Genital Panic
A discussion related to the 02.22.10 Diary entry:
Re: Genital Panic
by Observatorio de Arte (02.23.10 11:22 am)
I can't believe I missed the last day. Sounds like all that debate made this event the first good SITAC in ages.
Re: Genital Panic
by pttymth (02.24.10 12:45 am)
Its on youtube type in SITAC 2010, you'll see the fun, although it is Spanish.
lauramars.files.wordpress.com/
Re: Genital Panic
by jcfregnan (02.24.10 12:40 pm)
Thanks, pttymth, for pointing us to the youtube videos. In the interest of intercultural dialog (and at the risk of inciting a wholly unproductive partisan non-exchange), I'd like to offer an alternative reading of the disagreement that erupted after Amorales's performance.
Although she invokes a concept of context — specifying that Amorales's performance has occurred at a "feminist conference" — Sorkin's scandalized response supposes that a female body, semi-denuded publicly by an authoritative male gaze, can only ever bear one meaning: "ultimate machismo." In such a view, no irony, no satire, no allegory, nor any polysemy in general (to say nothing of dissemination) could possibly attend either the semi-naked body of a Woman, or the hyperbolic figure of the Masculine on stage. A (unitary?) feminist sensibility or a (reified?) feminist gaze at this (homogeneously?) "feminist conference" would here preemptively neutralize any multiplicity of meaning, reducing all iteration of the semi-denuded female body to an impossible singularity. (I was tempted to write "castrate" instead of "neutralize" but the metaphor would have discredited Eibenschutz's co-authorship of the performance, as Medina very appropriately pointed out.) This gesture (or this fantasy) seems to me to have its origin in an unlikely and anachronistic (read: "stupidly provincial") hybrid of a Protestant morality that recoils before the very image of non-reproductive sex, and a fascist politics of the signifier (as pttymth points out quite succinctly).
The mobility that Amorales documents in the first part of his presentation accords equally to the signifier of the (semi) naked female body. If we are prepared to distinguish between the naked female body in Rosler's work, the semi-naked female body in a Dolce & Gabanna ad and the naked female body in, say, the most repugnantly heteronormative pornography we could imagine, we are already conceding the iterability of the female body as signifier. Of course, no one would deny that the historical circulation of this signifier has sedimented around a phallocentrism, or a set of phallocentrisms. But by insisting that this is the only meaning that could possibly attend to the crowning act of Amorales's performance is to annul beforehand the possibility of any resignification whatsoever, and thereby to propose that phallocentric ideology would only ever be assailable from some mysterious "feminist" territory outside of phallocentric ideology. (In such a fantasy, a heterosexual male artist would probably have been precluded from the very possibility of voicing dissensus in the first place. Sorkin's suggestion for a more appropriate point at which to have ended his performance — "You could have ended with the book!" — says as much.) In my view, this position is not only ill-conceived; worse, it is politically self-defeating.
One final point: I don't think Medina's response to Sorkin's accusation of provincialism was a call for "cultural relativism." That is, he wasn't suggesting that machismo is culturally acceptable in Mexico, and therefore aesthetically appreciable as a quaint if backward cultural practice. Quite the contrary, he was invoking a particular history of geopolitics that couldn't be further removed from a relativist stance. His critique of absolutism (if I may be so bold as to reiterate him) was that certain cultural sensibilities that have been reified in the cultural centers of North America — resolutely Protestant/fascistic/hegemonic sensibilities, he was polite enough not to specify — should not be used to measure the relative modernity of post-colonial states.
The question of authorship (and a certain fantasy that an author's subject position ineluctably determines the signification of his utterances) seems to me to be at the center of this discussion. I wonder whether the relative anonymity of an online discussion will allow us to overcome that particular aporia, and to analyze the text of Amorales's performance in something other than an ad hominem register. In solidarity,
jcf.
Re: Genital Panic
by jennisork (02.25.10 07:19 am)
I don't know, is analysis the point, jcfreggnan? Your post is so ridiculously jargon-filled, that it seems to me you are more interested in blathering on behalf of your buddies Amorales and Medina, which is hyper-masculine in itself, the need to defend, couch, and otherwise ignore the obvious signifiers of "ultimate machismo" in the performance itself—namely, the presence of a uniformed soldier ordering the act of disrobing.
Also, you misread my response. I was not scandalized, I was fucking angry at the blatant disregard Amorales had regarding anything close to a meaningful contribution about gender!
