| 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. |
