research

If gender is a performance, an enactment, a scripted part then rewrites are possible. Aren’t they? In Feminism’s second wave, ignited by the publication of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique in us 1963 and stoked by its main proponents to establish equality, the rewrites were clearly defined, sometime achieved, but narrow in effect. Feminism’s Third Wave went through the script with a bright red pen. The gender dichotomy was subject to scrutiny in every quarter .

“Performance is not a difficult concept to us [women]. We’re on stage every moment of our lives.  Acting like women. Performance is a declaration of self – who one is. . . . And in performance we found an art form that was young, without the tradition of painting or sculpture. Without the traditions governed by men. The shoe fit, and so, like Cinderella, we ran with it.”
 Cheri Gaulke

“When women use their own bodies in their art work, they are using their selves; a significant psychological factor converts these bodies or faces from object to subject.”
 Lucy Lippard

“Performance can be fuelled by rage in a way that painting and sculpture cannot.”
 Judy Chicago

“Like no other genre, performance art stands for the liberation of traditional power structures and gender relations in the arts and society at large.”
 Barbara Clausen

“If one can generalise about the plethora of approaches and subject matter that make up feminist performance art so that it can be shown to have one overall intention, I believe it is the same as the one literalised by Hermine Freed’s 1974 film Art Herstory: to ensure that women are heard as well as seen, that they act under their own volition, tell their own stories and speak their truths. This purpose may not always be articulated in words, but can be conveyed in a gesture as basic as Schneemann’s return gaze when playing Manet’s Olympia or as playfully provocative as Annie Sprinkle showing us her cervix.”
Oriana Fox

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 all figure heavily in  STAGING REVOLT: FEMINIST PERFORMANCES OF THE ABJECT BODY [Amanda McCoy 2009].

In which McCoy argues that the aforementioned 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.”

Her dissertation is largely devoted to a consideration of how revolting feminist performances can re- invent the vocabulary used for the relationship between the material body and culture, thus attempting to rewrite the vernacular of gender roles and representations. But she also problematizes the physical and emotional harm knowingly imposed upon themselves by the artists by process, and she asks whether issues of ethics make it impossible to champion ‘revolting feminist performances’ without deep reservation and to question the position of feminist critics who champion this type of work without acknowledging the implications of promoting a practice that effectively harms women.

Whilst revolting feminist performances are potentially transformative articulations of the relationship between the material body and gender roles they are also potentially self destructive and may be viewed as analogous with ‘female hysteria’.

However the shift away from any attempt to create only positive, politically correct representations of women is an opportunity for female performers to employ entirely new devices, to express a wider variety of voices, experiences, and identities, and evidence an even wider range of seemingly-

innocuous cultural representations of woman. Whilst society’s view of the acceptable form for woman narrows by the decade the pile of bodies on the Other side grows;

“Othered bodies are in fact valuable, beautiful, and natural—[but] 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. 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

it’s concurrent interstitial identities—is a body in flux, and consequently it is a body that

can never be systematically knowable”.

Even to herself?

While the performer in such context may have the freedom to say and do things that are socially unacceptable in others, she may sacrifice to this freedom the re-emergence of ingrained cultural anxieties about female uncontrollability, unruliness, indefinable qualities and disquiet with gender roles and limitations;

“Performers might use disgust as a representational strategy that disrupts 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. “

A history of diagnosing intelligent, rebellious women as hysterical if they failed to fit comfortably into their prescribed gender roles is not long past and the derogatory associations of emotional weakness, coupled with high and increasing instances of depression, can  inevitably interfere with artistic intention.

