of the body helps to situate identity as an interaction between mind and body. This interaction is not a dualist relationship that privileges the mind as the seat of the "real" self while the body acts as a mere vehicle. In such a scenario, surgical transformations would be trivial since they would reflect only superficial changes that leave the "real" self unaltered. Instead, as Davis asserts, identity can be conceptualized as "embodied—that is, the outcome of an individual's interaction with her body and through her body with the world around her" (qtd. O'Bryan 22). If the body is fundamentally connected to our sense of self, what does it mean to approach the

118 surface of the face as a medium which can be sculpted into a work of art? How does an individual's interactions with the world around her change when her body itself is transformed? Who is Orlan once her former skin surfaces cease to exist, except in photographs and video footage taken before her operations? These questions are at the forefront of Orlan's work even during the preliminary steps of La reincarnation, as she uses computer software to mix her own image with the various paintings that will inspire her surgically (re)constructed features, trying on various versions of her projected new self. Orlan refers to her work as woman-to-woman transsexualism ("Intervention" 318), a term that marks the profound transition she experiences as she exchanges one identity for another. In many respects, Orlan's work resembles Cindy Sherman's Untitled Film Stills

(1977-1980), in which Sherman uses costumes, wigs, makeup, and various props and settings to perform certain "types" of women for the camera: the B-movie actress, the housewife, the tourist, the librarian, the working girl, the teen runaway. The shock of

Orlan's art is the permanence with which she makes changes to her image; while

Sherman can remove her disguises once she has finished photographing herself, Orlan becomes her art as she transitions from digital experimentation to the surgical table, where her body is cut open, rearranged, and forever altered.

The project runs a number of notable risks, including, as Augsburg notes, "it is impossible to predict how the body's soft tissues will heal in response to surgery" (290).

What happens if Orlan is displeased with her new face? What if she is inadvertently disfigured? What if there is still a disconnect between her skin surfaces and her inner

2 Orlan's identification with transsexualism may help to situate her work but the term has politically sensitive implications. Prosser points out that although the term "female-to-female transsexualism" emphasizes that Orlan is "deeply invested in the surgery" (62), she risks oversimplifying transsexual embodiment by suggesting that sex reassignment is merely a superficial surgical transformation.

119 sense of identity? While such concerns help to underscore the radical nature of the project, they also privilege the results of the surgery over the process itself, and as I argue above, Orlan publicly claims to be largely uninterested in her surgical results. Ince notes that, "A little publicized fact is that the necessity for corrective surgery has dictated the timing of some of [Orlan's] operations" (77). A need for corrective surgery suggests that

Orlan is concerned to some degree with her post-surgical image after all; nonetheless, her lectures and written reflections of her own work clearly emphasize the process rather than the end product. Neither does Orlan express any concerns about whether the operations will create a new, complete, tangible identity on the surface of her skin. Instead, argues

Zugazagoitia, "She sets about deconstructing models of female beauty and subsequently posits a notion of identity in flux, never fixed, but on the contrary open and in mutation.

For her, identity is not an immutable and inherent dimension but is something that has to be forged, educated, transformed, and enriched with every passing moment" (217).

Given that Orlan envisions identity as a process rather than a fixed set of corporeal and psychic features, the most exciting moments in the surgical project are transitional—the moments of suspended expectation during the surgery and during recovery, as her face remains on the brink of countless possibilities. O'Bryan writes that

Orlan realizes her creative potential during these in-between moments "where neither the original body nor a final body (evoking identity) is defined, and the maximum number of possible future identities exist" (86-7). This sustained interest in process over product

3 These moments of suspended expectation bear a resemblance to the quantum theory paradox known as Schroedinger's Cat, in which a cat placed inside a box with a potentially lethal substance remains by definition both dead and alive (and at every state in between) until an observer actually opens the box. Critical to this thought experiment is the idea that the act of observing changes the observed, an assertion which resonates curiously with issues of female embodiment, representation, and the gaze.

120 accounts for Orlan's decision to undergo an extended series of operations and recovery periods over an undetermined period of time; she is always a work in progress, the subject of constant transformation. Orlan never settles on one final, complete, definitive image of herself. Even her post-surgical art, entitled Self-hybridations (which I consider briefly at the end of this chapter), has produced a series of multicultural self-portraits, digital alterations of Orlan that constantly rework the face she is left with at the end La reincarnation. Orlan's corporeal identity is fundamentally unstable, ultimately representative of nothing so much as transformation itself.

The Sky is Falling

The elusive question of identity iaOrlan's work can be as disconcerting as the actual images of her body as it undergoes its surgical transformations. Who is this woman, whose face is literally constructed by a surgeon's hands and thus no longer resembles the one she was born with? Why would anyone deliberately marginalize herself in such a radical way? Orlan's work is sometimes criticized on the grounds that it expresses some form of mental illness (Augsburg 291); particularly from a psychoanalytical point of view, Orlan's sense of her hybridized identity and her willing embrace of the abject suggests, at least to some critics, that Orlan has a pathological compulsion to transform her "beautiful" body into something strange and unfamiliar, something "unnatural". Orlan argues against the ideological bias toward the concept of the natural, unaltered body, however, claiming that it is founded on "primitive, ancestral, anachronistic concepts. We think the sky will fall on our heads if we touch the body!"

("Interventions" 325). In the age of technology, bodies are in fact constantly altered and mediated, to the point where nature exists only as an idea: From before birth until death,

121 bodies are tested, monitored, managed, and optimized using advances in medicine and scientific knowledge. Even bodies that do not require medical interventions are encouraged to undergo transformation in order to attain cultural capital. Thomson points out that the disciplinary regimes of feminine beauty often encourage women to engage in physically disabling practices which, if "successfully" executed, are socially enabling:

The iconography and language describing contemporary cosmetic surgery

in women's magazines persistently casts the unreconstructed female body

as having "abnormalities" that can be "corrected" by surgical procedures

that "improve" the appearance by producing "natural looking" noses,

thighs, breasts, chins, and so on. This discourse terms women's-

unmodified bodies as unnatural and abnormal, while casting surgically-

altered bodies as normal and natural. Although cosmetic surgery is in one

sense a logical extension of beauty practices [...] it differs profoundly

from these basically decorative forms of reconstruction: like

clitoridectomies and scarification, it involves the mutilation and pain that

accompany many disabilities. {Extraordinary 27)

The female body, to restate Thomson's point, is systematically constructed as pathological and, paradoxically, in need of surgical intervention in order to achieve a

"normal", "healthy" and ideally even "desirable" physical appearance. That the contemporary body can be still be perceived as natural at all under the circumstances arises from the fact that bodies are altered and mediated according to regulative discourses described by Thomson as "cultural rules about what bodies should be or do"

{Extraordinary 6). These cultural rules construct an idealized, normative, "natural" body

122 that does not actually exist in any material, physical sense but nevertheless represents an

aspirational model for real bodies to emulate.

For Orlan to deliberately—and so publicly—move away from this constructed

cultural ideal is consequently conceived of as doing something "unnatural" to the body.

Why would she physically disable herself, enduring (and even disavowing) the pain and

mutilation associated with surgery, to transform her physical appearance in a way that

was not socially enabling? Orlan is unquestionably opposed to making her

transformations appear "natural" or to using surgery to normalize her appearance; instead

she produces "nomadic, mutant, shifting, differing identities" upon the surface of her body ("EXTRActions" 141). While her work might superficially appear to represent an

objection to elective surgical interventions,4 Orlan does not specifically oppose the ways

in which science, medicine, and technology have become so fundamental to constructions of the contemporary body. These are the very tools she employs to explore her own embodiment. Instead, her concern is that women in particular might be coerced into using technology to conform to beauty standards that erase their individuality. She writes:

My work is not against cosmetic surgery, but against the standards of

beauty, against the dictates of dominant ideology that impress themselves

more and more on feminine flesh... and masculine flesh.

Cosmetic surgery is one of the sites in which man's power over the body

of woman can inscribe itself most strongly. ("Interventions" 324)

4Orlan's work might appear to align with Morgan's suggestion that elective plastic surgery can be appropriated for feminist ends by using the technology to deliberately uglify the body; the participants would then compete for the title in Ms. Ugly pageants (45-6). Orlan instead envisions her body as a beautiful/ugly hybrid and rejects the idea that her surgeries have turned her into an "unfuckable monster" ("EXTRActions" 142).

123 Since to some degree we can choose what our bodies will be and do, Orlan explores a range of choices rather than using technology—plastic surgery in particular—to simply mimic and reinscribe conventional constructions of the beautiful, desirable feminine body.

In this respect, Orlan's work is quite closely aligned with the arguments that

Butler first advanced in Gender Trouble. Butler contends that gender is performative, the

"stylized repetition of acts through time and not a seemingly seamless identity" (141), and that bodies have no fixed, stable meanings; as such ideas about gender (and other markers of identity) can be transformed with sustained effort over time. The resignification of deeply-ingrained cultural constructs is not a simple process, but Butler sees possibilities in "a failure to repeat, a de-formity, or a parodic repetition that exposes the phantasmic effect of abiding identity as a politically tenuous construction" {Gender

Trouble 141). Orlan's work takes Butler's thesis to the extreme as she surgically reconfigures the markers of identity on her face and body, altering some while exaggerating others, allowing her skin's outer surface to perform her internal sense of hybridized identity. Her transformed features, pieced together from various portraits, create a "pastiche or parody of the fetishistic fragmentation of the female body by male artists" (Ince 6) that has invited numerous comparisons to Frankenstein's monster (see

O'Bryan 20-21; Ince 82-86). As a self-created art object—albeit an art object that relies on the work of a skilled surgical team and draws on creations by previous artists—Orlan reveals the extent to which identity can be a technologically-assisted choice rather than a coercive process of normalization that masquerades as "natural".

124 While Auslander refers to Orlan's physiognomy as "the result not of defiance of her culture's standards but, rather, of an effort to conform to canonical models of beauty"

("Surgical Self 130-31), this strikes me as a misleading because it suggests Orlan's face is the result of a botched attempt to surgically construct idealized feminine beauty. She does defy her culture's standards, in fact—not by eschewing surgery altogether, but by using it outside of its conventionally-understood, culturally-acceptable purposes. Orlan's surgeries represent a "flamboyant, public spectacle as feminist intervention" while they deprivilege "interventions which are part of living in a gendered social order" (K. Davis

463). Paradoxically, although Orlan undergoes a process normally meant to beautify the body, and her new features are a composite of images of canonically beautiful women, she continually emphasizes that her surgeries were never intended to make her more beautiful. In fact, having undergone the surgeries, Orlan is considerably less conventionally beautiful than she was; the implants in her forehead in particular render her appearance somewhat surreal. As such, Orlan's surgical performances are radically different from widespread cosmetic procedures designed to construct an idealized, optimal version of the self. While elective plastic surgery is increasingly commonplace in industrialized nations,5 Orlan's surgical procedures remain radical because her intentions are fundamentally different from those of most surgical patients. The relative success of

Orlan's work cannot be measured by her ability to construct an indisputably beautiful body or an indisputably beautiful work of art, since these were never her goal; instead her

5 The American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery places the number of cosmetic procedures performed in the U.S. in 2007 at 11.7 million (www.surgery.org), compared to Dull and West's figure of a half- million for 1988 (54). While any stats on elective cosmetic surgery are unreliable (given the elasticity of terms like "elective" and even "surgery", and the fact that procedures can take place anywhere from a medical clinic to a hotel room), the figures nonetheless point to an undeniable increase in surgeries over the last twenty years.

125 art seeks to "define who [she] is without being shaken by the gaze of the other"

("EXTRActions" 142), to find an authentic expression of selfhood that defies conventional forms of representation. Orlan claims to have been happy with her physical appearance before her surgeries ("EXTRActions" 147), so her operations are not intended to correct any perceived shortcomings of the physical body. Instead, they transform what is already a conventionally beautiful body into something less recognizable, a hybrid of different women whose features never fully settle into a comfortable, unified whole.

This transformation process is not easy for Orlan, and her work inevitably raises the question of how much pain she must endure for her art. Although the concept of pain is absolutely central to her work, Orlan denied for a long time that she herself experienced any pain (Auslander, "Surgical Self 132; Augsburg 292) in spite of the visceral images of needles, scalpels, and saws piercing into her flesh during her surgeries.

Augsburg situates this disavowal of pain as a feminist strategy intended to dismantle

"stereotypical associations between women, pain, masochism, and illness", arguing that if

Orlan admitted she experienced pain then she would be dismissed as a madwoman for undergoing the surgeries at all (306-7). Senft concurs that discussions of Orlan's mental health largely occur in gendered terms; as she points out, "no one seems to ask if Stelarc is mad" (540), in spite of his use of pain and mutilation and his work's shared premise that the body is obsolete. In a 1999 interview, six years after her last surgical performance, Orlan seemed to reformulate her contention that she didn't feel any pain, opting instead to draw a distinction between fleeting bodily pain and mental anguish:

Of course, for these operations there's a price to be paid: I don't suffer but

I am aware my body suffers, which are two very different things. If the

126 body is in pain, that's one thing, but if I am not suffering I can talk, I can

do other things. If/am in pain, I can no longer do anything—I'm forced

to suffer. (Ayers 183, my emphasis)

Orlan suggests in this passage that while her body is in physical pain, she can psychically

detach herself from that pain in order to continue her performance. While it seems that

the body can endure some pain, once that pain spreads to Orlan's conscious mind—once

she suffers—she can no longer participate in her surgery, dictating its terms, but instead

she must simply endure it. To some extent, such a statement contradicts her earlier work

by alluding to a Cartesian mind/body split: "/ don't suffer but I am aware my body

suffers" situates Orlan's fundamental sense of self in her consciousness, while the

physical body is merely the medium that is surgically sculpted into a work of art. As I

argued earlier, though, Orlan's surgery-performances are significant precisely because

they emphasize that selfhood is experienced through the body and cannot be

disassociated from the body's materiality. I suspect Orlan's self-contradiction here is a

deliberate tactic designed to further disavow her pain—and readings of her work that

equate a willingness to experience pain with mental illness—by suggesting that she has

found a way to disassociate from the physical trauma that her body undoubtedly

experiences on the operating table. Elsewhere, she compares her preparation for her

surgeries to a professional athlete preparing for competition, which does acknowledge

that the operations require a certain physical stamina—but these moments, as she jokingly points out, are fleeting parts of her work that should not be used as a shorthand

for her entire artistic output: "I've only been operated on nine times [...] the rest of the

time I'm 'normal'" (Kaufmann, "Cutups" 124-5).

127 "My Work is Blasphemous"

Orlan claims that she has "given her body to art" ("Interventions" 326), and

coupled with the suggestion that she needs to mentally surmount her surgical pain, it

might be tempting to read her performance as an expression of artistic martyrdom. The

title of the surgical project as a whole is La reincarnation de Sainte-Orlan, after all: does

this reincarnation, this transformation, only come after the symbolic death of Saint Orlan

on the operating table? Is redemption found in the mortification of the flesh? Orlan's

assertion, "I don't suffer but I am aware my body suffers," is reminiscent of the Christian

saint who transcends the pain of her martyrdom by turning her thoughts away from her

body's suffering towards the spiritual nobility of her cause. Then again, as Zugazagoitia points out, Orlan's thoughts—and her gaze—are not distanced from the body's pain at

all; in fact, she is thoroughly present in the moment and "engaged in the production of works that will result from the operation" (220). What are the intersections, then, between pain and religious iconography in Orlan's performances?

Orlan "baptized" herself Saint Orlan in 1971. Her work from the period is largely devoted to photographic self-portraits as the Madonna, the whore, or the saint, each image a parodic reconfiguration of male-created religious iconography. Many of the photographs feature Orlan wrapped in linens from her bridal trousseau, which are sometimes torn, sometimes stained in semen, and Orlan has a single breast exposed and her eyes turned towards the heavens in the conventional pose of religious ecstasy. Again,

Orlan's work shares overlapping interests with Cindy Sherman's photographs, the first series of which would appear a few years later: both lend credence to Butler's assertion that identity is performative, and that seemingly-fixed categories of identity can be

128 destabilized by "a failure to repeat, a de-formity, or a parodic repetition" {Gender

Trouble 141). Even twenty years before the surgical performances, Orlan's work reveals a sustained interest in reconfiguring institutionalized conceptions of (particularly feminine) identity using her own image as an art object. Thus, while the religious overtones of La reincarnation might invite a reading of the work as a form of martyrdom,

Orlan's art never reflects patriarchal institutions without parody, distortion, or play. The reliquaries6 produced by Orlan's surgeries are a prominent example: the abject materials of Orlan's surgeries—fat cells, sections of scalp, bloody gauze—are preserved, framed, added to installations, and even sold to raise funds for future operations. Orlan's handling of her surgical waste suggests the saint's relic, the bodily remains of the saint that are thought to heal and protect those who come into contact with them (Cunningham 20). Of course, Orlan's joke is that she is still alive, but these bits of flesh rescued from the medical waste bin are the physical remains of an old incarnation of Orlan. When she sells her reliquaries she not only reveals how her surgical detritus can become imbued with meaning by virtue of its framing, but she also constructs an ironic commentary on the necessity for female artists to sell their bodies in order to raise money for their work.

While Sprinkle and Dierlam metaphorically "peddle their asses" onstage and off—both perform eroticized displays of their bodies, and both are sex workers, if in radically different contexts—Orlan literally sells her body, bit by bit, to supplement her income.

In short, Orlan appropriates religious discourse within her work in the same way that she appropriates medicine and art history: she takes what helps her to express herself

6The reliquary is the container that stores a relic—in English the word "shrine" is synonymous. The relic itself is usually the physical remains of a saint, but can also be scraps of clothing or objects that saint is said to have touched or used during her lifetime.

129 but rejects the unchallenged authority of these fields of knowledge. To return to the

question of pain, then, while the surgical performances explore Orlan's longstanding

interest in (particularly French, Catholic) religious iconography, she insists that they must

be distinguished from the kind of body art that promotes self-sacrifice and self-abuse:

"Carnal Art does not desire pain, does not seek pain as a source of purification, and does

not perceive pain as Redemption" ("Intervention" 139). Cunningham points to saints

throughout history as fearless speakers of the truth, whose "frank speech has a prophetic

edge to it. The prophetic character of the saint's life derives from the fearless

denunciation of religious failings or perversities perceived from the vantage point of clear

allegiance to a life of perfection" (169). This role of the saint as prophetic truth-speaker

strikes me as far more significant to Orlan's project than the image of the persecuted

martyr who is tortured and dies for her spiritual ideals. Although surgery always carries a

risk of mortality, to suggest that Orlan intends to die on the operating table is to suggest that she is suicidal, and Augsburg persuasively argues that reading Orlan's work as an

expression of mental illness ultimately serves only to undermine and discredit her work rather than to seriously consider its implications (307). As I discuss at length in my next chapter, allegations of mental illness disable a person's ability to produce meaning, and

Orlan very carefully avoids citing the madwoman or the hysteric in her work in order to ensure that she is taken seriously.

That said, Orlan does commission a series of surgeons to cut into her "normal" and "healthy" body in a calculated manner that can be most accurately described as self- mutilation. Favazza defines self-mutilation as "the deliberate destruction or alteration of one's body tissue without conscious suicidal intent" (xviii-xix, my emphasis); of note is

130 the fact that this definition does not automatically assume that self-mutilation is a manifestation of mental illness. Instead, Favazza divides self-mutilation into two categories: only one is a deviant form of behaviour that expresses mental anguish or pathology, while the other is an act that brings deeper meaning to rituals and practices.

