Performance Studies

So Much Wasted: Hunger, Performance, and the Morbidity of Resistance

brittany — Thu, 10 Feb 2011 08:00:00 +0000

Traversing critical theory, body studies, psychoanalysis, philosophy, political theory, cultural studies, and performance studies, Patrick Anderson’s So Much Wasted captures the “politics of morbidity” embedded in the act of self-starvation. Anderson focuses on three settings—the hospital/clinic, a gallery, and a prison—to consider the way people who refuse food remain subject both to institutional means of force and control along with ideological constraints and mechanisms of discipline. What can these emaciated figures, hurling themselves toward death (or, as Heidegger calls it, “being-toward-death”), teach us about subjectivity, political resistance, and the production of power through everyday disciplinary practices?

Anderson’s central claim—that self-starvation both refuses and reproduces the power of the state, and as such produces bodies and subjects capable of radically unsettling the status quo—weaves itself through many seemingly disparate moments: the political resistance of Turkish prison hunger strikes, the state’s imposition that Terri Schiavo must live despite her husband’s wishes, the life-threatening starvation performance art of Chris Burden (who, after staging his own shooting, street death, and near electrocution, asked others to watch as he wasted away for twenty-two days in a Venice Beach, CA art gallery), and Adrian Piper, Ana Mendieta, and Marina Abromovic’s staging of self-starvation as provocative, artistic disappearance. Perhaps most compelling is Anderson’s reimagining of leading feminist theorizing about anorexia as the internalization of misogyny (e.g., Susan Bordo, Susie Orbach); instead, he argues that anorexics may cultivate a “taste for power” that subverts dominant ideas about women, gender, and queerness as they dramatically rebel against state intervention.

Playful and sharp, astute and extraordinarily sympathetic, Anderson captures the inherent tragedy, power, and radical potential in this seemingly “powerless” act of self-starvation. Not only does he write with breathtaking clarity, at times frolicking between mother-child psychoanalytic theories of feeding and sexuality only to later arrive in the world of masochistic performance art, but he also genuinely extends the leading critical theories of the body, performance, power, and subjectivity (e.g., Judith Butler, Michel Foucault, Sigmund Freud, Louis Althusser, and the like). Anderson insists that self-starvation is not simply perversion, but rather, a mechanism that produces troubled reactions from other bodies (individual or the state). Thus, he subtly asks whether psychological treatments, historiographies of starving bodies, force feeding, extensive monitoring, and even photographs might serve an even more perverse purpose: investing the state with the authority to say “who must live and who may die.”

Suitable for numerous audiences—graduate courses in psychology, sociology, gender studies, and performance; scholarly audiences interested in bioethics, fatness studies, prisons, and the philosophy of selfhood; and those practitioners who work with self-starving or self-mutilating clients—this book carefully outlines a politics of resistance through dying, near-death, and “wasting away.” Even if it sometimes floats above its subjects a bit—for example, I kept wanting more content directly from those who have survived their self-starvation attempts—Anderson has written a book worthy of attention and study. By imagining rebellion as a refusal to consume, he forges new and powerful links between gender, sexuality, the body, and the ideological apparatus of the state as it faces the many rebellions of its subjects.

Written by: Breanne Fahs, February 10th 2011

Being and Becoming Visible: Women, Performance, and Visual Culture

farhana — Wed, 08 Dec 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Edited by Stacey Weber-Fève, Olga M. Mesropova

The John Hopkins University Press

This book collects an array of articles previously published in the National Women’s Studies Association Journal, brought together for the first time under the auspices of elaborating on the theme of visibility in both performance and visual culture. As with all such collections, some pieces stand out in caliber, notably "Practical Perfection? The Nanny Negotiates Gender, Class, and Family Contradictions in 1960s Popular Culture" by Anne Mcleer, "Fractured Borders: Women’s Cancer and Feminist Theater" by Mary K. DeSchazer, and Vivyan C. Adair’s must-read piece "The Missing Story of Ourselves: Poor Women, Power, and the Politics of Feminist Representation."

I picked these three out of the rest because of their remarkable quality of questioning. These three theorists take nothing for granted in their articles, managing to question everything down to the marrow of their subject. They escape clichés of feminist critiques of art culture and add something truly important to the canon of thought.

One of the major pitfalls for many of the articles is a failure to complicate the viewer-viewed relationship. This is one reason Adair’s essay is such a breath of fresh air—she affords a much needed shift from the “educated” woman writing about the “disenfranchised woman” who presumably need to be made visible by the well-meaning author of the article. Adair, on the other hand, sensitively addresses the viewed body as text, which is simultaneously produced and read by policy-producing discourses. There is a need for some of the other authors to readdress the question of who is doing the looking, and who is being looked at. The simplistic tradition of the “male gaze” is no longer groundbreaking. What more can we say about the looker and the looked-at?

