Queer tracks : subversive strategies in rock and pop music 1409437027, 9781409437024

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An Ashgate Book

QUEER TRACKS: SUBVERSIVE StRAtEGIES IN ROCK AND POp MUSIC

For Becca

Queer Tracks: Subversive Strategies in Rock and Pop Music

DORIS LEIBEtSEDER Alpen-Adria Universität Klagenfurt, Austria Translated by REBECCA CARBERY

First published 2012 by Ashgate Publishing Published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Copyright © 2012 Doris Leibetseder. Doris Leibetseder has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Leibetseder, Doris. Queer tracks : subversive strategies in rock and pop music. – (Ashgate popular and folk music series) 1. Gender identity in music. 2. Homosexuality and popular music. 3. Sex and popular   music. 4. Queer theory. 5. Feminist theory. 6. Popular music – History and criticism.  I. Title II. Series 781.6’4’0866–dc23 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Leibetseder, Doris. [Queere tracks. English] Queer tracks : subversive strategies in rock and pop music / by Doris Leibetseder. pages cm—(Ashgate popular and folk music series) revised translation of Queere Tracks. Subversive Strategien in Rock- und Popmusik. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4094-3702-4 (hardcover)—ISBN 978-1-4094-3703-1 (ebook) 1. Rock music—History and criticism. 2. Popular music—History and criticism. 3. Gender identity in music. 4. Queer theory. 5. Music—Philosophy and aesthetics. I. Title. ML3534.L42813 2012  781.64086’6—dc23 ISBN 978-1-409-43702-4 (hbk)

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Contents List of Illustrations   General Editor’s Preface   Acknowledgements   Introduction: Historical Prelude  

vii ix xi 1

Track 01  Irony – The Cutting Edge  

15

Track 02  Parody – Gender Trouble  

35

Track 03  Camp – Queer Revolt in Style  

59

Track 04  Mask/Masquerade – Transforming the Gaze  

81

Track 05  Mimesis/Mimicry – Poetic Aesthetic  

105

Track 06 Cyborg – Transhuman  

131

Track 07  Trans* – Border Wars?  

149

Track 08  Dildo – Gender Blender  

169

Fade Out: Looking Forward  

183

Bibliography   Index  

197 213

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List of Illustrations 1.1 Linda Hutcheon: functions of irony (from Linda Hutcheon, Irony’s Edge: The Theory and Politics of Irony (New York and London: Routledge, 1995), p. 47. (Figure 2.1. The functions of irony). With kind permission from Taylor & Francis Books). 1.2 CD cover: Angie Reed Presents the Best of Barbara Brockhaus (CD booklet of Angie Reed Presents the Best of Barbara Brockhaus (Chicks on Speed Records, 2003). Photograph: Debora Schamoni. Drawing: Angie Reed. Design: Walter Schönauer. With kind permission from Chicks on Speed Records). 5.1 Bishi, Nights at the Circus (CD cover of Bishi, Nights at the Circus (Gryphon Records, 2007). With kind permission from Gryphon Records). 6.1 Music video stills: ‘All is Full of Love’, Björk (DVD Booklet of Chris Cunningham, The Work of Director Chris Cunningham (DVD) (Palm Pictures, 2003). Stills taken from the Björk video ‘All is Full of Love’ directed by Chris Cunningham. With kind permission from Chris Cunningham and Derek Birkett at One Little Indian). 8.1 Beatriz Preciado, Dildotopia (Beatriz Preciado, Kontrasexuelles Manifest (Berlin: b_books, 2003), p. 36. With kind permission from Beatriz Preciado). 8.2 Peaches Does Herself (from Peaches’ Official Blog on Flickr or www.peachesofficialblog.com/site//category/concerts/. Photographer: Steffi Loos. With kind permission from Stefanie Loos).

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General Editor’s Preface The upheaval that occurred in musicology during the last two decades of the twentieth century has created a new urgency for the study of popular music alongside the development of new critical and theoretical models. A relativistic outlook has replaced the universal perspective of modernism (the international ambitions of the 12-note style); the grand narrative of the evolution and dissolution of tonality has been challenged, and emphasis has shifted to cultural context, reception and subject position. Together, these have conspired to eat away at the status of canonical composers and categories of high and low in music. A need has arisen, also, to recognize and address the emergence of crossovers, mixed and new genres, to engage in debates concerning the vexed problem of what constitutes authenticity in music and to offer a critique of musical practice as the product of free, individual expression. Popular musicology is now a vital and exciting area of scholarship, and the Ashgate Popular and Folk Music Series presents some of the best research in the field. Authors are concerned with locating musical practices, values and meanings in cultural context, and draw upon methodologies and theories developed in cultural studies, semiotics, poststructuralism, psychology and sociology. The series focuses on popular musics of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It is designed to embrace the world’s popular musics from Acid Jazz to Zydeco, whether high tech or low tech, commercial or non-commercial, contemporary or traditional. Professor Derek B. Scott Professor of Critical Musicology University of Leeds

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Acknowledgements My thanks go to all my friends and family who have supported me in my unsettled life and throughout the creation of this work directly or indirectly, through thick and thin, and sometimes simply accepted that I had less time for them. I am grateful to Prof. Dr Josef Rhemann for agreeing to supervise my thesis at short notice and doing so in an uncomplicated way. My thanks also go to the examiner, Doz. Dr Arno Böhler whose suggestions led me to some particularly interesting correlations and to Prof. Dr A.M. Singer who was my supervisor at the beginning and took care to steer my work in the right direction. I am also thankful for the references for my funding applications from Prof. Dr A.M. Singer, Prof. Dr Hanna Hacker, Doz. Dr Sergius Kodera, Prof. Dr Doris Weichselbaumer, Dr Josefina Birulés Bertrán, Dr Rosa Rius Gatell and Beatriz Preciado PhD. I also want to thank the members of the queer reading group that arose from one of Prof. Dr Hannah Hacker’s courses for their insights and friendship. For a productive and fruitful stay abroad, I owe my thanks to Dr Angela Lorena Fuster Peiró (for accommodation, conversations and simply for her friendship), to the professors at the Universitat de Barcelona, Dr Fina Birulés Bertrán and Dr Rosa Rius Gatell, and to all the members of her seminar group ‘Filosofia i Gènere’ (Philosophy and Gender). Beatriz Preciado’s seminars at the MACBA (Barcelona) and the UNIA (Sevilla) also provided an important contribution to my work. Holding a seminar block about my work at the Universitat Autónoma de Barcelona for the ‘Literatura Comparada: Estudios Literarios y Culturales’ MA course (Comparative Literature: Literature and Cultural Studies) in the context of the module ‘Estudios Culturales’ (Cultural Studies) as well as the discussions with the students helped me in the clarification of some important points. This seminar was made possible by Dr Isabel Clua and Dr Meri Torras. The following presentations and resulting contributions from listeners were very helpful for the enrichment of my project: a presentation at the University of Durham LGBT Association’s ‘Q-week’ (thanks for the invitation go to Phil Bolton) and a presentation during the ‘7th European Feminist Research Conference’ in Utrecht. I received reassurance and suggestions from colleagues at Durham University, in particular Prof. Lucille Cairns and Dr Santiago Fouz Hernández. A special thanks goes to all the people close to me who lent a helping hand in various areas, particularly in the exciting end phase, both in submitting the thesis and in preparing the German manuscript for publication: Dr Barbara Eder MA,

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Rodolphe Blaise, Iban Calzada Mangues, Elke Mayr MA, Alexander Wilhelm and my proofreaders Gudrun Henninger MA and Birgit Pfeiffer. For making the translation possible and for their support, my sincere thanks go to my current workplace, the Women’s and Gender Studies Centre at the Alpen-Adria Universität Klagenfurt. I appreciate the communicative and helpful working environment in this team very much: Viktorija Ratković MA, Manuela Saringer, Hannes Dollinger, Mareen Hauke and Rosemarie Schöffmann. A person without whom the English version would simply not exist is Becca Carbery. I want to express my utmost gratitude for her translation skills, her knowledge about gender/queer issues, her editorial help and her seemingly never-ending patience, without which it would not have been possible for me to re-think the text I have rewritten for the (seemingly) thousandth time. Her insights into the current trans* movement and issues have also formed my thinking and her awareness of the up-to-date usage of trans* pronouns and terminology in English made her the most capable person for this task: the translation into English. Thanks for all that and for much more! This book was published with the support of Dr Manfred-GehringPrivatstiftung Klagenfurt and of the Forschungsrat of Universitaet Klagenfurt.

Introduction

Historical Prelude Why Queer Tracks? Of course, one would not be incorrect in thinking that I mean music tracks, however, this word has many possible meanings, for example, ‘trace’, i.e. what queer traces can be found in rock and pop music? This trace shows us the right way, even if it is not a ‘straight’ one. An important word has arisen here: way. In this semantic field ‘track’ can be seen as a path, trail route or even refer to train tracks. How can a queer way or ‘being on a queer track’ be explained? Sara Ahmed has already looked into this topic in her analysis of queer phenomenology and established the following: a way serves to allow us to move in a particular direction and is therefore linked to (sexual) orientation. The way describes a line between two points; this line can also become a path if it is used often enough. As Ahmed explained, we are concerned here with performativity; this path (be it intellectual or spatial) is dependent on the repetition of norms and conventions – an idea obviously influenced by Butler. These routes or paths are created as an effect of this repetition.1 It is in following these lines that we also make these tracks. What happens if the official route is suddenly no longer taken? Alternative ways are marked out or new lines are formed. I also took a new direction and followed the ‘desire line’; this is the term Ahmed gives to unofficial paths in the architecture of the landscape that show the traces of the daily comings and goings of people, who take deviant or unexpected routes.2 Queer tracks therefore describe traces, paths or ways in popular music that deviate from heterosexual orientation – queer grooves in the turntables for lovers of vinyl, or queer (in no way ‘gender binary’) codes for fans of digital music. As one can see from the title, the theoretical question in this work is: where and how ideas and strategies from feminism and queer theory, which subvert hegemonic gender concepts, have been employed in rock and pop music. The analysis of these strategies and the corresponding examples are of prime importance. My main concern is with the deconstruction and extension of the conventional binary gender system and the heterosexual matrix, which corresponds to the aims and objectives of queer theory.

1   Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham, NC, 2006), p. 16. 2   Ibid., pp. 19–20.

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In line with bell hooks’ suggestion, I will not simply remain in the academic ivory tower; rather I also relate my work to popular culture. For this reason Cultural Studies form the second theoretical axis in my work. Due to the fact that films and popular literature are being and have already been researched in relation to queer genders, I chose my personal area of interest: rock and pop music. A stereotypical gender image dominates in this sphere of popular culture, as the third wave of feminism in particular demonstrates, and queer elements are used mainly by the mainstream. For this reason, I particularly want to find feminist examples, whether female bands or other musicians who do not correspond to the usual gender clichés, and analyse their politically relevant subversive strategies that do not solely serve the purpose of increasing sales. As research currently stands, there are some academic works on the topic of women/gender in rock and pop music3 that contain descriptions and analytical categorisations,4 but almost no theoretical Cultural Studies work on queer genders5 in this area. In my opinion, a clearer and more detailed academic investigation of rock and pop music in relation to queer theory is lacking. For me, the anthology Queering the Popular Pitch, edited by Sheila Whiteley and Jennifer Rycenga (New York, 2006), represents a diverse collection of perspectives on queer contributions to pop music. Judith Halberstam’s chapter ‘What’s That Smell? Queer Temporalities and Subcultural Lives’ in her book In a Queer Time and Place. Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (New York and London, 2005) is a noteworthy contribution. In this chapter, she describes some bands and their subcultural background and shows lesbian and queer elements in their artistic works. 3   Angela McRobbie delivers a report from Cultural Studies about this topic in her chapter ‘Recent Rhythms of Sex and Race in Popular Music’, in Angela McRobbie, In the Culture Society. Art, Fashion and Popular Music (London and New York, 1999), pp. 111–121. Also: Mavis Bayton, ‘Feminist Musical Practice: Problems and Contradictions’, in Tony Bennett, Simon Frith, Lawrence Grossberg et al. (eds), Rock and Popular Music. Politics, Policies, Institutions (London and New York, 1993), pp. 177–192. 4   Mary Ann Clawson, ‘When Women Play the Bass. Instrument Specialisation and Gender Interpretation in Alternative Rock Music’, Gender & Society, 13/2 (1999): pp. 193–210. Also: Leigh Krenske and Jim McKay, ‘Hard and Heavy: Gender and Power in a Heavy Metal Music Subculture’, Gender, Place and Culture, 7/3 (2000): pp. 287–304. 5   There is more material on this in the area of film (cinema, TV) or also of music videos. Steven Drukman, ‘The Gay Gaze, Or Why I Want my MTV’, in Paul Burston and Colin Richardson (eds), A Queer Romance: Lesbians, Gay Men and Popular Culture (London and New York, 1995), pp. 81–95. Mimi Schippers wrote a sociological essay on queer identities in rock music ‘The Social Organisation of Sexuality and Gender in Alternative Hard Rock. An Analysis of Intersectionality’, Gender & Sexuality, 14/6 (2000): pp. 747–764. Also Sarah Cohen, ‘Popular Music, Gender and Sexuality’, in Simon Frith, Will Straw and John Street (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Pop and Rock (Cambridge, 2001), pp. 226–242. Simon Reynolds and Joy Press make a rather more journalistic than academic contribution to the analysis of gender identities in rock and pop music: The Sex Revolts: Gender, Rebellion and Rock ‘n’ Roll (London, 1995).

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Historical Roots First of all, I consider the historical roots of rock and pop music, with particular focus on the queer elements. Establishing the beginnings or origins of popular music is by no means an easy task. Many assign them to African American music, such as gospel and rhythm and blues, whereas others refer to the vaudeville tradition at the turn of the century. Perhaps it is a combination of both: the musical flow comes from the African American blues and jazz tradition and the performance character of the concerts stems from the travelling vaudeville variety shows. Interestingly, certain queer elements already existed in these two genres. The vaudeville shows included cross-dressers, who played the role of the other sex on stage. A well-known example is that of the American jazz musician, Billy Tipton, who also changed his gender role in real life. It was only discovered after his death that he was ‘anatomically female’. A vaudeville show could also contain a burlesque (an erotic show and the forerunner to a striptease). The writer of an 1869 article about new theatre taste remarked: ‘It was also an indispensable condition of the burlesque’s success, that the characters should be reversed in their representation, – that the men’s rôles should be played by women and that at least one female part should be done by a man’ (original emphasis).6 This representation of women in the vaudeville tradition – contrary to the burlesque – was done in a respectful and appropriate way: Vaudeville and burlesque each appealed to different audiences and featured two distinct styles of female impersonation. Vaudeville developed from those minstrel shows, that, since the Civil War, had catered to a largely female audience from the growing White middle class. Vaudeville impersonators deemphasized the minstrel show’s raunchy humour and lampooning of women and offered instead a celebration of femaleness and cultural norms in which impersonators strove for realistic portrayals of ‘ladies of fashion’. This respectable style of female impersonation was one of the most popular forms of theatrical entertainment of the early twentieth century.7

Burlesque is not so highbrow and makes the feminine look rather ridiculous. ‘Burlesque, which developed out of those minstrel shows that had appealed to working-class, largely male audiences, maintained the minstrels show’s raunchy humour and lampooning of cultural norms. Female impersonators working

  William Dean Howells, ‘The New Taste in Theatricals’, Atlantic Monthly, 16 (1869): pp. 640–644. Quoted in Robert M. Lewis (ed.), From Travelling Show to Vaudeville: Theatrical Spectacle in America 1830–1910 (Baltimore, 2003), p. 299. 7   Jeffrey Callen, ‘Gender Crossings. A Neglected History in African American Music’, in Sheila Whiteley and Jennifer Rycenga (eds), Queering the Popular Pitch (New York, 2006), p. 187. 6

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in burlesque did not strive for artful illusions; their goal was comedy.’8 More information about the New Burlesque with an empowering political message for women or femmes will be given in Track 04: Mask/Masquerade. Laurel and Hardy (Stan and Olly),9 Sarah Bernhardt,10 Charlie Chaplin and Bette Midler, who presented her shows as Divine Miss M11 in a homosexual bath house, were well-known artists from the American vaudeville tradition. Mae West’s piece Pleasure Man (1928) provided a view behind the scenes of a drag queen show, and unleashed a storm of public outrage, because the drag queens were portrayed as homosexual. Critics said that West fabricated a connection between the sexual underworld and female imitators.12 A further person of interest from the world of vaudeville, particularly for Europe and Vienna, was Josephine Baker.13 As Rosa Reitsamer notes, at the end of the nineteenth century Black musicians such as Arabella Fields, Bella Cora or Josephine Baker were highly sought after. These musicians also enjoyed a more pleasant situation in Europe than in the United States, as there was less discrimination and more profitable work. Nevertheless, the Black body was seen as exotic and primitive amongst White people. It was viewed as an absolute symbol of sexuality. Baker invented a special characteristic for her dance: ‘In drawing the attention to her bottom, she satisfied the need for the exotic of the White Europeans. Baker moved her bottom in an erotic way so that the bottom became another fetish for Black female sexuality.’14 Her dance style also became the predecessor to Black choreography, which became an important selling point for her performances. In hegemonic western discourses on Black popular culture the act of dancing was described as an expression of hypersexuality and as a bodily practice of Black people, women and homosexual men. In these discourses the bodily practice is directly associated with animalistic sexual behaviour so that Black people are seen as ‘born Dancing-Queens’.15

There were other opinions on Josephine Baker’s 1926 performance in Vienna, which concentrated more on the music:

 8

 Ibid.   Franc Cullen, Florence Hackman and Donald McNeilly (eds), Vaudeville Old and New: An Encyclopedia of Variety Performers in America (2 vols, New York and London, 2007), vol. 2, pp. 658–664. 10   Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 101–103. 11   Ibid., vol. 2, pp. 750–752. 12   Callen, ‘Gender Crossings’, p. 188. 13   Cullen et al., Vaudeville Old and New, vol. 1, pp. 55–57. 14   Translated from German. Rosa Reitsamer, ‘Von Josephine Baker zu Britney Spears’, [sic!]Forum für feministische GangArten, 55 (2005): p. 15. 15   Ibid., p. 16.  9

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Along with Baker’s body the ‘mechanical noise’ of Jazz is at the centre of the reception. The melody is disturbance, haste, nervousness, metropolis, which excites human beings … In the music the ‘paradoxical primitivism of modernity’ or ‘urban exoticism’ is inscribed, which is described by Jody Blake as the new European image of America; its ‘urban jungles’ and ‘mechanical beats’ represent modern barbarism.16

Jeffrey Callen stresses that in the 1920s and 1930s many of the working-class African American blues singers were openly lesbian or gay. Ma Rainey, for example, was one of the bigger blues stars of the 1920s, whose sexual involvement with women was known to the public. The advertisement for her song, ‘Prove it on Me Blues’, shows a drawing of Rainey, in which she stands on a street corner in a man’s hat, jacket and tie, and attempts to seduce two women.17 It was a similar case with the men. Elvis Presley also did a sexy dance on stage in Jailhouse Rock (1957). His legendary hip swing revealed his feminine side, which even earned him compliments from men.18 In the heyday of the rockabilly era (rock ’n’ roll with a country influence), this type of American masculinity was described by Nick Tosches in the following way: ‘the face of Dionysos, full of febrile sexuality and senselessness’. He also added that these vehement feelings excite women and that teenage boys reinvented themselves as the ‘Flaming Creatures’.19 Flaming Creatures refers to the title of a subculture film (1963) by Jack Smith, which glorifies omnisexual behaviour. According to David Sanjek this comparison ‘underscores the degree to which infatuation with Elvis not only crossed all gender boundaries but also fused if not confused those parameters’.20 As a female musician in the 1960s, Janis Joplin’s gender presentation and sexuality were somewhat ambiguous. Her bisexuality and the revealing of both her masculine and feminine side are mentioned repeatedly, but not explained in any further detail.21

16

  Translated from German. Wolfgang Fichna, ‘I Wanna be Like a Female Quincy Jones! Zur Konstruktion von Subjektpositionen afroamerikanischer HipHopMusikerinnen’, in Rosa Reitsamer and Rupert Weinzierl (eds), Female Consequences: Feminismus, Antirassismus, Popmusik (Vienna, 2006), p. 49. 17   Callen, ‘Gender Crossings’, p. 190. 18   Sheila Whiteley, ‘Popular Music and the Dynamics of Desire’, in Whiteley and Rycenga, Queering the Popular Pitch, p. 249. 19   Nick Tosches, ‘Rockabilly!’, in Patrick Carr (ed.), The Illustrated History of Country Music (New York, 1980), p. 230. Quoted in David Sanjek, ‘The Wild, Wild Women of Rockabilly’, in Sheila Whiteley (ed.), Sexing the Groove: Popular Music and Gender (London and New York, 1997), p. 138. 20   Sanjek, ‘The Wild, Wild Women’, p. 138. 21   Lucy O’Brien, She Bop II: The Definitive History of Women in Rock, Pop and Soul (London and New York, 2002), pp. 104–105.

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The most well-known age of rock and pop music, as far as gender parody is concerned, is that of glamrock, although signs of glam can already be found with Elvis Presley (e.g. his suits adorned with gold and his makeup).22 Little Richard was also a glittering representative of rock music. Glamour always played an important role in rock and in show business; did the Beatles’ hairstyles not also contribute to the ‘feminisation’ of men? ‘And for a brief time pop culture would proclaim that identities and sexualities were not stable things but quivery and costumed, and rock and roll would paint its face and turn the mirror around, inverting in the process everything in sight.’23 Glamrock presented its effeminacy and androgyny openly, just as the sexual revolution did: ‘When Marc Bolan wore glitter under his eyes on Top Of The Pops, when Bowie went down on Mick Ronson’s guitar, when the androgynous became the bisexual, it was clearly aimed at the intense morality of sixties youth culture.’24 In her Notes on Camp Susan Sontag stressed the importance and beauty of the androgynous. There is more on this in Track 03: Camp, because camp, glitter and glam are very much related. Marc Bolan, T. Rex and David Bowie were the beginning of glamrock. Via David Bowie a connection to the ‘Factory’ artists developed around Andy Warhol. A connection arose between London and New York. David Bowie was impressed by the Velvet Underground musicians, particularly by Lou Reed, and he got to know Iggy Pop, who also covered himself in glitter, but presented a more punk version of glamrock. The glitter was a subversive form of expression, which was connected to drag queens and transvestites and therefore to homosexuality.25 There were spin-offs of glamrock in the 1980s from Adam Ant, Culture Club (Boy George), Annie Lennox, Grace Jones and Marc Almond. Even heavy metal had a glam metal side, which started with Alice Cooper and bands like Poison and Hanoi Rocks who put female outfits on their male band members. It was not related to glitter; however, they did wear lipstick, eyeliner and often had long, permed and dyed hair. Even Guns N’ Roses used feminine makeup. (In this context, the double gender parody of the Kingz of Berlin is also interesting, when they, as drag kings, imitate the performances of the boys of Guns N’ Roses in girls’ clothes, and can be seen to have so much fun whilst behaving like men, who think that women normally move and dress in this way.) Even in the 1990s, the time of alternative rock and grunge, Kurt Cobain, Evan Dando and Jane’s Addiction wore women’s clothes. The phase of Britpop was reminiscent of David Bowie’s glam period in songs by Suede, Blur and Placebo. Films such as Velvet Goldmine (1998) by Todd Haynes or Hedwig and the Angry Inch (2001) by John Cameron Mitchell also contributed to the revival of glamrock. I would like to consider this last music 22   Barney Hoskyns, Glam! Bowie, Bolan and the Glitter Rock Revolution (London, 1998), p. 32. 23   Todd Haynes, ‘Foreword’, in Hoskyns, Glam!, p. X. 24   Ibid., pp. X–XI. 25  Hoskyns, Glam Rock, pp. 35–39.

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film, an original off-Broadway play (1998), more closely. The film is about a male to female trans person, who falls in love with a GI soldier in the former DDR, and has to marry him as a woman in order to live with her husband in the United States. Unfortunately, the operation does not go according to plan, and she is left with an ‘angry inch’ as a reminder. Hedwig’s husband soon leaves her and, working as a babysitter, she falls in love with a teenage boy, with whom she practices the songs she writes. Soon afterwards the boy26 makes a career with her songs; she, on the other hand, does not have much success with her punk band. Another important detail of the film is that some of the young guys in Hedwig’s band, and her lover, are played by women, who play their drag king role so well that it is not obvious at first glance and they pass as men. In the song ‘Tear Me Down’ Hedwig not only refers to the divided nation-state of Germany and the Berlin Wall, but also to the binary gender system, and to her exploitative relationship with her transgendered Croatian husband Yitzhak, whom she forces to give up his identity ‘in exchange for marriage’ ‘by denying him both wig and passport’.27 This side of Hedwig’s character is criticised alongside the construction of Hedwig as trans, because she does not have a genuine wish to be the opposite gender prior to her failed surgery. The ‘transformation’ of Hansel to Hedwig is not ‘freely chosen’.28 I would like to analyse the lyrics of one of the film’s songs, ‘The Origin of Love’, more closely. This song provides a good introductory example of queer genders in rock and pop music. The song lyrics tell a story taken from Plato’s Symposium, in which Aristophanes expresses his opinion on eros and love: First of all, you must learn the constitution of man and the modifications which it has undergone, for originally it was different from what it is now. There used to be three sexes, not just two (male and female) as we have now. The third consisted of the characteristics of both the others and has disappeared, though its name survives. The hermaphrodite was a distinct sex in form as well as in name, with the characteristics of both male and female, but now the name alone remains; solely as a term of abuse.29

Here Aristophanes speaks of three genders, the masculine, the feminine and the androgynous. With the aid of these three figures, he wants to explain the eros or

26

  A more detailed analysis of the musical, and of the boy’s name, Tommy Gnosis, is found in Judith Ann Peraino, Listening to the Sirens: Musical Technologies of Queer Identity from Homer to Hedwig (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, 2006), pp. 246–252. 27   Ibid., pp. 247–250. 28   Jordy Jones, ‘Gender without Genitals. Hedwig’s Six Inches’, in Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle (eds), The Transgender Studies Reader (New York and London, 2006), p. 450. 29  Plato, The Symposium, trans. by Walter Hamilton (London, 1987), 189 c, p. 59.