The performance artist Francesca Steele has been living her practice for the last two years [Appendix A];

“Initially I responded to Kathy Acker’s question in an essay about her own bodybuilding practice: ‘Is the equation between destruction and growth also a formula for art?’ (In Bodies of Work, 1997; originally published in Kroker and Kroker [eds.] The Last Sex: Feminism and Outlaw Bodies, 1993) Like Acker, I am transforming my body through the manipulative practice of bodybuilding which is based on the destruction and re-growth of muscles and using this to generate and inform a deeply personal creative practice (in her case, writing and in mine, live art). My performance practice-as-research methodology involves following a typical bodybuilder’s training regime and diet as an art practice, in dialogue with critical, cultural and historical studies of women’s bodybuilding. By re-framing these physically inscribed actions, I hope to position my practice as ‘both a doing and a thing done’ (Diamond, 1995), allowing space to interrogate the conventions of the female body as represented in live art historical contexts.”

Her practice considers the re-appropriation and subversion of body-based gender stereotypes through the making of performances that revolve around the strategies and techniques of bodybuilding.  Reconfiguring and presenting her body as a cross-gendered paradox, enabling a reading of her form that attempts to blur the binary oppositions inherent in patriarchal hegemonic cultures. She examines what parallels there might be between processes of bodily trauma and regeneration, the raw materials of bodybuilding, and the processes of making feminist art by utilizing strategies of endurance that often appear to override skill, craft and aesthetic considerations. All the time in killer heels.

My concern for Francesca mirrors that of McCoy’s ethical dilemma when entering into a dialogue on work she evidently finds exciting but disturbing. Having worked with her at a number of points throughout her transformation into Miss Plymouth 2010 my concerns are not, I believe, without foundation.

Competitive bodybuilding has two main elements, the work that you put into your body, lifestyle, food and exercise and the showmanship of posing and performing on stage. Steele’s original intention for the piece, apart from the durational act of bodybuilding was partly to do with;

“investigating masculine and feminine beauty; what attributes a female could take on or borrow from masculinity and where these boundaries between feminine and masculine lay in terms of the aesthetic of the body. I gave myself the goal to compete to give me a real objective to work towards and to help me to try to follow the process to the best of my ability, and also for the work to exist in the world of bodybuilding rather than just that of art. During the process most of my goals have changed as I have begun to understand more about competitive bodybuilding and can contemplate more of what its potential is within my art practice”. [Interview with Simon Keitch on the occasion of performing ‘Routine’ at the Pigs Of Today Are The Hams Of Tomorrow at Royal William Yard in Plymouth January 2010 with the Marina Abramović Institute for Preservation of Performance Art].

I recently interviewed her with the intention of updating myself on progress, performance and publicity. I had questions.

I wondered originally if her intentionality had changed throughout the process?

“I don’t think the essence of my intention has changed – I wanted to use the body itself as material and use bodybuilding as the manipulative process. Through the duration different things have become more important which weren’t quite so obvious to me as they are now – the exploration of gender in an aesthetic (and chemical) way, the issues that relate to bodybuilding and how it relates to self harm and how this is a clear lineage in female performance work particularly the marking of the body….”

“the sport is very basic – you train like this, eat like this and your body changes… Making finished pieces of artwork is a lot more complicated process. Though competing is more complicated -you work on lacking body parts, shed everything unnecessary, and do what it takes to complete the body – there is a visual selection process that goes on, a critical eye over the body and your natural structure – this correlates with the making, fine tuning, and consideration which makes the “finished” piece. “

An original assertion to maintain a blog throughout the process fell by the wayside, the all consuming focus of the regime altered entirely her outlook on life and the need for documentation became irrelevant. Her training her focus, her body the document.

There is other documentation, some of it she has not as yet, felt comfortable showing. This also relates to why the blog entries stopped, which apparently was not intentional. There were questions that she could not answer and a need to remain honest in her work;

“- and at the time there began to be things I was unsure of, some of this was around the drug use related to the sport.”

I asked about the duality of artist and bodybuilder. Was this hard to maintain? If there is little separation between your ‘lived life and the works I produce’ what space does Francesca Steele now inhabit offstage?