Throughout the different pieces, the theme of visibility effectively arises, but also the theme of invisibility. It becomes evident that what one does not see—in an Alice Neel painting, in a Lucille Ball show, or even in a feminist essay—that what is not seen and not said is just as important, perhaps more important than what is seen. The point of interest then becomes these cracks in visibility: looking and asking as much about “why absence” as “why presence.” Even beyond that, “becoming visible” is effectively related not only to telling a previously untold story, but complicating the stories that already do exist. “Visibility” comes to mean the visible(ness) of ambiguity, and each essay moves in its own way toward promoting understanding of that space that exists in between the dichotomies of dangerous thinking.

This is a valuable collection, which brings together articles that otherwise perhaps would never meet eye-to-eye. There is something integral in the attempt to bring together cross-cultural, interdisciplinary theory to address a theme which is so at the edge of both feminist and visual studies.

Written by: Beth Fagan, December 7th 2010

Engendering Performance: Indian Women Performers in Search of an Identity

gita — Wed, 27 Oct 2010 16:00:00 +0000

By Urmimala Sarkar Munsi, Bishnupriya Dutt

Sage Publications

In its very fragmentariness, Engendering Performance: Indian Women Performers in Search of an Identity serves as an alternative to the traditional scholarly textbook. Engendering Performance seems best utilized as a jumping off point for conversations, further studies and exchanges of the kind found in classrooms of higher education. The authors have purposefully refrained from offering an all encompassing meta narrative in exploring the role and position of gender and women in defining identity through theatre and dance.

In their introduction, the authors note that the concept for the book was developed as they designed a curriculum for the study of the performing arts for The School of Arts and Aesthetics at Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi in 2000. The book was born out of a desire to take a critical look at identity and body politics, dipping into a plethora of fields, including history, economics, cultural studies, ethnography, and feminist criticism to pose questions regarding the role of the actress-dancer in colonial and national culture as well as to analyze performance. The book aims to examine the meanings of performative gestures, as well as aesthetic historical codes, in other words, to debunk what history has taught and written with regard to theatre and dance, keeping gender in mind. The authors aim to simultaneously exist outside of prescribed disciplines, while interacting with them. In doing so, Engendering Performance reclaims the voice of the actress, moving against the general concept that the male actor is the voice and the actress is left at the margins.

While I do not come from a background of scholarly writings on theatre and dance, and I may have been lost at certain points when it came to the various topics and theatre- and dance-specific jargon, overall I found the text to be a worthwhile introduction to some of the continual questions and issues that arise within a new field, or a series of interrelated subjects. The book is divided into two sections, the first focusing on “The Story of the Actress” and the second entitled “Of The Woman Dancer.” Each chapter is a different look at aspects of these professions and identities.

The first chapter begins with an examination of the structures and spaces of theatres, while the second chapter discusses the challenge of public and private lives especially in the duality and the roles the actress must play.The authors discuss the custom of prostitutes as actresses, among other issues of space and identity. One chapter also looks at the Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA) which was initially formed as the cultural branch of the Communist Party, bringing theatre into politics while expanding the role and scope of the actress’ identity. Section two focuses primarily on dance and begins with a critical look at the ancient text of Natya Sastra, called the 5th Veda and seen as a performer’s rule-book. The authors pose questions such as “Who benefits from Natyasastra being the rule-book of gender and class/caste behaviour?” The following chapter takes a closer look at the body and the growing role of the body as a tool for a woman to “speak and write and communicate her-story as opposed to the common history.” In the last chapter, “Tale of Professional Woman Dancer in Folk Traditions in India: Commodification of Dance and the Traditional Dancing Women,” the text looks at the distinct rural and urban identities and the many levels of marginalization.

The final conclusion, instead of serving as a comprehensive overview, is a discussion with Samik Bandyopadhyay, a Kolkata-based critic of art, theatre and film.The intention of “disturbing the dominant narrative” seems to have been achieved, albeit in a fragmented way, which is acknowledged in the final discussion. Bandyopadhyay acknowledges the limitations of such a text; he says, and I agree, that this is an ongoing process. Connecting practice to theory and transcending fixed categories or genres, Engendering Performance takes a step and moves those seeming to encroach on this space, in order to create a new genre of performance studies based on the varied experiences within India.

Written by: Lakshmi Saracino, October 27th 2010