Orlan clearly places her project within the latter category; her work both reproduces and questions the ritualistic, regulative practices that shape the contemporary body. While

Orlan makes a public spectacle out of conventionally private7 surgical practices, removing some of the secrecy from the process, she also creates "visceral and grotesque images that evoke sensations of awe and horror to elicit the sacred dimensions of the experience" (Faber 87). Orlan's performances are by no means intended to demystify or normalize the surgical process; instead, Orlan creates a spectacle of violent transformation enacted upon her own body in order to re-examine the gravity of corporeal changes. Hewitt's explanation of the link between body modification and sacred rituals illuminates the religious dimensions of Orlan's surgical performances:

Marking the human body may be not only the most ancient art form but

also the oldest practice of religion as a systematic expression of a belief

that unseen extraordinary powers affect the course of natural and human

events, and that humans have the ability to affect these supernatural

forces. Many ancient cultures inscribed the body with protective symbols

and manipulated the body in rituals designed to communicate with gods

7 It might be more accurate to say that surgical practices used to be private. In a paper published in 1999, Kathy Davis argued that most women who undergo surgery "prefer secrecy to publicity and have no desires to confront others with their decisions" (460). Although for some women, cosmetic surgery is still a secretive means of achieving an idealized physical appearance, in the past decade the launch of magazines like NewBeauty, Skin Deep, and Body Language and reality television shows like Extreme Makeover (2002-2004) The Swan (2004), Dr. 90210 (2004-present) and the fictional Nip/Tuck (2003-present) have removed some of the stigma by openly discussing—and even glamorizing—cosmetic surgery.

131 and spirits. As a form of prayer, this supplication offers the human body as

religious text upon which spiritual beliefs can be written and read. (7)

In Orlan's case, transformations of the body are meant to communicate not with

higher spirits but with her spectators. In an increasingly secular world, Orlan asks what

forces affect the course of human events, and uses her body to reply—questioning,

resisting, reformulating, or sometimes merely drawing attention to the status quo. To

reformulate Hewitt slightly, Orlan's body is inscribed in the operating room with symbols

of her culture: fine arts, medical technologies, and religious iconography all come into

complex play on Orlan's body. Orlan gives her body to art, constructing herself as "a site

.of public debate that poses crucial questions for our time" ("Interventions" 319). The

rituals enacted on her body—whether she acknowledges their painfulness or not—raise

pressing questions about the body's limitations and boundaries in the contemporary

world and foreground its possible meanings in the future world.

An Inside Look

The debate surrounding the status of Orlan's body would be considerably less

lively if Orlan simply presented her surgical results after the fact rather than allowing

spectators to watch the process itself. While this chapter has focused thus far on Orlan's

overarching objectives in La reincarnation—as does most critical reflection on the

artist's work—I would like to shift to a reading of the surgeries as performances in order

to map audience reactions and to indicate the ways in which the spectator's gaze at

Orlan's opened body as a "work in progress" is fundamental to the piece. No matter how

frequently Orlan's surgical transformations are re-produced and re-imagined via video

recordings, photography, or digital alterations, the surgeries themselves carry a certain

132 significance as the precise—and fleeting—moments in which Orlan's actual material body is cut into and permanently transformed. Following Auslander's arguments in

Liveness, I hesitate to describe the surgical performances as somehow more "real" or

"authentic" than their mediatized reproductions simply by virtue of their liveness, particularly since spectators are not inside the operating room and therefore always see a mediated version of the performance. Nonetheless, even if spectators cannot be spatially present for Orlan's surgeries, they can be temporally present for the singular moment(s) in which the raw materials of her body are transformed into what will become, upon healing, a new iteration of Orlan's shifting identity. Spectators watching the live satellite feed would also see a unique performance in the sense that Orlan can and does manipulate and rework her video footage: "Sometimes during the operation I might say to the surgeon, 'careful, do that move again, the camera didn't catch it,' or 'Move aside, you're blocking me from the camera'" (qtd. Obrist 195). Finally, attendance "at" the surgeries also provides spectators with the ability to correspond with Orlan as the operations take place, and to receive instantaneous responses about what the artist is thinking and feeling in the moment (Kauffman, Bad 65). In a sense, then, the surgical performances can only "really" happen in this particular way one time, and Orlan consequently constructs these occasions as festive, carnivalesque spectacles.

During Orlan's seventh surgical performance, "Omnipresence", which took place in New York City in November of 1993, audiences around the world were able to watch as Orlan had a series of implants inserted under her facial skin. In keeping with Orlan's

8 Participating art galleries included Toronto's McLuhan Centre, the Banff Centre, New York's Sandra Gering Gallery, and the Centre Pompidou in Paris. The performance was also filmed for CBS's "Eye to Eye with Connie Chung"; see Friedling for a fascinating discussion of Chung's hostility towards Orlan's project throughout the segment.

133 assertions about the contemporary body itself, the performance was constantly mediated and monitored using the latest in technological innovations; in addition to the medical technologies employed by the surgical team, Orlan's operating room was wired with a live satellite feed providing images of the unfolding surgery, with cameras that recorded the surgeons and provided close-ups of Orlan's face, and with a phone, fax machine, and videophone that made it possible for spectators to communicate with (Man as the surgery unfolded (Auslander "Surgical Self 129). At the Centre Pompidou in Paris, cameras also filmed a panel of French intellectuals as they watched—or declined to watch—the unfolding surgical procedure (Beckett).9 In the background, the normally monochromatic walls of the operating room were painted bright green, and Orlan and her surgical staff were outfitted in futuristic costumes. Ince describes the uplifting mood in the operating room:

A party atmosphere prevails in the operating theatre while Orlan's surgery

is going on. Gone is the hushed sobriety we associate with this hi-tech

clinical cell; in its place, in addition to the extraordinary costumes worn by

Orlan and the medical personnel, a riot of posters and cut-outs of Orlan

from her previous works, the bustle of her associates, music and the hum

of communications technology used to record and broadcast the

performance. Props such as baskets laden with exotic fruit and crosses and

the devil's fork brandished by Orlan from her supine position on the

9 Orlan cannot have spectators inside the sterile environment of her operating room, and as a result she cannot make direct eye contact with anyone; nonetheless, spectators are "being watched" by a camera, and may be highly accountable for their own voyeurism as these images can be re-viewed and re-broadcast as Orlan sees fit.

134 operating table carry the connotations of high art and religious painting

into this weirdly hybrid cultural space. (21)

The staginess of "Omnipresence" highlights the importance of the surgeries as performances for an audience. Orlan's "operating theatre" is far removed from the gleaming white cleanliness that normally signifies medical order and authority. In The

Theatre and Its Double, Artaud shares his vision of a kind of theatrical language that features "new and surprising objects, masks, effigies yards high, sudden changes of light"

(93) and other ritualistic elements that will shake audiences out of the uncritical spectatorship he associates with conventional realist drama. These alienating, elevating elements are particularly crucial for distinguishing Orlan's surgical performances from conventional operations that take place in the same basic setting. Orlan puts Artaud's vision into practice as she creates a spectacle of costumes, effigies, colours, and soundscapes that give the mise-en-scene ritualistic overtones. The festive atmosphere of the operating room clearly situates the surgery as a cause for celebration, and the initial levity of the process jars with the violence of the operation as it unfolds. Augsburg points out that the "bloody, slimy, ghastly" scene of Orlan's opened body is an integral part of this carnivalesque scenario, in which the patient becomes the authority figure and the doctors must consent to "her unusual demands, not only of body transformation, but of surgical protocol" (305). This is no symbolic theatrical ritual; the sight of blood and bodily insides provides a constant reminder that Orlan's transformations are real and come with very real consequences—spectators who watch the "live" performances are assuming the risk that they may be witness to Orlan's serious disfigurement or even her death on the operating table.

135 Again, the conventional norms of medicine are challenged as Orlan accepts only local anesthesia for the procedures. Her refusal of general anesthesia creates the appearance that she is entirely unanesthetized, and this aspect of the performance alludes to the painful surgical procedures of the past. In The Old Brown Dog, Lansbury writes that in nineteenth and early twentieth century England, vivisection—the practice of performing experimental surgical procedures on live animals—was often deliberately conducted without the use of anesthesia, due in part to the belief that "the cries of vivisected animals helped to habituate the [medical] student to the pain of a human patient" (12). Later in her study, Lansbury points out that working-class women were frequently viewed as animals and thus treated similarly as subjects for medical research: impoverished patients requiring charitable medical treatments were strapped down to the operating table and subjected to painful procedures, including cervical cauterization, without anesthesia (86-7). These procedures commonly took place under the gaze of medical students, which further violated the patient by exposing her body against her will

(85). Lansbury associates these medical practices with the gynecological exams enforced under the Contagious Diseases Acts, which I discuss in the Chapter Two; there are also clear associations between vivisection, the treatment of impoverished women in England, and the unanesthetized fistula operations J. Marion Sims performed on slave women in

America during the same period. Orlan's work is of course vastly different, since she initiates her own surgery and she gives orders about what should be done to her body even during the procedures; in this sense she takes possession of her body against a history of painful, exploitative, and abusive surgical practices, much as Sprinkle does when she takes the speculum into her own hands. Nonetheless, Orlan's awakened state

136 during surgery is not purely designed as an affirmation of her control over the process—it is also a deliberate tactic on Orlan's part to horrify her spectators by reminding them of the history of involuntary surgical procedures that were once practiced under forcible physical restraint.

Along similar lines, O'Bryan sees in Orlan's work echoes of the dissection theatre, which traditionally featured a male doctor opening up a compliant female corpse in order to make her body's mysteries visible to his medical gaze and to the gaze of the other doctors who looked on (45). This power structure, argues O'Bryan, is inherently sexualized as it features a naked female body that awaits scientific "uncovering" by the male doctor (68). While Orlan's body in performance is reminiscent of the anatomical specimen, she actively resists the medicalized, sexualized gaze by remaining an active spectator to her own surgery. She is alert on the operating table, continuously watching the process of her own transformation and monitoring the images captured on video feed for later dissemination. As spectators watch Orlan watching herself, a complex gaze develops in which the performer—although she is in the liminal state between identities as her body undergoes its alterations—never ceases to be Orlan herself, never transitions into the state of depersonalization that marks the unconscious surgical patient. Put another way, Orlan never becomes just a body, but paradoxically retains an insistent measure of identity in spite of the ongoing erasure of her unique facial features. The mysteries of her body's insides are her own to discover. Orlan's refusal to "play dead" on the operating table is part of a larger effort in her work to assert agency over her own body. As I suggested earlier, her awakened state during the surgery is quite possibly the most subversive feature of her performance, as spectators find themselves confronted

137 with a vision of Orlan watching as the surgeons cut into her flesh and reveal her insides.

The moment where the audience's gaze penetrates the inside of the body is analogous to

what Annie Sprinkle calls the "eye fuck" (Kapsalis 118) in her cervical displays: while

Orlan's body is ostensibly the object of the gaze, her act of observing her own body-on-

display creates a kind of counter-gaze that destabilizes the power dynamic that exists in

more conventional performances.

Artaud's influence can be detected in the counter-gaze as well, as Orlan's

performance refuses to allow spectators to remain detached and complacent. While Orlan

resists the idea that her performances cause her pain, she is fully aware of her audience's

suffering as she "creates ritual that evokes horror, pain, chaos, and disorder in the

spectator" (Faber 89). Prompted by Artaud's call for "a theatre that wakes us up: nerves

and heart" (84), Orlan's carefully crafted acts of self-mutilation refuse disinterested or

disengaged spectatorship. While images of sedated surgical patients might be familiar

through film and television depictions and are thus less shocking than they once were,

Orlan's surgeries continue to provoke a powerful reaction as her consciousness during the

operations means that she is fully present to witness the horror of the body as it transgresses its boundaries. In a sense, watching Orlan watch herself forces the spectator to imagine herself in Orlan's place, confronting the painful sight of her own body opened up on the operating table. Suddenly, surgery is no longer a matter of simply giving oneself over to the doctor and (ideally, hopefully) reawakening transformed; the full gravity of cutting up the body becomes far more pressing when the spectator realizes the psychic pain of consciously experiencing the process from start to finish. Jones describes this phenomenon of the psychic transfer of pain in a discussion of the work of S/M

138 performance artist Bob Flanagan, arguing that "while pain cannot be shared, its effects can be projected onto others such that they become the site of suffering [...] and the original sufferer can attain some semblance of self-containment" (230, original emphasis). Kuppers concurs: "By puncturing the self-containment of others, the self perceives itself as more in control, psychically if not bodily" (Scar 85). Kauffman presents a compelling argument that the spectator's suffering during the performance also positions Orlan as a sort of analyst engaged in a "talking cure"10 with those who send messages into the operating room in order to share their pain—Orlan listens to their suffering but does not suffer herself, and she acknowledges their pain without sharing it

(Bad 65). While Orlan's body lies compliantly on the operating table, while she is the one undergoing a surgical procedure, she is nonetheless in control of this performance; her ability to transfer her suffering to the spectator within the "safe" context of a performance creates the counter-gaze so crucial to maintaining the agency of a performer in such a potentially vulnerable setting.

Needless to say, this uncomfortably close encounter with a conscious surgical patient is quite difficult for most audience members to watch, whether they experience

Orlan's work through a live satellite feed, on video, or as part of her frequent lecture circuits. As I mention above, though, audiences watching the performance in real time assume a certain degree of added risk that they will experience trauma as witnesses to unanticipated surgical complications; when Orlan is physically present next to her own video footage as part of a lecture or an art installation, her audience can see that she is well and has (presumably) recovered, whereas live audiences have no reassurance that

10 This idea of the artist as analyst is also significant to Kane's work, which I discuss in the next chapter.

139 her apparent pain and suffering are finite. While spectators are not permitted inside the

actual operating room (and consequently the room is never able to precisely mimic the

tiered operating theatre of past centuries), the images produced by the surgical

performances still offer a certain sense of immediacy that provokes a strong reaction in

audiences accustomed to the tidy, clearly delineated "before" and "after" images of

surgery but not to its intermediate steps. According to Lovelace, audiences at the Sandra

Gering Gallery were unable to stomach much of the subject matter of "Omnipresence"—

a third of the audience left as soon as surgeon Marjorie Cramer began her incisions, and

after three-quarters of an hour the gallery owner herself turned off the broadcast (13).

Faber recounts a similarly visceral response from an audience at the 2001 Montreal Film

Festival screening of the documentary film ORLAN, Carnal Art:

People in the audience around me were gasping, closing their eyes,

recoiling at images of her punctured and opened body: a surgeon inserts an

epidural needle into her spine, saws the skin on her leg following the lines

he has drawn on her flesh, empties the contents of a needle into her cheek,

slices into her lips, probes a tube into a fleshly hole under her chin, moves

an oblong implement around under her cheeks, cuts the skin around her

ear and moves the skin around like a flap. (89)

This vivid description underscores the "violent spectacle" (Faber 91) of Orlan's plan to

remake her body. The co-opted discourses of feminism that rely on the language of

"choice, fulfillment, and liberation" (Morgan 41) to glamourize elective cosmetic surgery have no room to deal with its more undesirable facets. Orlan takes on Western culture's

deeply ingrained transformation fantasies (and its paradoxical desire for inconspicuous

140 consumption) as she performs her ongoing series of disfigurations and refigurations for

an audience.

As Orlan heals from her operations, she photographs herself resembling a

severely battered woman—bruised face, cut lip, eyes swollen shut—and in doing so she

reminds her spectators that Western culture's unrestrained desire for change exacts a high

personal cost from the body. Agency and victimization maintain a complex

interrelationship in these surgical transformations:11 Orlan portrays her surgeries as a

cause for celebration since they represent willful acts of self-fulfilment, but her post­

operative photos are a striking reminder that she is relatively powerless as her body is cut

open, and that she risks serious injury and even death in the process. Can the visual

evidence of her pain be dismissed, particularly by feminist spectators and critics, on the

grounds that she was "asking for it" or she "did it to herself? Orlan's art is painful to

behold, and even as she celebrates each new transformation in the operating room, the process is intermingled with an equal sense of the spectator's horror at how far Orlan is willing to go for her art.

11 As they do, of course, in domestic abuse situations: is a woman simply a victim of her abuser—or more widely, of an oppressive culture—or does she bear some responsibility for her actions and choices?

141 "Sorry to Have Made You Suffer"

The success of Orlan's project as a particularly feminist mode of performance is somewhat debatable for reasons I will explore, but she does provide a considerable challenge to the eroticism encoded into conventional displays of the female body. Orlan makes us look at her body, but she also makes us look away. Her body's surfaces might invite a desiring gaze during the initial preparations for her surgery as she lies waiting for the scalpel to "penetrate" her body, but she is soon opened up, spilling, her insides revealed as she takes on the abject role of the "autopsied corpse that continues to speak"

("Intervention" 321), a sight which causes her spectators to turn away in disgust. Again,

Orlan's insistence that she remain conscious and able to watch her own surgery distinguishes her from the passive female corpse or the restrained animal undergoing vivisection, and yet at the same time, Orlan's performance clearly evokes the horror of the dead body and the unthinkable pain of unanesthetized surgery. Ince argues that spectators of shocking and provocative performance art (she cites Schneeman, Pane, and

Finley's work in addition to Orlan's) may be incapable of engaging in what Mulvey and others identify as the scopophilic gaze that objectifies the female body in performance:

In a conventional psychoanalytic account of the viewing relations set up

by showy, transgressive sexual film or performance, exhibitionism in the

performer is matched but also contained and controlled by voyeurism in

the viewer. But it is possible, too, in a different account of spectatorship,

that a voyeuristic gaze does not master the performance being viewed, and

that the exhibitionism itself be (paradoxically) sadistic, motivated by a

drive to control and master. (Ince 58)

142 Orlan's performances are not overtly sexual, but they certainly represent a form of

exhibitionism in their determination to (over)expose a process that is normally confined

to a private clinical setting. They can also be interpreted as sadistic in that their violent

spectacle deliberately evokes suffering in the spectator (K. Davis 458). Ince suggests that

performances like Orlan's might experience a shift in their power dynamic that equalizes

the viewer-viewed relationship (59). I would argue that Orlan's work does not simply

level the playing field, but in fact leaves the performer in control of her audience; in

addition to her ability to manage the viewer's gaze even during real-time performances

(given that the gaze is mediated through cameras and satellite feeds), certain images in

her work predictably cause spectators to turn away in disgust. Interestingly, as Orlan

controls the viewer's gaze, she concurrently loses control over her own physical body;

she can give directions to the surgical team but ultimately their manipulations of her body

determine its final form and they are responsible for preventing injury and mortality

during the procedure. Orlan controls the performance of the surgery, but in many ways

the surgery itself is beyond her control.

Although Orlan undergoes a process normally intended to enhance the desirability

of the body, she employs the technology to deliberately deform her own body (Augsburg

290), gradually becoming a grotesque amalgam of male-created images of idealized

feminine beauty. Where other female performers—Sprinkle and Dierlam among them— might coyly acknowledge the eroticism of their bodies-on-display, Orlan refuses a

sustained pleasurable gaze at her body by constructing herself as a female grotesque, an

"open, protruding, extended, secreting body, the body of becoming, process, and change"

(Russo 62-3). Furthermore, her emphasis on the surgical process and on her body's

1'43 ongoing transformation means that she cannot be objectified in the sense of a finished

product of artistic endeavour. Orlan's work, while impossibly radical by almost any

artistic standards, does suggest the possibility for a kind of performance that might

remove eroticism and aesthetic pleasure from the equation altogether.