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the need for a second person, or a soul mate, not a higher destiny of two people to be together but rather the ‘earthly side of one’s need to be part of a couple’.30 Aristophanes explains the sexual character of the three sexes in the following way: The reason for the existence of three sexes and for their being of such a nature is that originally the male came from the sun, the female came from the earth, the sex that was a mixture of both came from the moon as it partakes of both, the sun and earth. Their spherical shape and their circular walk were both due to the fact that they were like their parents. They were so powerful and strong had such a high sense of self-worth that they dared to take on the gods … they attempted to make their way to heaven and set upon the gods.31

As in the song ‘Origin of Love’, the enraged gods decided to punish them; Zeus cut them into two halves. What is not mentioned in the song, however, is that Zeus turned their faces around to the side that had been cut, so that they would be more aware of the cut and be more obedient. Apollo pulled the skin together over the side that had been cut, and bound them together at the middle of the stomach, where the belly button is now, and thus allowed the wound to heal. With this construction though, a further problem arose, as Aristophanes reflects: Man’s original body having thus been cut in two, each half yearned for the half from which it had been severed. When they met they threw their arms round one another and embraced, in their longing to grow together again, and they perished of hunger and general neglect of their concerns, because they would not do anything apart.32

Now Aristophanes explains how different sexual orientations arose: Each of us then is the mere broken part of a man, the result of a bisection which has reduced us to a condition like that of flat fish, and each of us is perpetually in search of his corresponding part. Those men who are halves of a being of the common sex, which was called, as I told you, hermaphrodite, are lovers of women, and most adulterers come from this class, as also do women who are mad about men and sexually promiscuous. Women who are halves of a female whole direct their affections towards women and pay little attention to men: Lesbians belong to this category. But those who are halves of a male whole pursue males, and being slices, so to speak, of the male, love men throughout

30   Translated from German. Platon, Sämtliche Dialoge, edited by K. Hildebrandt, C. Ritter and G. Schneider, vol. III. (Hamburg, 1988), p. XXVIII. 31  Plato, The Symposium, 190 b, p. 60. 32   Ibid., 191 a, p. 61.

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their boyhood, and take pleasure in physical contact with men. Such boys and lads are the best of their generation, because they are the most manly.33

According to Gudrun Perko, Plato has adopted a hierarchical qualification of love: firstly the male homosexual, secondly the female homosexuality and heterosexuality and thirdly the androgynes. Plato rejects criticism of the first category, which is that the boys who love men are shameful, and strengthens the positive sides, such as the boys being active in the polis, ‘when they reach maturity, engage in public life’.34 Nature decides male homosexuality and the wish of these men to remain celibate/unmarried. The second category is not as clear as the first one in the translation of Plato’s text that I used, because according to it these women ‘pay no attention to men’ and ‘direct their affections much more towards women’ (my emphasis). In the translation that Gudrun Perko uses, this statement becomes even more unclear, because these women direct ‘their affection not so much towards men, but more towards women’ (original emphasis).35 Perko concludes from this that women’s desire, albeit to different degrees, is directed towards both men and women: It is not logical within the explanation of the origin of desire, but it does not have to be unimaginable, that the women’s total disengagement from men and reproduction was unthinkable for Plato. According to Plato, tribads (lesbians) derive from these women. These women are for Plato ambivalent, as a lesbian, as a heterosexual or – and therewith Plato is introducing an entire new form, without labelling it as such – as a bisexual. He does not explicitly mention a bisexual eros; in his work it remains linked to homo- or heterosexuality. What these women are gaining from the eros in its ambivalent form – whether satisfaction or relaxation – is not mentioned. In the realm of the political these women are not relevant, according to Plato, because they are no longer mentioned.36

The third category of the androgynous, the mixed-gendered spherical being, and after Zeus’ cut, the heterosexuals, do not hold any political meaning for Plato and their central function is reproduction.37 Perko stresses that her use of the term ‘queer’ is a plural version of multiplicity and variety of different forms of human existence, that are much more complex and diverse than Plato presents.38

33

  Ibid., 191 d–192 a, p. 62.   Ibid., 192 b, p. 63. 35   Translated from German. Gudrun Perko, Queer Theorien. Ethische, politische und logische Dimensionen plural-queeren Denkens (Köln, 2005), p. 137. 36   Translated from German. Ibid., p. 138. 37   Ibid., p. 139. 38  Ibid. 34

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She views this term in contrast to other interpretations of ‘queer’.39 She calls the first form (feminist)-lesbian-gay-queer: here queer functions as a synonym for lesbian and gay. The second is lesbian-gay-bi-transgender. Her third, and preferred, form, as already mentioned above, is plural-queer, ‘in which the widest possible variety of human beings or forms of living (transgender man, transgender woman, intersexuals, drag kings and drag queens, camp, cyborg, tommboyfemme, lesbian, gay etc.) is gathered under the politically strategic umbrella term queer’.40 I support Perko’s third interpretation of the term ‘queer’ completely and I want my use of the word also to be understood in this way. Perko summarises Queer Theory in the following way: Its main points – such as the Laissez-Faire of plural and plurisexual forms of living, the possibility of self-definition, the opening of diverse spaces, the recognition of ambiguity and plurality, etc. – are against thinking in dichotomous binaries and therefore are aiming for a modified way of thinking: boundaries, hierarchical categorisations, univocal identity models and policies are broken, which exclude, marginalise and discriminate against certain people, and introduce a concept of a democratic society that is in favour of mutual recognition and plurality.41

This plurality also includes ‘skin colour, cultural background, culture, ability, sex, gender, desire and many more’, as Perko explains one page later. A musical movement from popular culture unites these queer versions with a feminist agenda – the Riot Grrrls or the queer-punk female bands. In my musical examples, all three versions of the term queer can be found, and as far as the time period is concerned, this starts in the 1980s and continues into the present. The reasons for this timescale stem from my own personal perception and the popular culture that I grew up with. As Rosa Reitsamer explains, in the 1980s (when punk had already passed) new androgynous types of women and African American female musicians, with critical feminist lyrics (e.g. kd lang, Tracy Chapman and Melissa Etheridge), began to conquer the international music industry, the charts and the hearts of women/lesbians. They chose to go through the commercial music industry and not the structure of ‘women only’ companies.42

39

  Queer as an ‘umbrella-term’ includes different fields and was criticised because it supposedly hides lesbians and gays, making them invisible, because being lesbian/gay is not recognised as such due to the term ‘queer’. 40   Translated from German. Perko, Queer Theorien, p. 8. 41   Translated from German. Ibid. 42   Rosa Reitsamer ‘Provokation, Poetik und Politik. Fragmente einer feministischlesbisch-queeren Rock- und Popgeschichte’, available at: http://translate.eip cp.net/ transversal/0307/reitsamer/de, retrieved 06.03.2008.

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The identity of ‘butch lesbian’, which until then was located in lesbian feminism, was empowered by the coming-out of k.d. lang and Melissa Etheridge and thus introduced in the mainstream. The lesbian and gay communities celebrate these musicians and these major record companies where they have their contracts, count on the profit from selling millions of recordings. Their presence in the mainstream is in context with the discussions about the demands for equal rights of homosexual couples on the one hand and with the debate about AIDS being considered a ‘gay disease’ on the other, which are firmly embedded in and reinforced by public discourse.43

Reitsamer gives an example here, on the other side of mainstream, of the selfappointed queens of Switzerland: Les Reines Prochaines (The Next Queens) with their song ‘I Wanna Be A Butch’ (1999), because they praise the virtues of a butch44 as being ‘strong’ and ‘sensitive’, ‘sexy’ and ‘powerful’. As Rosa Reitsamer analyses, with this song, they show that gender becomes a performative act through parody, deception and sarcastic gestures. Furthermore, a band from Vienna, SV Damenkraft, who produce electronic music, demonstrate this strategy and their love for Foucault in their lyrics and performances. In their song ‘all dykes and you’ (2004), they list all possible expressions and forms of a female person assigned by birth, but also including trans women, who ‘sleep together tonight’. With SV Damenkraft, it is not about the oppression of women or lesbians, rather sexuality, power and desire, as Reitsamer writes. She describes this form of ‘queer’ as Gudrun Perko’s first version, the (feminist)-lesbian-gay-queer one, because it refers to lesbian and gay and not to excluding identity politics.45 However, in my opinion these lyrics from SV Damenkraft contain the third form of ‘queer’, which is the plural-queer, because of the variety of human beings such as tomboys, trans boys, gay moms, etc., which are mentioned in this song. I saw one of their concerts myself and found that their performance very much contributes to the interpretation of their songs. One of the songs deals with Foucault and his name is often mentioned in the lyrics. At the end of the song a sex act is simulated, in which a more feminine band member clearly takes the position of the man, and the singer with a more masculine appearance takes the woman’s position. Due to the gender swap or parody, the position of power becomes confused. Before I go on to give a brief explanation of the structure and the methods of this work, I would like to quote Peraino with regards to the function of music in the examples that I analyse, which deal with gender and queer issues:

43

  Translated from German. Ibid.   Gudrun Perko introduces some notions of the queer terminology in her book Queer Theorien on pp. 22–25. A butch, according to her, does not see herself as a lesbian, rather defines herself as female born, but sees herself as masculine. However, some butches see themselves as lesbians, some of them as especially masculine looking lesbians. 45  Ibid. 44

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In all of these cases, music is the vehicle for the deployment of queer identity, that is, music serves as a technique of questioning – even an erotics of questioning – the received categories of gender and sexual identity such that the map of identity is theoretically, if not actually, reconfigured and redrawn.46

‘Gendercopyleft’47 The theory that features in my study is, as has already been shown in the previous example, the theory articulated by Judith Butler, according to whom there is no original gender. This fact is brought to light via copies or gender parodies. The gender ‘copyleft’ says that no proper/real gender exists that is copied, which is why genders can be manipulated or changed and produced in different ways. The genders that are presented are based on a false or invented original. I will deal with this more closely in Track 02: Parody. Working from this central statement, I began to look for strategies that use these theories, or at least contain part of them. In this way, I came across strategies such as irony, parody, camp, mask/ masquerade, mimesis/mimicry, whereby in the later strategies newer technological inventions come into play, which are crucial to the following strategies: cyborg, transsexuality and dildo. I am also interested in why these strategies are subversive in a queer sense, and where or at what point the subversion begins. Methods The methods that I use, as Judith Halberstam48 already mentions in their49 book Female Masculinity, come from a ‘queer methodology’,50 namely a combination of different methods that are applied in an interdisciplinary manner: text analysis, video analysis, interpretation of images, etc.: A queer methodology, in a way, is a scavenger methodology that uses different methods to collect and produce information on subjects who have been deliberately or accidentally excluded from traditional studies of human behavior. The queer methodology attempts to combine methods that are often

 Peraino, Listening to the Sirens, p. 252.   The title comes from Beatriz Preciado’s idea in her text ‘Gender and Sex Copyleft’, in Volcano Del LaGrace, Sex Works: Photographs 1978–2005 (Tübingen, 2006), pp. 152–154. 48   Sometimes referred to as Judith ‘Jack’ Halberstam in various publications, online articles etc. also vary. 49   ‘They’ is often used in this work as a gender neutral pronoun when the person’s preferred gendered pronoun is either unclear or if they prefer neutral pronouns. 50   Judith Halberstam, Female Masculinity (Durham, NC, 2004), p. 9. 46 47

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cast as being at odds with each other, and it refuses the academic compulsion toward disciplinary coherence.51

My methods are taken from several fields, including Queer Theory and Cultural Studies, as well as an historical analysis of terminology at the start of each chapter. Based on a constructionist concept of gender, my questions are as follows: which feminist-queer strategies are used in rock and pop music? How do they function? Where (in which examples) do they occur? The methodological process is to filter out those subversive strategies that stem from queer theory, which are also used in rock and pop music. In the analysis of popular music, the literary, musical and visual aspects are important. For these strategies, the history of the terminology is explained, which facilitates a more accurate definition and differentiation. On this basis I will also present a theoretical, philosophical analysis in each chapter (every chapter deals with a different strategy), which relates to their manifestations in feminism and/or Queer Theory. In so doing, I try to remain as true as possible to the original text with the aid of quotes and abstracts from the texts, because the same terms are often used and defined differently by different authors. In this section, I clarify the subversive characteristics of the strategy that are crucial to the analysis of the examples of rock and pop music in relation to the hegemony of heteronormativity and the binary gender system. These characteristics can be literary, musical or visual. The more concrete examples serve to illustrate and better assess the strategies. I did not use any sociological methods in order to determine whether the strategies are perceived as subversive because, firstly, I am not a sociologist, and, secondly, it would have stretched the content of my work too much. It was also not my intention to use interviews or to do field work. I preferred to stay within theory and the analyses of examples from rock and pop music. My work should contribute new knowledge by highlighting these queer strategies in rock and pop music, defining and analysing them. Part of the analysis also includes to what extent these strategies are subversive in the examples, in view of a queer undermining of heterosexual and binary gender systems. With this promise, I will finish the introduction and try to build a bridge to the exciting part, which will show us whether the questions I have posed will be satisfactorily answered.

51

  Ibid., p. 13.

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Track 01

Irony – The Cutting Edge I will begin with a clarification of the term irony because it is central to other strategies, such as parody, which undermine gender norms. Irony is a prerequisite for parody as it delivers a basic element, which is taken further in parody. The characteristics of irony are found on a semantic level, which are extended to a textual or performative level in parody. In her works on irony and parody, Linda Hutcheon stresses that these, and similar terms such as satire, pastiche and persiflage, are closely related to each other because, as in the case of irony and parody, they are interlinked. Furthermore, these elements are often less than clear, as they have been subject to many historical changes. Regardless, I dare to venture into the thicket of this partly rhetorical, partly artistic ‘trop(e)-ical forest’, and I want to lay down some points of reference that enable one to orientate oneself more easily. Historical Aspects, Definition, Recognition The use of irony can be traced far back, and, as the Historisches Wörterbuch der Rhetorik (Historic Dictionary of Rhetoric)1 shows us, can be found in a variety of different areas. As such, ironic elements can be found, amongst others, in Socrates’ philosophical argumentation, in figures of rhetoric in the work of Cicero and Quintilian, as a form of literary expression in the work of Cervantes and Thomas Mann, as a critical form of communication in theory and philosophy in the work of Schlegel and Kierkegaard and as a deconstructive element of language in the work of Derrida and Paul de Man. The following definition applies to all these possible uses: ‘that through irony, the opposite of what is meant is expressed’ and ‘that one implies the opposite of what one says’.2 Illustrations and explanations of the examples mentioned above clarify the scope and breadth of irony. Plato, for example, mentions Socrates in his ironic function, which is the attitude of false ignorance. This becomes most apparent in the Symposium, where Plato describes to Socrates how he loves and lives with irony. In a eulogy Alcibiades compares Socrates with the sileni, which are casings for small, precious idols and

  Gert Ueding (ed.), Historisches Wörterbuch der Rhetorik, vol. 4 (Tübingen, 1998).   Translated from German. Ibid., pp. 599–600.

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also represent a contradiction between the outer and inner: ‘Apparently he is in love with all beautiful youths, in fact he only places importance on inner values.’3 In his On Rhetoric, Aristotle also views irony as a noble form of joking and sets the superior countenance of irony against simple ‘clowning around’. The ironist amuses himself whereas the ‘clown’ tries to make others laugh.4 Irony was originally underestimated (it always had to be differentiated from lies) and went through a fundamental change in meaning, which first showed itself in the Nicomachean Ethics of Aristotle, in which he discusses eironeía and alazoneía, understatement and overstatement, modesty and boastfulness as reprehensible categories, which deviate from the truth. Ironists, however, appear nobler since they speak in their own characteristic way not for their own gain, but due to an aversion to bombast.5 Departing from Greek antiquity, during Roman times Quintilian felt that a feature of irony was that the view of the speaker differs from what they really say. We understand the opposite of what is expressed in speech: ‘In utroque enim contarium ei quod dicitur intelligendum est.’6 Humorous irony can be very varied and even take on a tragic dimension, for example in the case of Sophocles in Oedipus the King.7 A further form of tragic irony, which changes suddenly to bitterness and sounds like satire, can be found, for example, in the works of J. Swift when in his Modest Proposal in the eighteenth century, he recommends eating young children to alleviate the famine in Ireland.8 For the recipients it is important to recognise irony, so as not to interpret the meaning incorrectly. Literature studies provide us with clues as to how irony can be recognised or decoded. In order that an ironic formulation is also perceived as one, it is linked to ironic signals: that are in the text itself (such as a break in style, or as an intellectual contradiction in the content). However, they can also be found outside of the text itself, in its performance (such as in the ‘ironic’ tone of the speaker) or inferred from the context (in a statement that is not at all fitting to the speaker or the occasion).9

  Translated from German. Platon, Sämtliche Dialoge, vol. 3 (Hamburg, 1988); Content overview of Plato’s ‘Gastmahl’ by Otto Apelt p. XXXIII and compare Plato, ‘Das Gastmahl’ 215–220, pp. 65–73. Or in English: Plato, Plato in Twelve Volumes, vol. 9, trans. Harold N. Fowler (Cambridge, MA and London, 1925), 215a–220. 4   Uedlich, Historisches Wörterbuch der Rhetorik, p. 602. 5   Ibid., pp. 601–602. 6   Ibid., p. 604. 7   Ibid., p. 603. 8   Ibid., p. 606. 9   Translated from German. Uwe Spörl, Basislexikon Literaturwissenschaft (Paderborn, 2004), pp. 89–90. 3

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The Function of Irony To return to the original point, namely the question of how irony can be used as a subversive strategy, let us look closer at the function of irony and refine the definition taken from the Historical Dictionary of Rhetoric. According to Margaret A. Rose, irony is ‘a statement of an ambiguous character, which includes a code containing at least two messages, one of which is the concealed message of the ironist to an “initiated” audience, and the other the more readily perceived but “ironically meant” message of the code’.10 In contrast to similar tropes, irony works mainly with a code, which conceals two messages. Satire is usually described only as a broad, unanimous message for the readers. Parody, which is dealt with in Track 02: Parody, is a more difficult case as it not only contains at least two codes, but also possibly both ironic and satirical dimensions simultaneously, in that the object of their attack is also part of the parody and of the possible multiple ironic messages. The object of parody can, in contrast to the object of irony, be defined more clearly as a separate goal.11 In Hutcheon’s work, Irony’s Edge, two competing views of irony are discussed, which I want to cite here to illustrate that irony is not always recognised as subversive. In one tradition, irony is viewed as an essentially conservative force, which disrupts the seriousness of transforming a society and reconciles its members to a world that is second best. In contrast to this there is an alternative tradition, in which irony is seen as particularly subversive, namely where it shakes up the certainty of social order and suspends all final truths. The final form of irony, in Hutcheon’s words, possesses the ‘cutting edge’ or ‘sharpness’, which can cut or divide an element into two parts (or rather into two meanings). The second, more hidden meaning, in the case of subversive irony, serves to further the evaluation, i.e. it contains a political value. Subversive irony is thus characterised by a ‘cutting edge’, which possesses a political sharpness. Donna Haraway also sees irony as an appropriate political tool: Irony is about contradictions that do not resolve into larger wholes, even dialectically, about the tension of holding incompatible things together because both or all are necessary and true. Irony is about humour and serious play. It is also a rhetorical strategy and a political method, one I would like to see honoured within socialist-feminism.12

  Margaret A. Rose, Parody: Ancient, Modern and Post-modern (Cambridge, 1993), p. 84. 11   Ibid., p. 89. 12   Donna Haraway, ‘A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology and Socialist Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century’, in Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (London, 1998), p. 149. 10

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Hutcheon admits that in her work A Theory of Parody, she never established how irony functions in parody completely to her satisfaction. She viewed the interplay of the two as microcosm and macrocosm. For her, irony was structured as a miniature version (semantic) of the parodic double (textual) meaning. In her subsequent book with the title Irony’s Edge (1995) she established how the ‘ironic edge’, ‘cut’ or ‘sharpness’ gives parody the ‘critical’ dimension by marking the difference in the core of the similarity. In order to explain this, Hutcheon has to deal with the two functions of irony, namely the pragmatic and semantic functions, in more detail.13 Semantic and Pragmatic Functions of Irony According to Hutcheon irony can be defined on a semantic level as the marking of the difference in meaning or simply as an anti-phrase. As such, it has been emphasised by the superimposition of semantic contexts (what is said/what is meant). There is one signifier and two things that are signified, so for example one word and two meanings. The semantic contrast between what is said and what is meant is not the only function of irony. Its other more significant use on a pragmatic level is often dealt with as though it is too obvious to warrant discussion: irony judges.14 In my opinion parody also has this pragmatic function, because it judges and mocks. The semantic function of parody, however, is based on different conditions to irony. Irony is based on one word or one sign, which can have two meanings. Parody consists of a repetition or imitation, which takes on a second meaning in the act of repetition. Parody uses irony as a structural function in that irony occurs through maintaining the outer original form (style, structure, performance) and gives the content a different meaning. For Hutcheon, the pragmatic function of irony is that of the characteristic evaluation, which is mostly of a pejorative nature. Its mocking can, but does not have to, take the usual form of expressions of praise. The praise is used to conceal the mocking and abuse. Both functions, the semantic reversal as well as the pragmatic evaluation, are implied by the Greek root eironéia, which means dissimilation, affectation and questioning. Both are present here; the difference and the contrast of meaning and also a question, a judgement, which, as already mentioned, portrays the ‘cutting edge’ with its political sharpness. Thus, irony functions in two ways, as an anti-phrase and as an evaluating strategy. It implies the attitude of an encoding agent regarding the text itself, an attitude that also allows for and requires the interpretation and judgement of the decoder.15

13   Linda Hutcheon, Irony’s Edge: The Theory and Politics of Irony (New York and London, 1995), p. 4. 14   Ibid., p. 53. 15   Ibid.

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The level of ironic effect in a text is indirectly proportional to the number of obvious signals that can be used to achieve this effect. The presence of these signals in the text is a necessary for the decoder to experience the evaluating attempt of the encoder. Irony is usually at the cost of someone or something. It is therefore in this pragmatic and not in the semantic function that mocking irony becomes similar to satire.16 In a diagram, Hutcheon presents the different gradations of irony on a scale. She starts at the bottom with the weakest form of irony, which is purely decoratively reinforcing and emphatic. In the middle the critical temperature starts to rise, up to a level in which irony is generally viewed as a strategy of provocation and polemic, and differentiation from satire becomes more difficult. Each form of function17 can be interpreted positively (on the left-hand side) and negatively (on the right-hand side). The lowest level (the reinforcing form) is viewed in critiques, on the one hand as emphatic, and therefore affirmative, and on the other hand as purely decorative and disapproving. It contains relatively little critical sharpness.18 At this point, I would like to emphasise the oppositional forms of functions of irony, which Hutcheon calls transgressive on the positive side and subversive and insulting and offensive on the negative side. On the scale, this function already comes closer to the maximum affective charge. This indicates that the ‘cutting edge’ already possesses a certain political sharpness, which can divide the content into two directions or meanings (transgressive and subversive on one hand or hurtful and offensive on the other). I want to emphasise again clearly that for a subversive form of irony, the politically sharp ‘cutting edge’ has to be clearly recognisable. By clearly recognisable, I mean that, although the semantic level of irony can have two meanings, the pragmatic function with the political message still has to prevail and be clearly recognisable. This means that as a result of the sender’s clarity, these ironic statements are also viewed by the receivers as offensive and insulting. Hutcheon has separated the inseparable by artificially isolating a series of elements for discussion, which in practice work together, in order for irony to be able to emerge with its critical sharpness: its semantic complexity, the ‘discursive communities’, the role of intention and the contextual parameters and characteristics of irony.19 In her work she tries to understand why irony is used as a discursive practice or strategy, or is understood in such a way and looks into the consequences of its understanding, misunderstanding and cases when it backfires.

16

  Ibid., p. 55.   Hutcheon only characterises them as functions, however I would like to call them forms of function in order to differentiate them more clearly from the two (semantic, pragmatic) functions of irony. 18   Hutcheon, Irony’s Edge, pp. 46–48. 19   Hutcheon, Irony’s Edge, p. 4. 17

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Figure 1.1

Linda Hutcheon: functions of irony

‘Irony can and does function tactically in the service of a wide range of political positions, legitimating or undercutting a wide variety of interests.’20 Like Hutcheon, I am also interested in how irony operates as a discursive strategy on a linguistic level (verbal) and on a formal level (musical, visual, textual).21 The public are of great significance in the act of decoding: The interpreter as agent performs an act – attributes both meanings and motives – and does so in a particular situation and context, for a particular purpose, and with particular means. Attributing irony involves, then, both semantic and evaluative inferences. Irony’s appraising edge is never absent and, indeed, is 20

  Ibid., p. 10.   Ibid.

