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- Title
Staging the Obscene Body.
- Authors
Fuchs, Elinor
- Abstract
This article gathers scattered evidence which prove that the use of body in art by conceptual and performance artist Carolee Schneemann was replaced in the 1980s by the obscene body, aggressive, scatological and sometimes pornographic. Many feminists defend pornography. In blurring the boundary between good girl and bad girl, the theatre of female obscenity that will be discussed is a kind of repo theatre. It is possible to sense, on contemplating its terms, the source of power the merged signs of female sexual identity would open for women, a self-repossession that would signify the most profound cultural shift. At a programmatic level, some feminists have been working to break down barriers between the two populations of women and their representations. The performances that will be described are not programmatic. However they do not need to know about legislative frontiers to breach them. De Laurentis characterizes the subject of feminism as the discovery of those spaces in the representation of gender that representation leaves out, or more pointedly, makes unrepresentable. The semiotic merger would open up one of de Laurentis's space-offs in the representation of gender, a film term acknowledging a space already here within the terms of a particular representation, yet not recognizable, precisely, as a representation. It is still virtually impossible to think heterosexual woman without sex/class polarities, no matter how sublimated and masked such a crude division has become in an apparently liberal society. The performances that will be described seem to be working at the edges of the sexual space-off seeking through contradiction to find the unrepresented but present terms of a new construction.
- Subjects
ARTS; HUMAN body; NUDITY; FEMINISM; PORNOGRAPHY; PERFORMING arts; SCHNEEMANN, Carolee, 1939-2019
- Publication
TDR: The Drama Review (MIT Press), 1989, Vol 33, Issue 1, p33
- ISSN
1054-2043
- Publication type
Entertainment Review
- DOI
10.2307/1145943