The difficulty of such a proposition is that while Orlan insists that her work gives

her agency and helps her to express her inner sense of self, I argue that it also involves an

indefensible level of self-directed violence. Zimmerman identifies a tendency in early

seventies performance art to create "a simultaneously violated and violating body" (31),

where pain and suffering are incorporated into the performance as a means of dismantling

conventional images of the female body. Orlan's work is indebted to this tradition; rather

than trying to produce "positive" images of the female body to counter "negative" images

circulating in the culture at large, she uses her performances to underscore the ways in

which art, medicine, and religion have violated the female body, parodically violating her

own body through her series of operations and the installations that document the process

in graphic detail. While Orlan's work consequently commands attention, her use of her

own body as the raw material of her artwork is extremely risky, since surgeries "can and

do result in infection, bleeding, embolisms, pulmonary edema, facial nerve injury,

unfavorable scar formation, skin loss, blindness, crippling, and death" (Morgan 28). Do

performers need to destroy themselves in order to move beyond conventional

•representations of the female body-on-display? Does the female body in performance

need to come so close to death in order to express dissent? Orlan's photographs of herself

recovering from surgery are particularly telling of the violence she has inflicted on her

own body, standing as counter-evidence to her assertion that only her audience feels pain.

144 Out of context, the images suggest a victim of domestic abuse; in fact, the bruise patterns

on Orlan's face in a photo entitled Portrait produced by body machine 8 days after the

seventh surgery performance are nearly identical to Nan Goldin's self-portrait from 1984,

Nan, one month after being battered, which documents Goldin's physical abuse at the

hands of her then-lover. What, then, are we to make of Orlan's treatment of her own

body? Is Orlan's battered and bruised face an acceptable expression of feminist politics

by virtue of the fact that her self-harm is undertaken knowingly?

To a certain extent, of course, the shocking images produced during and after

Orlan's operations are a reminder of what all surgical patients essentially experience in

secrecy. The violence Orlan performs is a feminist response to the violence she sees

enacted on the female body in the culture at large. Orlan celebrates her corporeal

transformations rather than constructing an explicitly anti-surgical polemic, however—

and her continual assertion that the body is obsolete might inadvertently promote surgery

by downplaying its risks and consequences in spite of the very real evidence of suffering

enacted upon Orlan's own body. Orlan's work does not merely dismantle representations

of the female body; she dismantles the materiality of her own physical body. While her

work might successfully construct a body beyond conventional cultural notions of

femininity—or perhaps one which capitulates to regulative practices so thoroughly that it becomes completely alien—she cannot be celebrated uncritically as a model for the expression of feminist ideologies considering the deep ambiguity of her self-abuse.

Orlan's vision of female self-realization comes at an impossibly high personal risk, and commensurate cost, and is hardly reproducible as a feminist aesthetic.

145 Further problems arise from Orlan's decision as an artist to make her own body into her art object. When Orlan produces difficult images of her body it becomes challenging to separate the artist's social commentary from the parodic self- representations intended to oppose and critique the status quo. As Faber writes, "Orlan chooses to be a parodic exemplar of an unrestrained desire to transform the body.

Because of her ambiguous embodied communication, she runs the risk of reinstating the very ideologies she protests in her attempt to open—through violent spectacle—public debate about power and disempowerment in and through the feminine body." (91). To restate what I see here as Faber's critical argument: at what point does Orlan's parody of bodily dissatisfaction and the unrestrained desire for transformation become indistinguishable from actual dissatisfaction and unrestrained desire? To return to a question I raise in previous chapters: what kind of discursive community is required to distinguish earnest representations from parodic ones? In constructing herself as an abject female body, a body that seeks self-expression through radical surgical intervention, does

Orlan undermine conventional constructions of the feminine body or simply rearticulate and thereby reinforce them? Orlan is frequently portrayed in the media as a woman whose surgical project is simply intended to make her look like canonical works of

Western art; this interpretation makes sense of La reincarnation by situating Orlan alongside "surgery junkies" and women whose operations are fueled by fantasies of resembling Barbie dolls, porn stars, and celebrities. The more complex interpretation, that

Orlan appropriates commodified, male-created images of female beauty, mixing and matching them to create her own parodic, hybridized identity, contains a level of nuance that can get lost for spectators who have not been trained to read such performances with

146 a knowing wink. Orlan's approach to dealing with what she perceives as the media's inevitable distortions of her work is to incorporate reviews into her future exhibitions,

"since, whatever their reductive tendencies may be, they allow me to see my impact on the public I'm addressing, a public that isn't necessarily part of the micro-milieu of art"

("Interventions" 320). It seems to me that these misreadings (or perhaps, different readings) represent a failure on Orlan's part to share her political convictions with spectators who are not already part of her discursive community. At a glance, Orlan's performance closely resembles the very thing it sets out to critique. Given that the

"relationship between identity and the body is a slippery one that involves gendered, racial, cultural, political, and psychological variables with regard to, first, self-perception and then the gaze of each 'other' that's encountered" (O'Bryan 32), Orlan's efforts to surgically represent her internalized and unmediated sense of identity are already immensely challenging. The spectator's inability to distinguish the artist from the art object creates a breakdown in communications where the levels of representation in the performance collapse into one another in ways that seem ambivalent at best.

To further complicate matters, little is known about Orlan herself beyond her outrageous, larger-than-life artistic persona; she even kept her birth name, Mireille Porte, a secret until the information was unearthed by the New York Times (Lovelace 15).

While the performers I discuss in previous chapters collapse some of their personal lives into their stage personas, complicating the divide between artist and character, Orlan's secrecy about her private life means that there is no place to even begin the process of unraveling the differences between Orlan the artist, Orlan the art object, and Mireille

Porte, the woman behind all the show business. While such questions risk slippage into

147 the discursive quagmire of authorial intent, the complexity and abstraction of Orlan's work makes it tempting to seek out additional clues with which to interpret her project.

What kind of person can endure such rigorous physical and psychic transformations?

Outside the spotlight, when no one is there to observe the "horns" in her temples, who is

Orlan? When does she allow herself to experience the immense pain that she publicly disavows? And—more to the point for those who are hostile to calculated displays of abjection—what exactly is wrong with her? Mireille Porte's state of mind is a question that lurks in the background of all of Orlan's work. Orlan remains deliberately evasive with regards to her personal life, though, preferring instead to have her continual process of transformation speak for itself. As Kathy Davis puts it, "her body is little more than a vehicle for her art and her personal feelings are entirely irrelevant. When asked about the pain she must be experiencing, she merely shrugs and says: 'Art is a dirty job but someone has to do it'" (460). While Orlan's surgical performances are intensely intimate and personal, there is virtually no confessional mode in the works. As such, although La reincarnation is deeply invested in questions of identity, Orlan's own identity remains elusive, unarticulated, and just out of reach.

On the whole, while Orlan's work presents significant challenges to interpretation, she unquestionably manages to highlight the gravity of corporeal changes in a culture fueled by desire and consumption. While Orlan is not anti-surgery, her work strongly urges spectators to approach the surgical process with a full awareness of its difficulties and limitations. Orlan appropriates surgical techniques in order to assert and express her own identity, but her exposure of surgery as a laborious and risky process simultaneously presents a profound critique of the cultural imperative to maintain a

148 youthful, beautiful body. As elective cosmetic surgery becomes increasingly normalized,

Orlan expresses concern that it may also become compulsory ("Interventions" 324) rather

than one out of many technological advances that can aid in self-realization. By

illuminating the surgical process itself, Orlan rejects the tidy "before" and "after" photos

that gloss over the violence involved in transforming the flesh. As Orlan disavows the

pain her surgeries so clearly cause, she parodies the widespread cultural tendency to

downplay surgical pain and to focus exclusively on its projected results; her

performances dismantle the innocuous-sounding language commonly used to describe

surgery ("nip", "tuck", "lift") as she consciously—in every sense of the word—faces

disfigurement, serious injury, and even death on the operating table. The party

atmosphere that prevails in the operating room might be more accurately conceived of as

a kind of wake: Orlan's every transformation results in a symbolic death as she leaves her

old self behind. This kind of transformation is not to be taken lightly, and each symbolic

death, each manifestation of Orlan's corpse-body, is a reminder of how close to real death

these transformations take the artist. Although the performances might rely on a sense of heightened spectacle, the surgeries themselves are very real and very dangerous.

At the beginning of the chapter, I mentioned that Orlan has undergone eight out of nine planned operations, and given that fifteen years have elapsed since her most recent one it seems highly unlikely that the project will ever be completed. In a 1999 interview,

Ayers asked Orlan if she had any plans to complete her final surgical performance. Her response:

I want to get all the medical, artistic and financial arrangements in place,

and that takes a lot of time to arrange. If I don't manage it, well, bad luck!

149 I think I'm an artist who has given a lot, physically and intellectually as

much as financially, and so if I can't do these operations under good

conditions, I won't do them. It won't matter too much. (182)

Orlan's awareness that she has "given a lot" as an artist is perhaps reassuring given that

elsewhere her attitude towards her self-inflicted violence reads as deeply ambivalent. Her

failure to complete all nine planned operations may be the ultimate testament to the fact

that bodies cannot be changed endlessly and whimsically, and that technology has not

rendered bodies entirely obsolete as of yet. The biological body remains subject to

decline and decay, leading finally to death, a process exacerbated by various kinds of

manipulations, such as excessive eating, as in the case of Dierlam, or surgical

manipulations, as in the case of Orlan. Orlan's parody of the "unrestrained desire to transform the body" (Faber 91) consequently reaches its capacity at some point. In any

case, given Orlan's two overarching goals, to "define who [she] is without being shaken by the gaze of the other" ("EXTRActions" 142) and to construct her body as "a site of public debate that poses crucial questions for our time" ("Interventions" 319), Orlan has, for all intents and purposes, achieved her project's aims already. Additionally, an artist whose work is so centered on process over product must necessarily keep her project open-ended if her body is meant to represent a work in progress rather than a completed art object. Orlan no doubt sincerely intended to undergo a ninth operation at some point, but its incompletion is strangely fitting considering that it leaves her future identities, as of yet, undefined.

In recent years, Orlan's work has put surgical alterations aside, while she nevertheless retains a profound interest in transforming images of her own body in order

150 to express her sense of shifting, nomadic identity. In particular, the Self-hybridations project I alluded to earlier has allowed Orlan to experiment with extensive image alterations that would have been impossible to achieve using surgery, and the fact that the artworks are digital creations means that the project is far less costly and far less physically taxing for Orlan, who is now in her sixties. Self-hybrdations is devoted not to conventional Western notions of beauty, but to images of beauty drawn from pre-

Columbian cultures, from Africa, and from Native Americans. While Orlan's reincarnation looked to the future, her newer work turns to the ancient world in order to open up a new range of possibilities for the expression of her corporeal identity. While the Self-hybrdations series is quite striking, Orlan has received less attention for this work; despite its similar thematic concerns, it lacks the sensationalism and the intermingled disgust and curiosity that Orlan's surgical procedures attracted.

This highlights the radical nature of La reincarnation de Sainte-Orlan, and how it is fundamentally unrepeatable—even, now, for its own creator. At the very least Orlan begins the important work of providing a persuasive material demonstration of Butler's theory that identity is performative, as she strips away layer after layer of her self and rebuilds in her own image. If a similar mode of performance that does not involve the self-destruction of Orlan's work can be conceived, it will open up promising avenues for feminist self-expression and self-realization.

151 Chapter 5. It Is Myself I Have Never Met: Documenting Mental Illness in Sarah Kane's 4.48 Psychosis

Myth, biography and gossip crowd around the work of any artist, clouding our

view, but maybe no one more so at the moment than Sarah Kane. We don't know

her. We never knew her. Let's look at her work.

Mark Ravenhill, "Suicide Art?" (18)

Nothing will interfere with your work like suicide.

Sarah Kane, 4.48 Psychosis (221)

My previous chapters consider feminist performances that deliberately and self­

consciously construct the body as abject, unrestrained, or risky in order to denaturalize

cultural conceptions of the "normal" or "natural" feminine body. Such representations of

bodily spillage come with a certain risk that spectators and critics will read a willingness

to embrace the abject as an indication of some form of mental illness in the performer;

what kind of woman, after all, would show her cervix in a crowded theatre, take the stage

at a sideshow to display her strikingly large body, or broadcast herself joyfully receiving

facial surgery under local anesthetic? I have suggested throughout this study that the

visual response to bodies on stage tends to override the performer's words as well: practitioners' bodies and their actions seem in many cases to carry more meaning for

spectators than the ways in which they verbally construct their identities. Orlan strikes me as particularly in danger of being read as mentally ill; while she is extremely articulate

and self-possessed when she speaks, the assumption that she is mad helps to justify and

152 validate the horror and revulsion her spectators experience as they watch her surgical performances. Other performers engaging with disgust might be tempted to encourage a reading of their work as somehow "mad" or "unhinged" on the grounds that such a position affords them the freedom to do and say things that are not considered socially acceptable. The problem with mental illness (and with related concepts such as madness and hysteria, which I will explore) is that it actually removes a person from representation: Even if its sufferer is not institutionalized or somehow excluded from public life, she is rendered powerless by the perception that she can no longer make accurate claims about reality. Her ideas, however uncomfortable, are easily dismissed as

"crazy" and treated accordingly. There is a danger, in other words, that performers can become too abject and can consequently lose their ability to produce meaning. Mental illness—or, perhaps more significantly, the perception that certain representations must be rooted in mental illness—can have a profound impact on the reception of the types of performances I discuss throughout this study.

I turn my attention in this chapter to Sarah Kane's work, and particularly to her final play, 4.48 Psychosis, as a distilled example of how readings of mental illness can prevent a practitioner from receiving serious, considered critical attention. This chapter marks a shift in my study, since Kane's work reflects a more conventional theatrical mode in contrast to the performance art I discuss in earlier chapters. Kane provides an interesting case because she did not perform 4.48 herself, and consequently she did not place her own physical body before the spectator's gaze in the manner of a performance artist. In fact, Kane was no longer alive when 4.48 received its first production.

Consequently, Kane's out-of-bounds body is not materially present in the piece, but is

153 only represented linguistically, insofar as Kane stages some semi-fictionalized version of

her self as she writes play. At the same time, I argue that critical speculation about the

state of Kane's (absent) body, and particularly her mind, looms over interpretations of

4.48 as well as Kane's other works. Her writing is never allowed to stand for itself, but

instead it seems to give rise to innumerable questions about the playwright's unseen

body. Given that Kane did not perform 4.48 herself but her writing nonetheless draws on

her experience, this chapter is largely devoted to an analysis of the script of 4.48 itself

rather than to a particular production of the play. Nonetheless, the critical tendency to

view 4.48 as a form of confessional narrative and an expression of Kane's own corporeal

difference—her mental illness in particular—means there are profound connections

between Kane's work and the issues of gender, disability, and the normalizing discourses

of medicine I raise in previous chapters.

In fact, the question of how to adequately represent bodily difference in

performance is quite pressing with regards to Kane, since she did not simply fabricate or

exaggerate her corporeal identity in order to pose a challenge to the status quo; Kane

suffered from debilitating depression that ultimately resulted in her suicide. While it may

seem odd to discuss Kane's corporeal identity given that her self-staging is entirely

linguistic, I wish to emphasize the physical dimensions of mental illness as an

impairment of the central nervous system (see Charney and Nestler)—Kane wrote from the perspective of someone with an actual material bodily difference, and the complex

question of how and to what degree that impacted her writing is my focus throughout this chapter. Her mental illness located her body beyond the boundaries of normalcy without any performative embellishment; she had a physical impairment regardless of how she

154 chose to represent herself in performance. Paradoxically, in her everyday interactions

Kane would have appeared more physically "normal" and "healthy" than other

practitioners in this study because her mental illness did not obviously or overtly manifest

itself in her body. While the other works I discuss throughout this dissertation feature

carefully-constructed performative representations of bodily spillage, Kane's final play

was completed as she experienced an involuntary and devastating loss of control over her

own body, particularly including her mind. As someone who suffered from severe mental

illness, the extent of Kane's illness was not necessarily perceptible; rather than spilling

out of the body, her unruliness was contained within the body, tormenting her.

4.48 Psychosis might seem on the surface to reiterate the figure of the hysteric or

madwoman embraced by second-wave feminists as a potential site of resistance—I see

echoes in 4.48 of performance art works by Karen Finley and Lydia Lunch in

particular—but a closer reading of Kane's work also reveals the deeply painful personal

dimensions of living with mental illness. The terms "madness" and "mental illness"

inevitably collapse into one another given the blurry lines between the objective "fact" of pathology and social perceptions of what is deemed pathological behaviour. Donaldson

(101-2) warns that an important distinction exists between the two terms, however: The figure of the madwoman frequently acts as a literary metaphor for women's rebellion, but

she may or may not be mentally ill in the clinical sense. Her identity as a madwoman is the product of her failure to live up to social constructions of appropriately feminine behaviour. By contrast, mental illness involves a neurobiological impairment of the

1 The same could be said of Katy Dierlam, of course, but there is considerably less public controversy about whether suicidal depression is an illness than there is about whether fatness is an illness. See Chapter Three for an extended discussion of the fat-as-pathology debate.

155 physical body. While a madwoman might consciously or unconsciously choose to "act

out", the mentally ill person does not voluntarily control how or when her illness will

manifest itself. Consequently her actions, no matter how subversive they may appear,

cannot be read as a political statement. I underscore this distinction to emphasize that

Kane does not willfully construct herself as an unruly woman. While she may embody

Otherness as a consequence of her bouts of severe depression, her illness is not a

strategically disruptive performance in the sense argued by Butler. Orlan, Sprinkle, and

Dierlam, to a lesser or greater degree, have conscious and deliberate control over their

(seemingly) uncontrollable, uncontrolled bodies; Kane does not.

Having said that, diagnoses of mental illness are not purely factual, biologically-

grounded observations that exist free of ideological investments; there are feminist issues

bound up in the diagnosis and treatment of mental illness since "it is certainly true that women have been disproportionately and in some cases even falsely diagnosed as mentally ill" (Donaldson 101). Diagnostic uncertainty results from the fact that "mental illness" is a blanket clinical term that describes a wide range of thought disorders and dysfunctional behaviours. According to Busfield, what unites these varying disorders and dysfunctions is that "they are defined as both undesirable and the proper object of medical attention. In that respect the concept of mental illness is both evaluative and prescriptive" (108). This definition highlights the fact that diagnoses of mental illness depend on subjective evaluation by psychiatrists and on the customary labels applied to certain behaviours. By extension, it indicates that diagnoses of mental illness can be

2Granted, Dierlam's ability to fully control her body size is debatable, but she emphasizes in her performance that she chooses to be fat; certainly her own sense that she has a choice makes her situation radically different from Kane's.

156 employed as a mechanism to regulate behaviour deemed unacceptable within the social

practices of a particular time and place.3 Categorizing behaviours deemed socially

undesirable as manifestations of mental illness can provide a measure of control over

women who fail to fit comfortably into prescribed gender roles, and as I argue below,

Kane was no exception.