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what makes irony work differently from other forms which it might structurally seem to resemble (metaphor, allegory, puns).22

Irony occurs in a space between what is said (which is also included in that space) and the unsaid. An interaction of both elements is absolutely essential for irony to exist. The said and unsaid coexist for the interpreter and create the ironic meaning, which is not simply the unsaid meaning. Due to the fact that this undermines the said meaning by distancing the semantic meaning, it ‘complicates’23 the irony and is not trusted. With irony, a person moves beyond ‘true’ or ‘false’ and within ‘relevant’ and ‘inappropriate’. Irony removes the security that words only mean what they say: ‘It has even been called a kind of “intellectual tear gas” that breaks the nerves and paralyses the muscles of everyone in its vicinity, an acid that will corrode healthy as well as decayed tissues.’24 Irony makes people obviously uncomfortable and fascinates the mind rather than feelings. However, just the scale of the unease that irony causes allows one to suppose the contrary. Irony, it is said, irritates because it denies our certainty, by exposing the world as ambiguous.25 Irony in Feminist Discourse Similar debates are held in feminist circles, where irony is said to be viewed suspiciously due to its instability. However, the political power that lies in its potential to destabilise is acknowledged. In this way, irony can deconstruct and decentralise patriarchal discourse. It functions as a form of guerrilla warfare and changes what people interpret. In the section on the function of irony, the aforementioned quote from Donna Haraway makes her opinion clear that irony is simultaneously humour and a serious game, and that it should often be applied in feminism. According to Haraway the valid premise here is ‘The political struggle is to see from both perspectives at once because each reveals both dominations and possibilities unimaginable from the other vantage point. Single vision produces worse illusions than double vision or many-headed monsters’.26 Hutcheon cites feminist theorists, according to whom irony removes the legitimacy of the prescription of essentialist or natural gender identities. Judith Butler’s argument serves as an example of this, which as Claire Colebrook states, explains that:

22

    24   p. 14. 25   26   23

Ibid., p. 12. Ibid. Northrop Frye, A Biography (Toronto, 1989) quoted in Hutcheon, Irony’s Edge, Ibid., p. 15. Haraway, ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’, p. 154.

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Our gender identity is not expressed in language but created and performed through language. But Butler wants to go further and say that language does not just perform and create identity; it also creates the illusion of some subject or being that exists before language. The performance of the self as gendered or as social, creates the illusion of a self or body that was there to be expressed. (original emphasis)27

Butler writes further at this point that gender imitations disarrange and even imitate the myth of the original itself. Through the practice of imitation, the illusion of a primary and inner gender identity is exposed.28 In my view the ironic process shows that a word or a sign can have two different meanings applied to it. In this way, no clear attributions can be made due to just a sign. As Hutcheon mentions, irony can, for example, in the form of mimicry of the female gender identity, be interpreted in such a way that it includes the deceptive and deluding power of the feminine. Heterosexual men can see this lie or deception in relation to the genuinely feminine as attractive and forceful.29 However, I personally see this as a misogynistic interpretation of the imitation of the female gender because it implies that all women, as far as the ‘true’ form of the woman is concerned, deceive and lie. This representation cannot simply be cited as another example of irony and left untouched. In my opinion Hutcheon neglects here to demonstrate that this is a false essentialist attribution, which assigns the female the power of deception, thus my question, how do things look with the ‘true’ male being? Just as there is no male original, there is also no original female one. Judith Butler’s argument already shows that the imitation of the genders reveals false essentialist gender identities and attributions. The deception comes into play through a falsely assumed original.30 Hutcheon writes that the idea can be developed further that women, due to the imitation and deceptive presentation of a female original, are more open to, and tolerant of, ambivalence, ambiguity and diversity. However, as Hutcheon then correctly mentions, irony, with its emphasis on context, perspective and instability, is relevant for everyone and not just for women. Thus, it is not surprising that the   Claire Colebrook, Irony (New York, 2004), p. 127.   ‘Although the gender meanings taken up in these parodic styles are clearly part of hegemonic, misogynist culture, they are nevertheless denaturalized and mobilised through their parodic recontextualization. As imitations, which effectively displace the meaning of the original, they imitate the myth of originality itself. In the place of an original identification which serves as a determining cause, gender identity might be reconceived as a personal/cultural history of received meanings subject to a set of imitative practices which refer literally to other imitations and which, jointly, construct the illusion of a primary and interior gendered self or parody and mechanism of the construction.’ Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York and London, 1990), p. 138. 29   Hutcheon, Irony’s Edge, p. 33. 30   Colebrook, Irony, p. 128. 27 28

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most recent revival of rhetoric becomes a sign of the loosening of the shackles that bind us to a particular path, a paranoid obsession with security and to fixed singular designations.31 Irony has the potential and the recognition that all conceptions are limited. That which is maintained as a social truth is often politically motivated.32 Madonna’s Ambivalent Irony I would like to cite the pop superstar Madonna as an example of the weak form of irony. Madonna’s feminist–queer insinuations are very superficial and can be interpreted as ambivalent, although she does count as an icon in the lesbian and gay scene. Many know her ironic portrayal of stereotypical feminine figures, like the virgin, the ‘femme fatale’ or the ‘material girl’. At the beginning of her career she sang ‘Like a Virgin’ and writhed on the floor, scantily clad in a short white frilly dress in a way that had nothing to do with the innocent behaviour of a virgin.33 If I analyse this example according to Hutcheon’s criteria, I establish that this semantic function with the anti-phrase is present. The meaning of the virgin is reversed, whereby in the second meaning, that of the provocative, seductive woman, the ‘cutting edge’ is not recognisable. Where then, is the political sharpness? The only thing that occurs to me with regard to this is that a virgin is also allowed to present herself in a sexy way. The resulting political message would be female self-empowerment regarding one’s own sexuality. On the other hand, this representation is also very close to common male fantasies. The pragmatic function of this ironic example could be the judgement or mocking of these male fantasies. The question remains, though, whether most of the public would also understand it this way. On Hutcheon’s scale of functions, this irony corresponds to the form, which lies second from the bottom, which she calls ‘complicating’. Its positive interpretation is complex, rich and ambiguous; the negative is that it is misleading, imprecise and unclear. Madonna’s example of ‘Like a Virgin’ contains a rather minimal affective charge and is a far cry from the oppositional functions with the ‘cutting edge’ that contain a political sharpness and can therefore count as subversive irony. As Hutcheon suggests, Madonna’s name choice and the construction of ‘Madonna’ as a performer seem to have a lot of ironic potential. The Western iconographic tradition, in which the virginal Madonna is often paradoxically presented with 31   Hutcheon, Irony’s Edge, p. 33. Hutcheon quotes Dick Hebdige, Hiding in the Light: On Images and Things (London and New York, 1988), pp. 225–226. 32   Ibid., p. 33. Hutcheon quotes M.M.J. Fischer, ‘Ethnicity and the Post-modern Arts of Memory’, in J. Clifford and G.E. Marcus (eds), Writing Culture: The Politics of Ethnography (Berkeley, 1986), p. 224. 33   Gary Burns, ‘Live on Tape. Madonna: MTV Video Music Awards, Radio City Music Hall, New York, September 14, 1984’, in Ian Inglis (ed.), Performance and Popular Music: History, Place and Time (Aldershot and Burlington, 2006), pp. 132–134.

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a child, creates a further intertextual context. Madonna’s self-representation, in film, in videos, in her song lyrics as well as in live performances, is transgressive and perhaps also ironic. In Italian the word ‘Madonna’ is also used for the representation (statues, pictures) of the Virgin Mary. Is it appropriate or ironic that perhaps in Madonna’s case the icon and the Virgin Mary share the same label? Seen historically, ‘Madonna’ is a title of the Middle Ages or Renaissance, which was given to a woman of honourable origins out of respect. Those who see an irony that plays with patriarchal expectations in a knowing way in Madonna’s commitment to traditional musical symbols of childish vulnerability, see her as emancipating herself and other women, as she says herself ‘everything I do is sort of tongue in cheek’.34 For those who refuse to call this political irony, it’s the ‘sort of’ that is the problem. How much can one fit in without accepting certain conventions? Or do women have to willingly accept the patriarchal representations in order to discover how they function? Of course, irony has a long history as a weapon in the arsenal of the powerless in a ‘culture of resistance’. It is the history that evokes Madonna’s style as ironic. Luce Irigaray describes this play on feminine representations as ‘mimicry’,35 which I explain further in Track 05: Mimesis/Mimicry. One must assume the feminine role deliberately. Which means already to convert a form of subordination into affirmation, and thus begin to thwart it. Whereas a direct feminine challenge to this condition means demanding to speak as a (masculine) ‘subject’ … To play with mimesis is thus, for a woman, to try to recover the place of her exploitation by discourse, without allowing herself to be simply reduced to it. It means to resubmit herself – inasmuch as she is on the side of the ‘perceptible’ of ‘matter’ to ‘ideas’, in particular to ideas about herself, that are elaborated in/by a masculine logic, but so as to make ‘visible’ by an effect of playful repetition, what is supposed to remain invisible: the cover-up of a possible operation of the feminine language. It also means ‘to unveil’ the fact that, if women are such good mimics, it is because they are not simply absorbed in this function. They do remain elsewhere: another case of the persistence of ‘matter’, but also of ‘sexual pleasure’. (original emphasis)36

If political acts are to be assigned to Madonna as a result of her irony, then mimicry has become a mode of argumentation, which is exploited. The control over selfpresentation and the masculinity of the gaze that is suggested here is exactly that which is represented as a spectacle in the film Truth or Dare. The ambiguity is, however, never completely lost. Is it the subversive edge or sharpness of the irony, which is so rousing in Madonna’s performances? Or is it the disturbing fact and obviousness of her acts that buy into ‘feminine comfort fetishism’; an obviousness 34   Hutcheon, Irony’s Edge, p. 33. Hutcheon quotes S. McClary, ‘Feminine Endings’, in Music, Gender and Sexuality, 40 (1991): p. 209. 35   Hutcheon, Irony’s Edge, p. 34. 36   Luce Irigaray, This Sex which is Not One (New York, 1985), p. 76.

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that not everyone wants to read as irony.37 Those who credit her with the control of her erotic self-representation call masculinity and the patriarchal nature of these pictures into question.38 ‘Madonna the producer may have chosen the chain, but Madonna the sexual persona in the video is alternatively a cross-dressing dominatrix and the slave of male desire.’39 ‘It is somehow good to behave in a stereotypical way’ Madonna said in an interview,40 ‘as long as you do it with your brain’. Commentators have thought that the protective shield of irony is that every movement Madonna makes can be ambivalent, but ambivalence is not necessarily irony. Is Madonna so successful because of her irony or her ambivalence? Or both? The inability to make a clear differentiation is also the reason why she attracts so many different groups of the public: those who see her as completely dominated by the male gaze (either in agreement or condemnation) those who see her as ‘in control’ regardless of the choice of self-representation she has just made; those who only see her lively commercial instincts (and also either agree with or condemn this) and those who see her as subversive, flamboyant and provocatively deconstructing the traditional conceptions of the coherent subject through irony.41 Hutcheon views the way Madonna plays with irony as ambiguity. She asks whether Madonna is the self-empowering woman ‘in control’ or the ‘material girl’, an accomplice of patriarchy and capitalism. Her whole career is built on ambiguity that is evoked by the attribute of irony. This means that the same fact can be used again and again to argue for both sides. In autumn 1992 Madonna was on the cover of Vanity Fair, Elle and Vogue and she published the album Sex together with the recording of Erotica with the help of a 60 million dollar contract with Time Warner. Those who interpret her as ironically subversive see her as being in full control of her multiple representations and masquerades, regardless of whether she plays the virgin or the vamp with the help of irony or tricks. Those who refuse to assign irony to her only see complicity with the patriarchal representations and her desire to make as much money as possible. Madonna, in turn, attacks feminists because they supposedly do not understand her form of irony. She claimed that irony was her favourite thing and everything that she did could be interpreted as

37   Hutcheon, Irony’s Edge, p. 35. Hutcheon quotes J. Marcus, ‘Daughters of Anger/ Material Girls: Con/textualising Feminist Criticism’, in R. Barreca (ed.), Last Laughs: Perspectives of Women on Comedy (New York, 1998), p. 281 and G. Pevere, ‘The Battle of the Icons’, in The Globe and Mail (5 July): p. C 3. A. Tamburri ‘The Madonna Complex: The Justification of a Prayer’, The International Semiotic Spectrum, 17 (April): pp. 1–2. 38   Hutcheon, Irony’s Edge, p. 35. 39   Ibid., Hutcheon quotes C. Paglia, Sex, Art and American Culture: Essays (New York, 1992), p. 4. 40   Hutcheon, Irony’s Edge, Hutcheon quotes McClary, ‘Feminine Endings’, p. 149. 41   Hutcheon, Irony’s Edge, p. 35.

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ambiguous.42 However, Hutcheon stresses that ambiguity and irony are not the same, because ‘irony has an edge’.43 Reena Mistrey writes in her online essay about Madonna and Queer Theory that this ambiguity also has its disadvantages, because the public does not always read this weak irony in the way in which it is intended. An experiment showed that the interpretations of videos such as ‘Papa Don’t Preach’ and ‘Open Your Heart’ vary a great deal. The pornography in ‘Open Your Heart’ allows Madonna to appear as an object of male desire and not so much as an alternative to the patriarchal constructions of women as something to be looked at. Her representation of a ‘femme fatale’ may serve as an illustration of this argument, which can have both a de-masking and strengthening and reinforcing effect on the public.44 Madonna practises a superficial form of ‘queerness’ and the criticism that bell hooks expressed about the pop icon, namely, that she has appropriated African American culture to create a more radical and exotic style, can also be applied to the way she handles queer culture. In my opinion Madonna’s ‘scandalous’ French kiss with Britney Spears in a performance arose not so much from attraction towards one another, but rather for publicity reasons. Femininist-Queer Examples of Irony in Rock and Pop Music For Hutcheon the problem lies in the fact that irony can be both political and apolitical, conservative and radical, repressive and democratic. For this reason she wants to suggest a symbol under which a theory of irony can be written – the ‘iron’ as a sign of the transgressive, provocative and subversive possibilities in female spheres. The ‘iron’ can also be a ‘branding’ that hurts and marks and thus is a means of imposing power that can be used both in an alienating and subversive way.45 Irony arises as a reaction to the crisis of long narratives, as Jutta Weber claims. In my opinion it is also connected to the breakdown of demarcation between two genders or gender identities. Haraway explains this fact with the aid of the cyborg’s body: ‘A Cyborg Body is not innocent; it was born in a garden; it does not seek unitary identity and so generate antagonistic dualism without end (or until the world ends); it takes irony for granted. One is too few, and two is only one possibility.’46   Hutcheon, Irony’s Edge, p. 35. Hutcheon quotes D. Ansen, ‘Madonna: Magnificent Maverick’, in Cosmopolitan Magazine (1990): p. 310. 43   Ibid., p. 33. 44   Reena Mistrey, Madonna and Queer Theory (January 2000), edited by David Gauntlett, available at: www.theory.org.uk/madonna.htm, retrieved on 21.03.2006. 45   Hutcheon, Irony’s Edge, p. 36. 46   Jutta Weber, ‘Ironie, Erotik und Techno-Politik: Cyberfeminismus als Virus in der neuen Weltordnung?’, Die Philosophin. Forum für feministische Theorie und Philosophie, 24 (December 2001): p. 82. 42

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Irony is therefore the strategy of the post-modern and many artists, for example, Jenny Holzer, Laurie Anderson, Cindy Sherman47 and also some musicians of the 1990s and the present, also make use of this strategy. Riot Grrrls and Girl Culture In the Riot Grrrl ideology, it is almost as if feminism is already a given. Old items on the feminist agenda are of no great importance to them anymore; discussions concerning equal pay, childcare and abortion rights are pushed into the background in favour of symbolic values such as representation in the media. A playful approach to the serious topics of its predecessors is, however, demonstrated in this movement. In addition, there is flirtation with an ironic and provisional construction of identity, whereas essentialist feminism was concerned with an authentic self.48 The ironic register that represents a staged form of provocation and, as such, a type of symbolic violence, is used by the Riot Grrrls. Riot Grrrls want to create their own image, an independently projected entity. They want to order the world according to their celebrated images. The metaphor of war penetrates our culture and social imagination, as for example in popular music. The consumption of rock music began to be viewed as a political force and the Riot Grrrls are in a war against ‘cock rock’ or the revival of ‘geriatric’ rock, like the eternal performances by the Rolling Stones and other relics of the 1960s.49 Braidotti sees the power of irony in the forms that take on the cultural feminist practices of ‘as if’. Irony is the ‘ridiculous’ used in systematic doses. It is a progressive form of provocation and lets the air out of an excessive and vehement rhetoric – namely the general nostalgia, which dominated popular music during that period.50 The Riot Grrrls want to create their own time and space in order to express and develop their own wishes and, if they can’t, they get really angry. Their rage causes them to punish others in that the others interpret the Riot Grrrls as their worst fantasies and horror images of women in daily life. As Bette Midler said: ‘I am everything you were afraid that your daughter or your son could turn into.’51 In the early 1990s the Riot Grrrls began to describe their feelings of alienation in a male-orientated punk scene in which they were marginalised (in the music, in the fanzines). They criticised the media for its unsustainable ideal of perfect 47   ‘While irony remains a major stylistic device, of great significance are also contemporary multi-media electronic artists of the non-nostalgic kind like Jenny Holzer, Laurie Anderson and Cindy Sherman. They are the ideal travel companions in postmodernity.’ Rosi Braidotti, ‘Cyberfeminism with a Difference’, in Sandra Kemp and Judith Squires (eds), Feminisms (Oxford and New York, 1997), p. 522. 48   Simon Reynolds and Joy Press, The Sex Revolts: Gender, Rebellion and Rock ‘n’ Roll (London, 1995), p. 137. 49   Rosi Braidotti, ‘Un ciberfeminismo diferente’, Debats, 76 (2002): p. 107. 50   Ibid., p. 108. 51   Ibid., p. 112.

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femininity. They wrote moving accounts of their experiences of sexism and sexual abuse. In the beginning they were in Olympia, Washington and in Washington, DC.52 Riot Grrrls quickly featured in the media. In 1993 many of the Riot Grrrls felt that they were being trivialised or falsely represented by the media.53 This movement finally succeeded in breaking into Europe and was demonstrated by the weaker form of the ‘Girlie’ fashion, Girl Culture, or songs by girl bands like Lucielectric (‘Weil ich ein Mädchen bin’ – ‘Because I am a Girl’). However, the ‘Lady Fests’ that are organised in the different states in Europe remain close to the original idea of the Riot Grrrls. Riot Grrrls speak of empowerment through the formation of bands and producing fanzines – the old ‘Do It Yourself’ punk ethos – anyone can do it, but with a feminist twist. Their goal is to create a space for young women, in which they are free to express themselves without the dominating shadows of men. With the Riot Grrrls there is also a strong lesbian element and historical links to the gay punk homocore/queercore movement. Many of the Riot Grrrls have mothers who were involved in ‘first’ or ‘second wave’ feminism. The Riot Grrrls’ fanzines are full of problematic images of women: porn stars, Victorian beauties, happy housewives in advertisements, sweet, young girls in the children’s books. These illustrated articles contain emotional reports about rape and incest, about educated political critics, cooking recipes, poems and hit lists (e.g. the top 10 reasons why it is cool to spend time by yourself and not have a husband). The most obvious aspect of the Riot Grrrls rhetoric is the insistence of the word ‘girl’ as opposed to ‘woman’. Grrrl zines state that: ‘Clinical studies show that being a teenage girl fights self-esteem better than most other leading factors.’ Perhaps this is also just nostalgia about being an invincible ‘tomboy’ in prepuberty. This possibility is lost as a result of becoming ‘sexualised’. This is why the names of the fanzines are, for example, Crumbly Lil Bunny, and bands like Bratmobile, whose album title Pottymouth evokes the image of little ‘she devils’ who refuse to behave like ‘sugar and spice and all things nice’.54 On the other hand, the Riot Grrrls reject the ‘Tomboy-Rocker’, just as Joan Jett or Kim Gordon do not recognise it as a prototype. It is seen as unsatisfactory ‘to be one of the guys’. Kim Gordon spoke about how she ‘always idolised male guitar players. It was exciting to be in the middle of it but you also feel like a voyeur. There were isolated female musicians, but there was never any bonding or anything.’55 Kathleen Hanna sees this as only half the issue: What other (female) bands do is go ‘It’s not important that I’m a girl, it’s just important that I want to rock’. And that’s cool. But that’s more of an 52   Sol Haring, Feminismus und Frauenpolitik im Underground, available at: http:// solways.mur.at/politik.html, retrieved on 01.07.2006. 53   Reynolds and Press, The Sex Revolts, p. 323. 54   Ibid., p. 324. 55   Ibid., p. 326.

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assimilationist thing. It’s like they just want to be allowed to join the world as it is; whereas I’m into revolution and radicalisation and changing the whole structure. What I’m into is making the world different for me to live in.56

But what about the music? Despite their ‘pro-girl’ ethos the Riot Grrrls have not considered gender orientation of music in the music itself, criticise Simon Reynolds and Joy Press. Bands such as Raincoats or Throwing Muses have paid lip service in this sense and tried to question the phallocentric forms of rock music per se. From the perspective of a rock critic, most Riot Grrrl bands seem only to be concerned with the reinvention of the wheel. They sound like traditional hardcore or late 1970s punk bands. They criticise the tomboys; musically however, they do sound like the tomboys. This results partly from the nature of the subjects and the emotions that they deal with – rage, mistrust, self-hate, the fight to speak and articulate themselves. Another reason why the music sounds so simple and old-fashioned is that the ‘Do It Yourself’ ideology goes against musical professionalism, which actually helps to inscribe the gender difference into the sound of the music. It is also an elevation of the content over form, the ‘message’ above the music. These women are not interested in making a contribution to rock history, or to achieving an evolution of a form. Their priority is the process, not the product. It is about the empowerment, which comes from the ‘get up and do it’, and about inspiring the public to consider the spectacle of self-liberation.57 Some women from Girl Culture didn’t want to be considered in the context of feminism: Courtney Love, for example, mentioned in an interview that feminists have a bad aftertaste, because they are ugly and should shave their legs for once. However one of the hymns of this movement, ‘Girls Just Wanna Have Fun’ (Cindy Lauper), has some common ground with the second women’s movement, because, as before, young women are subjected to social restrictions, sexual abuse, discrimination and economic exploitation.58 Anette Baldauf interprets this as a generational conflict, in which the girls have to differentiate themselves from their mothers, the ‘institutionalised’ feminism and ‘anti-sex feminism’, primarily with their sexually explicit vocabulary, their rhetoric and their sexually charged habitus. Girl Culture arises from hedonism, desire and consumption.59 The ironic use of the baby-doll dress, in particular as used by Courtney Love, on one level portrays the Lolita costume and on another level was connected to a current debate. After Madonna, Courtney Love touched on a completely new aspect of femininity, just at the time when Carol Gilligan published a study in which she stated that lively young girls, who are self-confident in puberty, often 56

  Ibid., p. 326.   Ibid., pp. 326–327. 58   Ibid., pp. 327f. 59   Anette Baldauf, Genealogie einer ‘Revolution Girl Style’. Konstruktion, Distribution und Übersetzung popkultureller Phänomene am Beispiel ‘Girl Culture’ und ‘Girlie Kultur’, unpublished Doctoral Thesis (University of Vienna, 1998), p. 45. 57

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become uncertain, quiet women. At this point I would like to stress that Carol Gilligan is controversial due to her essentialist feminist views. With her ‘child whore’ look, her lipstick-smeared mouth and her wild, aggressive songs, Courtney Love seemed to be the absolute embodiment of Gilligan’s observation. Those who get back in touch with their inner little girl, which Love’s appearance provoked, discover that young girls are anything but sweet and innocent. On the contrary, they are angry and loud and have not yet suffered the typical process of feminine socialisation that transforms women into neat, modest, submissive and quiet beings. Love personified a woman who refuses to give up her original drive.60 Thus, this is the hidden or mocking ‘ethos’, as Linda Hutcheon would call it, the ‘girl power’; the rage and aggression of girls that rejected traditional ascriptions of femininity and brought them provocatively into play. Female musicians such as Courtney Love and Kat Bjelland (Babes in Toyland): used classical props of femininity (little girls’ dresses, plastic hairclips, and pink tights) which provoke dark associations with child abuse and paedophilia and brought both aspects together. Those women turned dirt into fashion and made it into a symbol of female power. At the same time the Riot-Grrrl-movement used the media for confronting the public with topics such as sexual abuse and sexual harassment. Evidently, those women wanted a new kind of representation, through which the subversive should replace the hackneyed ascriptions of femininity.61

With time, though, the tables turned and this look entered into the mainstream, became fashionable and lost its political edge. The Riot Grrrl movement was presented distortedly in the media, without its ironic subtext and what remained were sweet, angry, sexy girls in fashion magazines. ‘The cutting edge’ of the Riot Grrrls’ irony was not communicated further. Luckily, the song lyrics remain, as in Bikini Kill’s ‘Rebel Girl’, in which Kathleen Hanna sings about ‘The queen of my world’ and ‘in her kiss I taste the revolution’.62 Braidotti makes an appeal for irony, which should definitely be maintained because what we need is a greater complexity, multiplicity and simultaneity. We have to raise the problem of sex, class and race once more in order to look for these multiple and complex differences. Moreover, I believe that calmness, empathy and humour are important to overcome the ruptures and betrayals of this age. 60   Debbie Stoller, ‘Love Letter’, in Anette Baldauf and Katherina Weingartner (eds), Lips.Tits.Hits.Power? Popkultur und Feminismus (Vienna, 1998), p. 173. 61   Translated from German. Andi Zeisler, ‘Babe Tease. Über den Schmutz in der Mode und die Mode des Schmutzes’, in Baldauf and Weingartner, Lips.Tits.Hits, p. 294. 62   Reynolds and Press, The Sex Revolts, p. 330.