“Initially I didn’t tell anyone at the gym that I was an artist, it was difficult enough being pretty much the only female that trained there regularly! I don’t hide it now, but I also don’t go into great detail. The people that help me know and always have – but they also know me very well now. There really is no separation between life and artwork – particularly so with this work, it is an ongoing exploration, which I cannot step out of and go home or back to my life, like with usual performative works. It is extreme. It has impacted on or ‘diverted’ my lifestyle, my relationships, how I spend my time and probably my future health. I am an artist that uses my own body, this is the space I inhabit – this has always been essential in my work, it is not the first time I have taken risks with my body for artwork. There is a reason why some artists need to use their own body, maybe there is something pathological about this. I need to use myself as an example, as author and object.”

And now I felt I was getting somewhere. When I first met Fran she presented her, then future project, at the symposium Bodyscapes [the Kube Gallery, Poole, Dorset, May 2009] and openly alluded to a problematic relationship with food. Whilst possibly reductive, I connect Fran’s ability and success in exercising vice-like control over her body with earlier, less resolved, attempts.

Eating disorders are usually not considered self-harm because the resulting tissue damage is ordinarily an unintentional side effect. However, the boundaries are not always clear-cut when in some cases behaviours that usually fall outside the boundaries of self-harm may indeed represent just that if performed with explicit intent to cause tissue damage. Fran has legitimised her earlier transgressions through art.

An earlier distorted self-image has led to actual distortion of her body image. Possibly not just aesthetically. How far does the cross-gender paradox go? I have read accounts of hormonal changes and a cessation of menstruation, is this stripping her body of its biological purpose a step on the road to Post-Identity or another attempt at exertion of control?

Hard training, constant dieting and a desire to achieve a better looking physique are all common elements that can come into play in a disorder known as the Female Athlete Triad. The components that comprise this disorder are osteoporosis, menstrual dysfunction and eating disorders and its most common occurrence is within the fields of appearance related sports such as gymnastics, figure skating, ballet and bodybuilding.

The effects of the disorder can be devastating , bone density seems to be the biggest issue long term. In the short term fertility is an issue for obvious reasons, but the body can bounce back when fat deposits, weight, and normal exercise and nutrition patterns have been re-established.

Has Fran successfully re-gendered? Is this androgyny? Gender-role transcendence? Post-identity?

Nuts? By, albeit hopefully temporarily, circumventing the cycle that is the foundation stone of her gender role through her own agency has Fran succeeded where all else have failed? By removing the catalyst of her objectification, subjugation and role as possession has Fran rewritten herstory? [sic]

Successfully rewritten the gender role dichotomy? And all the time in killer heels?

But if, as Kathy Acker posits, we can only view life through a ‘lens of sexuality’ and the idea of a neutered Western society is impossible, has she circumvented that? Or is she now the only Other?

Arguably, her personal circumstances, a single woman with no children, have allowed her to exercise such agency, but at what cost to her future health and happiness? Steele’s almost offhand reference to such a compromised future I find disturbing but has she, in the truest sense of all, freed herself from the confines of gender roles and given herself free range?

To McCoy this is a ‘misperformance’ of a cultural stereotype of femininity, at times indistinguishable from the very stereotype it seeks to dismantle. Regardless of what a performer intends or hopes to accomplish by self-consciously constructing herself as ‘unruly woman’, ultimately the successful communication depends on the viewer’s reception and perception of the performance.

There is a risk that for, spectators outside discursive communities, performances of this oeuvre are simply a spectacle that reinforces the cultural ascendancy of the normative male body and a sense of the ongoing violability and volatility of the female.

In the same manner that enforced stasis has reconfigured the working function of Steele’s body does constructing ‘revolting’ images so insistently have an impact on a performer’s sense of her own embodiment? Is it possible to dwell within abjection over a continuing  period of time, more or less permanently, in Orlan’s case, and not begin to feel abject. What came first? The woman or the egg?

Even those 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……….madness, hysteria, and mental 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.” McCoy, again somewhat reductively.

Our all pervasive lack of choice cannot be usurped by parodied actions of self harm or body control. These actions are forced upon us by the very codex we seek to crack. This very dichotomy reigns Steele back in. Curtails her free range, and is her pophole.