While I certainly do not wish to deny the material reality of mental illness, I

highlight the socially constructed dimensions of the diagnostic process in order to

connect this discussion to medical valuations of the healthy, contained, and proper body I

cite in previous chapters. I frame mental illness as a disability in the sense argued by

Thomson, which I draw on throughout this dissertation: Like other disabled bodies, the

body of the mentally ill woman is invested with socially determined meanings that far

outstrip her physiological difference from "normal" bodies. More important than the

material fact of Kane's mental illness was the critical perception that her writing

indicated some form of madness—in particular, I argue that Kane's failure to write what

critics deemed appropriately feminine work prompted a discussion of her mental health

long before the playwright showed any physical indications that she was, in fact,

struggling with depression. Her disability was not a self-evident feature of her physical

body, but was instead discursively constructed around her failure to capitulate to "cultural

rules about what bodies should be or do" (Extraordinary 6). Critics who speculated that

Kane was unwell were reacting far more to their discomfort with her writing than to any particular physical or behavioural anomalies that they noted in the playwright. While

3 Homosexuality is the prominent example of shifting definitions of mental illness: the American Psychiatric Association classified it as a clinical mental disorder until 1973, as did the American Psychological Association until 1975.

157 reviewers relied on medical terminology to legitimize their critiques of Kane's subject

matter, they were in fact largely responding to Kane's "misperformance" of her gender.

This chapter marks a departure from my previous discussions since, as I

mentioned earlier, Kane is a playwright and not a performance artist. Kane did

occasionally act in her own works: she played Grace in three performances of Cleansed,

which required her to appear nude onstage, and she also performed as "C" in Crave

(Saunders 13). Given that Kane's works demand considerable vulnerability from their

performers, Kane felt it would be unfair to ask actors to do anything on the stage that she

would be unwilling to do herself (Macdonald, "Never Got Her"). Kane did not perform

4.48 Psychosis, however, and the play's seemingly-biographical content provokes an

acute awareness of Kane's physical absence from the work. Nonetheless, the play shares

striking similarities with the performances I discuss in other chapters. While it has a

script, the dialogue is disjointed and reads like an intimate stream-of-consciousness rather

than a conventional realist narrative. The subject matter draws on Kane's personal

experiences without clearly distinguishing art from life. In contrast to conventional

dramatic texts, the number of characters is indeterminate,4 the lines have no designated

speakers, and there are no stage directions apart from noted moments of silence. Most importantly, 4.48 contains the first-person narrative of a severely depressed person who expresses disgust at her state of abjection and is hostile towards the medical establishment's attempts to provide therapy and medication for her illness. While Kane declines to turn her personal experiences with depression into a self-performed one-

4 In production, creative use of sound could easily allow for this show to be staged with one actor, or even without any actors in the playing space at all. One-actor productions of 4.48 Psychosis were staged at Glasgow's Cumbernauld Theatre in November of 2008 (Fisher) and at the Young Vic in July of 2009 (Cavendish).

158 woman show, she shares with her performance art predecessors a concern for how to

adequately represent subjective corporeal experiences in performance. I consequently

consider Kane's play, a semi-biographical account of an out-of-bounds body, as an

outgrowth of the "revolting" feminist body-based performances discussed in previous

chapters.

Kane was resistant to consideration as a "woman writer" since she wanted her

work to be judged "on its quality, not on the basis of [her] age, gender, class, sexuality, or

race" (Langridge and Stephenson 134). While Kane's desire to have her work considered

in isolation from the markers of her personal identity is understandable, it's also naive; I

contend throughout this chapter that the overwhelmingly negative critical response to

much of Kane's work during her lifetime indicates that she violated deep-seated biases

about what sorts of writing (young, middle-class, white) women ought to produce, and as

such her work demands a feminist analysis in order to fully assess its impact.

Furthermore, I concur with Aston (80) that the "diseased male identity" (Saunders 30) underlying the brutality in many of Kane's plays suggests that her work was, in fact,

deeply concerned with gender relations. While Blasted, Phaedra's Love, and Cleansed offer more explicit, visceral examples of male violence, my concern in this chapter is with the more pervasive forms of violence circulating in the diagnosis and treatment of mental illness. What does Kane, as a feminist writer, have to say about institutional psychiatry? What does she have to say about psychoanalysis? What does she have to say to critics who assert that her portrait of the "diseased male identity" must be a function of her own disease? As Showalter has persuasively argued, any representation of madness raises feminist issues in and of itself, since "madness, even when experienced by men, is

159 metaphorically and symbolically represented as feminine: a female malady" (4);

consequently, this chapter isolates the largely overlooked 4.48 Psychosis as particularly

relevant to a discussion of Kane's importance within feminist theatre criticism.

In the following pages, I argue that while Kane's death has led critics to read 4.48

as nothing more than a suicide note, the play itself, despite its apparent stream-of-

consciousness, actually shows evidence that it was carefully constructed over a long

period of time, and that Kane was extremely conscious of how she staged her self within

the work. Consequently, I contend that the play deserves serious consideration as an

attempt to articulate both the inner workings of mental illness as a bodily difference and

the shortcomings of institutional psychiatry. While I am reluctant to exploit Kane's

biography, that fact that she ended her life—in a hospital where, as a suicide risk, she

should have been under continual surveillance—indicates that psychiatric care failed

Kane even more thoroughly than it did the speaker in 4.48. Reading the play as a suicide

note is reductive, but suicide unquestionably informs the work. Unfortunately, Kane's

ability to address mental health issues and to give a voice to psychiatric patients are

inevitably limited by her own illness; both positive and negative critical responses to

Kane were preoccupied with framing her entire body of work as an expression of mental

illness, which ultimately overshadowed the critique of psychiatric practices and medications in her final play. Finally, I address the difficulties of staging representations of mental illness at all in the face of an oppressive tradition of putting female hysteria on display, and I argue that Kane's profound lack of agency ultimately makes it impossible to champion 4.48 as a successful articulation of feminist body politics. I see in 4.48

Psychosis a dangerous progression of the more self-destructive tendencies of 1990s

160 performance art; in particular, Orlan's assertions that she has "given her body to art"

("Intervention" 326) and that the "body is obsolete" ("Intervention" 325, "EXTRActions"

142) resound eerily with the fact of Kane's suicide. Kane undoubtedly realized as she

wrote the play that it would be produced posthumously (Greig xvi); was she trying to

articulate her self in the absence of her physical body? I hesitate to label 4.48 Psychosis

as "suicide art", for reasons I will explore at length, but this chapter argues that Kane's

- death makes an objective reading of the play nearly impossible. The representations of

mental illness that circulate in and around Kane's work once again raise the question of

how performers can articulate personal experiences of the abject, uncontained, or out-of-

bounds body without reiterating sexist constructions of female weakness or inferiority,

and—more critically—without harming themselves in the process. While hysteria, madness, and mental illness have at times been celebrated as potential sites of feminist resistance, I emphasize that the risks of self-destruction and the loss of agency seriously undermine the apparently subversive powers of the madwoman.

Raising Kane

Kane's first play Blasted, which Sierz calls "one of the most talked about but least seen British plays of the nineties" {In-Yer-Face 105), was produced in 1995 when Kane was just twenty-three. While Blasted begins as the most linear, naturalistic narrative that

Kane would ever write, there is a menacing sense of tension beneath the surface of the play; by the third scene the hotel room setting has exploded and the play's structure unravels into a series of nightmarish, fragmented war scenes reminiscent of Artaud's

161 Theatre of Cruelty. The play provoked an extremely hostile reaction from the press,

which raised concerns about Kane's mental health and the Royal Court's irresponsible

use of tax dollars. With its explicit scenes of rape and brutality, Blasted was largely

dismissed by critics as a juvenile attempt to shock audiences. The Royal Court was no

stranger to this type of controversy; given its mandate to produce innovative new works,

works that defy "the artistic, social and political orthodoxy of the day, pushing back the

boundaries of what [is] possible or acceptable" (Royal Court), the theatre is accustomed

to censorship, to bad press, and to public debate over the artistic merits of its most

challenging plays.6 The critical outrage directed at Kane was, if anything, a sign that the

theatre had accurately assessed the importance of this young playwright, just as it had

forty years earlier with John Osborne, the "original angry young man" (Sierz, "John

Osborne" 136), whose Look Back in Anger was initially ill-received at the Royal Court

but ultimately proved a pivotal work of post-war British theatre (Saunders 1-2).

Kane, for her part, was—as a young, inexperienced playwright—deeply

disheartened by the critical response to her debut and overwhelmed by the unwanted

attention she received from the press (Greig x). Eventually, with the encouragement of a

number of established playwrights who admired her work, including Martin Crimp,

Edward Bond, Caryl Churchill, and Harold Pinter, Kane went on to write four more

5 Artaud urged theatre practitioners to eschew "purely descriptive and narrative theatre" (76) in favour of a theatre of "violent physical images" (82) and poetic language. While Kane claims she did not read Artaud until 1998 (Saunders 16), she clearly inherited Artaudian sensibilities via her fondness for Edward Bond and Howard Barker. 6 The Royal Court continues to spark criticism, most recently for its production of Caryl Churchill's Seven Jewish Children: A Play for Gaza, which has been accused of anti-Semitism for its perspective on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

162 plays. While her works became increasingly minimalist and disjointed, they maintained a constant preoccupation with love, lust, pain, death, and self-sacrifice. Kane finished writing her final play, 4.48 Psychosis, in February of 1999. A few days later she attempted to overdose on prescription drugs, was hospitalized, and, while under medical care, hanged herself in the bathroom at King's College hospital. As the theatre world collectively mourned the loss of a young life, critics began to retract their former assessments of Kane's work. Many turned back to the plays in the hopes of finding an explanation for Kane's suicide or at least some overlooked evidence that she had been ill, which as I mentioned earlier was not physically apparent on Kane's body.

By the time 4.48 was produced at the Royal Court's Jerwood Theatre Upstairs sixteen months after Kane's death, a certain mythology had built up around the artist; her public image was that of a young, brilliant enfant terrible whose bouts of suicidal depression fueled her writing, ultimately at the expense of her own life. 4.48 was largely interpreted as a series of clues about Kane's state of mind in her final days—an overly simplistic but perhaps inevitable reading given that she killed herself immediately after completing the work. Parts of the play were unquestionably drawn from Kane's personal life; 4.48 is clearly informed by the playwright's increasingly acute bouts of depression and her experiences with medications and psychiatric treatments. Consequently, lines like

"I have resigned myself to death this year" (208) and "after 4.48 I shall not speak again"

(213) were easily construed by critics as Kane's personal farewell to the world.

7 The production chronology of Kane's works is as follows: Blasted (1995), Phaedra's Love (1996), Cleansed (1998), Crave (1998), and 4.48 Psychosis (2000).

163 4.48 Psychosis takes its title from the time of day when Kane felt most lucid and

when she did most of her writing. Her friend and fellow playwright David Greig

explains:

For a period of her depression, Kane had found herself awoken, every

morning, at 4:48 a.m. She took this moment, the darkest hour just before

dawn, and found in it a moment of great clarity, a moment where the

confusions of psychosis seemed to evaporate. The paradox in the play is

that the moment of clarity in the psychotic mind is, to those outside it, the

moment when delusion is at its strongest, (xvi)

This paradox is equally representative of critical reactions to 4.48: while Greig

claims that Kane's writing took place during her moments of clarity, the play is often

read as evidence of Kane at her most delusional. In many ways, 4.48 is deeply resistant to

interpretation; the play is carefully constructed, indicating that Kane was extremely

conscious of how she expressed herself in this final work, and yet Kane's level of

technical control seems nearly impossible given the extent of her depression as she

finished the play. Critics have a tendency to read the play at face value rather than asking

if Kane was engaging in some form of wider social commentary through the work. 4.48

is overwhelmingly perceived as the story of Kane's final days, regardless of the particulars of any given production. The play seems unable to exist without the specter of

its author looming over the work; in some cases—as with a 2008 production by the

Polish company TR Warzawa, staged at the Edinburgh International festival, and a 2009 production at the Young Vic—the actors cast in the production in fact bear a striking resemblance to Kane, as though directors were in fact trying to recreate Kane's absent

164 body on the stage. In a typical review of the first production, The Guardian's Michael

Billington calls the play a "75-minute suicide note" and draws comparisons to Sylvia

Plath, calling Kane's work "a rare example of the writer recording the act she is about to

perform" ("Suicide Note"). This interpretation of the play-as-suicide-note persists nearly

a decade later; in a July 2009 review of the Young Vic production of 4.48, Dominic

Cavendish notes his reluctance to get swept up in the play's dark humour, since

"knowing that Kane took her own life after writing this, you can't help approaching it

with extreme caution" ("Young Vic"). While Kane's friends and family urged the public

not to let her suicide overshadow her artistic achievements, 4.48 in particular collapses

life into art in a way that has largely precluded readings of the play's content and themes

beyond the facts of Kane's own life and death. Saunders points out that a similarly

reductive reading could be made of Kane's entire oeuvre, since every one of her plays

contains a character who "either attempts or succeeds in taking their own life" (110).

I want to offer a reading of the play that acknowledges Kane's presence in the

work but also suggests that the main speaker of 4.48 functions similarly to the artistic

personae I discuss in previous chapters. I am not overly concerned with precisely

distinguishing fact from fiction in the play; while I take it as a given that Kane's own

experiences of bodily difference informed her writing, I read the speaker as a character

who both is and is not Kane. That is to say, while she sometimes speaks in Kane's voice,

she also reflects the multiple, fragmentary, and unstable self that so often appears at the center of postmodern performances. Given that the speaker of the play suffers from psychosis—from a series of symptoms including depression, hallucinations, paranoia, feelings of disembodiment, and a loss of differentiation between dreams and waking

165 life—it is extremely challenging to define the self articulated within 4.48, and even more

challenging to speculate about Kane's own personal situation in relation to the work.

Who is the woman in this play? How can she articulate her selfhood when her illness has

fragmented her sense of identity? If speaking builds subjects, are the speaker's delusions

(by virtue of her expression of them throughout the play) valid representations of her self

and her reality? Are they as legitimate as the ways in which her body in constructed by

medical discourses throughout the play? These complex questions indicate the depth of

Kane's final work and suggest avenues for reading the play as something far more

complex than a suicide note.

In fact, a curious tension exists in Kane's final play, where the work itself is a

carefully crafted and skilled piece of writing, but the content reflects the disorienting,

insular world of a mental breakdown. Supposing this play documents Kane's own

personal struggles with psychosis, it does so from a reflective distance that suggests she

wrote during periods of wellness—the inability to express oneself being a hallmark of

psychosis. Kane's reflective distance and her technical proficiency as a playwright

prompt me to position her as an analyst as well as a patient in 4.48; even as she suffers

from depression she maintains a profound interest in articulating her experiences in order to explore the social dimensions of mental illness and give a voice to patients who are

otherwise silenced by the treatment process. In the following pages, I consider why Kane documented the experience of psychosis the way that she did and what she hoped to accomplish—I consider, in other words, how Kane "stands beside her hysteria"

(Schneider 116) in her final work.

166 Powers of Speech

I envision Kane-the-playwright, through the act of writing itself, as the analyst of

the unnamed speaker in 4.48 Psychosis, and consequently read the play as a reworking of

the psychoanalytic "talking cure". Putting aside Kane's work for a moment, I want to

trace the significance of the play as a form of talking cure by outlining some of the

feminist issues at stake in the psychoanalytic process. Bernheimer notes that the

Victorian era saw a dramatic increase in cases of female hysteria, which can be attributed

to increasingly rigid gender roles demanding female purity, submissiveness, and

domesticity. With no appropriate outlet for their emotions, women "transformed their

repressed hostility and desire into physical symptoms that simultaneously acknowledged

and disavowed those feelings" (6). In the 1880s, Joseph Breuer's patient "Anna O."

(Bertha Pappenheim) found that recollecting her experiences under hypnosis—in effect,

being given an appropriate outlet for her repressed hostility and desire—relieved her of

her hysterical symptoms. The talking cure (without hypnosis, which was discontinued by

Freud) is a psychoanalytic technique that persists today under the same premise: that the

analysand's verbal exploration of her problems, under the guidance and interpretation of

o

an analyst, can relieve the body of the somatic symptoms of illness. Contemporary

psychoanalytical practices encourage the analyst to facilitate the patient's self-

understanding without imposing meanings, values, or interpretations on the process

(Pulver 14), but as a number of feminist readings of Freud's case study of "Dora" (Ida

To say that these symptoms are somatic is in no way to discount the serious pain and distress that hysterics endured. Furthermore, contemporary understandings of stress identify a close relationship between mental exhaustion and physical illness. In hindsight, it is difficult to say whether hysterical symptoms were purely somatic or not, but the distinction is largely irrelevant for the sufferer: the experience of one form of illness is as real as the other.

167 Bauer) have pointed out, analysts have historically taken on a far more active, even aggressive, role in the construction of their patient's stories. Over the course of her analysis, Freud failed to listen to Dora but instead insisted—against her objections—that she had repressed the desire to be an object of sexual currency between her father and his friend Herr K., who had been making sexual advances towards her from a young age

(Caminero-Santangelo 70-1). Dora's most prominent somatic symptom, aphonia, or loss of voice, points to a tremendous need to be heard and validated, and yet Freud's analysis silenced her further, eventually causing her to break off her treatment entirely. Showaiter describes the relationship between Freud and Dora as a struggle for mastery in which

Freud was "determined to have the last word"; his case study, which is intended to demonstrate "his power to bring a woman to reason, and to bring reason to the mysteries of woman" (Showaiter 160), is ultimately far more revealing of Freud himself than it is of

Dora.

Kahane argues that Dora's case points to the limitations of the talking cure itself.

The patient's act of telling her story is supposed to restore her sense of herself as a subject, and yet Freudian narratives construct women as passive objects of male desire:

Since hysterics suffered from gaps in their memories, holes in their

stories—the signs of repression—Freud's aim was to fill those gaps.

Listening closely to the patient's communications—words, gestures,

tone—Freud suggested meanings of which the patient was unaware [...]

When his patients came into possession of their own stories, Freud

believed, they would not have to speak across the body. Yet Freud

neglected to ask how a woman comes into possession of her own story,

168 becomes a subject, when even narrative convention assigns her the place

of an object of desire. How does an object tell a story? (21)

This passage helps to elucidate the potential attraction for feminists in the figure of the hysteric:9 "Speaking across the body" suggests a resistance to having one's words and gestures (mis)interpreted by psychoanalysis; madness is a refusal to let Freud "fill the gaps" in the hysteric's stories and a refusal more generally of the "rigid structures of male discourse and thought" (Sho waiter 160). If women are excluded as the subjects/authors of conventional linear narratives, then perhaps multiple, fragmentary, open-ended storytelling—like the unruly performances I discuss throughout this study— can provide women with a voice and can resignify their bodies both physically and linguistically as something more than objects of desire. At the end of this chapter, I discuss the severe limitations of celebrating hysteria as a metaphor for feminist rebellion rather than situating it as a very real and painful punishment for failing to perform

"proper" feminine roles; for now, I merely point to the subversive possibilities that seem to suggest themselves in women's hysteria and the refusal to construct logical, linear narratives.