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Irony and the ability to laugh at ourselves present important elements in this project and are necessary for success, as various feminists such as Hélène Cixous and French & Saunders have demonstrated. As the Bad Girls’ manifesto says: through laughter, our rage becomes a weapon of liberation’.63

Angie Reed Angie Reed gives us a good example of irony in the post-Riot Grrrl era, because she presents herself as a perhaps not so unusual, angry secretary, who does not take her typically feminine role very seriously and airs her anger in a very feminine ‘machisma’. The music is not based on a punk band, with the conventional instruments such as guitars, bass and drums like the Riot Grrrls, but rather on electronic music and Angie Reed’s voice; her musical genre is described as electro clash, punk with hip hop. Her performance on stage is supposedly the only ‘one-secretary show’. ‘Angie Reed presents the best of Barbara Brockhaus with music for the LaZy not the BureaucraZy’ is written on the CD cover. Thus, Angie Reed slips into the role of Barbara Brockhaus and delivers the hyperbolic, ironic presentation of an office secretary. She begins the self-illustrated booklet (copying the Riot Grrrls’ DIY method) with the ironic sentence ‘I’m Barbara Brockhaus and it’s my job to work here. Hurray, I cheer!’ It becomes clear in the following lines that she means exactly the opposite; if she is hearing the ticking of the clock, she is obviously bored. Her illustration shows a particularly sexy secretary with fishnet stockings and high-heels who is typing on her typewriter ‘abcdefghi’. And then suddenly ‘klmonp’, which is intended to illustrate onomatopoeically that what is being typed ends up in the bin (as the arrow from the typewriter to the bin shows). She writes about her work under her drawing and explains that in her job it is essential to know how to type but that everything that she types is for the bin, and that, even if she is doing several tasks at the same time, after sending a fax, she is still able to relax.64 In the meantime, boredom takes over again and she starts thinking about a guy, Lars Langenscheidt. This clear heterosexuality is ‘queered’ when she says 63   Translated from Spanish: ‘Lo que necesitamos, más bien, es una mayor complejidad, multiplicidad, simultaneidad, y volver a planterarnos sexo, clase y raza para buscar esas multiples y complejas diferencias. También creo en la necesidad de dulzura, compassion y humor para supercar las rupturas y embelesamientos de la época. La ironía, reírnos de nosotros mismos son elementos importantes den este proyecto y son necesarios para el éxito, como feministas de corte tan diverso como Hélène Cixous y French & Saunders han señalado. Como dice el Manifesto of the bad Girls ‘A través de la risa, nuestra ira se convierte en una arma de liberaciòn.’ (original emphasis). Braidotti, ‘Un ciberfeminismo diferente’, p. 116. 64   Angie Reed Presents the Best of Barbara Brockhaus (Chicks on Speed Records, 2003).

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CD cover: Angie Reed Presents the Best of Barbara Brockhaus

‘Ooh, he’s quite a guy with a feminine side’ on the second page of the booklet. She confidently explains what she wants from him with the motto ‘Girls just wanna have fun’, gets straight to the point and expresses her sexual intentions very openly on the telephone. What she says next corresponds more to common male fantasies and it is not clear whether it is intended to be ironic. With respect to irony, it remains ambivalent, as is the case with Madonna – a political cutting edge is lacking (be it feminist or queer). Barbara Brockhaus is apparently not completely clear herself about what she just said. This is suggested in the following lines: ‘Mind the pause before he speaks. It’s long. The clock is ticking and it’s got me thinking, gee, I said something wrong.’ However, the missing ‘cutting edge’ appears in the song lyrics of the first song on her CD. She suggests a different tone in her song ‘I Don’t Do Dirty Work, Sucka!’, where she reminds her boss that she does every task and works fast

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and that she is the last person to leave the office, which is why she wants to be paid fairly. However, she would not do any dirty work for him. Her boss likes to play with power, but she keeps on refusing to do dirty work: ‘You wanna lick my fingers clean? Suck my finger! Don’t linger!’. Here, Angie Reed takes on the clear, confident, feminine position once more and makes clear that she does not accept everything, and especially not sexual harassment. With ‘Suck my finger’ she openly retaliates, reverses the immoral offer and commands him to suck her finger. This image is portrayed pictorially on the CD cover. Angie Reed, alias Barbara Brockhaus, is depicted in a tight red skirt with high heels, sticking a finger in the mouths of two kneeling men and visibly enjoying it. On the third page of her booklet Angie Reed makes an ironic allusion to her female housemate, who she doesn’t hate, quite the contrary: ‘No, not so. I live in a Box with a room-mate whom, luckily, I don’t hate. No, au contraire it’s quite a pleasant affair – being we both enjoy having fun. She has fun written between the legs and fun is always on the tip of her tongue.’ However, this lesbian innuendo is not taken further. Angie Reed plays with more or less subtle (more often very obvious erotic) insinuations that appear to have ‘slipped out’ naively and innocently. The ironic insinuations possess more of a ‘cutting edge’ and political significance than for example with Madonna, although Angie Reed often plays with this slight ambivalence (as in Madonna’s mainstream songs), which simply inspires male fantasies. The influences of the Riot Grrrls are on the one hand raw, edgy, punky music and on the other hand sexually explicit lyrics, which, in the example ‘I Don’t Do Dirty Work, Sucka!’ express rage towards the patriarchal system and are clearly ironic in their direction, and can hardly be interpreted in more than one way. In conclusion, I would like to mention again that for subversive irony a cutting edge with a political message is essential but it bears the danger of being insulting or offensive, which is why subversive irony is difficult to find in mainstream popular music (for example Madonna). In subculture strong political meanings are transmitted more often and therefore easier to find in the queer-feminist works of the Riot Grrrls and Angie Reed, whereas Madonna uses a complicating and ambiguous irony (according to Hutcheon’s scale) and its interpretation can be unclear or imprecise so its empowering and political meaning may remain hidden and inaccessible. The insulting and offensive downside of the oppositional form of irony is too risky when targeting a mainstream audience. This is why the transgressive and subversive irony is mostly applied for subcultural audiences that are already familiar with the political content and know how to read the message.

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Track 02

Parody – Gender Trouble Historical Aspects, Definition, Recognition According to the Basislexikon Literaturwissenschaft (Basic Lexicon of Literature Studies) parody originates from the Greek. ‘Par-odé’, which roughly means ‘after or contra song’ is an intertextual device that can be described as ‘the adoption of a recognisable structure and constitutive criteria of an original that mocks and belittles that original (or a connected position, its reception etc)’.1 Margaret A. Rose looks closer at the Greek etymology of the word and explains that in ancient Greece the term ‘parados’ described an ‘imitating singer’ or ‘imitating singing’ in contrast to the concept of an ‘original singer’. The word ‘ridiculous’ was used to describe the basic meaning of parody as the singing of a song whose words had been distorted or changed.2 In the following quote M.A. Rose deals with the comic effect of parody: The dictum that the essence of humour has resided in raising an expectation for X and giving Y, or something else which is ‘not entirely X’, instead is also particularly well suited to describing the mechanism at work in parody when a text is quoted and the quotation then distorted or changed into something else; although here too a contrast will generally be made comic by a careful rather than by a haphazard selection of elements … In parody the comic incongruity created in the parody may contrast the original text with its new form or context by the comic means of contrasting the serious with the absurd.3

In the case of parody, in contrast to irony, it is a question of emulation. According to the Historisches Wörterbuch der Rhetorik (Historical Book of Rhetoric), parody as a device not only fulfils the requirements for imitation but also displays the ‘imitation’ and not, as in classical theory of impersonation, where the ‘imitation’ must be concealed.4 On the topic of parodistic art Hutcheon writes: ‘By this definition, then, parody is repetition, but repetition that includes difference  Translated from German. Uwe Spörl, Basislexikon Literaturwissenschaft (Paderborn, 2004), p. 155. 2   Margaret A. Rose, Parody: Ancient, Modern and Post-modern (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 7–9. 3   Ibid., p. 33. 4   Gert Ueding (ed.), Historisches Wörterbuch der Rhetorik, vol. 6 (Tübingen, 2003), p. 638. 1

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(Deleuze 1968); it is imitation with critical ironic distance, whose irony can cut both ways.’5 However, modern art forms demonstrate that the critical distance between the parody itself and the original text does not always lead to irony. Many parodies do not render the original text ridiculous, but rather use it as a standard according to which they examine the contemporary more closely.6 Parody that can be branded as respectful would be considered more of a homage than an attack, although the critical distance and a marked difference still exist. Differentiation Satire Having reached this point it becomes all the more important to differentiate parody from other genres or strategies such as satire. Although parody and satire treat their target in a similar way and make it into the butt of a joke, a big difference between them is that parody also uses the previously formed material of its target for the creation of its own structure. Furthermore, satire is not based on the imitation, distortion or citation of another literary text nor is it limited to original artistic material. When it does deal with such pre-formed material it is not dependent on it for its own characteristics, as parody is, rather it mocks its target from outside of itself.7 Burlesque, Persiflage, Pastiche Burlesque has a more recent origin than the Greek etymology of parody. Rose writes that it stems from the Italian ‘burla’, which roughly means ‘joke’ or ‘trick’. In literature burlesque represents a form of mocking poem.8 I explain the erotic form of burlesque in Track 04: Mask/Masquerade, with particular focus on the new burlesque as a politically-correct striptease. Persiflage describes a lightly satirical mocking of someone else’s work and, as in some uses of ‘burlesque’, can also refer to a comical or mocking mimicry. If it is used for something parodistic, the term ‘persiflage’ is more a description of attitudes of the parodists than the structure and technique of parody. If it is used to describe mimicry it has less to do with the comical citation or distortion of literary works than literary parody.9 5   Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-century Art Forms (NewYork and London, 1985), p. 37. 6   Ibid., p. 57. 7  Rose, Parody, p. 82. 8   Ibid., pp. 54–56. 9   Ibid., p. 68.

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Pastiche describes a neutral practice of summary that does not have to be critical or comical.10 In post-modern debates, there are many contributions and differences of opinion regarding the different descriptions of pastiche and parody.11 Like parody, pastiche is the imitation of a peculiar or unique style, the wearing of a stylistic mask, speaking in a dead language. However, it is a neutral practice of this kind of mimicry without the underlying thoughts of a parody, without the satirical impulse, without laughter, without the constant latent feeling that something normal exists in comparison to the imitation that gives a rather strange impression. Pastiche is an empty parody that has lost its sense of humour.12 This form of pastiche is criticised as relativistic and is put under the label of ‘neoconservative postmodernism’.13 Identifying Characteristics of Parody In order to be able to differentiate parody from the other existing forms Margaret A. Rose states that the following are identifying characteristics for parody: • Firstly, relating to changes regarding the coherence of the cited text: 1. Semantic changes: a. seemingly meaningless, absurd changes in the message, subject or material of the original b. changes in the message, subject or material of the material that are of a more meaningful, ironic or comical nature. 2. Changes to the wording and/or the literal and metaphoric functions of the words that were taken from the original. 3. Syntactic changes that can also have an effect on a semantic level. 4. Changes in tense, person or other grammatical changes in the sentence. 5. Juxtaposition of passages within the parodied works or with new passages. 6. Changes in the associations of the imitated text that are evoked by the new context or other contextual (also between the lines) changes. 7. Changes in the sociolect, idiolect or in other lexical elements. 8. Changes in the metre or rhyme in the parody or verse or other such elements in drama or works of prose.

10

  Ibid., p. 72.   Dick Hebdige, Hiding in the Light: On Images and Things (London and New York, 1988), p. 195. 12  Rose, Parody, p. 222. 13   Hal Foster, Recodings: Art, Spectacle, Cultural Politics (Washington, 1985), p. 123. 11

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• Secondly, regarding direct statement: 1. Comments on the parodied text, the author of the parody or about its readers. 2. Comments on or about the readers of the parody. 3. Comments about the author of the parody. 4. Comments about the parody as a whole text. • Thirdly, regarding effects on the readers: 1. Shock or surprise and humour, which are evoked by the conflict with the expectations of the parodied text. 2. Changes of mind of the readers of the parodied text. • Fourthly, with regard to the parodist’s ‘normal’ or expected style of subject or material: A change in the parodist’s style is a useful sign of the presence of parody as is the identification of incoherence within the parodied work or between it and the new context. This happens when the reader perceives a noticeable difference between the known style of the author of the parody and that, which the parodist uses to write the parody. Furthermore, a change in the expected subject or material can also be an indication of parody.14

Parody and Subversion Regarding the subversive aspect of parody Margaret A. Rose states that even if the perspective of the parodist or parodists seems to be anti-normative or distortive parody often serves to revive norms by recreating those norms in a new context, before they become the subject of a new critique or analysis.15 Viewed in this light, it is not a simple imitation, rather a distortion of the original. The method of parody is to ‘de-realise’ the norms that the original tries to ‘realise’, thus reducing the normative status of the original to a convention or mere artifice. Linda Hutcheon sees two different forms of parody: ‘Parody can be thought of as a specific technique and also as a mode of discourse. As a technique, parody involves the articulation of a critique by expressing a meaning different to the

 Rose, Parody, pp. 37–38.   Ibid., p. 82.

14 15

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stated or ostensible meaning through a repetition or doubling.’16 For Hutcheon, parody is a ‘repetition with a critical difference’.17 On the politics of parody Kleinhans writes that radical criticism differentiates between three forms of parody: firstly, the inherently apolitical; secondly the inherently critical; and thirdly as a simple form of contemporary art and cultural production. On the topic of the inherently apolitical type of parody, he explains that this parody first separates the form from the content and then evaluates the separation (an act of violence against an organic whole) then attributes the form more meaning than the content (formalism). It is a variant of aestheticism, a separation of the human values of the artistic experience, and sees art solely as a matter of inner form, which is separate from everyday life and from the viewer. It is bound to a relationship between subject and text that is invariably a training programme for alienation.18 The second, inherently progressive form, creates an open form that allows for a complex experience. The text becomes open (or free) and produces a freeing effect amongst the public (however, we should remember that freedom can only be taken and never given).19 But within this ambivalent possibility for interpretation neither decision is dropped, therefore, as Hutcheon correctly recognises, the ambivalent irony is not subversive enough. A third radical position is that parody represents an inherent aspect of contemporary art, as both today’s high culture and mass culture are heavily parodistic. Art is never coherent. It always gets a variety of answers from different people. Parody is resistant to advanced capitalism. Parody is a means of modifying things that people believed could not be changed. In this sense it is flexible. However, as soon as people feel that history is changing and that things around them can change, they use parody differently. It is employed profoundly and cuttingly against the past, against the status quo, against whatever is holding people back. In artistic and political expression it is merged with anger, although it is rather softer and more diffuse in everyday life. In art, parody serves to signal prosperity, diversity, possibility and hope for the future as a whole culture may be transformed though parody. Parody gives us the possibility to create new associations. Hutcheon cites this example: At is best this is how the 1960s counterculture was able to use parody. It is what is marked in Jimi Hendrix’s performance of ‘the Star-Spangled Banner’. That version of the national anthem took something totally identified with the dominant culture and magically transformed it into something that said to youth culture, ‘we have a right to this, too … we can take it over and transform it to our 16   Chuck Kleinhans, ‘Taking Out the Trash. Camp and the Politics of Parody’, in Moe Meyer (ed.), The Politics and Poetics of Camp (New York and London, 1994), p. 196. 17  Ibid. 18   Ibid., pp. 196–197. 19   Ibid., p. 197.

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own ends using our own unique tools and talents’. This kind of parody reveals a greater sense of the range of life and its possibilities, an awareness of the grotesque, of carnival, and of anger, sensuality, and sexuality.20

Dennis Denishoff is therefore of the opinion that parody is particularly suited to being used by oppressed groups or individuals to undermine normative ideals and negotiate their own position within society. Parody allows for such manoeuvring, not only through its structural dependence on the variety of interpretations, but also because it forces the public to think about the potential existence of other ontological possibilities that have yet to be articulated.21 Hutcheon uses Stockhausen as a second example of parody in music with regards to national anthems: when Stockhausen quotes but alters the melodies of many different national anthems in his Hymnen, parody becomes what one critic calls a productivecreative approach to tradition (Siegmund-Schultze 1977). In Stockhausen’s words, his intent was ‘to hear familiar, old, preformed musical material with new ears, to penetrate and transform it with a musical consciousness of today (cited in Grout 1980, 748).22

Hutcheon points out a central paradox in parody and states that the transgression is always already authorised. Imitation, even with a critical difference, is subject to the hegemonic system. In Foucauldian terms the transgression becomes a confirmation of the limits of being,23 as Foucault claims that the productive efficiency, strategic prosperity and positivity of power should be seen.24 Nancy Fraser also refers to Foucault’s view that modern power is more ‘productive’ than prohibitive and ‘capillary’. Thus, it is already at work at the lowest extremities of the social body of everyday social practices.25 She goes on to write that modern ‘power touches people’s lives more fundamentally through their social practices than through their beliefs’, namely through so-called ‘micropractices’ that constitute the social practices of everyday life.26 Nancy Fraser sees great potential for change in these everyday practices, if people became aware of the possibility to face up to their way of life and maybe 20

  Ibid., p. 199.   Dennis Denisoff, Aestheticism and Sexual Parody. 1840–1940 (Cambridge, 2001), pp. 3–4. 22  Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody, p. 7. 23   Ibid., p. 26. 24   Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, An Introduction (London, 1990), pp. 94–95. 25   Nancy Fraser, Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse, and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory (Minneapolis, 1989), p. 18. 26  Ibid. 21

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try to change it. David Halperin explains how these micropractices can be used to resist normativity and how this can lead to a shift towards a queer culture: Resistance to normativity is not purely negative or reactive or destructive, in other words; it is also positive and dynamic and creative. It is by resisting the discursive and institutional practices which, in their scattered and diffuse functioning, contribute to the operation of heteronormativity that queer identities can open a social space for the construction of different identities, for the elaboration of various types of relationships, for the development of new cultural forms.27

Halperin also argues through Foucault that it is not enough ‘to be homosexual’, rather the important task is to ‘become queer’, which is a non-essential identity without prescribed conditions, rather it is a horizon of possibility and selftransformation.28 To summarise once more, with regard to parody, it can be said that parody is fundamentally duplicate and split. Its ambivalence originates both through conservative and revolutionary powers that are inherent to its nature and the authorised transgression.29 In this sense, parody can be described as subversive. It undermines the dominant conservative forces that set the structure through the transgression and introduces revolutionary forces with the help of the critical difference. One also has to consider the authority and transgression that require the opacity of parody. Every parody is obviously hybrid and has at least two meanings.30 The queer element, that is intrinsic to parody, is characterised through its capacity for anti-essentialism. It dares to take the step towards the transformation of identities and this change serves as an example to others. In the following quote Denishoff mentions gender parody and explains that, with parody, the focus is not on the removal of the subject but on change: ‘This shift in focus reveals that parodists of aestheticism and the dandy-aesthetes did not, as is often assumed, try in some clumsy, hostile fashion to eradicate their subject. Rather, in many instances, they attempted to modify or revamp the subject while acknowledging its beneficial contributions to contemporary culture.’31 He goes on to write that the aim of the sexual parodist is not to modify preceding representations to bring them nearer to the fundamental truth, but rather to elicit a pleasure that arises through the questioning of the idea of an original gender.32

27   David M. Halperin, Saint Foucault. Towards a Gay Hagiography (New York and Oxford, 1995), p. 67. 28   Ibid., p. 79. 29  Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody, p. 26. 30   Ibid., p. 28. 31  Denisoff, Aestheticism and Sexual Parody, p. 3. 32   Ibid., p. 4.

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In Butler’s theorisation, gender and sexual identity are constructs communicated as texts written on and by the body through dress and performance. Parody is more appropriate here than satire as the analytical model precisely because its traditional association with the intramural realm of coded discourse, rather than social and moral concerns, emphasises the queer constructionist challenge to the assumption that gender, sexuality and identity exist exclusively within the extramural domain.33 However, he also warns that Butler’s formulation can lead to a blurring of the difference between conscious performances such as ‘drag’ and unconventional sexualities in general. As Jonathan Dollimore stresses, if Butler’s model is applied trans-historically, the pre-sexological, pre-psychoanalytical concept of sexuality as a private act risks being erased.34 Judith Butler’s Gender Parody Butler attaches the construction of gender identities to the body and explains, via Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, how laws are inscribed on the body. In his work, Foucault describes this strategy, which does not involve a repression of the desire of the prison inmates; rather it manipulates their bodies so they see the prohibitive law as their being, their style and their necessity. Thus, this law is not literally internalised but incorporated into the body; bodies develop that are marked and characterised by this law.35 Constructed Gender Identities Butler states that gender identity as disciplinary production can also be reformulated: The disciplinary production of gender effects a false stabilization of gender in the interests of the heterosexual construction and regulation of sexuality within the reproductive domain. The construction of coherence conceals the gender discontinuities that run rampant within heterosexual, bisexual and gay and lesbian contexts in which gender does not necessarily follow from sex, and desire, or sexuality generally, does not seem to follow from gender.36

On the topic of identification she writes:

33

 Ibid.  Ibid. 35   Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York and London, 2006), p. 183. 36   Ibid., pp. 184–185. 34

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The acts, gestures and desire produce the effect of an internal core or substance, but produce this on the surface of the body … Such acts, gestures enactments, generally construed, are performative, in the sense that the essence or identity that they otherwise purport to express are fabrications manufactured and sustained through the corporeal signs and other discursive means.37

Gender Parody Acts, gestures and desires create the illusion of an identity that serves the reproductive, heterosexual system. Through the example of drag – Butler refers to Esther Newton’s article on Female Impersonators – this illusion and the production of gender identities is revealed. Playing with gender parody does not mean that an original is being imitated, it reveals much more; that the ‘original’ gender identities are themselves only imitations of a non-existent original.38 Butler emphasises that parody is not subversive as such, rather that it is through repetition that it can disrupt cultural hegemony.39 She uses the term strategy to point out the coercive structure of the performance of gender identities. Those that perform their gender identity ‘wrong’ are regularly punished. The act of gender identity is bound to the repeated enactment and gender identity is fixed via stylised repeated acts. This performance has the strategic aim of keeping gender identity within a binary frame.40 In her book Bodies that Matter Butler clears up any misunderstandings and emphasises that there does not necessarily have to be a connection between ‘drag’ and subversion. She states that ‘drag’ can serve to denaturalise as well as idealise hyperbolic heterosexual gender norms.41 If every gender is ‘drag’ this means that the imitation lies at the heart of the heterosexual project and its binary genders. ‘Drag’ is therefore not a second imitation that requires an existing, original gender. Rather, hegemonic heterosexuality itself constantly and repetitively tries to imitate its own idealisations; so much so that it has to repeat its imitations and that it even puts pathologising practices and normalising sciences into place to produce and construct its claims on originality. A certain fear remains that its own idealisation of heterosexual performativity can never be completely and finally achieved.42 However, Butler makes clear that there are nevertheless areas in which heterosexuality recognises its lack of originality and naturalness but still keeps its power. Butler cites the example of Venus Xtravaganza from the film Paris is Burning, a pre-operative transsexual 37

  Ibid., p. 185.   Ibid., p. 188. 39   Ibid., p. 189. 40   Ibid., p. 191. 41   Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ (New York and London, 1993), p. 125. 42  Ibid. 38

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of Latin origin who is murdered as a result of homophobic/transphobic violence whereas another (White) performer can pass as straight and whose ‘vogueing’ appears in Madonna’s heterosexual video productions. Light entertainment films such as Some Like it Hot are an example of non-subversive uses of drag, as, according to Butler, that homosexuality is hidden and mocked only strengthens the heterosexual regime.43 Critique of Butler’s Gender Parody Sabine Hark cites critiques of Butler’s notion that parody exposes the original, authentic or real as fallacy and thereby can be seen as a practice, which exposes every supposed characteristic of a gender identity and whose ‘effects include the proliferation of gender configurations, the destabilisation of substantive identities and naturalised obligatory heterosexuality’.44 Butler’s approach was heavily criticised, because material gendered relationships are supposedly negated and the basis of feminist politics is lost. According to Hark, two discourses come into conflict, ‘feminist conceptualisations of gender on one hand and theorisations of parody as politics on the other’. One problem with the second discourse is that until Butler’s works were brought out in the German-speaking world, the discussion of aesthetic practices as political practices had hardly been attempted. In the English-speaking world Butler’s thoughts preceded Cultural Studies and the analyses of camp culture. A border is no longer drawn between ‘pre-political (sub-) culture and organised politics’ as Kennedy and Davis demonstrate via the ‘traces and effects of the political actions in the style of lesbian women’.45 Though they: make recourse to the hierarchically organised difference between masculine and feminine, however they do not use this repertoire to conform to dominant gender roles, rather to make lesbian desire and lives and autonomous female living visible. In a time in which American politics and society, under the rule of Senator McCarthy, was hounding anyone who was ‘unamerican’ i.e. communists, and lesbians and gays, this was a real act of rebellion against normative stereotypes of femininity and masculinity and restorative gender relations.46

