MIAMI UNIVERSITY The Graduate School Certificate for Approving the Dissertation We hereby approve the Dissertation of Susan Pelle Candidate for the Degree: Doctor of Philosophy _____________________________________ Director Dr. Stefanie Kyle Dunning _____________________________________ Reader Dr. Madelyn M. Detloff _____________________________________ Reader Dr. Kathleen N. Johnson _____________________________________ Graduate School Representative Dr. Emily A. Zakin ABSTRACT (DIS)ARTICULATING BODIES AND GENDERS: PUSSY POLITICS AND PERFORMING VAGINAS by Susan Pelle The vagina has metaphorically and metonymically been the body part that stands in for the category “woman” and it is this emphatic and fabricated link that imposes itself on bodies, psyches, and lives with often horrifying consequences. My goals in exploring performative and performing vaginas are many. I not only lay out how, why, and in what ways the “normal” and “abled” female body established in both dominant and mainstream discourses is, simply put, one with a specific type of vagina, but I also confront the “truth” that vaginas purport to tell about women and femininity. Ultimately, I maintain that representations of vaginas and the debates and discourses that surround them tell us something about our culture’s fears, anxieties, and hopes. Living life as abject can be painful, even unbearable, yet as individuals negotiate this life they can experience pleasure, assert agency, and express ethical and just visions of the world. The artists, writers, and performers explored in this dissertation strategically perform vaginas in multiple and disparate ways. As they trouble, resist, and negotiate “normative” understandings of vaginas, they simultaneously declare that the “problem” is not about bodies at all. The problem is not the vagina. Instead, the problem concerns our cultural attitudes that regard non-normative bodies and identities as abnormal, perverse, disabled, pathological, and incomplete. As performing vaginas disarticulate, disrupt, and reconceptualize the assumed connections between anatomy and identity, a world that could be, a future not so far away, begins to open up. As a result, we might imagine an alternative future where queer, raced, and/or disabled bodies are not named, categorized, fixed, shunned, shamed, and/or punished. One cannot merely counter “negative” representations of the vagina, nor can the vagina solely be embraced as a woman’s center or her connection to all women. Instead of determining and limiting just how one should live out her life as a woman, is it possible for vaginas to determine nothing specific at all thereby opening up both the category “woman” and vaginas to infinite possibilities? (DIS)ARTICULATING BODIES AND GENDERS: PUSSY POLITICS AND PERFORMING VAGINAS A DISSERTATION Submitted to the Faculty of Miami University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of English by Susan Pelle Miami University Oxford, Ohio 2008 Director: Dr. Stefanie Kyle Dunning © Susan Pelle 2008 TABLE OF CONTENTS List of Figures iv Dedication v Acknowledgements vi Prologue “Performative and Performing Vaginas” 1 Introduction “Is a Cunt Ever Just a Cunt?: The Politics of a Counterdiscursive Pussy Pride” 6 Chapter One “‘I Am No More. And Satisfied’: The ‘(Dis)Abled’ Vulva in Alice Walker’s 37 Possessing the Secret of Joy” Chapter Two “The ‘Grotesque’ Pussy: ‘Transformational Shame’ in Margaret Cho’s Stand-up 60 Performances” Chapter Three “‘When Is a Tulip Not a Tulip?’: Bodies and Pleasures in Jeanette Winterson’s 89 The PowerBook” Chapter Four “‘It Began with an Image’: Loss, Disorientation, and Vulnerability in Shani 114 Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night” Epilogue “There are No (Happy) Endings: Always Becoming Otherwise” 135 Works Cited 141 iii LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1 Chicago, Judy. “Sojourner Truth Plate” from The Dinner Party. 18 July 2008. <http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/eascfa/dinner_party/wiki/images/31.710.jpg>. 19 Figure 2 Chicago, Judy. “Virginia Woolf Plate” from The Dinner Party. 18 July 2008. <http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/eascfa/dinner_party/wiki/images/38.717.jpg>. 20 Figure 3 Musa, Hassan. The Origin of Art. In Looking Both Ways: Art of the Contemporary African Diaspora. Ed. Laurie Ann Farrell. New York: Snoeck, 2004. 120. 29 Figure 4 Sherman, Cindy. Untitled, #261. In Cindy Sherman: Photographic Work, 1975-1995. Eds. Zdenek Felix and Martin Schwander. Schirmer Art Books, 1995. 88. 31 Figure 5 Cho, Margaret. I’m The One That I Want. <http://media.collegepublisher.com /media /paper872/stills/3cbe63e9acf7b-3-1.jpg>. 67 Figure 6 Cho, Margaret. CHO Revolution. 18 July 2008. <http://uaflibrary.us/moviebrowser/ covers/DVD-1233.jpg>. 77 Figure 7 Cho, Margaret. Assassin. 18 July 2008. <www.austinyoung.com/menu/images/ margaret_cho_assassin.jpg>. 77 Figure 8 Niebrugge, Ron. Red Tulip. 18 July 2008. <http://www.hardin.k12.ky.us/creekside/ RED-TULIP..jpg>. 98 Figure 9 Rembrandt, Harmenszoon van Rijn. “Portrait of Saskia as Flora.” 