To return to 4.48 Psychosis, then, Kane's dual position as analyst and analysand suggests a form of the talking cure that resolves some of the issues with traditional psychoanalytic therapy delineated above. Dora's hysteria stems in part from her anger about not being permitted to tell her own story in her own way; Kane's play restores some agency to the analysand since her story is not mediated through the voice of a male

9 Gilbert and Gubar's The Madwoman in the Attic remains the landmark work on the subject. 10 There is a certain sexual violence implied by this phrase that also speaks to the ways in which Freud is complicit in Dora's victimization.

169 analyst. This also has wider implications for Kane's work as a whole: her play is a refusal to have the story of her illness mediated through the voice of theatre critics. Kane essentially guides her own persona through the manifestations of her psychosis, and she therefore attempts to possess her own story, working as a playwright/analyst to guide and interpret the representation of a psychotic break. She is not in danger of imposing unwanted meanings on the process; the playwright neither objectifies nor silences the speaker at the center of 4.48. In fact, the play emphasizes the importance of articulating one's experiences as part of the healing process, arguing particularly for the psychotic patient's right to be heard and validated even where her utterances are at odds with medical perceptions of her reality. While the speaker's return to wellness is a desirable outcome in the play, there is also an acknowledgment that she11 is an intelligent and capable woman who does not need to be condescendingly "brought to reason" by a paternal figure—by a psychiatrist within the play or a theatre critic beyond the play.

Kane's other significant departure from psychoanalysis is that her talking cure does not construct a logical, linear, coherent narrative but is instead rendered as poetry, poetry that retains its gaps and omissions. Consequently, Kane never constructs any sense of a unified, singular subject in the play or any portrait of mental illness that can fully account for the complexities of her experience. The speaker remains fragmented and therefore resistant to decisive, authoritative readings of her corporeal Otherness.

11 While 4.48 does not explicitly indicate the gender of its speakers, I use "she" for the main speaker and "he" for her psychiatrist, both for clarity and in order to situate this chapter within the context of my dissertation's wider discussion of how women's bodies are positioned within medical discourse. There are also a few clues in Kane's text that she was envisioning a female speaker, which I will discuss.

170 Rigid Form, Scattered Content

Structurally, 4.48 contains a series of twenty-five fragments of text, each divided by a series of dashes that suggest a shift in time, location, and/or speaker. The various fragments of the play also represent shifting poetic styles, including the breathless cadence of a poetry slam, repetitive lists of numbers (counted down by sevens) and action words, tense doctor/patient exchanges, quotations from the Hebrew Bible,12 and, most significantly, the (inner?) monologue of a severely depressed speaker. On the page, certain fragments are arranged in a specific visual pattern:

the capture

the rapture

the rupture

of a soul

a solo symphony

at 4.48

the happy hour

when clarity visits (242)

Additionally, much of the text is punctuated by silences, while the five dashes between fragments suggest more significant pauses, moments of non-verbal tension like those

12 Although the play contains numerous Biblical allusions, they appear most significantly on 228-29 in the section that begins "We are anathema / the pariahs of reason". While actor Daniel Evans (see Saunders 174) mistakenly claims the religious imagery comes from the Book of Revelation (an oft-repeated error in critical assessments of 4.48), the passage is in fact a jumble of quotations from Leviticus, Chronicles, Jeremiah, and Isaiah.

171 employed by Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter. The formal aspects of 4.48 as a written text highlight the immense authorial control of Kane, the playwright, staging psychosis.

Since spectators cannot see Kane's script during a live performance, its details exist for the benefit of actors, directors, and designers. Although it lacks clearly defined speakers with designated lines or a conventional dramatic structure, the play nonetheless provides quite a bit of information about how it should be performed. The arrangement of Kane's work on the page gives strong indications as to its pacing, rhythm, volume, stops and starts. To read the play is to hear how it sounded to Kane herself as she wrote it.

Consequently, I concur with Saunders that the play was not "hastily written like a suicide note" (111), but instead indicates sustained work over a considerable period of time.

While its content may be disjointed, unsettling, and at times impenetrable, the collapsing boundaries of its inner world stand in contrast to the writing itself, which is carefully crafted and tightly controlled.

The voice(s) of the play are another matter altogether; the preoccupation with reading 4.48 as Kane's own personal suicide note is caused in part by her ability to capture the "bewildered fragments" (210) of the psychotic13 mind in manner that is affirmed by clinical descriptions of the experience. Spectators have little to grasp onto as the play unfolds, and as such they are forced to step into the disorienting experience of living with a mental illness. Where are we? Who is speaking? When does this happen?

Are the events of the play verifiable beyond the perceptions of the main speaker, or are

As an important aside, the word psychotic is often incorrectly employed as a synonym for psychopathic and sociopathic. The latter terms are used to describe those who obtain gratification through acts of profoundly anti-social behaviour. A psychotic person, by contrast, has a distorted perception of "reality" which makes day-to-day functioning difficult.

172 they hallucinations? The contents of the play mirror the state of psychosis itself, as

Kaplan describes it:

One of the defining attributes of psychosis is thought disorder,

characterized by hallucinations, disorganized speech and delusional

thinking, all of which contribute to a feeling of gross sensory overload. In

a psychotic onset, frequently there is an attendant sharpening of the

senses, and the psyche is overpowered and overwhelmed by stimuli it

cannot sufficiently organize and interpret. Individuals have described

feeling dissolution of the bonds that constitute identity, including feelings

of dislocation and dissociation from the body, and a blurring of the

boundaries between inner life and external reality. (120)

The question at the center of this play is how the speaker can overcome her disordered thinking to restore her sense of self: "How can I return to form / now my formal thought has gone?" (213). Kane's plays frequently delve into the horrors of having one's bodily boundaries violated by external forces; the images of mutilation, impalement, cannibalism, and rape in her earlier works tended to provoke a visceral disgust reaction from spectators who were unaccustomed to such shocking displays in the theatre. In many ways 4.48 is more unsettling, however, as the psychotic subject is not threatened by a tangible, external entity. There's no villain in this play. Instead the body attacks itself, dissolves its own boundaries, loses its ability to process information.

Lacan argues that the sense of losing oneself and one's boundaries (or the sense of becoming abject, to draw on Kristeva) is the predominant feature of psychosis. As children gradually develop a self-image and acquire language, they transition from what

173 Lacan terms the Real—the indistinct, undifferentiated "early chaos of perceptions and sensations, feelings and impressions" (Fink, Clinical 88)—into the Symbolic Order, where experiences and perceptions are "named by language and can thus be thought about and talked about" (Fink, Lacanian 25). Psychosis is essentially a failure to transition into the Symbolic Order: The psychotic person never fully overwrites the Real with the linguistic signifiers that allow her to conceptualize or verbally articulate distinct experiences or the sense of a differentiated self, and consequently there is no "/to do the relating, no longer any recognizable center of intentionality" (Fink, Clinical 89). 4.48''s structure indicates this lack of differentiation by failing to separate the play's dialogue into distinct roles for a clearly-defined number of actors. The play allows for the possibility that there is only one speaker, even during what appear to be doctor/patient exchanges.14 In terms of its content, 4.48 suggest that during a psychotic episode, language somehow seizes the speaker, moving through her in an involuntary manner rather than being controlled by her. In one fragment she refers to herself as "no native speaker" and then lists off a series of words: "irrational / irreducible / irredeemable / unrecognizable / derailed / deranged / deform /free form" (222-3). While each word might be read as an attempt to define or articulate her self in the throes of illness, her need to immediately grasp for more words suggests that she cannot adequately express her reality through language. As someone who identifies herself as a writer (213), these episodes where she lacks linguistic control represent a significant loss of subjectivity for the speaker.

On some level a play can only ever have one speaker: the playwright. As Caminero-Santangelo points out, even if accounts of mental illness are based on actual events, the representations themselves are a product of deliberate artistic choices on the part of their author (20).

174 Of course, in the absence of a clearly-defined I, reality itself (in the sense of a

shared cultural view of "things as they really are") is elusive; in addition to her vivid

nightmares and episodes of acute paranoia, the primary voice in this play has become

incapable of distinguishing the details of historical atrocities from her own actions. She

takes responsibility for extreme acts of violence in a chilling passage that sounds like the

words of a woman possessed by demons:

I gassed the Jews, I killed the Kurds, I bombed the Arabs, I fucked small

children while they begged for mercy, the killing fields are mine, everyone

left the party because of me, I'll suck your fucking eyes out send them to

your mother in a box and when I die I'm going to be reincarnated as your

child only fifty times worse and as mad as all fuck I'm going to make your

life a living fucking hell I REFUSE I REFUSE I REFUSE LOOK AWAY

FROM ME (227)15

The dissolution of identity in Kane's final play is terrifying, for once the speaker

loses a clear sense of her self as a bounded, coherent, discrete entity, all the hate and

sickness and rage in the world become a part of her and she no longer wishes to live.

Girl, Interrupted

Nonetheless, in spite of having "resigned [her]self to death this year" (208),

4.48's main speaker appears to either forcibly or voluntarily meet with a psychiatrist.

The resulting therapy sessions, case histories, and lists of goals for self-improvement make up the only fragments of the play where the characters and settings seem relatively

15This passage seems to allude in part to Kane's play Blasted, where a soldier rapes the main character, Ian, and then sucks his eyes out. This creates a deeply problematic association between Kane's creative process and her psychotic episodes—does her art stem from her mental illness? I explore this question at length.

175 clear (although, as I suggest earlier, their apparent clarity may be misleading). These

clinical fragments represent a more rational, logical world that aims to restore order to the

body and mind of the psychotic subject. The speaker's potential for recovery does not

presuppose a positive view of the psychiatric institution, however; the speaker instead

describes the treatment process as shameful, humiliating, and even futile. She is

particularly dismayed as she appears before a panel of doctors ("Dr This and Dr That and

Dr Whatsit") for a psychiatric evaluation and has a sudden overwhelming sense of her

lack of corporeal control:

Burning in a hot tunnel of dismay, my humiliation complete as I shake

without reason and stumble over words that have nothing to say about my

"illness" which anyway amounts only to knowing that there's no point in

anything because I'm going to die. [...] Watching me, judging me,

smelling the crippling failure oozing from my skin, my desperation

clawing and all-consuming panic drenching me as I gape in horror at the

world and wonder why everyone is smiling and looking at me with secret

knowledge of my aching shame. (209)

Under the medical gaze, the speaker finds herself unable to adequately express her resistance to the term "illness" to describe her profound conviction that her life is nearly over, and she feels belittled and exposed. The psychiatrists impose a label on the

speaker's condition and promise treatment, constructing her as an object for study, and consequently they are portrayed as pushy, incompetent figures: "Inscrutable doctors, sensible doctors, way-out doctors, doctors you'd think were fucking patients if you weren't shown proof otherwise, ask the same questions, put words in my mouth, offer

176 chemical cures for congenital anguish and cover each other's arses until I want to scream for you" (209).16

I will return to the question of "chemical cures for congenital anguish" momentarily, but what strikes me most immediately about this passage is the speaker's desire to have her own perceptions of the experience validated in spite of how they might differ from medical knowledge. I see Kane's own commentary as a playwright emerge particularly clearly in this section of the play, as she draws attention to the lack of agency accorded to psychiatric patients. To return to Lacan for a moment, if the speaker in this play is experiencing a psychotic break, then she not only loses her distinct sense of self but also a substantial amount of her language and her ability to speak (more specifically,

Lacan would say that she never assimilated language to begin with). Consequently, she cannot articulate a clear and well-founded objection to the ways in which she is constructed against her will by psychiatric discourse. Nonetheless, she does quite explicitly object to medical constructions of her body, and this is where I see Kane-as- playwright interjecting into the piece—from a reflective distance outside of psychosis, she argues for the speaker's subjectivity. Once again, if the play is a semi-fictionalized version of Kane's experiences, this indicates that at least part of the play was written when Kane was well. As I argued earlier, seZ/'-consciousness—and by extension, the ability to argue for one's agency—is lost during a psychotic break.

The "you" the speaker refers to is the psychiatrist who appears in other fragments of the play. The script suggests the speaker has a romantic attachment to the psychiatrist (210), although this may simply indicate a form of transference since no reciprocal feelings are explicitly noted. I have omitted a discussion of this relationship since its parameters are so uncertain, but the ethical implications of such a power imbalance provide directions for further readings of 4.48.

177 The play unquestionably positions the speaker as psychotic: she is disoriented, angry, depressed, paranoid. Given her potential for self-harm, this is not a person who has been incorrectly identified as in need of help, and the medical interventions she is offered seem both appropriate and necessary under the circumstances.17 A common feature of psychosis is the individual's inability to recognize or accept the extent of her illness and consequently to follow prescribed treatment plans. Termed "lack of insight" in psychiatry

(Sims 204), this phenomenon prevents the psychotic subject from recognizing that certain delusions, hallucinations, or feelings of paranoia are too strange or improbable to be real.

4.48's speaker clearly demonstrates behaviour that can be categorized as "lack of insight" as she refers to her illness in quotation marks and describes her suicide as inevitable.

Concurrently, by presenting the situation from her point of view, the play emphasizes that although the speaker falls outside of the parameters of "normal" mental health, she must be permitted to actively participate in her body's narratives. While psychiatric discourse seeks to diagnose the speaker, to effectively tell her what she is going through in objective scientific terms, she insists that her perceptions of reality—while medically defined as delusional and irrational—are legitimate because she experiences them.

Kuppers writes that "the diagnostic gaze of the medical practitioner can roam freely across the displayed bodies of patients, and only rarely are its obtrusive and objectifying powers acknowledged in the everyday encounter" (Disability 39); the speaker's ability to recognize and resist the diagnostic gaze represents a disruption that potentially restores some of her agency in the treatment process. Since psychosis is characterized by a loss of identity and a loss of language, the speaker's desire to have her experiences validated is

17 Then again, a bolder reading of 4.48 might dispute the claim that the speaker clearly requires medical attention. There is a strong implication in the play that suicide offers a legitimate solution to the speaker's suffering, and that it should be permitted as an act of freewill .

178 crucial to her recovery. While psychiatry clearly plays a role in guiding the speaker

through the potentially self-destructive manifestations of her illness, the play nonetheless

insists on the importance of giving a voice to patients who are silenced by the treatment

process.

A further critique of the mental health system emerges through the speaker's

resistance to treating her depression with medication in addition to therapy. She tells the

psychiatrist that "there's not a drug on earth can make life meaningful" (220), and

expresses resistance to taking medication on the grounds that she won't be able to think

clearly enough to write. Again, a concern for language prevails, as both her work as a

writer and her therapy depend on her ability to communicate. She finally agrees to try

antidepressants, which she refers to as "the chemical lobotomy", when the doctor points

out that her life depends on it: "nothing will interfere with your work like suicide" (221).

Shortly thereafter comes a list of the nine different drugs and doses the speaker is given,

along with details of their extensive side effects: insomnia, loss of appetite, anxiety,

rashes, short term memory loss, paranoia, sexual dysfunction, dizziness, confusion,

dementia, and feelings of rage. Initially, the dialogue in this fragment appears to represent

the psychiatrist reading aloud from his patient's clinical case history: "Fluoxetine

hydrochloride, trade name Prozac, 20 mg, increased to 40mg. Insomnia, erratic appetite"

(224). However, the language soon shifts to a less detached, professional register which

suggests the speaker herself is recounting all the attempts to medicate her: "Mood:

fucking angry. / Affect: Very angry" (224). The case history includes details that reflect poorly on the treatment process, including the speaker's confinement by three male

179 nurses "twice her size" (223) and her premature discharge from the hospital to make a

bed available for a more acutely psychotic patient (224). The series of failed attempts to

medicate the speaker ends with "refused all further treatment" (225) and then the

following passage which describes, with dark humour, an attempted suicide that mimics

the language of her case history: "100 aspirin and one bottle of Bulgarian Cabernet

Sauvignon, 1985. Patient woke up in a pool of vomit and said 'Sleep with a dog and rise

full of fleas.' Severe stomach pain. No other reaction" (225). Ironically, the fleeting pain

of a suicide attempt has considerably fewer side effects than life on medication.

I'm Beginning to See the Light

Once the speaker will no longer accept medication, she experiences a full

psychotic break, and consequently the language of the play becomes increasingly abstract

and moves rapidly from one disorienting fragment to the next. Spectators experience the

dissolution of self along with the speaker as the play loses its coherence and tumbles

inevitably towards suicide. The only apparent hope for the speaker comes from a

recurring motif of light, which appears from the very beginning of the play:

a consolidated consciousness resides in a darkened banqueting hall near

the ceiling of a mind whose floor shifts as ten thousand cockroaches when

a shaft of light enters as all thoughts unite in an instant of accord body no

longer expellent as the cockroaches comprise a truth which no one ever

utters (205)

1 The use of the pronoun "her" is one of the few indications in the text that Kane was imagining a female speaker.

180 The "consolidated consciousness" and the "instant of accord" suggest the sense of coherent identity that the play's speaker is trying to recover, while the "ten thousand cockroaches" illustrate the despair and confusion that occupy the speaker's mind during a psychotic episode. The cockroaches scatter when a shaft of light enters, implying that light—"enlightenment", and also the moment where the speaker will greet death by

"stepping into the light"—can drive psychosis away.

Not all the light in the play is given positive associations, though; the recurring words "hatch opens / stark light" suggests, as Saunders points out, a patient on suicide watch who must be checked on hourly during the night (112). In a wider sense this "stark light" also suggests the stage lighting within the theatre itself, and Kane-the-playwright's sense that critics monitored her plays for indications of her own mental health. The speaker is not sustained by this clinical/theatrical light, this surveillance, but rather by the moment of clarity she associates with 4:48 in the morning, the time just before dawn when she is most lucid: "At 4.48 / when sanity visits / for one hour and twelve minutes I am in my right mind" (229). There is a sense of inversion here, for when the actual morning light arrives, the speaker's psyche is plunged back into darkness. Throughout the play, the speaker periodically reminds herself that her moment of clarity will arrive if she can wait patiently for it: "Remember the light and believe the light / An instant of clarity before eternal night" (206). These words sustain her through her most difficult moments.

Interestingly, the play also suggests that 4:48 is the time of day when the speaker plans to take her life, since she claims "After 4.48 I shall not speak again" (213), and then later says that "At 4.48 /1 shall sleep" (233). The speaker's assertion that she will end her life during the most lucid period of her day positions her suicide as an act of self-realization

181 rather than as a manifestation of her psychosis. This supports her earlier assertion that she is not ill, but has merely accepted the inevitability of her death.

Given that the speaker associates light with the mental clarity she will experience as she takes her life, her final request in the play, "please open the curtains" (245), might be read with a sense of finality: she is ready for the light to enter and for her mind to be fully present in the moment where she commits suicide. Something significant happens before the play's final line that makes the ending seem considerably more hopeful, though. The speaker's despair in the play is largely caused by her debilitating love for a woman that she has never met and never spoken to,1 a woman she sees in her dreams:

I dread the loss of her I've never touched

love keeps me a slave in a cage of tears

I gnaw my tongue with which to her I can never speak

I miss a woman who was never born

I kiss a woman across the years that say we shall never meet (218)

The speaker's desire for this unknown and unknowable woman resurfaces a number of times, notably during the final fragment as the speaker experiences a full psychotic breakdown which she blames, in part, on her unrequited love: "I'm dying for one who doesn't care / I'm dying for one who doesn't know / you're breaking me" (243). Several lines later there is a long moment of silence represented by substantial blank space in

Kane's script, and then the play's penultimate line: "It is myself I have never met, whose face is pasted on the / underside of my mind" (245). Recalling Lacan's assertion that

19 While the fragments of the play that express love for an unknown woman could be assigned to a different actor, there is a strong indication that the main speaker delivers the play's final fragment—a fragment in which unrequited love appears to be central to the psychotic breakdown represented in the dialogue.