43

  Ibid., pp. 126–130.   Translated from German. Sabine Hark, ‘Parodistischer Ernst und politisches Spiel’, in A. Hornscheidt, G. Jähnert and A. Schlichter (eds), Kritische Differenzen – geteilte Perspektiven. Zum Verhältnis von Feminismus und Postmoderne (Opladen and Wiesbaden, 1998), p. 116. 45   Ibid., p. 118. 46   Ibid., pp. 118–119. 44

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For Hark these subcultural style categories do have an anti-normalising aspect and are therefore politically relevant. A separation of culture and politics is not appropriate.47 Cultural Studies theorist Dick Hebdige also ascribes political importance to subculture: ‘style in subculture is … pregnant with significance. Its transformation goes “against nature”, interrupting the process of “normalization”. As such, they are gestures, movements towards a speech which offends the “silent majority”, which challenges the principle of unity and cohesion, which contradicts the myth of consensus.’48 On the topic of the critique that the basis of feminist politics, based on the feminist categorisations of gender, is lost through Butler’s gender parody (dissolution of gender categories), Hark is of the opinion that political identities are never fixed and final as new antagonisms always arise.49 Hark therefore does not agree with the critique and claims that fixed identities or gender categories are not necessary for politics. However, she warns not to equate subversion with the destabilising of categories.50 Thus, Butler also recognises that her example of drag does not always have to be subversive. Using Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s ‘articulatory practice’51 Hark explains further why an identity does not always have to be determined and absolute: every practice ‘that establishes a relationship between elements so that its identity is modified as a result of articulatory practice’52 is a practice of articulation. For strategies of identity politics, the term hegemony comes into play as a battle of and about discourse: to determine the common sense or doxa of a society. Hegemony describes the process in which cultural authority is negotiated and called into question. This means that hegemony is constantly reconstituted, renewed, defended and modified. No form of hegemony can exhaustively and permanently stipulate the meanings and values of a society. (original emphasis)53

Laclau and Mouffe write that the effects of hegemony always arise from an excess of meaning that is formed by the shift – hegemony is therefore metonymic,54

47

  Ibid., p. 119.   Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (New York, 1979), p. 18. 49   Sabine Hark, Deviante Subjekte: die paradoxe Politik der Identität (Opladen, 1999), p. 19. 50   Ibid., p. 20. 51   Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London, 1985), p. 134. 52  Hark, Deviante Subjekte, p. 24. 53   Ibid., p. 25. 54   Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, p. 193. 48

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which is interesting for the identity politics movement.55 In the sense of Bourdieu the political field can be understood as a stage of the fight for power. Here, the identities are the inputs as well as the effects of a symbolic fight. Identity becomes a means of staging politics.56 Teresa de Lauretis analysed that identity politics are based on a mimetic theory of representation as the equivalent of the ‘real’. Collective identities are created by invoking a prior ‘real’.57 With regard to this topic, another component comes into consideration. Foucault writes: ‘It is a form of power which makes individuals subjects. There are two meanings of the word subject: subject to someone else by control and dependence, and tied to his own identity by a conscience or self-knowledge. Both meanings suggest a form of power which subjugates and makes subject to [sic]’ (original emphasis).58 According to Laclau and Mouffe, it is not enough to replace the idea of a homogenous, unified subject with the idea of multiplicity and fragmentation. The problematic of the ‘essentiality’ remains.59 Hark calls for a dialectic of non-fixity that cannot be seen as a dialectic of the separation of different fragments, ‘rather as one of subversion and over-determination’ (original emphasis).60 She goes back to the psychoanalytical assumption ‘that the subject doesn’t “own” a real identity rather the subject is a lack, and tries to hide this through, amongst others, permanent acts of identification. Thus, the identity that a subject “has”, has always been constructed solely through acts of identification, that do not refer back to an inner core of the individual’ (original emphasis).61 Hark cites Jacques Lacan’s theory of identification as a transformatory process in which identity is understood as the effect of identifying with something that lies outside of the individual and the taking on of the ‘I’ as a reflection of oneself. The identity belongs in the imaginary world (reflections, identification). The individual tries to eliminate the otherness of others by assimilating the others’ otherness.62 There is a constant battle between the imaginary world that tries to keep identity stable and the symbolic world that continuously subverts identity. On a political level this means that ‘additional new acts of political intervention and identification become necessary’.63

 Hark, Deviante Subjekte, p. 25.   Ibid., p. 53. Pierre Bourdieu, ‘Identity and Representation: Elements for a Critical Reflection on the Idea of Region’, in Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 220–228. 57  Hark, Deviante Subjekte, p. 55. 58   Michel Foucault, ‘Afterword’, in Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow (eds), Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermetics (Chicago, 1994), p. 212. 59   Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, pp. 121 and 181. 60  Hark, Deviante Subjekte, p. 60. 61  Ibid. 62   Ibid., pp. 61–62. 63   Translated from German. Ibid., p. 63. 55

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Thus, identities are ‘empty signs’ that can have a variety of phantasmical occupiers and are therefore adopted and articulated in many different ways. Laclau and Mouffe cited the ‘free floating character of political signifiers’. There is no essential connection between signified and signifier. Signifiers can therefore latch on to a variety of political discourses. On the other hand this also implies a ‘radical indeterminacy of democracy’, as Claude Lefort interprets, as someone can never permanently set the name or denotation.64 Many theorists attach the problematic of the subversion of fixed identities to the difference between ‘performance’ and ‘performativity’ in the works of Judith Butler. (I will deal with the linguistic term ‘performativity’ in more detail later on.) In her chapter ‘Critically Queer’ Butler writes that performance is a ‘bounded act’, that is, a theatrical portrayal of gender norms and that performativity consists of the repetition of norms, that do not depend on one’s own will or choice, through which identity is constituted. Butler makes it clear that to reduce the term performativity to performance is a mistake.65 When referring to the characteristic of performance as personal choice and performativity as a discursive process,66 one often differentiates between ‘voluntarism’ and ‘anti-voluntarism’. The subversive possibility lies in the ‘resignification’, although this is not always under the control of the producer.67 The effects of performativity are therefore much less predictable than the effects of parody. Thus, in the case of gender parody, it is much more complex to determine whether a particular form is subversive or not as the production of meaning no longer lies with the author.68 Butler cites some examples where performative acts, according to her interpretation, are also successful. Performativity will be dealt with in more detail in the section on subversive speech acts. In Bodies that Matter she cites further critique of her gender parody, namely that radical feminism argues that ‘drag’ is merely a substitute for and appropriation of ‘women’ and is therefore misogynous. According to this argument then, lesbianism is nothing other than a substitute for and appropriation of men.69 Sabine Hark looks into this discourse and ascertains that for a long time the gay ‘queen’ culture was seen as sexist in lesbian cultures as it pointed to a misogynous imitation of heterosexual femininity. ‘Fem’70 and ‘butch’ were also taboo. The parodistic playing with genders has come back into fashion and has been experiencing

64

  Ibid., p. 66.  Butler, Bodies That Matter, p. 234. Frederick Roden, ‘Becoming Butlerian: On the Discursive Limits (and Potentials) of Gender Trouble at Ten Years of Age’, International Journal of Sexuality and Gender Studies, 6/1–2 (2001): p. 27. 66   Nikki Sullivan, A Critical Introduction to Queer Theory (Edinburgh, 2003), p. 89. 67  Butler, Bodies That Matter, p. 241. 68   Nikki Sullivan’s example of the ‘Barbie slasher’ in A Critical Introduction, p. 92. 69  Butler, Bodies That Matter, p. 127. 70   ‘Fem’ can also be written as ‘femme’. I use the version that Hark uses. 65

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a cultural, political and theoretical revival, for example through ‘drag king’ workshops.71 Halberstam gives us a definition of ‘drag king’: A drag king is a female (usually) who dresses up in recognizably male costume and performs theatrically in that costume. Historically and categorically, we can make distinctions between the drag king and the male impersonator. Male impersonation has been a theatrical genre for at least two hundred years, but the drag king is a recent phenomenon. Whereas the male impersonator attempts to produce a plausible performance of maleness as the whole of her act, the drag king performs masculinity (often parodically) and makes the exposure of the theatricality of masculinity into the mainstay of her act. Both the male impersonator and the drag king are different from the drag butch, a masculine woman who wears male attire as part of her quotidian gender expression. Furthermore, whereas the male impersonator and the drag king are not necessarily lesbian roles, the drag butch most definitely is. In the 1990s, drag king culture has become something of a subcultural phenomenon.72

A ‘butch’ can use various embodiment techniques to adopt masculinity: firstly, the physio-technical to alter the biological body, for example through fitness training, taking hormones or with the help of plastic surgery: secondly, through territorialising practices, which mainly deal with the surface of the body (piercings, tattoos, ties, signet rings, studded wristbands, baggy trousers, hoodies, baseball caps): thirdly, transgressive practices that deal with the articulation of the body, that is, how the body functions in space. These practices include typical movements, motor skills and speaking with a clear, loud voice. Wide, sweeping gestures and a firm and penetrating gaze also belong in this group of practices. Fourthly, social practices, that is, everyday societal roles: who does the dishes, who repairs the window, and who has the questioning and who has the clarifying part in a conversation?73 As an example of a critique of the ‘fem/butch’ aesthetic, Hark repeats the opinion of Carole-Anne Tyler (1991),74 namely that ‘butch/fem’ are parodistic resignifications of heterosexual norms that strengthen the assumption that heterosexuality is the ‘authentic’ or ‘natural’.75 By contrast, in the lesbian ‘butch/ fem’ representation, Hark sees the 71

  Hark, ‘Parodistischer Ernst und politisches Spiel’, p. 121.   Judith Halberstam, Female Masculinity (Durham, NC, 2004), p. 232. 73   Steffen Kitty Herrmann, ‘Bühne und Alltag. Über zwei Existenzweisen des Drags’, in P. Thilmann, T. Witte and B. Rewald (eds), Drag Kings. Mit Bartkleber gegen das Patriarchat (Berlin, 2007), pp. 115–132. 74   Carole-Anne Tyler, ‘Boys Will Be Girls: The Politics of Gay Drag’, in Diana Fuss (ed.), Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories (London and New York, 1991), pp. 32–70. 75   Translated from German. Sabine Hark, ‘Parodistischer Ernst und politisches Spiel’, p. 127. 72

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attempt to use the ‘language of gender’, that is, with and through hegemonic gender representations to make an other, lesbian desire visible and to organise the social and erotic ‘inner life’ of lesbian communities. The lesbian adoption of the iconography of ‘butch/fem’ therefore does not have a cross-dressing content; it is not about wearing the gender of the other sex and hide the ‘female’ lesbian behind the mask of the masculine or feminine gender and pretend to be the opposite. (original emphasis)76

She emphasises that ‘butch/fem’ practice is about the generating lesbian visibility and not pretending to be the other gender or ‘imitating the heterosexual original, rather to expose the ideologically founded coherence between sex, gender, desire and identity through allegories, and thereby first and foremost to make spaces for lesbian difference’.77 Hark makes clear that it is not about a ‘substitute vision of heterosexual romances’ rather it is about the ‘sexual de-authorisation of gender’.78 As an example Hark cites the performance of a lesbian singer as a man: Phranc as Neil Diamond. Phranc’s parody operated in the cultural poltical space between the genders, which is often rendered unliveable but nevertheless exists. In the work of Teresa de Lauretis (1987) [79] this can be understood as space-off, that is, the spaces that are left out or actively silenced by hegemonic representations of gender and sexuality. (original emphasis)80

She declared that the aim of this performance was not to confuse the public and thereby uphold the heterosexual economy, but rather a complication of what it means to ‘be a man’ and also what it means to ‘be a lesbian’.81 ‘Indeed, it was less relevant for the success of the performance that the public were aware of the anatomical sex “behind” the mask, what was much more decisive was the complex economy of desire that was brought into play and movement between Phranc and the public’.82 Sabine Hark is committed to not continue with hegemonic accounts of naturalised binary gender, on the contrary, she wants to tell stories of other genders for a change: ‘stories in which gender would not be irrelevant, but would always appear in new and unexpected presentations’.83 76

  Ibid., p. 128.   Ibid., p. 129. 78  Ibid. 79   Teresa de Lauretis, Technologies of Gender (Bloomington, 1987). 80   Translated from German. Sabine Hark, ‘Parodistischer Ernst und politisches Spiel’, p. 133. 81   Ibid., p. 134. 82  Ibid. 83   Ibid., p. 136. 77

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In the book Female Masculinity Halberstam analyses debates on masculinity in women within queer communities, for example ‘butch’, and also talks about FTMs (Female to Male transsexuals): Female masculinity is a particularly fruitful site of investigation because it has been vilified by heterosexist and feminist/womanist programs alike; unlike male femininity, which fulfills a kind of ritual function in male homosocial cultures, female masculinity is generally received by hetero- and homo-normative cultures as a pathological sign of misidentification and maladjustment, as a longing to be and to have a power that is always just out of reach. Within a lesbian context, female masculinity has been situated as the place where patriarchy goes to work on the female psyche and reproduces misogyny within femaleness.84

Sometimes, female masculinity coincides with the self-indulgence of male supremacy, sometimes with a form of social rebellion. According to Halberstam masculinity in women can also be a sign of sexual otherness, but can also denote a heterosexual variation. The unconventional behavioural role and appearance of a woman can be seen as a pathological, as well as a healthy, alternative to the theatrical affectation of traditional femininity.85 Of course, Halberstam argues against this pathologising of ‘gender dysphoria’86 and describes a particular type of lesbian masculinity in more detail, the ‘stone butch’: within certain brands of lesbian masculinity, the effects of gender dysphoria produce new and fully functional masculinities, masculinities, moreover, that thrive on the disjuncture between femaleness and masculinity. By detaching the lesbian role of stone butch from dysfunctional sexuality, we establish a zone of gendering in which sexual practices and sexual identities may emerge from and within unstable gendering.87

Referring to Butler’s performance theory, Halberstam writes that the ‘stone butch’, who is a ‘butch who does not let her partner touch her sexually’,88 defies this because her performance is a non-performance. Butler, herself, wrote about the ‘stone butch’ when she discussed the logic of inversion:

 Halberstam, Female Masculinity, p. 9.  Ibid. 86   Why not use euphoria instead of dysphoria? 87  Halberstam, Female Masculinity, p. 119. 88   Gayle Rubin, ‘Of Catamites and Kings: Reflections on Butch, Gender, and Boundaries’, in Joan Nestle (ed.), Persistent Desire: A Femme-Butch Reader (Boston, 1992), p. 467. Cited in Halberstam, Female Masculinity, p. 120. 84

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The logic of inversion gets played out interestingly in versions of lesbian butch and femme gender stylization. For a butch can present herself as capable, forceful, and all-providing, and a stone butch may well seek to constitute her lover as the exclusive site of erotic attention and pleasure. And yet, this ‘providing’ butch who seems at first to replicate a certain husband-like role, can find herself caught in the logic of inversion whereby that ‘providingness’ turns into a self-sacrifice, which implicates her in the most ancient trap of feminine self-abnegation. She may well find herself in a situation of radical need, which is precisely what she sought to locate and find and fulfil in her femme lover.89

Halberstam does not agree with Butler’s view that the ‘stone butch’ takes on the female role because she neglects her own need, as Butler does not differentiate between ‘feminine self-abnegation’ and ‘butch self-abnegation’. Halberstam does not see any similarity to the self-sacrifice of a woman for a man. Butler looks more closely at the critique of her gender performance theory in the ambivalence of ‘drag’ in Paris is Burning: ‘drag’ is both compliance and subversion. It subverts and complies with racist, misogynous and homophobic norms of oppression. She analyses successful ‘drag king’ performances, that is, those that could affect authenticity so well, that they could not be discovered. The artificial aspect of the performance could not be perceived as artificial: On the contrary, when what appears and how it is ‘read’ diverge, the artifice of the performance can be read as artifice; the ideal splits off from its appropriation. But the impossibility of reading means that the artifice works, the approximation of realness appears to be achieved, the body performing and the ideal performed appear indistinguishable.90

Diane Torr gives us the instructions as to how a drag king performance works. She was already holding the first drag king workshops in New York in the early 1990s.91 In the ‘drag’ performances we are witness to a subject that imitates and repeats the legitimising norms that devalue it. Butler looks at the question of imitation and repetition of the hegemonic system in more detail and draws on Gramsci in order to explicate how hegemony works: these hegemonies operate, as Gramsci insisted, through rearticulation, but here is where the accumulated force of a historically entrenched and entrenching   Judith Butler, ‘Imitation and Gender Insubordination’, in Fuss, Inside/Out, p. 25. Cited in Halberstam, Female Masculinity, pp. 126–127. 90  Butler, Bodies That Matter, p. 129. 91   Diane Torr, ‘Geschlecht als Performance. Eine Anleitung zum Drag-KingCrossdressing’, in Anette Baldauf and Katharina Weingartner (eds), Lips.Tits.Hits. Power? Popkultur und Feminismus (Vienna, 1998), pp. 209–213. 89

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rearticulation overwhelms the more fragile effort to build an alternative cultural configuration from or against that more powerful regime. Importantly, however, that prior hegemony also works through and as its ‘resistance’ so that the relation between the marginalized community and the dominative is not, strictly speaking, oppositional. The citing of the dominant norm does not, in this instance, displace that norm; rather, it becomes the means by which that dominant norm is most painfully reiterated as the very desire and the performance of those it subjects.92

On the subject of the film Paris is Burning, Butler does come to a more positive and optimistic conclusion concerning the possibility of a change in dominant cultures.93 In conclusion, she expresses her discontent regarding the subversive possibilities of ‘drag’ but stresses that in other processes, such as in the reclamation of the term ‘queer’, it is very possible to put up a resistance.94 Subversive Speech Acts Using Austin’s speech act theory, Butler explains in Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative the reasons why a word can possess such a capacity for resistance. Austin dealt with performative utterance and found out that ‘A. they do not “describe” or “report” or constate anything at all, are not “true or false”; and B. the uttering of a sentence is, or is a part of, the doing of an action, which again would not normally be described as, or as “just”, saying something’ (original emphasis).95 He quotes four examples of this: ‘I do (sc. Take this woman to be my lawful wedded wife)’ – as uttered in the course of the marriage ceremony … ‘I name this ship the Queen Elisabeth’ – as uttered when smashing the bottle against the stem … ‘I give and bequeath my watch to my brother’ – as occurring in a will … ‘I bet you sixpence it will rain tomorrow’.96

Austin differentiates between three different forms of speech act; the locutionary, the illocutionary and the perlocutionary: We first distinguished a group of things we do in saying something, which together we summed up by saying we perform a locutionary act, which is roughly equivalent to uttering a certain sentence with a certain sense and reference, which again is roughly equivalent to ‘meaning’ in the traditional sense. Second, we said that we also perform illocutionary acts such as informing, ordering,  Butler, Bodies That Matter, pp. 132–133.   Ibid., p. 137. 94   Ibid., p. 231. 95   J.L. Austin, How To Do Things With Words (Oxford, 1978), p. 5. 96  Ibid. 92 93

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warning, undertaking, &c., i.e. utterances which have a certain (conventional) force. Thirdly, we may also perform perlocutionary acts: what we bring about or achieve by saying something, such as convincing, persuading, deterring, and even, say, surprising or misleading. (original emphasis)97

According to Butler, what is missing, however, is that the power if the speech act is closely linked to the status of speech as a bodily act. The social life of the body is produced through an interpellation that is both linguistic and productive. These interpellations are social performative utterances that have become ritualised and sedimented with time. The body is not just a sedimentation of speech acts that have constituted it. No speech act can fully control the rhetorical effects of the speaking body.98 Performative utterances not only reflect prior social conditions, rather they also have social effects. The sedimented practice gives the body cultural meaning without determining it. Thus, the body can unsettle the cultural meaning at that moment by disowning the discursive means by which it was constituted.99 The word that wounds can become an instrument of resistance. ‘Insurrectionary speech becomes the necessary response to injurious language, a risk taken in response to being put at risk, a repetition in language that forces change.’100 Derrida also works with performative utterances and their repetition, which he terms iteration. In his view, performative utterances succeed ‘only because they “cite” and not because actors intentionally want to produce something new that did not exist before’.101 Reality is produced by repetition, for example in the ‘I do’ of a marriage ceremony. In hegemonic political discourse, the given structure is prolonged through repetition, or in a Foucauldian sense, these performative utterances are not producing any new discourse, rather they are complying with existing rules and are instating these rules through their compliance.102 Iterability is a repetition with a ‘différance’ (‘a deferred, delayed, deviant, deferring force or violence that causes a difference’103) in the repetition. The difference in the repetition is the new aspect that Derrida contributes to Austin’s speech act theory. Through the repetition alone, the repetition becomes something else. Derrida sees in this a possibility for deconstruction, namely in the attempt to bring a textual difference to light, which is already at work in the text.

 97

  Ibid., p. 109.   Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (New York and London, 1997), pp. 153–155.  99   Ibid., p. 158. 100   Ibid., p. 163. 101   Translated from German. Sabine Hark, Deviante Subjekte, p. 149. 102   Bernd Liepold-Mosser, Performanz und Unterbrechung. Prolegomena zu einer Philosophie des Politischen (Vienna, 1995), p. 96. 103   Translated from German. Jacques Derrida, Gesetzeskraft. Der ‘mystische’ Grund der Autorität (Frankfurt am Main, 1991), p. 15.  98

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Sabine Hark also wants to use the term iterability in the theory of power so that she can ‘do justice to the task of breaking down the fossilised chunks of identity’. She wants to use iterability as a tool to understand political identities as performative figures and to build something new. Consequently, it is understandable why identities are so powerful in the political field and how one can come into contact with identity that makes reference to this power.104 Therefore, a high amount of subversive potential lies in performative speech acts. Judith Butler considers the reclamation of the word ‘queer’ by the lesbian and gay movement to be a successful example of how a once hurtful word that was used as an insult took on a positive and proud meaning through constant repetition. In this case, the subversion was successful. To summarise, I want to re-emphasise three important aspects of a subversive parody: • Firstly, to repeat the ‘cutting edge’ of irony, as elements of irony (two levels of meaning) are also to be found in parody; the meaning with the political sharpness has to be clearly recognisable, so in the case of parody, a repetition with a critical difference. • Secondly, as Judith Butler analyses in her gender parody, there has to be no original behind the copy so that an inner core is produced on the surface of the body through acts, gestures and desire. • Thirdly, the subversive speech act: subversive speech acts were successful with the word ‘queer’, which was cited as an example by Judith Butler. Music Example: Peaches The most appropriate example for gender parody in rock and pop music is the singer Peaches, who in many ways and on many levels manages to imitate male musicians. In her first album, The Teaches of Peaches, she parodies the male rock scene and insults the ‘Rock show’ as a ‘Cock show’.105 In songs such as ‘Lovertits’, ‘Fuck the Pain Away’ and ‘Set it Off’ she imitates the macho demeanour of her male colleagues, both in the lyrics and in the wild, edgy rhythms on her beatbox that are influenced by her punk energy. She produces a parody of the tough music of the bad boys. In the song ‘Kick It’ from her second album, Fatherfucker, she duels with Iggy Pop about which of them is tougher – not completely without self-irony.106 Peaches relates that she met Iggy Pop in the back-stage area of a concert where she used penises and body hair to bring posters of scantily clad girls in bikinis up to date with the current gender   Translated from German. Sabine Hark, Deviante Subjekte, p. 150.   Peaches, ‘Rock Show’ on The Teaches of Peaches (Kitty-Yo, 2000). 106   Peaches, ‘Kick It’ on Fatherfucker (Kitty-Yo, 2003). 104 105

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discourse. Allegedly, Peaches was then supposed to sing with Iggy Pop’s band but his guitarist refused to work with her after he discovered her ‘Crotch Gallery’ on her website and insulted her, saying that no chick with hair is ever going to play with the Stooges. Consequently, in a duet with Iggy Pop she sings ‘some people don’t like my crotch’ and Iggy Pop answers ‘cos it’s got fuzzy spots’.107 Peaches also wanted to show some body hair in her second music video, ‘Set it Off’,108 after she had signed her European contract with Sony. It was a bigbudget video, ‘in which she sat in a locker room as her pubic and armpit hair grew to Rapunzel proportions. Apparently, Sony couldn’t appreciate a powerful, hirsute sister, and Peaches was dropped’.109 This video finally got replaced with a less subversive version. On this subject Peaches says: ‘that is the fascinating thing about hair; as soon as I let it grow here (points to between her legs at to her armpits), instead of on my head, that is seen as shocking. I’m not saying women should not shave, but I would like us to have the choice.’110 The first song on her second album, Fatherfucker, is a cover of an old Joan Jett hit ‘Bad Reputation’ (‘I don’t give a damn ‘bout my bad reputation’); maybe Peaches’ second album is a tribute to Joan Jett, because she was and still is a role model for many female bands. In an interview, Joan Jett admits that at the beginning with The Runaways she only stuck the whole thing out because she did not want female musicians to be seen as freaks anymore.111 She describes how The Runaways were treated in 1976: People thought we were crazy, they treated us like lunatics, they could not understand why we wanted to play guitar and be in a rock band. The believed it was all just a game, put-on and fake. When we got angry and insisted that we meant it seriously, they felt threatened and called us whores and sluts. Then we got really furious and swore back at them … Our music was not played on the radio, we hardly got any press, they did not want to give these weird teenagers any chance; there was no fairness for us.112

As Simon Reynolds and Joy Press write, Joan Jett’s band imitates the hard rock attitude of the male bands of her time and portrayed the hardness, independence and lack of respect of the masculine rebellion. These women were successful 107

  Florian Sievers, ‘Lass uns (nicht) über Sex sprechen’, interview with Peaches in Spex. Das Magazin für Popkultur, 9 (2003): p. 54. 108   Available at: www.youtube.com/watch?v=5KUBOtWzkyk&feature=related, retrieved 19.08.2011. From Peaches, Teaches of Peaches (Kitty-Yo, 2000). 109   William V. Meter, ‘Peaches: She is a Very Kinky Girl’, 23 June 2003, available at: www.spin.com/articles/peaches-shes-very-kinky-girl, retrieved 19.08.2011. 110   Sievers, ‘Lass uns (nicht) über Sex sprechen’, p. 54. 111  Film The Runaways (2010) by Floria Sigismondi. 112   Translated from German. ‘We Got Spit On Quite a Bit. Interview mit Joan Jett’, in Baldauf and Weingartner, Lips.Tits.Hits.Power?, p. 258.