In deference to the staunch boys club in Mexico City, I think you have willfully misread Amorales' performance: you seem to consider him an interesting and important provocateur, when in reality, his presentation was narcissistic and self-aggrandizing, since it hinged on his own local celebrity. Rather than an analysis of authorship and iconography of his generic little black butterflies, he was more than willing to taking a hit from the (foreign, female) organizers as a "one for the team" player.
Considering my own sexual politics, the assumption that all feminists, myself included, are somehow scandalized by a half-hearted striptease (served up with an unfunny side of irony and malice) is about as puritanical as it gets. Let me gently remind you that nudity is not the same as "non-reproductive sex." (your words, not mine). Sex never once crossed my mind at the performance, or in its aftermath, only the gender dynamic, which, again, has nothing to do with the sex act either. To want it to be is not to make it so. Bored and annoyed, maybe, at the low level of discussion, there and here, but certainly not scandalized.
Re: Genital Panic
by jcfregnan (03.02.10 12:12 pm)
We're both talking about SITAC, right, jennisork? The International Symposium on Contemporary Art Theory? If we disagree about the fundamental interest of analysis, I suppose this conversation is moot. I do want to thank you, though, for clarifying your position, and for attempting valiantly to raise the level of discussion by unfettering it from jargon and analysis.
You were angry, not scandalized. Duly noted. But now I'm unclear about whether you were angry because Amorales' contribution wasn't meaningful in general, or because its meaning wasn't about gender. My initial interpretation was that you were angry because you didn't approve of the meaning of his contribution about gender. I certainly wasn't making claims about all feminists. I was trying to make clear certain ideological consequences of your invocation of the mantle of feminism in that particular context: namely, that it afforded (and continues to afford) you the authority to declare that your own reading of Amorales' performance was the only legitimate or relevant one, and to ignore all others as "misreadings." I was trying to show that there are serious political limitations to your reading, limitations that apply to the project of feminism "itself."
I deliberately refrained from expressing my own inclination toward Amorales's performance. Whether I find him to be an interesting and important provocateur (or not) seems, to me, to be beside the point. Whether his performance was narcissistic and self-aggrandizing or not also seems to me to be beside the point. (I would be hard-pressed to imagine an iteration of SITAC, or any academic conference for that matter, that was free of self-aggrandizing narcissists.) The suggestion that his performance hinged on his local celebrity, however, seems to be worth considering a little more closely, since such a claim might seem to justify your calling the performance "stupidly provincial."
I'm not sure whether I agree or not that his performance hinged on his local celebrity. To some extent, it did presume that a certain subset of the audience would recognize the other participants in the performance. Many of those in attendance recognized Eibenshutz immediately as Amorales's wife, since the two have been collaborating in public performances for some time now. With this information, they would have been prepared to receive this part of the performance as a bilateral, bi-gendered co-production. Further, many Latin American audience members would also have recognized the actor portraying the military figure as Jesus Ochóa, who has had a long career in the public spotlight. So yes, the performance's ironies were woven within an intertextual web to which non-Mexican members of the audience wouldn't have had immediate access. Does that make the work locally resonant, or merely provincial? Does it open the possibility that Amorales' performance bore meanings to which you, personally, were not privvy? Is it conceivable that such meanings might complicate the reading you are insisting upon? (Would it not be narcissistic to imagine otherwise?)
But there's something else in your apparent disdain for Amorales's local celebrity that bothers me. Why invite Amorales to contribute a performance to a symposium on art theory, if not (at least in part) to capitalize on his local celebrity? I'm not pronouncing any judgment here, but asking as innocently as possible: you were paid for your services, no? PAC presumably subsidized the lion's share of your paycheck, but one has to imagine that the entrance fee — MXN$50 per day for those enrolled at or employed by educational institutions, MXN$100 otherwise — covered at least some of the conference's expenses. How many paying members of the audience were familiar with your work before the conference, as compared to those who were familiar with Amorales'? Again, to be as clear as possible, I'm not saying there is anything wrong with your profiting from Amorales' local capital. But it seems disingenuous not to recognize that your own accrual of social (and/or economic) capital at this conference was in part a function of Amorales' local celebrity.
In my willful misreading of his performance, then, and given that Amorales has probably attended one or two versions of SITAC previously, it makes perfect sense that his performance might mobilize his local celebrity, and twist it to his own ends: say, by inscribing it in a register to which white North Americans wouldn't generally have direct access. Regardless of its annual theme, SITAC has always been about local difference and its gradation along a North-South axis. This seems as worthy a topic of public discussion as your feelings of anger, boredom and annoyance.
jcf.