182 psychosis causes a loss of distinction between self and other, I read "It is myself I have never met" as the speaker's moment of realization (brought about under the guidance of her analyst/playwright) that she is in fact the woman who appears in her dreams.20 The moment is an epiphany; all the love and longing and sense of loss the speaker has felt evaporate in a moment of self-recognition, making it possible for her to "come into possession of her own story" (Kahane 21) and to begin to recover. Having recovered her sense of herself as a subject, as "an T rather than a 'she'" (Caminero-Santangelo 102), having essentially talked her way out of her illness, the speaker also recovers her sense of agency. Consequently the final line of the play—"please open the curtains"—is a hopeful line that indicates a renewed interest in the world outside the insular realm of mental illness. The light floods into the room not to mark the speaker's "instant of clarity before eternal night", but instead to signal the fact that she has been pushed to her mental and physical limits and has finally made it through to a place where she can begin to heal.

Ultimately, the speaker is not successfully healed by doctors or medication, but by her own subconsciousness as she nears her death but finds at the last possible moment that she has a reason to live. A similar reading of the play's ending appeared in the first production of 4.48, in which director James Macdonald instructed his cast to open the theatre's windows and let in natural light along with the sounds of the London streets below (Saunders 125). Spectators who were drawn into the psychotic experience as the

This moment also offers compelling evidence that the play's main speaker is in fact female, since the absent lover/self is gendered female. 21 Alternately, to return to the theatrical metaphor, "please open the curtains" suggests that Kane herself has recovered from her psychosis and is prepared to share her experiences on the stage. Fink, however, points out that while Lacan believed a patient could be treated for psychosis, it could not be cured {Clinical 101)—once again this raises the question of whether Kane's attempts to document the experience resulted in another final,fata l psychotic episode.

183 play unfolded found themselves released at the end when the outside world suddenly flooded into the theatre space.

Everyone Loves a Dead Girl

The ending of 4.48 Psychosis is of course open to alternate readings, and the hopeful tone I identify above has been largely overshadowed by the fact that Kane herself could not find a reason to go on living. As I suggest at the beginning of this chapter,

Kane's depression and suicide have a tendency to dominate discussions of her work, and

4.48 is impacted the most given its proximity to the playwright's death. While Kane's last work expresses a profound desire to speak and not be spoken for, critical responses have imposed an interpretation onto Kane's work and she is no longer in possession of her own story. Furthermore, while the contents of the play are intentionally obscure and disorienting, there's a tendency to approach the text as a series of clues rather than simply letting it remain ambiguous and open-ended. Is this a portrait of Kane's own illness just before her suicide? If so, then how much legitimacy do we assign to the speaker's point of view, given that she suffers from an illness characterized by delusional thinking and paranoia? Kane's struggle with suicidal depression suggests that she was in a position to offer an account of psychosis that differs from most accounts, which tend to be written by doctors. In contrast to familiar historical case studies such as Augustine, Anna O., and

Dora, whose experiences with hysteria are mediated through the voice of their male doctors, Kane's central character tells her own story, rejecting the ways in which her bodily difference is constructed by the "smooth psychiatric voice of reason" (209).

184 Moreover, Kane-the-playwright's refusal to construct her speaker's story in a clear,

logical, straightforward manner also marks a resistance to the ways in which women's

narratives have been shaped and controlled by the language of psychoanalytic discourse.

Unfortunately, the fact that Kane became increasingly ill as she finished writing 4.48

means that the more provocative aspects of this work are potentially dismissible as the

unreliable impressions of a troubled mind. While the figure of the psychotic in Kane's

final work embodies a threat to classical images of the rational, complete, contained

(male) body, Kane's mental illness also allows critics to point to her transgressions as

evidence that she requires a doctor to recuperate her ability to behave and express herself

in a "normal" way. Critical responses to Kane have in fact been curiously insistent on

reading her works as an expression of mental illness. I suspect that the emphasis on her

physical impairment reinforces the idea that she has a treatable medical condition that can

and should be corrected: Kane is considerably less dangerous if her ideas can be

controlled with medication and therapy, as opposed to the unstoppable, unruly

madwoman who deliberately rebels against her society. While 4.48 struggles to articulate

the speaker's experience beyond the language of psychiatry, then, reviews of Kane's

work reinstate that language, pathologizing the playwright and ultimately discrediting her

work as irrational, confused, or even harmless.

As I mention in this chapter's opening, Kane's early plays came as a shock to many theatre critics, who wondered how a young female playwright could produce such raw, savage stage imagery. Some dealt with the perceived disjunction between Kane's

gender and her writing by considering her as an honorary male playwright (Aston 79),

185 particularly by grouping her with the "angry young men" who dominated the British

theatre of the 1990s: Mark Ravenhill, Jez Butterworth, Simon Block, David Eldridge,

Conor McPherson, Alex Jones, Anthony Nielson, Martin McDonagh, Joe Penhall, Patrick

Marber, Philip Ridley, and Ben Elton. Significantly, while Rebecca Prichard and Judy

Upton are sometimes mentioned alongside these male playwrights (Aston 79), Kane is

the only female playwright consistently included in the canon, and David Edgar suggests

that Kane's suicide is widely perceived as the end of the "angry young man" movement

as a whole (302).

Those unwilling or unable to disregard Kane's gender instead assumed that her

work could only be the product of a disturbed mind; Jack Tinker's scathing review of

Blasted, for instance, suggested that Kane's play writing grant "might have been better

spent on a course of remedial therapy" ("Disgusting"), while Charles Spencer's review of

Phaedra's Love claimed, "it's not a theatre critic that's required here, it's a psychiatrist"

(qtd. Sierz, In-Yer-Face 108). In hindsight, the fact that Kane did struggle with suicidal

depression makes it difficult to claim that such assessments were completely

unwarranted. At the same time, the precise impact mental illness might have had on

Kane's writing is impossible to determine. There are striking parallels between Kane and

the figure of the nineteenth-century hysteric: like the rebellious, unconventional, creative

women who were diagnosed as hysterical, Kane's negative critical reception is clearly

22 There are numerous competing critical terms used to describe the young, disaffected, predominantly male British playwrights of the 1990s: Angry Young Men (which was first used to describe John Osborne and his theatre contemporaries in 1950s Britain), Cool Britannia, the Bratpack, In-Yer-Face, and the New Brutalists are common. 23 While Kane's sexuality is rarely discussed anywhere, Pinter mentions in passing in a memorial piece for the Guardian that she dated women (see Hattenstone). I speculate critics may have categorized Kane as an "angry young man" in part by assigning her masculine stereotypes as a lesbian-identified playwright.

186 rooted in her failure to meet gender expectations. As Showalter argues in The Female

Malady, "During an era when patriarchal culture felt itself to be under attack by its rebellious daughters, one obvious defense was to label women [...] as mentally disturbed, and of all the nervous disorders of the^m de siecle, hysteria was the most strongly identified with the feminist movement" (145). Briggs concurs that the concept of hysteria conflates pathology with a failure to adequately perform one's gender: "Hysteria is at once a diagnostic gesture of dismissal of women as complete participants in public life, a social role uncomfortably inhabited by suffering women, and a warning about the dangerous consequences for women of engaging in "unfeminine" behaviour (247). While the term hysteria has fallen out of medical use, it continues to circulate in critical analysis of performances (see Schneider 115-16), and it certainly resonates in discussions of

Kane's work: the reviewers cited above clearly suggest Kane is mentally ill in order to justify their discomfort with her work rather than out of a genuine concern for her physical wellness. Kane's mental illness did not manifest itself overtly in her body, and so her critics saw no obvious physical signs that she was unwell. Rather, they used clinical language where they were in fact responding to perceptions of Kane—via her writing—as the metaphorical madwoman who rebels against social constructions of appropriately feminine behaviour. Showalter's assertion that madness is systematically coded as feminine implies that those who questioned Kane's mental condition sought to reaffirm and reinforce her gender as well; mental illness could account for the graphic nature of Kane's plays while simultaneously denying her work the cultural currency of the "angry young man" plays written by her male contemporaries.

187 At the beginning of this chapter, I drew a comparison between Sarah Kane and

Karen Finley, since both practitioners are interested in verbally constructing a fragmented

and disoriented subject, and both collapse the boundaries between sex and violence in

their work. A decade before Kane wrote 4.48, reviewer C. Carr speculated on why

audiences became so hostile at Finley's shows, and her conclusion about the gendered

terms in which Finley's "filthy" language was received offers some insights into the

critical reception of the abject in Kane's work:

Obviously a man doing the same routine wouldn't be confronted like

this—nor would the act have the same meaning. A filthy woman (in any

sense of the word) has stepped further outside of social mores than a man

can possibly get. Hard-working men get dirty. They're a common sight in

soap commercials, taking their showers. But that kind of dirt on a woman

signifies "crazy" or "victim." No positive meaning is possible. Just as

obscenity coming from a man asserts a tough manliness, in a woman's

mouth it signals a threatening femininity, a banshee. (125)

The response to Kane's work, like that to Finley's, has considerably more to do with her

violating expectations about the "proper" domain of "women's writing"; while her male

colleagues in the British theatre sometimes received negative critical responses for their

similarly troubling work (as did Mark Ravenhill, for instance, for his 1996 play Shopping

and Fucking), their mental health was not called into question and reviewers focused on

the perceived shortcomings of the plays rather than speculating about the playwrights' personal lives. As I mention in my previous chapter's discussion of Orlan, critical

"diagnoses" of mental illness, no matter how facetious they may be, are intended to

188 disavow, discredit, and silence certain types of representation. The suggestion that an

individual requires medical treatment and surveillance—to draw loosely on both Foucault

and Szasz—is a form of social control that labels and punishes those who do not conform

to the social ideologies of a certain time and place.

It wasn't until after Kane's suicide—once she had, in effect, silenced herself—

that critical opinions of her work began to shift. In the spring of 2001, the Royal Court

featured a retrospective of Kane's work, and for the first time her plays were widely

recognized for their careful crafting and their technical proficiency. A number of theatre

critics retracted their earlier opinions of her work, most notably Charles Spencer, whose

review of the revival of Blasted begins with the words, "Well, I was wrong" ("Admirably

Repulsive"). He goes on to state that while he still doesn't care for the play, he now

considers it a serious and impressive piece of work. The review takes an unfortunate turn,

however, when Spencer begins to speculate that the play must have stemmed from one of

Kane's bouts of depression, and he ends his review by stating that he "can only apologise

to Kane's ghost for getting her so wrong the first time around. And may she now sleep in

peace". While Spencer's review seems genuinely well-meaning, he once again takes the

opportunity to suggest that Kane's creative output is the product of a diseased mind, and

his final sentence suggests that her suicide itself is what prompted his reassessment—that

somehow Kane, in killing herself, proved that she was a serious writer with a real

emotional investment in her work and not simply a young woman who was acting out.

Kane, who is "sleeping in peace", is of course safely incapable of responding to this or

any other critical discussions of her work. Her suicide makes it possible for critics not just to examine her work, but to take possession of its meanings. Any playwright's work

189 ceases to be fully hers once it is handed off to a production team, of course, but Kane was notorious for hovering over rehearsals and correcting what she perceived as misreadings of her work. When Kane's agent Mel Kenyon wryly points out in an interview that

"everyone loves a dead girl" (Saunders 144), she suggests in part that Kane's work is now wide open to (mis)interpretation without challenge from its author.

Spencer's reassessment highlights the dangers of celebrating the critical shift in favour of Kane's work that occurred after her suicide. Would her work have been given a positive re-evaluation in the absence of such an early and dramatic death? Is Kane now part of a legacy of fetishized female writers whose suicides preclude an objective or fair assessment of their technical proficiency? More importantly, does Kane's suicide "prove" to reviewers that her creative output was fuelled by mental illness, as they suspected, and does her work then become a spectacle of her (absent) body's pathology? Spencer, for his part, seem to have decided after a few more years of reflection that Kane's work is passe and to dismiss her entirely; his 2006 review of a German production of Blasted compares

Kane to a posturing adolescent and then glibly suggests that "goths and emos should book [tickets] now" ("Blast"). Spencer's eventual lack of interest in Kane appears to be a shared sentiment; Sierz wrote in 2005 that "her importance in the British theatre has already faded", and noted that with the exception of the Royal Court's retrospective, her works were hardly ever produced in England anymore ("Beyond Timidity?" 55). The apparent waning interest in Kane's oeuvre may be an unfortunate consequence of

24 Sierz's pronouncement may have been a bit hasty; as I mentioned earlier, three separate productions of 4.48 alone were staged in London, Glasgow, and Edinburgh in 2008 and 2009, and several new volumes of scholarship on Kane are currently in the works.

190 reductive summaries of her work as "suicide art", which undoubtedly appears tedious and one-dimensional after its initial impact has worn off.

Critical assessments of Kane that flippantly recommend psychiatric help during her lifetime and then position her as a serious-but-seriously-ill writer after her death are profoundly dismissive. While 4.48 Psychosis might be uncomfortable to watch, it cannot be easily explained away merely as a manifestation of Kane's illness. Granted, since

Kane is no longer capable of responding to questions about her work, there's simply no way of knowing to what extent the play reflects her state of mind as she wrote.

Ravenhill's comments on the subject are insightful: "I wouldn't like to guess whether that depressive aspect of Kane's personality had been informing her work all along. Or whether the bouts of depression were interruptions to her creative self. [..] But I would certainly resist the idea that she was a great writer because she had suicidal impulses"

("Suicide Art?"). Again, the tightly-controlled form of the script points to carefully crafted writing that took place over a considerable period of time. The play was not hurriedly dashed off in Kanejs final days as she descended into mental anguish, and while it offers Kane's perspective on the experience of psychosis, there's compelling evidence that the events portrayed within the script could not have occurred during the writing process. If Kane herself suffered from psychotic episodes as disorienting and painful as those portrayed in her play, it seems highly probable that they interrupted her writing so that she only wrote when she was well. In any case, it does not matter what state of mind Kane was in when she wrote her plays; ultimately, knowing whether she was depressed neither enhances nor detracts from her work. The history of cultural

191 production is filled with examples of artists who were mentally ill and yet that mental

illness did not prevent an assessment of the importance of their work itself.

The Limits of Madness

The most compelling feature of 4.48 Psychosis is its reworking of the talking

cure: Kane attempts to come into possession of her own story and to render that story in a

poetic form that resists conventional linear narratives or facile readings of the self staged

within the work. Far more than a suicide note, 4,48 suggests Kane's refusal to be

relegated, as Dora was, to the margins of her own narrative. The play offers an extensive

critique of psychiatric treatments and provides its spectators with a sense of how

disorienting and painful psychosis is, thereby dispelling notions that mental illness is just

a gratifying way of acting out or seeking attention. The play consequently represents an

extremely self-aware response on Kane's part to critical assessments of her work: to my

mind, this play is Kane's way of acknowledging the physical reality of her illness while

nevertheless leaving a lasting impression of her tremendous skill as a playwright. If

nothing else, the careful crafting of this final work is a reminder that Kane was no less

talented for her illness; reviewers who tried to suggest otherwise were—like Freud

"bringing reason" to Dora—attempting to impose normative gender roles on a bright

young woman who failed to capitulate to social expectations about proper behaviour and proper self-expresion.

Having said that, Kane's work is profoundly problematic from the perspective of

feminist theatre criticism. Like Dora and the innumerable other women labeled as hysterics, Kane fails to change the world to respond to her needs, and her struggle against

192 the conventions of normative femininity ultimately results in her self-destruction. In

Chapter Three, I cited Kupper's observation that fat is a "master sign that determines the

body and rules all discourses" ("Fatties" 282); I think a reformulation of that statement

adequately summarizes the issue with Kane's work as well: her mental illness acts as the

master sign that determines the body and rules all discourses. How can she have any

agency when she is both medically and socially positioned as delusional, confused, and

unbounded? How can she rely on the power of words, or construct her self against

dominant readings of her body, when psychosis robs her of language and of her center of

intentionality? How can her point of view ever be granted legitimacy given how easily it

can be dismissed as irrational or confused? While I argue throughout this chapter that

Kane appears to have written 4.48 during periods of respite from her illness, I also

demonstrate how less attentive readings have simply assumed the work was a suicide

note—and that it was therefore written when Kane was "not in her right mind".

Consequently, while Kane may have been able to unsettle her spectators and create

harrowing stage imagery, her illness is ultimately disempowering as it allows her entire

body of work to be positioned as a sort of uncomfortable but skewed vision of the "real"

world.

Given the ease with which Kane's position can be undermined, the play might not

retheorize mental illness so much as it simply places a representation of Kane's non- normative body on display. The broken-down, raw, miserable character at the center of

4.48 may avoid the eroticism encoded into conventional displays of the female body, but

she nevertheless attracts a sort of displaced voyeuristic gaze as she performs Kane's

illness for the audience. Thomson distinguishes this non-sexualized, voyeuristic gaze as a

193 stare, a way of looking at the performing body that continues to exert an unequal power relation: "If the male gaze makes the normative female a sexual spectacle, then the stare sculpts the disabled subject into a grotesque spectacle. The stare is the gaze intensified, framing her body as an icon of deviance" {Extraordinary 26). Thomson's more recent work suggests that the disabled subject need not be victimized by such a stare, but that she can instead learn to manage the staring encounter in such a way that her presence attests to bodily diversity and asserts her right to public visibility (Staring 8). While this may be true of the kind of stare that is directed at Sprinkle's cervix, Dierlam's fleshy excesses, or Orlan's flayed face, Kane's eventual suicide suggests that she failed to manage her staring encounters. I see echoes here of the nineteenth-century freak show, as spectators gazed at the body-on-display to bolster their own self-identity and to satisfy their fascination with the psychotic's abject Otherness. Even more so, Kane's work resonates with the history of putting female hysterics on display, particularly within Jean-

Martin Charcot's "hysterical theatre" at the Salpetirere. From 1882 to 1893, Charcot exhibited his asylum patients in an amphitheatre during public lectures that were heavily attended by the most prominent artists and intellectuals in Paris. Charcot would hypnotize his patients and then have them perform their illnesses for the crowd of onlookers, eating coal when they were told it was chocolate, barking like dogs, and rocking a top hat as though it were a baby (Showalter 148; also see Kuppers Disability 41-2, Schutzman 132-

3). Kane's exhibition is not as profoundly exploitative since for the most part she controls the representational apparatus, and the fact that the speaker gets to articulate her own experiences means she has far more agency than the women of the Salpetirere.