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because they suppressed their feminine tendencies. This tomboy approach is, however, somewhat unsatisfactory as it emulates the masculine rebellion, including its misogynous components.113 Men did not even tolerate that; Joan Jett talks about a concert in Italy where they were even spat on, on stage, because they were women.114 Joan Jett was a ‘macha’ and played the rebellious ‘bad girl’ role. Her biggest hit was ‘I Love Rock’n’Roll’ – the eighth song on Peaches’ album is also called ‘Rock’n’Roll’. These title words are used as lyrics in the song and repeated over the wild, bawling and powerful rhythm. The cover of the album Fatherfucker shows a portrait photo of Peaches in ‘drag’ with a full, black beard and black false eyelashes. A small curl of her black hair can still be seen, as can the black straps of a piece of feminine clothing. The portrayed masculinity loses some of its believability because of the full and very shiny beard and especially because of the feminine attributes (eyelashes, curl, straps), which could very well have been Peaches’ aim. She does not take the drag king performance seriously; it does not seem to be her intention to look like a real man, rather she wants to be a being that is between genders. This is evident from the following incident; in answer to the criticism, which accuses her of having penis envy, she said that she prefers the term ‘hermaphrodite’ envy (the politically correct term would be intersex), as there is so much masculinity and femininity in all of us.115 The CD cover design is very much a critique of the male rock scene. The lettering ‘Peaches’ is in the style of the 1980s heavy metal or hard rock design. The image that is printed on the CD itself mimics the often sexist graphics of her male colleagues and shows an explicit picture of the female genitalia with a microphone. Maybe this is an allusion to the way women have long been used in the rock music scene, or a suggestion that women have finally entered the ‘male’ domain of music in their own self-confident way? This explicit portrayal of a vagina, even if it is in a jazzed up, rock version, reminds us of the feminist artists of the 1970s in California, who grabbed attention with their ‘cunt art’.116 Even then, they were already using Butler’s idea of the linguistic performative of the reclamation of insults.117 The feminist performative politics at the end of the 1960s in California, which stemmed from radical activist groups and guerrilla theatre, was, in contrast to the established image of American feminism, politically 113   Simon Reynolds and Joy Press, The Sex Revolts: Gender, Rebellion and Rock’n’Roll (London, 1995), p. 233. 114   ‘We Got Spit On Quite a Bit. Interview mit Joan Jett’, in Baldauf and Weingartner, Lips.Tits.Hits.Power?, p. 258. 115   Peaches’ biography, available at: www.guardian.co.uk/music/peaches?tagpage=2, retrieved 21.08.2011. 116   Faith Wilding, ‘The Feminist Art Programs at Fresno and Calarts, 1970–75’, in Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrad (eds), The Power of Feminist Art: The American Movement of the 1970s, History and Impact (New York, 1994), p. 35. 117   Beatriz Preciado, ‘Género y performance. 3 episodios de un cybermanga feminista queer trans …’, Zehar, La repolitización del espacio sexual (2004): p. 8.

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incorrect. They used the resources available to marginal groups in an exaggerated way.118 Peaches is sometimes accused of using sexist, soft pornographic (words, images, stage performances) material that is too explicit; actually, men received their fair share. The title of the CD Fatherfucker criticises the swearword that is often used in hip-hop. Peaches makes its misogynous components visible. She turns the male version on its head and parodies the word itself with ‘fatherfucker’. In an interview Peaches comments: ‘Motherfucker’s [sic] so over. You call everybody a motherfucker – you call your mother a motherfucker. It’s a pretty extreme and intense word. Instead of shying away from that, I thought I’d bring the fact that we’re using the word motherfucker in a really mainstream way to the fore.’119 In a Butlerian sense, this is a successful linguistic performative subversion of patriarchal, dominant, heteronormative and binary gendered relations in the form of parody. If one considers Margaret A. Rose’s recognition criteria for parody, according to the first point, Peaches implemented a change in the coherence of the cited text and, according to point I.2, changed the wording. Peaches creates a moment of surprise through the gender change of the first part of the word; she imitates the original word and through the distortion manages to draw attention to the actual meaning of the swearword, which not many people are aware of, with such a overused word like ‘motherfucker’. The subversion lies therein; the receiver begins to think about the meaning of the word, whether ‘fatherfucker’ actually makes sense, does it even work? Can a woman do that too? The repetition of the changed swearword introduces a difference or an ironic distance, which ultimately subverts the meaning and actually opposes the initial intention of the word. Thus, the two different translations of the Greek etymology of the word parody as an ‘after (in the sense of “close to”) and contra singing’ are both present in Peaches’ example. One recognises the parody in the word ‘fatherfucker’ immediately and it cannot be missed so there is no risk of ambivalence and a non-subversive interpretation. The ‘cutting edge’ is present and with it the political sharpness. The following example is similar in this respect: With the changing of genders Peaches wants to achieve a balance; this is why she parodies the ‘shake your tits’ that drunken boys often shout at concerts with ‘shake your dicks’. Peaches does not do this to give them a taste of their own medicine, she just wants both genders to be equally celebrated and valued. The question raised here is: ‘will you cope with this celebration if it is really completely open and equal?’120 This is why the song ‘Shake Yer Dix’ finishes with: ‘Are the motherfuckers ready for the fatherfuckers?’121

118

  Ibid., p. 7.   Kitty Empire, ‘Ripe for Stardom’, interview with Peaches, 2003, available at: www.guardian.co.uk/theobserver/2003/aug/17/features.review17, retrieved 21.08.2011. 120   Sievers, ‘Lass uns (nicht) über Sex sprechen’, p. 53. 121   Peaches, ‘Shake Yer Dix’ on Fatherfucker (Kitty-Yo, 2003). 119

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Peaches goes into a lot of detail and attacks heterosexual clichés. For example, in the song ‘Back it Up Boys’ she criticises male hip-hoppers who talk up anal sex with women. She sings that this kind of sexual act is better between boys and she gives the reason why; ‘it feels great to stimulate your prostate’. With these lyrics ‘she breaks down the barrier to the seemingly impenetrable heterosexual male body’122 and says that men should try it amongst themselves because they can enjoy it a lot more. Peaches’ parody cannot be construed as merely possessing an ambiguity that increases sales, like in Madonna’s ambivalent parody, rather it aims for equal opportunities for every gender or ‘queer person’, of whatever sexual orientation or identity. Peaches may be vulgar but she is never aggressive or angry, rather open and inviting. ‘It is ultimately about the equal encounters of bodies regardless of which constructed gender they are.’123 Her parody is an invitation to celebrate all forms of gender and sexual orientation. It is not about mocking someone or paying anyone back, it is a very open and equal celebration. In the song ‘I U She’, she talks about her bisexuality and the advantage of it being that she does not have to make a choice.124 During her stage performances the ‘Queen of electrocrap’ sometimes dons a pink strap-on dildo and poses with it with her legs open. This is her way of rocking the audience’s gender roles. She performs a nice sexshow-punk-hiphop-inferno but knows that if the dominant system is going to wobble, the impact must have force.125 In an interview she admits that when she poses straddle-legged on the stage, she feels like a oneperson Kiss concert – as is shown in the video of ‘Rock’n’Roll’ from her second CD, Fatherfucker. Her energy seems to be insurmountable, in pink underwear she ‘stage dives’ into the audience, clambers about on the gallery, backward-rolls suggestively straddle-legged over a loudspeaker, pours water over herself or lets grapes fall on her. The only way that Peaches can be perceived as ambivalent is in the pornographic content, which she is particularly accused of in her third album, Impeach my Bush, because the hard and edgy sound has been softened and the critical sharpness in the lyrics is missing. The ironic innuendo in the title can be interpreted as political (as an attack on the then US president). If ‘bush’ is read as a synonym for ‘vulva’, the question is, why her femaleness should be impeached or doubted – or is that not precisely a queer ‘dis-identification’ as a woman? The music video ‘Going Downtown’ gives us the answer; here, Peaches performs as a woman and as a man. This time the cross-dressing is perfect (not like on the cover of Fatherfucker and, at the beginning, in this successful ‘drag king’ performance, she really does look like a man). Later on, the male and female person that she portrays in the video blend into each other. 122

  Sievers, ‘Lass uns (nicht) über Sex sprechen’, p. 54.  Ibid. 124   Peaches, ‘I U She’ on Fatherfucker (Kitty-Yo, 2003). 125   Sievers, ‘Lass uns (nicht) über Sex sprechen’, p. 53. 123

Track 03

Camp – Queer Revolt in Style Historical Aspects, Definition, Recognition The origin of the word camp is not completely clear. In the dictionary of late Victorian slang, it is defined as ‘Actions and gestures of exaggerated emphasis. Probably from the French. Used chiefly by persons of exceptional want of character’.1 It was mainly used colloquially in the world of theatre, high society, the fashion world, in show business and in the urban underground. In high culture the word was used in the 1920s to describe a literary style, for example that of Oscar Wilde, Max Beerbohm, Ronald Firebank, etc., literary figures who made use of strategies such as aestheticism, aristocratic distance, irony, theatrical frivolity, parody, effeminacy and sexual transgression. In the English-speaking world, the connotative connection with ‘gay’ and ‘lesbian’ was established towards the middle of the 1940s.2 The urban drag scene is described in Isherwood’s The World of the Evening (1954) and in Esther Newton’s analyses Mother Camp (1972). In the first half of the twentieth century camp was used as a code or secret language to not let ‘normality’ into this outsider’s world.3 The essay ‘The Girl of the Year’ by the popular American journalist Tom Wolfe, published in 1963, contained the word camp. In the same year, a parody of a spy novel was published by the English writer C. Connolly with the title Bond Strikes Camp in which good-looking Russian spies operate in drag.4 When Susan Sontag’s milestone ‘Notes on Camp’ was published in late 1964, camp’s scope of meaning had already increased and included the popular taste. Thus, the word also referred to pop music (with performers who used their androgynous and transgressive representations as a strategy, for example The Kinks, The Rolling Stones, New York Dolls, David Bowie, etc.). It also referred to Andy Warhol’s pop   J. Redding Ware, Passing English of the Victorian Era (New York, 1909), pp. 60–61. Cited in Fabio Cleto ‘Introduction: Queering the Camp’, in Fabio Cleto (ed.), Camp: Queer Aesthetics and the Performing Subject. A Reader (Edinburgh, 1999), p. 9. And in Moe Meyer, ‘Under the Sign of Wilde. An Archaeology of Posing’, in Moe Meyer (ed.), The Politics and Poetics of Camp (London and New York, 1994), p. 75. 2   Sabine Hark, ‘Parodistischer Ernst und politisches Spiel’, in A. Hornscheidt, G. Jähnert and A. Schlichter (eds), Kritische Differenzen – geteilte Perspektiven. Zum Verhältnis von Feminismus und Postmoderne (Opladen and Wiesbaden, 1998), p. 7. 3   Cleto, ‘Introduction: Queering the Camp’, p. 9. 4   Mark Booth, ‘Campe-Toi! On the Origins and Definitions on Camp’, in Cleto, Camp, p. 75. 1

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art5 (these two areas, pop music and art, were not so separate as Andy Warhol also worked with musicians, such as Lou Reed and Nico). Sontag’s ‘Notes on Camp’ (1964)6 is arguably the most well-known work on the subject of camp. She wanted to present a description of this sensibility (she describes ‘camp’ as such as opposed to as an idea) that did not yet exist. In his article ‘Vs. Interpretation’ Thomas Hübener writes about ‘Miss Camp’ Susan Sontag and describes camp as the following: ‘As a way of experiencing things, camp is viewing the world and art purely from an aesthetic point of view. This absolutisation of the aesthetic at the expense of the moral and political is similar to the camp approach of the dandy perspective on the world.’7 Hübener compares camp to the strategy of irony: ‘“camp sees everything in inverted commas”. Thus, camp establishes a structurally ironic – and at the same time this means a disengaged, “cool”, non-identifying view of the world’.8 Hübener cites Jean Michel Jarre’s ‘Oxygène Part IV’ (1976) synthesiser music as an example. Susan Sontag ‘Notes on Camp’ In order to provide a better overview of this article, I outline it in bullet points, as it does, albeit somewhat vaguely, convey a certain feeling and the characteristics of camp. The notes begin with the following sentence: ‘Many things in the world have not been named; and many things, even if they have been named, have never been described.’9 This introductory sentence is very secretive and gives the impression that Sontag wants to say something between the lines. Thus could very well be the case as she only deals with the connection between camp and homosexuality towards the end of the essay, which we now find troubling. This sentence could be a play on Oscar Wilde’s famous statement ‘the love that dare not speak its name’. In a roundabout way, the following description of camp could be seen as a conservative critique of homosexuality: ‘It is not a natural mode of sensibility, if there be any such. Indeed, the essence of Camp is its love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration. And Camp is esoteric – something of a private code, a badge of identity even, among small urban cliques.’10 As Fabio Cleto notes, Sontag’s (non-) definition of camp is full of concessions to the dominant culture, which saw camp as an apolitical, kitsch middle-class quirk.11 For Sontag, capturing a sensibility in  5

  Cleto, ‘Introduction: Queering the Camp’, p. 10.   Partisan Review, 31/4 (1964): pp. 515–530.  7   Thomas Hübener, ‘Vs. Interpretation. 75 Jahre Susan Sontag (1933–2004)’, Spex, 312 (2008): p. 119.  8  Ibid.  9   Susan Sontag, ‘Notes on Camp’, in Cleto, Camp, p. 53. 10  Ibid. 11   Cleto, ‘Introduction: Queering the Camp’, p. 10.  6

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words, and on top of that, one that is so lively, powerful and modern like camp is best done in the form of notes as opposed to an essay that should follow a clear and direct line of argument. The notes are most suited to capturing this particularly fleeting sensibility. She dedicates the 58 notes, which I briefly summarise below, to Oscar Wilde: • Notes 1–6: Camp = aestheticism, style over content; occurs in objects and in people’s behaviour. • Notes 7–22: Camp = artificiality; exaggeration, androgyny as sexually attractive, viewing things with a double entendre; to camp = a mode of seduction. • Notes 23–33: Camp = extravagance, excessive ambition; out of date; objects are camp. • Notes 34–44: Camp = a form of truth about the human condition that is not moralistic, the artificial is the ideal – the theatrical. • Notes 45–49: Camp = no difference between mass produced and unique objects, which is according to Oscar Wilde the democratic esprit of camp; homosexual taste. • Notes 50–58 Camp = a form of enjoyment, appreciation, not a valuation. Sontag’s notes explore the origins and the inner workings of camp. She concentrates particularly on how camp incorporates contradictory messages. However, as Cynthia Morill states, camp resists producing the distance, which is necessary for the classification and separation of opinions, objects and behaviour. Thus, Sontag reveals the troubling nature of camp, that is, the destabilising of the relationships between things. Camp disrupts the binary logic of Western culture.12 Queer and camp are thereby very similar, as queer theory is about the breakdown of binary categorisations. Queer theory detached the binary system from ‘lesbian and gay theory’ at the end of the 1980s. ‘Queer thinking thus promotes a sabotage … a stonewalling – of the manifold binarisms (masculine/feminine, original/copy, identity/difference; natural/artificial, private/public, etc.) on which bourgeois epistemic and ontological order arranges and perpetuates itself.’13 The demystifying of cultural constructions serves as a powerful weapon to disrupt ‘straightness’. Like camp, queer encourages rather than excludes contradictions, although the lesbian element seems to disappear under this term.14 In summary, Fabio Cleto writes, ‘Camp and queer, in fact, share in their clandestine, substantional inauthenticity, and in their unstable and elusive status, a common investment in “hetero-doxia” and “para-doxia” as puzzling, questioning deviations from (and of)

12   Cynthia Morrill, ‘Revamping the Gay Sensibility. Queer Camp and Dyke Noir’, in Meyer, The Politics, p. 115. 13   Cleto, ‘Introduction: Queering the Camp’, p. 15. 14  Ibid.

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the straightness of orthodoxy’.15 Camp and queer are related words; camp is queer as a state and a way of being.16 According to Denisoff, camp is an empathetic act of legitimisation that supports the view that all identities are socially constructed and changeable. In Epistemology of the Closet Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick offers a definition of camp that is based on sympathy. Camp is then successful as a strategy of self-empowerment, if the authors are connected with the camp subjects, as well as with the people who value the camp quality of a text and thereby indirectly recognise their positive associations.17 Sedgwick uses the term ‘camp recognition’, which does not mean the registering of established codes, rather a sudden disruption and expansion of these codes.18 Unlike kitsch-attribution, then, camp-recognition doesn’t ask, ‘What kind of debased creature could possibly be the right audience for this spectacle?’ Instead it says what if: What if the right audience for this were exactly me? What if, for instance, the resistant, oblique, tangential investments of attention and attraction that I am able to bring to this spectacle are actually uncannily responsive to the resistant, oblique, tangential investments of the person, or some of the people who created it? And what if, furthermore, others whom I don’t know or recognize can see it from the same ‘perverse’ angle?19

Kim Michasiw emphasises the democratic aspect of camp recognition in the sense of what Sontag termed the democratic esprit of camp. As Sedgwick states, camp recognition makes use of the relationship with the readers and of the projecting imagination, in that the object becomes a screen or an indirect mirror through which the viewer can simultaneously see the author and the like-minded viewers. Camp could also be understood as an irony that becomes evident.20 Jack Babuscio argues that camp can be a subversive means of illustrating these cultural ambiguities and contradictions that oppress us all, homos, heteros and particularly women. Richard Dyer is more critical in this sense and states that not every homosexual camp is progressive. Camp can, however, demystify images and the world’s view of art and media. In drawing our attention to the tricks that the artist uses, camp can remind us that what we see is only one view of life. This does not keep us from enjoying it but it does stop us from believing everything

15

  Ibid., p. 16.   Ibid., p. 30. 17   Dennis Denisoff, Aestheticism and Sexual Parody: 1840–1940 (Cambridge, 2001), p. 123. 18   Kim Michasiw, ‘Camp, Masculinity, Masquerade’, differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, 6.2–3 (1994): p. 151. 19   Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley, 1990), p. 156. 20   Michasiw, ‘Camp, Masculinity’, pp. 152–154. 16

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that we are shown too quickly.21 In summary, Chuck Kleinhans writes that camp, like every subcultural attitude in our society, functions within the boundaries of a racist, patriarchal, bourgeois culture. That camp is defined in contrast to the dominant culture, does not automatically construct camp as radically oppositional. Only the audience and the context of an exhibition can complete this subversion. This opposition is more obvious at some times than at others.22 As a solution Moe Meyer divides camp into two forms; ‘Camp’ with a capital ‘C’, which is the original, fundamental, political and intentional parodistic practice that originated with Oscar Wilde in order to generate social awareness and camp with a small ‘c’ or ‘pop camp’. He wants to introduce a queer meaning as the difference between Camp and pop camp, because Sontag complicated the interpretations by removing any queer meaning from the characteristic codes and thus camp was confused with rhetorical and performative strategies such as irony, satire, burlesque, drag and with cultural movements like pop.23 Pop camp can also be seen as a parody of camp, which, as Linda Hutcheon writes, is very post-modern, as it manipulates the codes of a political value. Camp is the primary, original form and the heterosexual pop camp is the second-rate imitation; the fake version. However, as Judith Butler wrote about drag, gay is to hetero not as copy is to the original, rather as copy to a copy. Therefore, according to Fabio Cleto, pop camp is actually a queer, subversive strategy; it is a special case. Andy Warhol and his pop art show that in the sexual and epistemological deviance, mass production and pop are mixed with the meaning of camp.24 On the other hand, as George Melly states, one can also argue that pop camp is a contradiction in itself, as camp is the ‘in’ taste of an elite minority, however pop is a mass phenomenon.25 Camp transforms things that are excluded by the most serious high society into something glamorous.26 ‘Camp, in this respect is more than just a remembrance of things past, it is the re-creation of surplus value from forgotten forms of labor’ (original emphasis).27 Mark Booth looked at the difference between pop and camp in more detail. As George Melly emphasised, in the 1960s pop was more or less a synonym for camp. Based on Richard Hamilton’s attributes list for pop, Booth made a similar list for the television industry and advertising media’s camp, i.e. the camp that Meyer described as pop camp.28 21   Richard Dyer, ‘It’s Being so Camp as Keeps Us Going’, Body Politik, 10 (1977): p. 13. 22   Chuck Kleinhans, ‘Taking Out The Trash. Camp And The Politics Of Parody’, in Meyer, The Politics, p. 195. 23   Cleto, ‘Introduction: Queering the Camp’, pp. 18–19. 24   Ibid., p. 20. 25   George Melly, Revolt into Style: The Pop Arts in Britain (London, 1970), p. 174. 26  Cleto, Camp, pp. 319–320. 27   Ibid., p. 320. 28   Booth, ‘Campe-Toi!’, p. 73.

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Camp

Popular (designed for mass audiences)

Easily accessible

Transient (short-term solutions)

Determinedly facile

Expendable

Trashy

Low cost

Mock luxurious

Mass produced

Mass-produced

Young

Youth worshipping

Witty

Witty

Sexy

Mock sexy

Gimmicky

Wilfully hackneyed

Glamorous

Mock glamorous

Big business

BIG BUSINESS29

Nowadays, it is much easier to avoid any confusion between camp and pop. Although camp was an important factor in defining the style of pop, pop was mixed with other (mainly music) styles, e.g. folk, country, music-hall and Hollywood razzmatazz.29 Chuck Kleinhans sees camp as a parodistic strategy, whose origins lie in gay subculture and which provides an impetus for subtextual reading. He considers a political critique of camp and a detailed analysis of parody as a strategy of resistance in contemporary media to be necessary.30 Kleinhans sees Sontag’s essay as original and provocative, and argues that we can recognise camp as a strategy of interpretation, which views the world from an aesthetic perspective and in a particular style. He cites the sentence that states that camp is the love of the unnatural, the artificial and exaggeration (Note 8).31 For Babuscio, camp represents a different consciousness, ‘a heightened awareness of certain human complications of feeling that spring from the fact of social oppression’.32 Babuscio finds four basic characteristics of camp:

29

  Ibid., p. 74.   Kleinhans, ‘Taking Out The Trash’, p. 182. 31   Sontag, ‘Notes on Camp’, p. 56. 32   Jack Babuscio, ‘Camp and the Gay Sensibility’, in Richard Dyer (ed.), Gays and Film (New York, 1984), p. 40. 30

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irony,33 aestheticism,34 theatricality35 and humour.36 Esther Newton specified three characteristics for camp. She summarised Babuscio’s irony with the word ‘incongruity’ and uses a ‘campy queen’ who wanted to grow plants in the toilet cistern as an example of this incongruity. Her work then also includes theatricality and humour, as in Babuscio’s work. (In Newton’s work, the aestheticism, which was included in Babuscio’s work, is included in the theatricality as it describes the style of camp; the incongruity is the main content and humour is the strategy of camp.)37 As Kleinhans correctly recognises, Dyer and Babuscio have not considered the wider concept of camp, which is based on the connection between camp and the arts (in the wider sense), as Susan Sontag analysed. Since the publication of ‘Notes on Camp’, the media world (television, radio, music, advertising, journalism) used or even co-opted camp but much of the subversive potential is unfortunately neutralised by the naturalisation. In the media of mass culture there is a tendency to suck up anything that is different and change it into an aspect of fashionable transformation. It always has to find something that is ‘other’ in order to spice things up for the oversaturated tastes. The cannibalisation of subcultures by the media is a structural indicator of the culture industry.38 In her chapter ‘Eating the Other’ in Black Looks: Race and Representation, bell hooks establishes that in the mainstream, ethnicity often serves simply to spice things up and that the approval and enjoyment of ‘racial difference’ has entertainment value. It is ‘in’ to break taboos with regards to sexuality and desire and to raise these subjects.39 When camp is appropriated for a non-homosexual use and the extravagant theatricality, love of the artificial and extreme emotional range are applied, Kleinhans calls this ‘het camp’. On the other hand, in cases where camp is extended to both phenomena, i.e. based in gay subculture and a non-gay appropriation, this brings us back to the category of ‘kitsch’.40 Kleinhans differentiates between ‘high camp and ‘low camp’, where high camp means the seamless illusion of female impersonation and low camp accepts the deconstructed gender presentation of the drag queen. ‘Trash’ is a similar concept, which Kleinhans calls intentional low camp. ‘Trash’ makes it clear that the aesthetic sensibility is also socially constructed. In other words, low camp deliberately celebrates bad taste. With

33   Jack Babuscio, ‘The Cinema of Camp (Aka Camp and the Gay Sensibility)’, in Cleto, Camp, p. 119. 34   Babuscio, ‘Camp and the Gay Sensibility’, p. 43 and ‘The Cinema of Camp’, p. 120. 35   Babuscio, ‘The Cinema of Camp’, pp. 123–124. 36   Kleinhans, ‘Taking Out The Trash’, p. 187. 37   Esther Newton, ‘Role Models’, in Cleto, Camp, p. 102. 38   Kleinhans, ‘Taking Out The Trash’, p. 187. 39   bell hooks, Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston, 1993) p. 21. 40   Kleinhans, ‘Taking Out The Trash’, p. 187.