23 July 2008. <http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Rembrandt_Harmensz._van_Rijn_ 086.jpg>. 105 iv For Melissa You imagine her in a huge velvet hat with great dangling black feathers, but she shaves her head instead and goes for three-day midnight walks. ~ Judy Grahn v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS There are those. whose speaking is so profound, so intense, whose voices pass gently behind things and lift them and gently bathe them, and take the words in their hands and lay them with infinite delicateness close by things. ~ Helene Cixous I am moved, humbled, overwhelmed, and changed by the profundity and intensity of the exchanges I have had over the past six years. How, then, do I even begin to acknowledge those who have graciously, gracefully, and with care, somehow, in someway, shaped me as a human being? My dear friend Connie Kendall has earnestly and repeatedly stressed to me a sentiment passed on to her long ago: that when an individual agrees to mentor you she simultaneously agrees to “take on your life.” My living is better having been touched by the presence, movement, intellect, thoughts, words, concerns, and hopes of a small group of women who agreed to guide me, teach me, and form my committee. Professors Stefanie Dunning, Madelyn Detloff, Katie Johnson, and Emily Zakin, through your “infinite delicateness,” you have shaped my way of thinking, my sense of self, and my place in and connection to the world. Without your presence and ability to “take on my life,” this dissertation would not exist. To Emily, who encouraged me to engage with philosophical issues I initially resisted. Thank you for your time and thoughtfulness. To Katie, who is overwhelmingly compassionate, rigorous, and sincere, and who stood behind this project from the get go and nuanced it in exhilarating and unforeseen ways. To Madelyn, who is lovely, who imagines, believes in, and actively strives for a more just world. Through your own living, you have taught me that there is an anxious beauty in acknowledging that who we are at this moment is not who we once were or who we might become. I am honored to sense traces of you throughout this dissertation. And finally, to Stefanie, who led me to this dissertation topic, whose brilliance astounds me over and over, and whose humor reminds me that vi there are some things we needn’t take too seriously. Your long-term dedication to, passion for, and interaction with this project has made it something I’m proud of. Although all errors and flaws are my own, I hope I do all of you justice. There are also individuals who taught, guided, and supported me and whose lives are intricately intertwined with my own. To Mary Jean Corbett, who helped me find my way back and I strive to be more like. To Catherine Fox, Connie Kendall, and Jeanette Herman, who went before me and flourished. I reach out to each of you for advice, look up to you as mentors, confide in you as friends and colleagues, and find you to be always radiant, lovely, and exceptional. Your honesty, empathy, and willingness to engage with me have made all of the difference in my living. To Erin Douglas, Jen Cellio, Amie Fletcher, and Jamie Calhoun for revealing your own lovely eccentricities, while all along embracing my own. We have been and continue to be humored, disappointed, ecstatic, moved, and changed as we walk together through this odd little space better known as graduate school, our second home, our second family. Without your perpetual splendid presence, I would not have made it through. To the glorious Debbie Morner, who gracefully guided me through the personal and academic challenges of graduate school. To Cindy Lewiecki-Wilson and Jay Dolmage, who offered up brilliant lessons in disability studies. Chapter two would not be what it is without your guidance. To Lynn Rapin, who quietly got me unstuck. To Anne DiNardo, Nick DiNardo, Karen Boyhen, Ellie Wilke, and Heather Burr, who bring empathy, humor, art, and literature into my world. To Candace McClelland, the poet I continue to dream with. To Jennifer Junker, who is a lovely constant. And finally, to Melissa Spencer, who deeply and genuinely embraces all of me. Your own movements in the world remind me of what it is I love in life. My existence is richer, sweeter, and more delicious because of your presence. vii Prologue Performative and Performing Vaginas The vagina, like the category ‘woman,’ is a political category (Kim Q. Hall 113). Concepts, categories, and abstractions […] can effect a physical and material violence against the bodies they claim to organize and interpret (Judith Butler, Gender Trouble 116). Pussy, cunt, vagina, vulva; a lack, an absence, a dark hole, a grotesque perversion; a mystery that is “hungering, voracious, excessive, without restraint” (Bordo 160); “a sheath for a sword” (Muscio 4); “veiled in an impenetrable obscurity” (Freud 17); “an unoccupied space; a cavity (perhaps decaying – that foul odor!); a hollow that is hollow (only air, and besides that, worthless)” (Frueh, “Vaginal Aesthetics” 138).