Nonetheless, the performing body in 4.48 invites a similar sort of gaze at mental illness,

194 an intermingling of medical edification and prurient interest, and Kane consequently may not be able to stage her struggles without severely disempowering herself. Without the degree of self-consciousness and carnivalesque play I identify in this dissertation's other

"revolting" performances (and indeed, how can mental illness be represented playfully without infantilizing its sufferer?), it becomes difficult to envision Kane's play as politically transformative. How can she stare back at her spectators, or resignify the body of the mentally ill woman? Sprinkle gives herself cervical exams and Orlan directs her own surgeries, while Dierlam willfully ignores medical imperatives to get her body under control. Kane has no viable options for self-treatment, and willfully resisting recommended medical treatments can (perhaps does?) result in her self-destruction. Her inability to control the situation—expect by taking her own life—underscores the powerlessness of mental illness. Furthermore, since the psychotic subject is defined by psychiatry as categorically incapable of making accurate claims about herself or the world around her, anything Kane's speaker says can be framed as delusional, both within the context of the play and beyond. Like Kane herself, the more rebellious or dissatisfied or unbounded the speaker becomes, the more she is urged to "correct" her behaviour.

Without agency, her presence on the stage is more of a spectacle than a counter-gaze.

Consequently, while mental illness might initially appear to strategically reject cultural constructions of the feminine body, the associated loss of identity does not restore a powerful subject position; as I pointed out at the beginning of this chapter, psychotic episodes and bouts of depression are not representations of the abject, unbounded, out-of-control body, but actually are that body. A question that looms over

4.48 is whether staging the "desperate communication of the powerless" (Showalter 5) in

195 fact restores agency to the mentally ill subject, or whether the play simply creates a voyeuristic gaze at a spectacle of corporeal difference. To some degree, Kane escapes this question by not performing the work herself: Any woman (or man, or ensemble of actors) who takes on the role of the speaker in 4.48 is presumably at a remove from the semi-fictionalized subject matter unless she suffers from mental illness herself, and consequently her identity is not easily collapsible into the character on the stage. There is a pronounced artist/art object division here that does not exist in the body-based performance art I discuss in previous chapters. At the same time, the absence of a "real" mentally ill woman on the stage does not prevent Kane from staging her self as she writes, nor does it prevent directors themselves from trying to collapse Kane's experience into the play's character(s), and as I have argued at length, Kane's death has made it possible for spectators to assume that her work is an entirely confessional and autobiographical representation of her own experiences. While any given actor might be able to reproduce the role of the speaker, the play never becomes a generic story about mental illness but instead remains—for better or worse—the story of Kane's mental illness, particularly since reviewers cannot resist linking the play back to its author's suicide.

Kane's suicide also suggests that the playwright failed to attend to the very painful personal cost of writing the play. The time it took Kane to write 4.48 was time she spent trying to articulate the experience of a psychotic break, and her death a few days after the play was completed suggests she was in a very bad state at the end of the writing process. I can only speculate about Kane's frame of mind in her absence, but evidence suggests that the act of writing 4.48 may have contributed in some way to

196 Kane's suicide. Kane's agent and close friend Mel Kenyon suggests as much in an interview when she states: "I'm still angry that she felt she had to dig so deep to write the last play that she couldn't find another way out" (Saunders 153). To uncritically champion this play on the grounds that it expresses resistance to psychiatric discourse and to social constructions of proper femininity is to overlook Kane's profound suffering in writing the piece. Zimmerman argues that 1970s performance art used the body to explore images of violence and death, and in so doing constructed a "simultaneously violated and violating body" (31). I see a similar contradiction in Kane's work: She linguistically re-creates the body of the mentally ill woman beyond conventional representations in 4.48, but in her personal suffering and her suicide she also literally destroys her own body. Is this a performance of self-assertion, then, or one of victimization? Can this play be celebrated as a feminist response to psychiatry given the violence that Kane inflicts on herself? Doesn't suicide essentially neutralize any potential threat presented by the out-of-bounds body by utterly and definitively removing it from representation? I argue in previous chapters that performances of abjection can inadvertently exploit and even dismantle the body, thereby harming the performers;

Kane's suicide is the most extreme example of this potential harm. Caminero-Santangelo argues that "insanity is the final surrender to [dominant discourses] precisely because it is characterized by the (dis)ability to produce meaning" (11), and Kane's suicide is a radical demonstration of that disability. Her death means that she cannot say anything more; she has essentially silenced herself, ceased to transform and to enact transformation.

Kane's severe limitations underscore the shortcomings of any feminist performances that turn to mental illness, madness, and hysteria in search of productive

197 sites of feminist rebellion. Donaldson cautions that, "however it is romanticized, madness

itself offers women little possibility for true resistance or productive rebellion" (101).

Madness is not a strategy for social change, it is a removal from social participation; to

"go mad" is to remove oneself from discourse, to become unable to speak, to be locked in

the attic or the asylum away from the public eye, and at its extreme, to engage in

complete self-destruction. Hysteria is not a way to joyfully terrorize the status quo by

self-consciously constructing oneself as an unruly woman, but is instead a deeply painful

and ultimately devastating means of turning restrictive gender roles back inwards on the

body. Consequently, the figure of the madwoman cannot be upheld as a model for

overturning social inequalities.

The madwoman's lack of agency points to wider implications for feminist

performance practices: There is a limit to how unbounded, unruly, and abject the body

can become. Turning the frustrations of limited social roles back on the physical body is a

potentially dangerous endeavour, since the extreme limit of such actions is ultimately

self-destruction. Additionally, the act of performing what appears to be a complete loss of

control over body and mind is to situate oneself beyond the bounds of representation, and

performers need to be aware that such a position dismantles their ability to produce

meaning. Again, performances need to remain attentive to the dual meanings of

"revolting": There needs to be a sense that the performing body is a site of contestation as

well as abjection. My final chapter suggests that irony is fundamental to revolting performances; the spectator's ability to read the unbounded body as a conscious choice

on the performer's part is what potentially allows for agency and abjection to co-exist.

198 Chapter 6. Conclusion: Implications, Complications, and Directions for Further Inquiry

The borderline work of culture demands an encounter with "newness" that is not

part of a continuum of past and present. It creates a sense of the new as an

insurgent act of cultural translation.

Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (11)

It is in order to attack the spectator's sensibility on all sides that we advocate a

revolting spectacle which, instead of making the stage and auditorium two closed

worlds, without possible communication, spreads its visual and sonorous

outbursts over the entire mass of the spectators.

Antonin Artaud, The Theatre and its Double (86)

At the outset of this project I envisioned revolting feminist performances as potentially transformative articulations of the relationship between the material body and its culture.

I now have a growing sense that these representations of "bodily eruption" (Bordo 189) range from relatively ambivalent (Sprinkle, Dierlam) to dangerously destructive (Orlan,

Kane) given the various types of harm these performers impose on themselves.

Nonetheless, I remain convinced that the performances I discuss here also destabilize the concept of corporeal identity as an essential, fixed feature of the material body; the exaggerated, parodic performances of female uncontrollability, contagion, and spillage underscore the extent to which language constructs the meaning(s) we attach to any particular body. Furthermore, I see the shift away from attempts to create unanimously

199 positive, politically correct representations of women as an opportunity for feminist performances to express a wider variety of voices, experiences, and identities—and consequently to reveal the political investments of an even wider range of seemingly- neutral cultural representations of "femaleness". My concluding thoughts on these performances of abjection are rather ambivalent, for while the performances are exciting, unusual, and transgressive, they also exact a high personal cost from their performers and may ultimately fail in their attempts to retheorize the body. This final chapter attempts to unravel what I perceive as the transformative possibilities of revolting performances from their potentially destructive outcomes, and considers what types of representational strategies might adequately express resistance to dominant cultural constructions of the body without causing excessive harm to their practitioners. In the following pages, I draw on Bhabha's work to consider how the ambiguities and contradictions of these performances arise from the fact that they express interstitial identities that do not reside at the center of a clearly-defined, homogenous ideological community. As a result, I leave aside my misgivings about how "adequately" feminist these performances are to focus instead on their potentially positive and negative outcomes. I explicitly trace the ways in which revolting bodies can destabilize essentialist notions of the body, and I consider how these performers articulate a resistance to seemingly-objective medical knowledge in particular. Having established the more positive capabilities of revolting performances, I draw on Hutcheon to underscore the ways in which their interpretation relies on spectators to make the irony "happen", which may ultimately mean that only spectators who already share the political investments of revolting feminist practitioners may actually read the works as "misperformances" of feminine stereotypes. Finally, I

200 trace the various types of pain and suffering the performers must negotiate, and I question the position of feminist critics who champion this type of work without acknowledging the political implications of promoting a representational mode that effectively harms women. My final section traces some current manifestations of the revolting body in the art world and points to further directions for the work I began in this study.

Identity in the Interstices

Re-reading Bhabha's introduction to The Location of Culture, I am struck by the similarities between his concept of "interrogatory, interstitial space" (5) and my analysis of revolting feminist performances throughout this dissertation. Bhabha's critical argument is that postmodern and postcolonial identities are performed and contested along the borders, gaps, and thresholds of clearly-defined communities and subjectivities.

These hybridized, interstitial identities are never complete, closed, or static, but instead represent an ongoing process of negotiation that resists closure. "In-between" identities can also cause tension where they deviate from the dominant ideologies of their bordering communities:

It is in the emergence of the interstices—the overlap and displacement of

domains of difference—that the intersubjective and collective experiences

of nationness, community interest, or cultural value are negotiated. How

are subjects formed "in-between", or in excess of, the sum of the "parts"

of difference (usually intoned as race/class/gender, etc.)? How do

strategies of representation or empowerment come to be formulated in the

competing claims of communities where, despite shared histories of

201 deprivation and discrimination, the exchange of values, meanings and

priorities may not always be collaborative and dialogical, but may be

profoundly antagonistic, conflictual and even incommensurable? (2)

While I do not explicitly deal with the interstices between gender, race, and class in this dissertation, a slight reformulation of Bhabha provides a useful framework for my own project: corporeal identities are performed and contested in the overlap and displacement of domains of discursive difference. In other words, the cultural

"meanings" of the bodies in revolting feminist performances are constructed in the interstices between innumerable discourses: feminism, performance, disability studies, science and medicine, pornography, the fine arts, freakishness, queer studies and camp, beauty, religion and ritual, psychoanalysis, and "women's writing". They do not reflect a unified, internally consistent, monolithic feminist ideology because they exist along the boundaries of mainstream 1990s feminism, in negotiation with other ways of reading the contemporary body. As such, the representational strategies of these performances are in constant flux. They straddle the boundaries between innumerable polarities, refusing to settle comfortably into one category or the other: subject/object, beautiful/disgusting, safe/threatening, educational/erotic, confessional/fictional, natural/freakish, self- realized/self-destructive, and healthy/pathological. The performances are complex and contradictory, asserting and undermining innumerable identities in an attempt to articulate the performing body. And of course, the abject body itself represents an

"interrogatory, interstitial space" in which to raise questions about identity since it forms, as Butler puts it, the "constitutive outside to the domain of the subject" (Bodies 3).

Bhabha's work also resonates with Douglas's fundamental argument in Purity and

202 Danger that the borders between cleanliness and pollution are spaces of productive inquiry, since "all margins are dangerous. If they are pulled this way or that the shape of fundamental experience is altered. Any structure of ideas is vulnerable at its margins"

(121). Throughout this dissertation, I have attempted to trace the complex and shifting

"strategies of representation or empowerment" that potentially arise in the interstices between feminism, performance practices, and the competing discourses that construct contemporary corporeal identity.

I highlight the similarities between my work and Bhabha's concept of the interstitial in order to emphasize two key points which help to account for the complexities of the performances I analyze in previous chapters: first, the ambiguities and contradictions I describe might be conceived of as integral to interstitial1 identity since they arise from the attempt to negotiate the claims of competing corporeal discourses. Second, an interstitial identity must by definition come into conflict with its peripheral communities on occasion—here, with mainstream feminism in particular— since its marginal position implies a departure from some of the tenets of those communities. Although my analysis of disgusting performances often points to what I see as deeply problematic and contradictory representations of women's bodies, situating these performances as articulations of interstitial identity allows me to envision them as intentionally complex and necessarily ambivalent. While I still have deep reservations about certain performative strategies, which I will explore at length, I temporarily put

11 describe feminist performances as "interstitial" rather than using Victor Turner's term "liminal", to emphasize that these identities are not simply transitional or headed towards a "final destination"; feminist practitioners might find some representational strategies more productive than others, but settling on any one definitive way to represent would inevitably lead to essentialism and exclusion.

203 these concerns aside in order to consider how the "in-betweenness" of these performances potentially functions as a mode of resistance.

Incredible Bodies

The most significant function of revolting performances, in my opinion, is that they destabilize what might otherwise appear to be fixed categories of identity. In performing the very bodies that have been relegated to the margins of representation, these performances ask why certain physical traits are imbued with so much cultural value while others are insistently represented as disgusting. An essentialist notion of the body—a notion that pervades contemporary popular culture largely due to its potential to generate capital—posits that certain (seemingly trans-historical, trans-cultural) physical characteristics are inherently good, natural, and desirable. Those whose bodies are not coded as good, natural, and desirable are encouraged to exert a constant effort to bring their bodies into line with cultural ideals in order to "better themselves". My chapter on

Dierlam explores this problem at length, since I see the current disdain for fat as the most ubiquitous example of what Goffman calls the "spoiled identity": body fat is never envisioned as a simple excess of adipose tissue (whatever evaluative factors are used to determine "excessive"), but is instead overburdened with value judgments about what is beautiful, healthy, clean, moral, considerate, responsible, and competent.2 Other manifestations of bodily difference are framed in a similar manner, if arguably with less urgency than the fat body: As Thomson points out, the culturally idealized body

2 As I write this, there is considerable speculation about who will be appointed to replace David Souter on the U.S. Supreme Court. Various media outlets have expressed concerns that the forerunners for the nomination, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor, might be bad choices since their "excessive" body size puts them at increased risk of mortality (see Campos, "Fat Judges"). I am deeply skeptical that such discussions emerge fromgenuin e health concerns rather than from prevailing attitudes that a fat woman's failure to control her body points to a general inability to make sound decisions.

204 maintains its ascendancy in part by emphasizing its difference from the bodies it excludes as Other {Extraordinary 7). The irony is that the body idealized by Western culture and proliferated around the world at this particular moment in history has become increasingly unattainable, and an ever-growing number of bodies are consequently marginalized and excluded as Other. How can these Othered bodies be reinstated into cultural representation as signs of something besides corporeal failure?

While one possible approach might be to simply replace "bad" representations with "good" ones—by insisting that Othered bodies are in fact valuable, beautiful, and natural—such a position continues to rely on simplistic, essentialist, and exclusionary binaries that fail to adequately capture the complex and shifting process of identity negotiation. The performances I discuss in this dissertation mark an important shift away from popular cultural representations of the body, in that they reject the idea of a fixed, static, coherent corporeal identity that language must work to describe—or that performance must work to represent. Instead, they are founded on the poststructuralist notion that the "meanings" of bodies are constructed by language itself, and consequently changing the ways we discuss bodies can alter the meanings we attach to certain physical, biological characteristics. In other words, bodies are not inherently beautiful or disgusting, but instead our way of talking about them makes them so. I acknowledge here, as elsewhere, that bodies are not purely discursive fabrications with no material reality, but emphasize nonetheless that language invests bodies that fail to assimilate into cultural norms with meanings that far outstrip visible physical differences; Bogdan articulates this best in his description of the freak's body, which I cite in Chapter Three:

"Being extremely tall is a matter of physiology—being a giant involves something more"

205 (24). The "Public Cervix Announcement" provides a particularly persuasive demonstration that bodies are discursively constructed. Sprinkle's spectators never "just" see a woman displaying her vaginal cavity—although on a purely physical level, that is all her performance involves—but instead they read into her body various intersecting and sometimes contradictory identities: an anatomical model, a work of art, a pornographic display, an obscene display, a sexy woman, an exploited woman, an empowered woman, a teacher, a healer, a hustler, an entertainer. While Sprinkle could mistakenly be imagined as "just" a sex worker, her actual performance emphasizes what

Bhabha calls "the overlap and displacement of domains of difference" (2), where her role as a sex worker makes up only one of her shifting constitutive identities.

If corporeal identity is not fixed, but instead represents—to draw once again on

Butler's argument about gender— "the stylized repetition of acts through time and not a seemingly seamless identity" (Gender Trouble 179), then it becomes possible to imagine restoring agency to bodies that are culturally marginalized. The process of re-articulating excluded bodies and identities is far from simple, but Butler suggests that conventional representations can be rendered "incredible" (180, original emphasis) through a "failure to repeat, a de-formity, or a parodic repetition that exposes the phantasmatic effect of abiding identity as a politically tenuous construction" (179). This description offers a rather succinct summary of the performative strategies I discuss throughout this dissertation: The revolting body fails to simply reproduce normative female corporeity, but instead deforms and dismantles (sometimes literally, as with Orlan and Kane) culturally elevated images of the clean, natural, proper, and contained female, while simultaneously reiterating and exaggerating the idealized feminine body in order to

206 critique the socially constructed dimensions of its underlying values. Perhaps most importantly, these performances dismantle the notion of the body as a static entity that can be held indefinitely in some fixed, perfected, desirable state, but instead insistently represent the female body as "a phenomenon in transformation, an as of yet unfinished metamorphosis" (Bakhtin 24). The female body—the idea of "femaleness" itself, with all its concurrent interstitial identities—is a body in flux, and consequently it is a body that can never be systematically knowable.

No Way to Treat a Lady

This idea of the unknowable female body underscores the other significant function of revolting performances: By arguing that corporeal identity is discursively constructed, they undermine the fields of knowledge that lay claim to certain categorical, universal truths about the body. Throughout this project I focus primarily on performative representations of scientific and medical discourses: gynecology in Sprinkle's work, obesity in Dierlam's, plastic surgery in Orlan's work, and psychiatry in Kane's. These performances share the fundamental view that while science and medicine seek to uncover hard, objective, true facts on which to build an understanding of the body, and consequently to produce a model for optimal physicality, these "facts" are necessarily reflections of the dominant ideology of a particular time and place. This argument is made particularly persuasive by the striking resonances in these works to various social and medical constructions of the body from the nineteenth century: the invention of the speculum, freak shows, vivisection, and female hysteria. By hearkening back to earlier medical practices and conceptions of the body that are currently deemed harmful and oppressive, these performances remind their spectators that contemporary corporeal

207 discourses may also reveal serious shortcomings with the benefit of some historical perspective.

Current medical constructions of the body are nonetheless deeply influential, possibly because they appear for the most part genuinely well-intentioned; the popular aphorism "above all, do no harm" has largely shaped social perceptions of medicine's overarching mission and of a doctor's ethical responsibility toward patients.

Consequently, harmful or oppressive representations may actually be more insidious in medical discourse than they are in other constructions of women's bodies—in advertising, fine art, or pornography, for instance—precisely because medicine is widely perceived as having a patient's best interests at heart. Feminist critiques of medicine point out that any field which seeks "secure knowledges" of the body (Kuppers, Scar 33) and which categorizes bodily differences within seemingly-neutral polarities of normal/abnormal or healthy/pathological is inherently problematic. Neither does contemporary medicine exist in isolation from the cultural constructions of idealized corporeity I discussed earlier; clinics and research centers are ultimately businesses that are encouraged (financially or otherwise) to isolate, study, and treat "undesirable" bodily differences. Thus, while medicine can improve the quality of our lives and can provide a framework within which to conceptualize our embodied experiences, it is nonetheless irresponsible to uphold medical discourse as an infallible, objective account of all bodily processes and meanings. Historically, women's bodies have been systematically pathologized and devalued within medicine as "figures of dense, unspeaking, gross corporeality" (Price and Shildrick 146). It is worth considering how these representations

208 persist in contemporary discourse, and how they might be effectively challenged, disrupted, or transformed.