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regards to the aesthetic and social perception, low camp shocks in order to make its standpoint known.41 In the late Victorian era, the camp aesthetic and the dandy aesthetic were seen as cultural degeneration, as Halberstam writes in their study of gothic horror about ‘technology of monstrosity’. They also cites Bram Stoker’s Dracula as an example of a figure who represents Otherness itself as a distilled version of all Others, which was produced through and in sexological and psychopathological fictional texts.42 In my opinion there are many examples of camp in popular culture, although it is a subversive camp, which contains a more political content, the ‘cutting edge’, and takes a more concrete lesbian and gay, feminist and queer position than in the description of camp in Sontag’s ‘Notes on Camp’ or in Hübener’s article. I want to highlight once more that a subversive camp, as Sedgwick emphasises, is based on sympathy, which makes this strategy of self-empowerment successful; this sympathy has to present on both sides. In describing camp as a sensibility, Sontag tried to express this sympathy as a passion. The authors were connected to camp subjects and to the people (the recipients) who value the camp quality of a text and thereby make positive associations. The music examples will be discussed in more detail towards the end of the chapter. Feminist Camp with Music Example: Madonna In his book Aestheticism and Sexual Parody 1840–1940 Dennis Denisoff mentions Ada Leverson, a friend and a contemporary of Oscar Wilde who offered him shelter in her house during his trial. During the 1890s she became known for her short, sharp contributions to The Yellow Book and Punch, which were described by Wilde as wonderful, witty and delightful. She was also one of the harshest critics of camp, not because of the sexual tendencies, but because of the ‘inclusiveness, specifically with regard to the gender politics inherent to aestheticism itself’.43 In this sense, her works do make use of this aestheticism’s questioning of models of identity, gender and sexuality. In spite of this, Leverson criticises that instead of being a momentary, celebratory release of contemporary sex and gender based politics, this aestheticism remains stuck in its own oppressive essentialism.44 In Guilty Pleasures Pamela Robertson defines feminist camp as ‘a female form of aestheticism, related to female masquerade and rooted in burlesque, that articulates and subverts the “image- and culture-making processes” to which

41

  Ibid., p. 189.   Denisoff, Aestheticism and Sexual Parody, p. 84. Judith Halberstam, Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (Durham, NC, 1995). 43   Denisoff, Aestheticism and Sexual Parody, p. 104. 44  Ibid. 42

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women have traditionally been given access’.45 This definition follows Leverson in that it criticises the misogyny within the gay friendly community.46 Robertson also complains that women were left out of the discussions of camp before 1960 because, at the time, women, lesbians and heterosexual women had even less access to the images and to the process of cultural production than gay men. Many female artists count as camp, for example Garland, Streisand, Callas, Dietrich and Garbo, and also appropriations of feminine clothing, style or language by gay men are taken as a given in camp culture.47 Women and/or lesbians are in a position between feminist theory and politics, which privileges White heterosexual women and gay theory, which privileges White gay men. Any discussion of the relation of women to camp will therefore unavoidably throw up questions of appropriation, co-optation and identity politics. The tradition of feminist camp, which runs parallel to that of gay camp, but is not identical, represents oppositional forms of performance and reception. Robertson analyses Madonna as an example of feminist camp after 1960. She chooses the icon because she is most present in public as a performer of ‘gender bending’ (parody and feminine/masculine masquerade). However, in 1993, a contribution was published in the magazine New Yorker on the subject of ‘camp is dead, thanks to Madonna’, which stated that ‘gender tripping can’t be subversive anymore’, because Madonna ‘has opened all the closets, turning deviance into a theme park’.48 This article expresses a controversial opinion on Madonna.49 Returning to camp as our starting point, Robertson states: Camp has has undergone two important changes since the 1960s to become a more overt, more public sensibility, and a mainstream fashion. The first is the ‘outing’ and ‘heterosexualization’ of camp, its virtual equation with first pop and then postmodernism, coincident with the publication of Sontag’s essay. The second is a more recent shift to overtly politicized camp and radical drag, dating back to gay camp’s changed status following Stonewall and the 1970s gay liberation movement, and its revitalization in the 1980s with the onset of AIDS and ‘queer’ politics. The first predominantly heterosexual pop and/or postmodern style of camp applies to Madonna’s career as a whole—in her extraordinary self-marketing, her changing images, and her retro-cinephilia. The second, more explicitly homosexual and political style of camp inheres primarily in Madonnas (sic) explicit references to gay subcultures, especially drag and vogue-ing, in

  Pamela Robertson, ‘What Makes the Feminist Camp?’, in Cleto, Camp, p. 271.   Denisoff, Aestheticism and Sexual Parody, p. 105. 47   Robertson, ‘What Makes the Feminist Camp?’, p. 267. 48   ‘Goings on About Town’, New Yorker, 22 February 1993: p. 10. 49   Pamela Robertson, Guilty Pleasures: Feminist Camp from Mae West to Madonna (Durham, NC and London, 1996), p. 118. 45 46

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conjunction with her stated identification with gay men, her flirtation with lesbianism, and her AIDS charity work.50

Whether Madonna can be described as feminist camp is very contentious, particularly after her assertion ‘I’m just being ironic. That’s the joke of it all. It’s a luring device, like the whole boy-toy thing. It’s playing into people’s idea of what’s humiliating to women’.51 She has been labeled a postfeminist because for her it is about the survival of women in music and calling feminist orthodoxies such as makeup, high heels, skirts and long hair into question. The same debate exists about the politics of her camp.52 ‘Madonna, especially in her Boy Toy and Material Girl incarnations, seemed the epitome of the newly defined camp style, embracing crass consumer culture, like pop, and updating it through new media forms “the ultimate postmodern video star”’.53 Madonna’s video ‘Vogue’ portrayed a particular relationship between gay subculture, Hollywood stars and feminist camp. It shows the cultural practice of vogueing but reprocessed for the mainstream. It is shown through the performance of a combination of African American and Latino gay dance elements (breakdance) and female imitation, or put more simply, only usual male and female types (e.g. the civil servant, the school girl). As already mentioned in Track 02: Parody, Judith Butler also uses the documentary film Paris is Burning to give examples for gender parody. She thereby also criticises ‘Vogue’ because Madonna diluted the homosexual political components for the straight public. In my opinion the documentary film Paris is Burning and ‘Vogue’ can be considered as examples of camp, according to Moe Meyer’s differentiation, or naive camp, to use Sontag’s terminology. Madonna’s video would be an example of intentional camp, therefore not successful; termed pop camp or camp with a small ‘c’, which conforms to the dominant system through its apolitical character. According to bell hooks, however, the documentary film Paris is Burning by Jenny Livingston, who is a White lesbian, is too much from the White point of view because the viewers see Black men who are obsessed with ‘an idealized fetishised version of femininity that is white’.54 The fact that Livingston is White is well disguised as one only hears her voice when she asks questions; one never questions how her position shifts and skews the interpretation of what is observed. hooks writes that many scenes were sad or tragic for her, as for other African Americans, which seems to amuse the White people in the audience, particularly those that report on hardship, pain and loneliness. The tragic aspect to this is when

50

  Ibid. p. 119.   Brian Johnson, ‘Madonna: The World’s Hottest Star Speaks Her Mind’, Macleans, 13 May 1991: p. 48. 52  Robertson, Guilty Pleasures, p. 125. 53   Ibid., p. 123. 54   bell hooks, Black Looks, p. 148. 51

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one recognises that the men of colour are falling over themselves to imitate the members of a society that actually does not want to have them at all.55 In Madonna’s mainstream video, the sex and gender roles are only portrayed in an ambivalent way; men are in suits, not in drag, and the lyrics of the song are: ‘It doesn’t matter if you’re black or white, or if you’re boy or girl.’ She then raps a list of names of Hollywood stars. The stars are presented like Andy Warhol’s Superstars: as brand names who sell their pretty faces and are therefore accessible to all. Madonna’s critics complain that the content of her songs is empty. Thus, a parody of this song came into being, which is contained in Julie Brown’s Medusa: Dare to be Truthful and has the title ‘Vague’, where the lyrics are focused on the low IQ of stars who do not think (‘Personality of spam …/Ladies with no pointof-view/Fellas who don’t have a clue’), and that everyone can be a star, because ‘there’s nothing to it’. Many of Madonna’s critics see Madonna’s adoption of homosexual and ethnic subcultural practices more as an appropriation of the style than convincing politics. Feminists have criticised Madonna’s postmodernism and pluralistic queerness because it questions the concept of ‘woman’ and homosexual identities and ignores differences. Robertson raises the question of whether this not also has to do with the relationship between camp popular culture, post-modernism and politics. Can camp deal with difference nowadays? Camp is based in a culture of oppression, which raises the question; is it possible to do anything else through camp other than to express hierarchies of power? Robertson therefore decides to look more closely at power in relation to camp and Madonna’s stardom56 and deals with the debate surrounding power and fan identification in the work of Lynne Layton in more detail: ‘Madonna’s art and its reception by critics and fans reflect and shape some of our culture’s anxieties about identity and power inequalities. Madonna disturbs the status quo not only because she is an outspoken, sexy, woman, but because she has a lot of social and economic power.’57 Madonna’s power enables her to stand as an important symbol for intervention politics. But power is a privilege, which is related to her economic power, ‘whiteness’ and influence. Madonna can thereby mask the powerlessness of the subcultural groups through her performance of agency and power.58 Robertson concludes that if Madonna is the death of camp, it is not because camp has changed so much, but rather because the context of camp and the way in which it is consumed has changed. Her final words on the subject are as follows:

55

  Ibid., pp. 150–154.  Robertson, Guilty Pleasures, p. 133. 57   Lynne Layton, ‘Like a Virgin: Madonna’s Version of the Feminine’, in Adam Sexton (ed.), Desperately Seeking Madonna: In Search of the Meaning of the World’s Most Famous Woman (New York, 1993), p. 171. 58  Robertson, Guilty Pleasures, p. 134. 56

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The mainstreaming of camp taste in contemporary culture may help articulate a queer subjectivity and coalitional politics, but it may also serve to obscure real difference and to reduce gay politics to a discourse of style. Perhaps, in the future, camp will be dead – if the conditions of oppression are gone and there is no longer any need for camp as a survival strategy. But, in the meantime, we need to scrutinize our camp icons, and our own camp readings and practices, to ensure that we do not naively substitute camp for politics.59

In her chapter ‘Notes on Musical Camp’, Freya Jarman-Ivens even looks at musical moments in order to find out if some musical textual features are camp. She identifies ‘the thread of camp in the fabric of the music’, although, as she admits, it is not ‘entirely possible to make a clear separation of such elements’, i.e. the music and the performance, the text and the context. She does not look at Madonna in this chapter, but amongst other examples, she does look at Liza Minelli’s ‘Auf Wiedersehen, mein Herr’ in the musical Cabaret. Jarman-Ivens discovers a sense of exaggeration, flamboyance and playfulness as well as a rhythm of tension and resolution: ‘At the same time, the out of tune instruments put the listener immediately on edge, the timbre enhancing the tension of the text. (Here, we might also invoke what Sontag concludes is “The ultimate Camp statement: it’s good because it’s awful”.’60 A final, appropriate example of the camp aesthetic from Madonna (also with regards to the musical style) is her 2005 album Confessions on a Dance Floor, which harks back to the disco era, in which the decoration consists of glittering disco balls and multi-coloured lights. The music also takes on elements from the 1970s, like ABBA, whose music is often cited in homosexual contexts (for example in the film The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994) by Stephan Elliot). Jarman-Ivens refers to Madonna’s retro-camp as well, but more in the sense that Madonna is referring to a ‘bygone cinematic era’ when she is citing the individual names of these icons and using the style of them.61 Female Camp Androgyny with Music Examples: Annie Lennox, Grace Jones As George Piggford emphasises, ‘Female androgynous’ figures are a particular feminine tradition of camp. Piggford wants to focus attention on the ‘biological sex’ of the performers who try to break down notions of gender, particularly in cultures in which the man is seen as the norm. These female androgynous figures  Robertson, Guilty Pleasures, p. 138.   Freya Jarman-Ivens, ‘Notes on Musical Camp’, in Derek B. Scott (ed.), The Ashgate Research Companion to Popular Musicology (Aldershot, 2009), pp. 189–204. Sontag’s quote is taken from: Susan Sontag, ‘Notes on Camp’, in Cleto, Camp, p. 65. 61   Freya Jarman-Ivens, Breaking Voices. Voice, Subjectivity and Fragmentation in Popular Music, unpublished PhD Thesis (University of Newcastle, 2006), p. 55. 59

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do not simply dress as men, rather they are women, who dress, perform, write and appear as ‘gendered’ identities that are placed somewhere in the space between man and woman. These women use a camp sensibility, an appearance and behaviour code that ironises and mocks gender norms in order to undermine the gender assignment of their culture.62 Sontag writes in her notes on androgyny that it is one of the great images of the camp sensibility and that sexual attractiveness is directed against the core of one’s own sex. Thus, according to Sontag, the most attractive is often the masculine in women and the feminine in men. Piggford cites Annie Lennox as an example of this with her video for the single ‘Sweet Dreams (are made of this)’ (1983) where she wears a conservative black business suit, has a flame-red crew cut and excessively heavy makeup and lipstick. Although much is based on codes associated with the male, she is still very much recognisable as female. The wearing of a man’s suit, which historically speaking was actually a symbol of rebellion for rock stars, represented a challenge for the cultural construction of sexuality and the power dynamic because, as Lennox said herself, wearing the suit already gave her more power.63 For Lennox, the suit is an expression of the music of the Eurythmics with new technologies such as a ‘drum machine’ and synthesiser. She had her own production business. ‘Her suit, her cropped hair, can thus be interpreted as a statement of business, a female artistic control and disco style. As a woman conventionally defined by her body, her wearing of the male suit masked her femininity but, rather than constituting a denial of her identity, it was an assertion of autonomy.’64 In the next video, ‘Love is a Stranger’ (1983), an androgynous looking Lennox portrays two types of drag. In the first half she appears as two different female characters. First she wears a platinum blonde wig, long false eyelashes and a mink coat; later she wears a long black wig, heavy lipstick and a shiny black dress. In the second half of the video she wears a black business suit, reflective sunglasses and no discernible makeup. It is not clear if Lennox is a man in female drag (in the first half of the video) or a woman in male drag (in the second half). This video definitely has a confusing effect, including on the MTV censors, who stopped the video in the middle of the first broadcast. It went so far that all Eurythmics videos were banned on US television until Lennox had actually proven that she was in fact a woman and not a ‘transvestite who will corrupt American youth’. It seems as if she plays a too dangerous game65 with biological sex and gender performance for MTV’s taste. On the other hand, her hard rock contemporaries’ drag, e.g. the way in which Kiss and Motley Crue were portrayed, is tied to a 62   George Piggford, ‘Who’s that Girl? Annie Lennox, Woolf’s Orlando, and Female Camp Androgyny’, in Cleto, Camp, p. 284. 63   Sheila Whiteley, Women and Popular Music. Sexuality, Identity and Subjectivity (London and New York, 2000), p. 124. 64   Ibid., p. 125. 65   Piggford, ‘Who’s that Girl?’, p. 285.

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certain construction of American masculinity and supported the dominant gender system because it showed that men in women’s dresses and makeup were grotesque and inappropriate. In comparison to the androgynous performance of Annie Lennox, the performance of these groups was rather ‘clownish’.66 In my opinion Kleinhans’ previously mentioned differentiation between high camp and low camp is appropriate here. The hard rock drag is at the bottom level of camp and can also be described as ‘het-camp’ or ‘pop camp’. Moe Meyer described pop camp as apolitical and cooperating with the dominant system, which applies to this example. However these performances were only precursors to an iconic camp moment: Lennox’s appearance as Elvis Presley at the Grammy Awards in 1984. As she came onto the stage in men’s clothes with a typical Elvis Presley hairstyle and stubbly facial hair the effect on her audience was the same as that of the MTV censorship – confusion. Then she began to sing ‘Sweet Dreams’ and her identity became clear. The video for the next single, ‘Who’s that Girl?’, contains Lennox as both an Elvis double as well as a blonde love-song singer. At the end of the video, ‘Elvis’ Annie kisses ‘love-song singer’ Annie passionately on the lips in a narcissistic conclusion.67 The confusion that was triggered in the audience and the censors had to do with the lack of ‘camp recognition’.68 Someone who does not share this sensibility cannot decode camp.69 However, in my view, a further possibility remains unmentioned, namely that the audience and the MTV censors do actually recognise the political message of camp (to transform the gender system) and act against certain performances precisely because of it. Whiteley praises Lennox in her strategy to escape the traditional image of women in rock music and provides a powerful example of women’s artistic expression. Annie Lennox herself said that to be in the middle, so not obviously man or woman, makes you a threat and therefore gives you power.70 Grace Jones The best example of ‘female androgynous’ camp is, in my view, Grace Jones. Her edgy androgyny, which is portrayed as ‘disco-diva’, and her connection to homosexual club culture are evidence of her position as a camp cult figure. On her albums Warm Leatherette and Nightclubbing she develops a post-modern role. Her live performance, which alludes to her androgyny, is actually called ‘One Man

66

  Ibid., p. 287   Ibid., p. 285. 68  Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, p. 156. 69   Piggford, ‘Who’s that Girl?’, p. 297. 70  Whiteley, Women and Popular Music, p. 133. 67

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Show’, a title that reinforces the idea that there is no real Grace Jones.71 Warm Leatherette (Island Records, 1980), a version of Daniel Miller’s Song which was inspired by J.G. Ballard’s ideas about the eroticisation of car accidents, is about fetishised sexuality. Her skin colour is Grace Jones’ only authentic element; all the other roles are interchangeable. One of Susan Sontag’s criteria is hereby satisfied, namely that camp expresses something, which is actually very serious, in a playful way – through fun artificiality and elegance. June L. Reich writes something that applies to the content of Grace Jones’ songs, namely that camp is a celebration of passionate transgressions. Camp is not a mere inversion or duplicity, it alters the sensibility. Aesthetic of Camp: ‘Fangoria: Hagamos algo muy vulgar’ – Music Video In my opinion, the video ‘Hagamos algo muy vulgar’ (‘Let’s Do Something Very Vulgar’) by the Spanish ‘Madonna’, Fangoria (previously also known as Alaska) is the most appropriate example of the sensibility or aesthetic of camp. Two of Alaska’s songs, ‘A quién le importa’ (‘Whose Concern is it?’) and ‘Bailando’ (‘Dancing’) are unofficial anthems of the Spanish lesbian and gay movement. In the first song she asks the provocative question, whose business it is what she does. Although people point and gossip behind her back, it does not bother her because she leads a different life. She is criticised but has no guilt, even though people criticise her life. The second anthem is about dancing. Alaska or Fangoria is also described as queen of the movida, so of the avant-garde (not only from an artistic point of view, but also with regard to sexual orientation of the binary gender system), which came about in Pedro Almodóvar’s circle in the 1980s. Another one of her songs describes the ‘Rey del Glam’ (King of Glam), someone who is stuck in 1973, the year of glam rock, and wears pointed, heeled shoes, eye makeup, two kilos of eyeliner, black lipstick, glitter in their hair, black nail varnish, leopard and leather-look. The video for ‘Hagamos algo superficial y vulgar’ came out in 199072 and contains many camp ingredients. As Susan Sontag wrote in her first six notes, camp is not about content, rather about form and artificiality or stylisation. The camp ambition, which becomes apparent in the video via an accumulation of kitsch and ‘trash’, is expressed through the use of various objects and styles that are linked to mass culture, for example Barbie dolls, rubber ducks, doughnuts and 71

  Joy Press and Simon Reynolds, ‘Who’s That Girl? Maskerade und Herrschaft’, in Anette Baldauf and Katharina Weingartner (eds), Lips.Tits.Hits.Power? Popkultur und Feminismus (Vienna, 1998), p. 161. 72   The song came out in 1990 on Fangoria’s album Salto Mortal (Subterfuge Records, 1991). The video can be seen on the collection De Alaska a Fangoria (CD and DVD) (EMI, 2004).

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the clothing style that ranges from the extraterrestrial look through to fetishism and never takes itself seriously. The content of the video, about the theft of a man’s business card, could be seen as a feminist narrative if it ended differently. The woman gets revenge on the man who pushes her back into her traditional role as a woman by handing her a hand-held blender. The conclusion, however, where the man follows her with a chainsaw, is modelled on the ‘trashy’ horror films and ‘splatter movies’. Otherwise, this music video is, in the sense of Sontag’s camp, very much playful (as is also shown in the first shot of the toy monster) and full of theatricality (exaggerated gestures of Fangoria and her extraterrestrial background dancers). As Sontag shows in her last note, what seems to be abnormal in everyday life is normal in the arts (for example Fangoria’s fetish clothing that she wears to the supermarket). In camp, there is also a good taste of bad taste (such as this kitsch and multi-coloured video), which furthers the enjoyment and does not judge. Monster-Camp: Lady Gaga Since 2008, Lady Gaga’s meteoric rise to stardom and the ongoing question as to whether she is queer or not, make her an ideal example of a queer pop musician. I will explain why Lady Gaga’s strategy is camp and look into whether her use of this strategy is subversive. Lady Gaga fulfils the characteristics for camp, i.e that it is not so much about beauty as about artificiality and stylisation. Moreover, the ambition to create something extravagant and exceptional is evident in Gaga’s work. Her artificialsounding electronic voice, the variety of dresses and costumes and her seemingly endless creative use of mass produced objects (e.g. Diet Coke cans, tele phones, sunglasses, etc.)73 in her music video ‘Telephone’, take us back to Wilde’s democratic esprit of camp and corresponds to Moe Meyer’s pop camp. Lady Gaga presents a gendered portrayal of Coke, substituting curlers with ‘Diet’ Coke cans. Articles about ‘her status as a fetishist object of consumption’74 can be found online on in media res and Bully Bloggers, where Jack Halberstam points out that Gaga liberates the power of objects.75 Halberstam goes on to say that if Lady Gaga is objectified by male voyeurism, it does not matter so much:

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  As discussed in ‘Answering the Feminist Call: Lady Gaga’s “Telephone” as Pop Art’ by Dom Nasilowski in media res, available at: http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/ imr/2010/08/04/answering-feminist-call-lady-gagas-telephone-pop-art, retrieved on 15.07.2011. 74  Ibid. 75   Jack Halberstam and Tavia Nyong’o, ‘Iphone, U-Phone …… Or is Gaga the New Dada? …… Or Roll Over Andy Warhol ……’, 22 March 2010, available at: http://bullybloggers. wordpress.com/category/pop-culture/, retrieved on 15.07.2011.