Throughout this dissertation, I discuss works that insistently represent the body that is medically constructed as pathological, abnormal, or unbounded. At times the performances embrace and exaggerate images of illness and portray the performing body as a source of contagion. Concurrently, these performances resist medical discourses by challenging the "facts" of science and by situating women as the authorities over their own bodies and bodily processes; Dierlam and Kane resist medical treatment, while

Sprinkle and Orlan engage in self-directed procedures. Medical certainties are undermined as the representations of bodies on the stage shift from ill to healthy and back again. In short, these performances once again demonstrate in-betweenness, a sustained interest in playing with the polarities of wellness and pathology in order to destabilize scientific claims to a specialized, professional knowledge of the body.

Despite Sprinkle's lack of medical credentials, she uses a speculum to reveal her cervix to spectators; in so doing, she argues for her right to self-knowledge and self- ownership and resists the conventional structure of the gynecological exam, in which the doctor uses specialized tools to view a woman's body in a way that she herself cannot.

Additionally, Sprinkle's counter-gaze during her cervical display indicates a refusal to accept the role of the "cooperative object" (Kapsalis 19) who will assume a silent, passive position as her body is examined; Sprinkle consequently destabilizes the power relationship between doctor and patient as she remains an active participant in the process of reading her body's meanings.

209 Along similar lines, when Dierlam, a five hundred pound woman, takes the stage at Coney Island as a campy Fat Lady sideshow, she refuses to silently allow her body's meanings to be constructed by medical discourses that position fat as a raging epidemic and the most extreme manifestation of corporeal failure. Throughout her performance,

Dierlam remains unapologetic about her size, uninterested in transformation, and insistent that she is happy, fulfilled, and beloved just as she is; Dierlam stages both her

"impossible" body and her correspondingly "impossible" sense of self-worth, thus revealing the deeply-ingrained cultural biases that lay beneath current scientific and medical constructions of fat. By drawing on the queer, campy theatrical sensibilities that she inherited from her work with Charles Ludlam, Dierlam also reminds spectators that medicalized conceptions of corporeal Otherness can slowly change over time as the dominant culture itself becomes more tolerant of certain kinds of difference; homosexuality was once coded as criminal, pathological behaviour but has achieved greater social acceptance, and some day the fat body might do the same.

Orlan represents a polar opposite to Dierlam's refusal to transform: she is so eager to employ medical tools and technologies to reconstruct her appearance—in spite of the physical and psychic pain associated with such alterations—that her self-directed surgical performances are sometimes read as an expression of mental illness (Augsburg 291).

Orlan disavows readings of her physical alterations as particularly "unnatural" on the grounds that the contemporary body is in fact constantly monitored, mediated, and optimized by medical technologies, even where such interventions are entirely elective; as with Sprinkle, Orlan's real transgression is employing the tools and techniques of medicine for her own purposes despite her lack of medical credentials. Additionally,

210 Orlan's decision to remain awake during her surgeries means that her body never becomes a passive object on the operating table, but instead she remains active, engaged, and in charge of her transformation.

Finally, Kane's work demonstrates how diagnoses of mental illness can act as a measure of social control over unruly women. In her final play, 4.48 Psychosis, Kane stages a fictionalized version of her own (absent) body's struggles with mental illness and in so doing, she highlights the lack of agency accorded to psychiatric patients.

Unfortunately, 4.48 has been largely dismissed as confessional "suicide art" because of its proximity to Kane's own suicide, and Kane's critique of psychiatric practices in the play has been largely overlooked. I see striking parallels between Kane and the rebellious, unconventional, creative women of the nineteenth century who were diagnosed as hysterical, and I argue that public perceptions of Kane's illness were discursively constructed by her failure to capitulate to normative gender roles and not in fact founded on any visible manifestation of Kane's depression. While I draw on

Thomson's work in the field of disability studies throughout this dissertation, I see

Kane's situation as the most persuasive example of Thomson's fundamental argument:

Disability—the embodiment of Otherness—has far more to do with the perception of bodily difference than the fact of bodily difference. Again, this argument supports the notion that corporeal identities are discursively constructed and that medicine consequently cannot lay claim to objective, hard facts about the body; like any concept of corporeal identity, medicine is culture-bound and history-bound.

The nineteenth century circulates as a subtext throughout the dissertation:

Sprinkle's use of the speculum acts as a corrective against its historical role as a tool of

211 subjugation, both of slave women in 1840s America and of women deemed prostitutes in the 1860s England under the Contagious Diseases Acts. Dierlam's work draws on the history of freak sideshows and women like Celesta Geyer who were exhibited as Fat

Ladies, particularly within the carnivalesque atmosphere of Coney Island. Orlan's performance alludes to the European anatomical theatres of the past, and also to the history of both the vivisection of unanesthetized animals and the painful experimental operations that were performed on impoverished hospital patients. Finally, Kane's critical reception bears a striking resemblance to the history of diagnosing intelligent, rebellious women as hysterical if they failed to fit comfortably into their prescribed gender roles, and her final play is a revision of the psychotherapeutic "talking cure" that alludes to

Freud's work with Ida Bauer.

The Problem of Irony

Thus far I have argued that the revolting body poses a challenge to essentialist notions of identity, and that performers who embrace images of bodily spillage can resist the narrow parameters of the culturally idealized body. Images of the disgusting, abject, or unbounded body are not without severe limitations, however; I have raised a number of concerns about the revolting body throughout this dissertation that I wish to elaborate in further detail here. First and foremost, the revolting body is an ambivalent body, and as such it would be naive to assume that it can systematically retheorize dominant cultural constructions of female corporeity. While the out-of-bounds performer might have the freedom to say and do things that are socially unacceptable in other contexts, she achieves this freedom in part by fueling cultural anxieties about female uncontrollability and unruliness. Performers might use disgust as a representational strategy that disrupts

212 the objectifying, desiring gaze at the female body-on-display and forces spectators to experience the performing body in a new way—as a body that can repel desire, and cast away the gaze—but in so doing they simultaneously validate certain longstanding linkages between female corporeity and abjection. Grosz argues that the female body is already positioned as a body that lacks containment:

[women] are represented and live themselves as seepage, liquidity. The

metaphorics of uncontrollability, the ambivalence between desperate, fatal

attraction and strong revulsion, the deep-seated fear of absorption, the

association of femininity with contagion and disorder, the undecidability

of the limits of the female body (particularly, but not only, with the onset

of puberty and in the case of pregnancy), its powers of cynical seduction

and allure are all common themes in literary and cultural representations

of women. (203)

What, then, is the advantage of continuing to perpetuate such representations within feminist performance practices? How can revolting female performers clearly distinguish themselves as parodies of abjection? The revolting bodies at the center of the works I discuss here are intended as "misperformances" of cultural stereotypes of femininity, but at times they are indistinguishable from the very stereotypes they seek to dismantle. This problem, as I have suggested elsewhere, is largely grounded in the limitations of irony itself. As Hutcheon points out, irony relies on interpretation and not merely on intention (100). Regardless of what a performer hopes to accomplish by self­ consciously constructing herself as an unruly woman, ultimately the successful communication of irony—and the successful execution of Butler's call for a "failure to

213 repeat, a de-formity, or a parodic repetition" {Gender Trouble 179)—depends on the spectator's reception of the performance. Hutcheon argues that for irony to successfully

"happen" between an ironist and an interpreter, both parties must belong to overlapping discursive communities, which she defines as "the complex configuration of shared knowledge, beliefs, values and communicative strategies" (91). In other words, on some level the only spectators who are receptive to the ironies of these performances are the spectators who already share at least some of their ideological investments— consequently the performers run the risk that they are, to use a colloquial expression,

"preaching to the choir". There is a serious risk that for spectators outside these discursive communities, performances of the revolting body are simply a spectacle of difference that both reinforces the cultural ascendancy of the normative (male) body and reinforces a sense of the ongoing violability of the female body. Butler's theories of performativity suggest that the repetition of revolting female performances over time might eventually create a wider discursive community that would be receptive to the irony of such performances, but I wonder if they could just as easily have the opposite effect of bolstering harmful stereotypes about women's bodies. Is the attempt to stage a revolt inherently valuable even if it fails, or worse still, inadvertently reinforces the very representations it struggles against?

To some degree, performers might be able to signal their ironic intentions more clearly by using a campy, carnivalesque, or playful tone that suggests the presence of double-entendre in the performance. In such a scenario, spectators would not necessarily have to "get" the precise meanings of the irony itself in order to sense that the performance does not quite mean what it says. It seems to me that my own chapters here

214 represent a continuum from the performance most likely to make irony "happen" to the least likely to do so (although admittedly, spectators' precise readings of the irony in the

"Public Cervix Announcement" are relatively unpredictable). One way to situate the continuum from Sprinkle to Kane is that the performances become increasingly insular and inward-looking, and the abject bodies at the center of the performances consequently become less clearly distinguishable to spectators as imitative representations of corporeal abjection rather than actual abjection. Perhaps the most productive representations of revolting bodies are those with lower stakes in terms of the physical and psychic pain they demand from their performers. Or perhaps there is no limit to how abject the performing body can be as long as the performer adequately conveys that her Otherness is a deliberate, self-conscious, exaggerated (and possibly joyful?) representation of the disgusting, and not the genuine article.

I suspect the performances that are most successfully read as ironic are those that are humorous or playful, that draw attention to their constructedness by clearly signaling the gap between performer and stage persona, and that occasionally ease up on the performer's—and by extension, the spectator's—suffering by coding the body as a source of pleasure and not simply pain. Unfortunately, as I argue in terms of Sprinkle and

Dierlam, such a performative mode is also not nearly as confrontational—the other side of the "revolting" coin—and it might consequently allow spectators to ease back into an entitled gaze at the performing body. Furthermore, as Eagleton has pointed out (148), the political efficacy of carnivalesque performances might be undermined by the fact that carnival itself is a "licensed affair", a socially-sanctioned outlet for representations and ideologies that do not fall into line with the status quo. This suggest that performances

215 which are too carnivalesque or signal their ironies too clearly are in danger of having their social critiques safely contained within spaces of licensed transgression (the avant- garde performance space, the Coney Island sideshow) rather than circulating in the culture at large. To some extent, the appearance of genuine abjection—and genuine danger—is what makes the performing female body "a site of public debate that poses crucial questions for our time" (Orlan "Interventions" 319). Further inquiry is necessary to determine how the revolting body might draw attention to itself as a disruptive performance that encourages ironic readings, without concurrently sacrificing the confrontational tone that requires audiences to remain accountable for their own position as spectators, and without situating the performances as relatively harmless carnivalesque representations that are not fundamentally intended to enact serious social change.

The Problem of Harm

The other major shortcoming I perceive in revolting feminist performances is that they potentially harm their performers. To begin with, the female body-on-display in these performances is frequently subject to a gaze that either constructs her as a sexual spectacle or as a grotesque spectacle (Thomson, Extraordinary 26), neither of which is a particularly empowering position. I have argued throughout this project that performers can stare back, but they are nevertheless the bodies that are on display on the stage, and thus always the main focus of the staring encounter. On a physical level, these practitioners also subject themselves to various risks: Sprinkle's audience is permitted to get very close to her body and she is consequently vulnerable to unwanted sexual contact and to violence. Dierlam's mobility was quite limited, and her appearance on the stage likely aggravated the physical ailments that prevented her from moving freely in the first

216 place. Orlan's physical risks are so tremendous they can hardly be listed—she is willing to accept disfigurement, illness, and even death as the price of her repeated transformations. The physical harm that Kane underwent in writing 4.48 Psychosis is somewhat difficult to ascertain, but certainly her suicide a few days after she completed the play suggests that she put her writing before her own physical wellness. I wonder if constructing the body so insistently and repeatedly as revolting has an impact on a performer's sense of her own embodiment; is it possible to dwell within abjection over a sustained period of time—even more or less permanently, in Orlan's case—and not begin

Xofeel abject? These practitioners clearly use their own experiences to inform their work;

I wonder how they resist letting their work inform their experiences in turn.

The emotional risks of these revolting performances are equally extensive: these women risk being dismissed, objectified, ridiculed, shouted down, and completely rejected by their spectators. Even those spectators who are receptive to feminist body- based performances might reasonably ask whether self-harm represents a genuine political revolt or whether it simply reinforces the female body as a site of violence.

Performers who engage in self-harm are frequently dismissed by their detractors on the grounds that their difficult work is sensationalist and attention-seeking at best, and a manifestation of masochism and mental illness at worst. In fact, questions about the mental health of these practitioners circulate time and again in writing about revolting performances; who would deliberately harm herself for art's sake unless she was clearly unwell? This is a dangerous question for the performer to contend with, since she risks losing her agency if her ability to make sound decisions about her own body is in doubt.

In my previous chapter on Kane, I discussed at length how madness, hysteria, and mental

217 illness represent particularly dangerous territory for performances to tread, since these labels effectively silence women and remove them from representation altogether. There is yet another risk, then, that a performer could lose her ability to speak and to be heard altogether given the mode in which she has chosen to perform.

The fundamental issue that looms over these performances, and all their attendant consequences, is whether the women who participate in them are somehow exploited in spite of their willing participation. Gerber's concerns about freak performers, which I cite in Chapter Three, resonate here: "If an individual consents, by virtue of what appears to be acts of free choice, to being degraded, exploited, or oppressed, does the act of consent end the moral problem that his or her situation seems to constitute?" (38). While I cannot assume that I am somehow in a privileged position to decide what is "good" for these performers, I nevertheless hesitate to uncritically champion revolting performances on the grounds that they are, to a lesser and greater degree, clearly harmful to their performers. I have argued throughout this dissertation that revolting bodies are productive sites of feminist inquiry, but I also feel that it is extremely important for feminist critics to acknowledge the great personal cost to practitioners who engage in performances of abjection—to complacently point to the fact that these practitioners knowingly and deliberately harm themselves is not enough. Revolting female performers who stare back at their spectators, reminding them that the act of looking has political implications, are also staring back at feminist critics; we must realize our own complicity in the spectacle of the abject body on the stage, even as we are tempted to celebrate all its transgressive possibilities. I am inclined to agree with Caminero-Santangelo when she contends that every iteration of feminism should be unified in a commitment to improve the lives of

218 "real" women (180), and consequently I contend that no matter how transformative these performances may be, we need to acknowledge the suffering of the "real" women who write and perform them.

Continued Revolt

My scope is necessarily limited in this dissertation given the complexities of these performances, but I see a number of areas for further inquiry that could map some of the approaches to the out-of-bounds body employed by other practitioners, which might possibly reveal which representational strategies are more productive than others in terms of undermining dominant cultural constructions of embodiment without causing excessive harm to the practitioners. Certainly, the intersections between gender and race demand a closer analysis. Both Suzan-Lori Parks and Canadian performance artist Mara

Verna have constructed works around the figure of Saartjie Baartman, the so-called

"Hottentot Venus". The story of Baartman's profound exploitation during her life and after her death suggests some further connections between my work on freak shows, gynecology, vivisection, and autopsies, and could introduce a discussion of race and colonialism into my research. In fact, a wider consideration of the nineteenth-century sideshow, the postmodern sideshow, and disability theory would provide ample material for a study unto itself that could build on the work of Thomson, Adams, and Bogdan in particular. Jennifer Miller's work as a Bearded Lady could provide an interesting contrast to Julia Pastrana's exhibitions in nineteenth-century Europe, and a discussion of male sideshow performers could include Mat Fraser, a performer I have alluded to elsewhere in this project, whose self-display of his phocomelia resonates with the story of Stanley

Barent, a man who performed in sideshows as a "Seal Boy".

219 Carolee Schneemann and VALIE EXPORT'S performances could offer some interesting contrasts to the discourses of pornography in Sprinkle's work. There are also a substantial number of artists both past and present who have worked with blood, surgery, pain and self-mutilation: early practitioners, such as Marina Abramovic, Ana Mendieta, and Gina Pane, would provide counterpoints to Orlan's work in particular, as would younger practitioners such as Kira O'Reilly, Regina Jose Galindo and Nicole Blackman.

Opening the discussion to include male practitioners would provide a wealth of artists to consider: Stelarc, Ron Athey, Franko B., Bob Flanagan, Yang Zhichao, and

Fakir Musafar all engage in extreme body-based performances that share striking similarities to those I have discussed here, and their particular engagements with BDSM

(bondage/discipline, dominance/submission, and sadism/masochism) and body modification might undermine stereotypical associations between women and pain.

David Roman's Acts of Intervention also suggests, in part, some productive connections between gay male performance art, blood and pain, and the AIDS virus that could provide an interesting counterpoint to my work here. Additionally, a closer look at the male playwrights who were labeled "New Brutalists" in 1990s British theatre would provide further context for Kane's work and would deepen a discussion about whether raw, savage stage imagery is still considered an indication of a diseased mind where male writers are concerned.

I also see the potential to take this study in various other directions: the work of physically disabled performers beyond the sideshow (Mary Duffy, Cheryl Marie Wade,

Angela Ellsworth), transgendered peformers (Kate Bornstein), queer performers (Shawna

Dempsey and Lori Millan, Staceyann Chin), and artists whose work deals explicitly with

220 aging (Rachel Rosenthal) and with the maternal body (Jess Dobkin) can create inroads for considering in more detail questions about difference, transformation, and the gap between a "real" performer and her stage persona.

The revolting body continues to circulate in recent works of art, most prominently in photography and video installations in addition to performance. The 2007 exhibition

Global Feminisms: New Directions in Contemporary Art indicates that concerns about self-harm remain pressing in current iterations of body-centric art (all the works featured were from 1990 or later), and also that the abject, uncontained, and unbounded body is prevalent in feminist artworks across cultural divides, particularly in regions where the abject body comes to represent political unrest. Future research is certainly warranted to discover how the abject body can function in some works of art as a physical representation of a diseased social order, as they largely appeared to in the Global

Feminisms exhibit. The abject body in these works provoked a similar critical response to the works I have discussed: one reviewer pointed out that "many of the most memorable pieces dealt graphically with mutilation, pain, and psychic disconnection" (Withers 460), while another summed up the exhibition as follows: "Expect self-mutilation, violent sexuality, and disquieting body images. Expect to be shocked. Expect to feel, to gasp, to thinl? (Hauck, original emphasis). There were over eighty different artists from around the world featured in the Global Feminisms, but reviews of the exhibition tended to focus on the more shocking and violent works, many of them conceived as responses to war and political oppression: on Tania Bruguera's Burden of Guilt, in which she wears a butchered lamb around her neck and eats soil; Ryoko Suzuki's Bind series, in which photographs depict Suzuki with blood-soaked lengths of pig skin tightly binding her face;

221 Sigalit Landau's Barbed Hula, in which video footage depicts Landau using barbed wire as a hula hoop that slowly shreds her torso; and Regina Jose Galindo's Who Can Erase the Traces?, in which the artist leaves a trail of bloody footprints across Guatemala City to protest a violent political regime. The persistence of images of bodily spillage and uncontrollability in these works indicates a continued need for feminist critics to ask how such works might be considered transformative, while also considering the political implications of the pain and suffering that practitioners inflict on their bodies in the quest to represent themselves beyond dominant cultural stereotypes

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