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because everything is an object in her world, including her. The relations between objects (phone, car, butch, chains, honey, sandwich, prison) are more animated than the relations between subjects – for the most part, conveyed via neutral interactions, which are deliberately devoid of passion, emotion or affect. The phoniness of the entire mise en scene flattens the hierarchy that places subjects over objects and it attributes action to things (the sunglasses smoke in the prison yard scene, the pancakes bite in the diner) and object-like status to people – both Beyoncé and Lady Gaga become the thing they are doing – Gaga makes a sandwich and becomes a sandwich in her white outfit. Beyoncé hoards honey and becomes honey in her bright yellow dress. Gaga/Beyoncé becoming objects opens a whole new domain of lesbian aesthetics – one in which the ‘becoming-object’ is lesbian because lesbianism has already been defined as always derivative, always unreal, the original fake. While lesbianism was largely absent from Warhol’s repertoire of glamour and success, it becomes the foundation for new formulations of fame precisely because it has always been conveyed as ugly, anti-aesthetic, and some combination of too real (hence unaesthetic) or too unreal (hence … The L Word?). The linking of beauty itself to gayness in Warhol’s world, a link that Valerie Solanas found so enraging that she tried to kill Warhol, has been replaced in the world of Gaga by an ongoing discourse of gender bending.76

Karin Sellberg and Michael O’Rourke emphasise, as did Halberstam, that the way in which Gaga uses objects corresponds to ‘an object-orientated philosophy, which emphasises a “vicarious causation” which turns towards objects and demands a humanitarian politics attuned to the objects themselves’.77 So far we can see that Lady Gaga is camp; she seems to make fun of camp. The question is whether this is accompanied by a certain downplaying of lesbian, gay or feminist issues. Halberstam says: Lady Gaga and Beyoncé demonstrate a femininity done right and over done to the point of parody. But here is where it gets interesting – while Lady Gaga always seemed like a drag queen in her outrageous costumes, in this incarnation she reminds us that no one does femininity like a fierce femme and while you can already see the drag shows going on in a bad gay bar near you with super tall drag queens lipsyncing to Gaga and Beyoncé and cat-fighting their way across the stage, remember you heard it here first – you cannot Gaga Gaga, honey so don’t even try! She is camping camp, she is dragging drag, she is ironing irony

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 Ibid.   Karin Sellberg and Michael O’Rourke, ‘Gaga and Object Oriented Ontology’, 3 August 2010, which is a comment on http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/ imr/2010/08/02/mainstreaming-avant-garde-gender-and-spectacle-gagakoh, retrieved on 15.07.2011. 77

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Lady Gaga is also politically active for lesbian and gay rights as her campaigning against the ‘don’t ask and don’t tell’ policy of the US army shows. (‘A message from Lady Gaga to the Senate’ from September 2010 can be seen on YouTube.) In July 2011 she received honorary citizenship of Sydney for her commitment to gay and lesbian issues. However I could not find the cutting edge or the political clarity in her work in order to pin down where the subversiveness lies in her pop-camp strategy. I would first like to take a look at her feminist approach and then look closer at what she thinks queer is. In an interview in 200979 Lady Gaga said that she is not a feminist, because she loves men. This was discussed on in media res; Jessalynn Keller wonders if this is ‘indicative of a “postfeminist” media culture, where feminism is acknowledged, yet dismissed as unnecessary to today’s young women. Empowerment then becomes more about a stylized performance, often through the display of sexy clothing coupled with the language of feminism, rather than actual social change’.80 Even if Lady Gaga refers to feminist culture in her work (e.g. her video ‘Telephone’ as a parody of the film Thelma and Louise) she still, as Jessalynn Keller points out, just expresses her femininity in one particular way and not as other feminist performers do, like the Riot Grrrls for example, as a source of empowerment and a critical analysis of patriarchal culture. Lady Gaga’s performances do not contain the same political edge against the patriarchy as the Riot Grrrls’ concerts; she is, as she says in the same interview, also celebrating ‘American male culture’. A clear message does not even come across in Gaga’s lyrics, as the song ‘Scheiße’ on her album Born this Way (2011, Interscope Records) shows, where she sings about ‘if you are a strong female/you don’t need permission’ and ‘love is objectified by what men say is right’, ‘blonde high heeled feminist enlisting femmes for this/Express your women kind fight for your rights’. At first glance it seems that these slogans contain feminist issues but overall the words do not make sense. Also if you see this together with the album cover image, her face and arms forming part of a motorcycle, one can assume that she is playing with the objectivation of herself by men. However, Jack Halberstam defends Lady Gaga strongly against the critique of Camille Paglia, who thinks that Gaga is just a copycat and that Madonna was 78   Jack Halberstam, ‘You Cannot Gaga Gaga’, 17 March 2010, available at: http:// bullybloggers.wordpress.com/category/pop-culture/, retrieved on 15.07.2011. 79   www.youtube.com/watch?v=habpdmFSTOo&feature=player_embedded, retrieved on 11.07.2011. 80   Jessalynn Keller, ‘I’m not a Feminist … I Love Men: Rethinking Lady Gaga’s Postfeminist Rhetoric and its Potential for Social Change’, 2 August 2010, available at: http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/imr/2010/08/01/im-not-feminist-i-love-menrethinking-lady-gaga-s-postfeminist-rhetoric-and-its-potential, retrieved on 11.07.2011.

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much better and much more of a feminist. Halberstam is in this case right, because Paglia seems to be caught in ‘the tired cycle of oedipal denunciations’81 and stuck in 1990 if she cannot see ‘a single shred of glamour or talent in Lady Gaga’s gender-blending and articulate performances’.82 I think we need to differentiate at this point between postfeminism and third wave feminism as these terms are also mentioned in the comments on the blog about ‘Gaga’s not being a feminist’ interview. I agree that Lady Gaga can be called a postfeminist as Angela McRobbie83 describes it, as she does not explicitly label herself as a feminist nor does she have clear or explicit feminist messages for her audience in her work. However feminist ideas can still be seen, read into and discussed in her music, and it also does not mean that her work cannot ever have feminist potential. However, she cannot be called a subversive feminist, because her messages are not explicit enough to show the cutting edge, the political power for social change. Nevertheless Gaga is very useful for third wave feminists in order to discuss current images of women or gender (bending) in media and culture. As Halberstam mentions the ongoing oedipal accusations in the Paglia critique I want to highlight that third wave feminists are quite aware about the oedipal generation conflicts and avoid them, as they think that first and second wave issues are still relevant. Thus, in his recent talks, Halberstam speaks about Gaga Feminism, a new feminism he is working on at the moment. These ideas, which convey Lady Gaga as a figure for a feminism that privileges gender and sexual fluidity, were published in 2012.84 Kirsty Fairclough notes that Gaga is a spectacle and a totally constructed identity who ‘consistently highlights gender performativity; she plays male and female, queer and straight. Add to this her professed love for the monstrous and grotesque, she can be placed firmly against mainstream pop princesses and can be read as interrogating the performative nature of both gender and sexuality’.85 Concerning Lady Gaga’s queerness I focus first on her androgyny and the ongoing discussions as to whether she is in reality a transsexual, intersexual or a man with a penis. I think this is one of her strongest points – her constant fluidity of identities, which I will discuss later in Track 08: Dildo. However, it seems as though after all 81

  Jack Halberstam, ‘What’s Paglia Got To Do With It?’, 14 September 2010, available at: http://bullybloggers.wordpress.com/2010/09/14/whats-paglia-got-to-do-withit/, retrieved on 15.07.2011. 82  Ibid. 83   Angela McRobbie, The Aftermath of Feminism: Gender, Culture and Social Change (London, 2009), p. 83. 84   J. Jack Halberstam, Gaga Feminism. Sex, Gender and the End of Normal (Boston, 2012). 85   Kirsty Fairclough, ‘Mainstreaming the Avant-Garde: Gender and Spectacle at GAGAKOH’, 3 August 2010, available at: http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/ imr/2010/08/02/mainstreaming-avant-garde-gender-and-spectacle-gagakoh, retrieved on 15.07.2011.

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the gender bending, she still wants to be seen as a woman. In the video ‘Telephone’, one can see her blurred crotch for a short moment and the two supposedly lesbian guards walking away and saying ‘I told you she did not have a penis’. In a conference in Berlin entitled ‘What’s queer about queer pop’ (11–13 November 2010) Lady Gaga was one of the main examples for the discussions about whether queer interventions in pop culture have constructive perspectives or if they just lead to homonormativity, where the critiques on normativity are missing. Using the example of Lady Gaga’s video ‘Telephone’, Tim Stüttgen tries to answer the question of whether a queer representation has failed: In Lady Gaga’s video ‘Telephone’ one sees many former codes of queerness; whether it is the deviant, homosocial space of the prison, the kiss with a lesbian butch, the female gangster or buddy relationship with Beyonce Knowles who is an icon of black pop – Jonas Akerlund’s video understands completely who to incorporate distinctive codes of queer topoi and to integrate them with sponsored product placements from Virgin and Dolce & Gabbana.86

Gaga obviously furthers homonormativity and some of the speakers at the conference also said that Lady Gaga should stop confusing us.87 With her 2011 album Born this Way Gaga makes an effort to express herself more clearly. The words of her first song on this album contain Hutcheon’s cutting edge, the important political dimension of her message, which must not be ambivalent in order to be subversive. The lines of this song, in which she lists a variety of different ethnic and diverse geo-political backgrounds, different abilities, sexual orientations and trans* identified, rich or poor people, and refers to them as being on the ‘right track’, show the potential for Lady Gaga to be the first subversive queer role model in mainstream pop were it not for the title of this song and of the album Born this Way and the phrase ‘cause baby, you were born this way’. However, Gaga holds on to the idea of a fixed identity; her words sound very similar to the argument of ‘homosexuality is in the genes’ and lead to false essentialist biologism. Categories and essentialisms are not queer at all. So she still is confusing us, because her identity in her performances is queer and fluid, but in her lyrics, she tells us a different story. Gaga seems to be following the traces of the queer track but if one looks closer she is at some important points (e.g. homonormativity, explicit feminist statements, no biologisms) missing the subversive queer-feminist one. Looking at her music video ‘Born this Way’, one discovers queer-feminist citations, e.g. the pink triangle at the beginning and at the end. During and after the birth of the evil, the black and white image of her performance with spread legs and holding/using a machine gun, her hair in a feral and wild mane, reminds me 86   Translated from German. Tim Stüttgen, ‘What’s Queer about Queer Pop now’, MALMOE (Wien, April 2011): p. 16. 87   Christine Rösinger, ‘Was ist der Unterschied zwischen Peaches und Lady Gaga?’, available at: http://fm4.orf.at/stories/1668181, retrieved on 08.07.2011.

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of the picture and performance of Austrian feminist artist VALIE EXPORT in her ‘Action Pants: Genital Panic’, which at the end of the 1960s was very daring and was aimed at confronting men with their objectification of women.88 The first lines spoken in the video ‘this is the manifesto of Mother Monster … a race within humanity, a race which bears no prejudice, no judgement but boundless freedom’, show that Gaga wishes for a non-discriminatory future (race/ colour critiques). As Gaga also calls her fans monsters and herself the Mother Monster and says that she was also a monster and freak at school, she uses the monster as a metaphor for otherness and difference and tries to overcome the fears of being different or the fear of monsters.89 In reflecting on the cover of Born this Way, where her face and arms form part of a motorcycle, it is not far-fetched to compare it with posthuman bodies and cyborgs, and if we remember her use of objects and her becoming an object, Lady Gaga is opening the connotation of queer and going beyond the human. This is one of the ideas Sara Ahmed presents in her Queer Phenomenology, when she writes about doing things. Ahmed analyses the orientation of objects and explains that the ‘object itself has been shaped for something, which means it takes the shape of what it is for’ (original emphasis).90 An object can therefore even fail to do the work for which it was intended, but as Ahmed says, this is not so much the fault of the object itself, rather that ‘the body cannot extend itself through the object in a way that was intended’.91 For Ahmed, the reason an object works does not have anything to do with the thing or the person using it, it is when ‘the person and the thing face each other in the right way’ (original emphasis).92 In other words, ‘the failure of something to work is a matter of a failed orientation’.93 So in this sense Lady Gaga is queering the queer, because she uses objects for something for which they are not intended but the objects also work with her body. In Lady Gaga’s system/world the failed orientation is needed in order to work. This is why I am of the opinion that Lady Gaga’s subversive queerness lies in her use of objects and becoming an object herself, but not in her attempts to win over gay and lesbian people in the way she is doing. This only leads to homonormativity.

88   http://bodytracks.org/2009/06/valie-export-aktionshosegenitalpanik-action-pantsgenital-panic/, retrieved on 16.07.2011. 89   Compare Halberstam’s ideas in Skin Shows. 90   Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham, NC, 2006), p. 46. 91   Ibid., p. 49. 92   Ibid., p. 51. 93  Ibid.

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80 Anarcho-Camp: Scream Club

Scream Club are two hip-hoppers from Olympia, Washington, who ‘alongside the “gender-fuck” also do “genre-fuck”’ as Christiane Erharter and Sonja Eismann so appropriately formulated in their sound lecture.94 They mix hip hop with a punk aesthetic and lyrics. Their videos ‘Don’t F*** With My Babies’,95 ‘I’m Going Crazy’96 and ‘Acnecore’,97 show the Do-It-Yourself aesthetic that they have adopted from the Riot Grrrls and from punk and also a certain naivety in the choice of topic. The song that deals with the problem of acne, which is not always solely a pubertal one, is demonstrative of this naivety. In their lyrics, they mix the raw expressions of violence from hip hop and punk with the politically self-empowering slogans of the feminist Riot Grrrls and the queer movement. The content of ‘Don’t F*** With My Babies’ (from the album Don’t Bite Your Sister, Retard Disco, 2004) is as follows: Scream Club will not stop short of violence to defend other women because they cannot stand it any longer that women have to live in fear; there is even already a queer army for defence purposes. They call on all feminists to hold their fists high (at concerts this brings about a feeling of self-empowerment and togetherness); they no longer want to quietly take things lying down. Scream Club uses a Riot Grrrls slogan, ‘We gonna riot not diet’, which aims towards not submitting to dictates regarding their figure but using the energy to riot. Their demand ‘bell hooks for president’ is a play on the electoral campaign in 2008, as bell hooks is an African American feminist and literature professor (with her, one could kill two, or actually even three, birds with one stone: she is a woman, even an authentic feminist and of colour!). The two singers mention that these ‘babies’ that they are defending are not only women but can also be ‘trannies’ (a controversial term, which is still viewed as offensive by much of the trans* community), so trans* people and men. I will discuss in/exclusion of trans people in more detail in Track 07: Trans*. I term this strategy anarcho-camp98 because Scream Club draw on the punk influences of the Riot Grrrls along with revolutionary slogans and thereby incorporate empowering feminist-queer elements.

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  Entitled ‘Queering the Bitch’, presented on 12.01.2008 during the event ‘Lust am Verrat’ (Lust for Betrayal) in Vienna. 95   www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wd9fu9zJfE, retrieved on 14.01.2008. 96   www.lastfm.de/music/Scream+Club/+videos/+1--N2-opLhvhw, retrieved on 14.01.2008. 97   www.lastfm.de/music/Scream+Club/+videos/+1-I2Xh1rQvEuw, retrieved on 14.01.2008. 98   Beatriz, Beto, Preciado gave me the idea to invent new strategies such as ‘anarchocamp’.

Track 04

Mask/Masquerade – Transforming the Gaze To view gender roles as masks is not so far-fetched. Nietzsche already mentioned this correlation and Joan Riviere was the first woman to analyse femininity as masquerade in 1929. In order to explain why mask and masquerade is a queer strategy, I deal with the gaze in more detail and also with the strategies as to how the gaze can be deceived. Firstly, a quote from anthropology, which shows that masks cannot stand on their own and are always dependent on context. Claude Lévi-Strauss recognised that masks, like myths, cannot be read on their own as isolated objects, rather they attach themselves to myths that should explain their origin and justify their role: ‘Each type of mask is linked to myths whose objective is to explain its legendary or supernatural origin and to lay the foundation for its role in ritual, in the economy, and in the society.’1 Nietzsche One philosopher has dealt with the mask in a way that is significant for my analysis of queer strategies in rock and pop music; he came upon the idea of the mask through his engagement with Greek tragedy. In contrast to the thinking of his time, in which the mask was considered to be disingenuous and sinister as it concealed honesty and openness, he viewed the mask as not necessarily deceitful and bad. Nietzsche sees nothing false in the use of the mask so long as one is aware of and can take pleasure in it.2 It seems that Nietzsche also dealt with role play; in the The Gay Science/ The Joyful Wisdom (Aphorism 356), he mentioned a profession as specific role. Surprisingly he also looked at the role of the woman, which in his opinion is a desired image of the man: ‘If we consider the whole history of women, are they not obliged first of all, and above all to be actresses?’ (original emphasis)3 This was followed by critique of men, which he put in the words of a wise man: ‘it is the men … who corrupt women; and everything that women lack should be atoned   Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Way of the Masks (Vancouver, 1982), p. 14.   Walter Kaufmann, ‘Nietzsches Philosophie der Masken’, in W. Müller-Lauter and V. Gerhardt (eds), Nietzsche – Studien. Internationales Jahrbuch für die NietzscheForschung, 10/11 (Berlin and New York, 1981/1982), p. 112. 3   Nietzsche, Friedrich, The Joyful Wisdom (New York, 1924), Aphorism 361, pp. 319–320. 1 2

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for and improved in men – for man creates for himself the ideal of woman and woman moulds herself according to this ideal’.4 Nietzsche is therefore aware that circumstances force various forms of roles and masks upon people.5 There are many different masks and some masks conceal another mask; ‘every philosophy also conceals a philosophy; every opinion is also a lurking-place, every word is also a mask’.6 Walter Kaufmann’s concluding remarks on the mask in Nietzsche’s work are as follows: The image of the mask, with its inherent dualism of appearance and reality, is of course questionable. Maybe – as Nietzsche himself suggests in some of his later statements – there is only fluidity and nothing really fixed. And maybe there is not even a ‘self’. Maybe individuals have no being and no nature, and if they did have one, then one could say that their task is to overcome it. Nietzsche’s depth stems partly from the fact that his work raises these questions.7

So according to Nietzsche, behind the mask, there is only another mask. Analysis of the Gaze An analysis of the gaze or the look in our society is a big help in explaining the strategy of the mask and masquerade as the mask or masquerade deceives the gaze and diverts the attention to something else in order to distract from something that the wearer wants to hide. The first theory of the gendered gaze emerged in the 1970s and principally dealt with the genders’ different practices of looking. In Reviewing Queer Viewing Caroline Evans and Lorraine Gamman explain the way in which John Berger described the different forms of viewing in 1972. He also looked into the various forms of the gendered gaze and argued that men look at women and, in being looked at, women also observe themselves. He describes how power differences operate, which stem principally from the economic and ideological effect of capital, and how they influence the relationship between the genders by positioning women as objects and men as subjects. He wrote that the viewer is usually male in our culture, as women are already taught and convinced in early childhood to continuously observe themselves. The image of the woman normally serves to please the man.8 4

  Ibid., Aphorism 68, p. 102.   Kaufmann, ‘Nietzsches Philosophie’, p. 118. 6   Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, Aphorism 289 (Maryland, 2008), p. 161. 7   Kaufmann, ‘Nietzsches Philosophie’, pp. 130–131. 8   Caroline Evans and Lorraine Gamman, ‘The Gaze Revisited, or Reviewing Queer Viewing’, in Paul Burston and Colin Richardson (eds), A Queer Romance: Lesbians, Gay Men and Popular Culture (London and New York, 1995), pp. 18–19. 5

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Berger’s work does not include a model of ‘power’ that is connected to ideas of consumer fetishism and capital, rather it is similar to the Marxist model of power ‘from above’. Foucault’s model is different as it permeates all social classes and is not defined solely on an economic basis. Foucault ascribes power to knowledge and gives us a model of the objectification of women and also of men without referring to psychoanalysis.9 In a Foucauldian sense, the gaze is surveillance. In his book Discipline and Punish he uses Bentham’s panopticon model to explain disciplinary power in society. This model is an architectonic building in the circular form with a tower in the middle. The cells are positioned at the periphery and each cell has two windows. One is on the outside and one looks to the tower in which there is a guard who can see all sections. There could be a prisoner, an ill person, an insane person, a school pupil or a worker inside, according to what the building is being used for. This permanent visibility guarantees the exertion of power, as the inhabitants of the cells know that they can be monitored down to the smallest movement. Thus, they are permanent objects of information and adhere to the rules without them being explicitly enforced. This structure dissociates vision from being seen. For Foucault, Bentham portrayed an optimal form of control that manages to reform morals, preserve health, vitalise industry, broaden education and decrease the public duties. According to Foucault, the panopticon is a new political autonomy that is not based on sovereignty but rather on a disciplinary society. The punished are not persecuted; rather the body is trained as a usable force and as a centralisation of knowledge accumulation. The criteria are the economic productivity of power mechanisms that reach such a wide range and efficiency.10 The growth of the capitalist economy required the specific modality of disciplinary power, which was the precursor of the oppression of the forces and bodies. According to M. Rodríguez Magda, this model was replaced by omnipresent technology. This presence of ubiquitous video cameras was accepted and the feeling of being watched has become a usual occurrence. This reality obtains its true dimension through registration, copying and archiving. In this way, society protects itself from risks. The citizen feels more protected, from the violent fringes of society, than they feel spied on. Does the twenty-first-century individual even exist if they are not seen by anyone?11 Even our private lives can no longer be separated from images (e.g. holiday photos and videos, family parties, etc.)12 We hope that these pictures amount to a coherent story and thus portray our life or even replace it. Bentham’s panopticon produced its normalising effect regardless of whether the guard’s place was occupied or not. The transmodern panopticon is

 9

  Ibid., p. 19.   Rosa Maria Rodríguez Magda, Transmodernidad (Barcelona, 2004), p. 176. 11   Ibid., p. 177. 12  Ibid. 10

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based on this seeing without the gaze (e.g. Paul Virilio’s ‘seeing machine’). It is in this way that remote monitoring emerges in real time.13 The disciplinary gaze originated with the modern, the fragmented gaze is postmodern and the transmodern paradigma offers us a total gaze, the transparency is constantly present regarding the absence (of a guard). Facebook is another example of this transmodern gaze. This substitution of the presence with the image is shown at its most extreme through virtuality. The excess of absence is portrayed, for example, by the computer games14 in which the protagonists are just copies of real actors. There is no original that is not just a cyber-technological construction in turn.15 The development of the gaze to the point of the image production without an object led to the Baudrillardian murder of the real.16 The analysis of the mask or masquerade will lead to a similar result, which will be explained in more detail in the course of this chapter. The controlling and disciplinary functions of the gaze, which are explicated in Foucault’s work, illustrate the importance of the gaze in our society. This chapter illustrates the strategies that exist to deceive and confuse the gaze and thereby escape categorisation (e.g. the classifications in a binary gender system). Before I go into the strategies of the mask and masquerade a clarification of visual pleasure and enjoyment in viewing, as in Laura Mulvey’s article on ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, is necessary.17 Foucault’s central thesis is that power starts in the gaze. The psychoanalytical perspective shifts the emphasis onto the idea of gendered power relationships (in particular ‘phallic power’). Mulvey’s article is the first contribution that connects the gaze with Freud and Lacan’s psychoanalysis.18 In this article, she writes that cinema offers many possible variations of enjoyment whilst watching. One of those is scopophilia, pleasure (lust) whilst viewing. Freud wrote about this in the Three Essays on Sexuality and isolated scopophilia as one of the sexual instincts, which exists as a drive quite independently from the erotic zones. Freud associates scopophilia with taking people to be objects and subjugating them to a controlling and prying gaze. In his examples, Freud mainly concentrates on children’s voyeuristic activities, i.e. their desire to see that which is private and forbidden (curiosity about other people’s genitals and bodily functions). In his analysis, scopophilia is essentially active but it can develop into a narcissistic form. In extreme forms it can lead to a perversion and produce obsessive voyeurists, whose only sexual gratification comes from viewing an objectified other in an active, controlling sense.19 13

    15   16   17   18   19   14

Ibid., p. 178. Ibid., p. 179. Ibid., p. 180. Ibid., p. 182. Appeared for the first time in: Screen, 16/13 (Autumn 1975). Evans and Gamman, ‘The Gaze Revisited’, p. 21. Laura Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures (Bloomington, 1989), pp. 16–17.

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Alongside the scopophilic aspect that arises through the pleasure of using another person as an object of sexual stimulation, there is a second aspect that develops through the narcissism and the constitution of the ego and has to do with the identification of the viewed image. Laura Mulvey cites Jaques Lacan to explain the mirror theory; he describes how important the moment is for children, in which they recognise their own mirror image as this represents a significant root of the constitution of their ego. The mirror phase happens when the physical ambitions exceed the motor capacities with the result that the recognition of a self is joyful and that they perceive their own mirror image as less flawed than their own body. Recognition is therefore associated with misrecognition. What is important is that this image, the matrix, portrays an imaginary, a recognition/misrecognition and an identification and therefore the first articulation of the ‘I’, the subjectivity. This is thereby the birth of a long love-affair between the image and the effigy of the self. Mulvey introduces the similarity between the cinema screen and the mirror; she points out that the fascination with cinema is strong enough to allow a temporary loss of the ego. This feeling of forgetting one’s own world has something to do with the pre-subjective moment of recognition of the image. At the same time, cinema has been produced by ego ideals, for example the stars of the big screen. Stars are central in two areas, both with regard to the screen and also the script, where they play a role in-between similarity and difference (the glamorous person plays an everyday person).20 On the one hand the two contrasting aspects require a separation of the erotic identity of the subject from the onscreen object (active scopophilia), but on the other hand also an identification of the ego with the onscreen object. In this way, the gaze can be appreciative in its form but threatening in its content.21 The current image of the woman as (passive) raw material for the man’s (active) gaze is significant for the content and structure of the representation. A psychoanalytical background is necessary here; in their representation, women can mean castration and thereby activate voyeuristic and fetishist mechanisms in order to deal with this threat.22 The male subconscious has two possibilities to escape this castration anxiety; either dealing with the flashbacks of the original trauma (to explore the woman and reveal her secret), or the degradation, punishment or also the rescue of the guilty object. Further, there is also the complete rejection of the castration anxiety where the woman is replaced by a fetishised object or the figure that is represented is remodelled into a fetish so that it comes across to the viewer as strengthening rather than as threatening.23 The fetishistic scopophilia augments the physical beauty of the object and transforms it into something self-gratifying. Voyeurism, however, can be associated 20

    22   23   21

Ibid., pp. 17–18. Ibid., pp. 18–19. Ibid., pp. 20–25. Ibid., p. 21.

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with sadism as the pleasure lies in attributing the guilt to someone (castration) and thereby precipitating the control and subjugation of the guilty person.24 Mulvey bases much of her argument on the assumption that the male figure cannot withstand the burden of being sexually objectified. It is true that in the 1970s, when she wrote the article, there were very few erotic images of men but since then the naked male body has been increasingly put on display and (homoor hetero-) sexualised. In the 1980s and 1990s, the male body was increasingly used in advertising and fashion. Porno magazines for women were founded, which used codes for the objectification of men that had previously only been used in gay magazines.25 Suzanne Moore was the first critic to distance herself from this conventional kind of analysis of the gaze and directed attention to the voyeuristic female heterosexual image. She argues that codes and conventions that are associated with gay pornos create another space for women as active voyeurists of the male erotic spectacle. Even British style magazines such as The Face, Blitz or i-D are marketed at both genders. The images of pop stars and models, for example, appeal to both the gay man and the heterosexual woman. Thus, Linda Williams also analysed pornography in the United States that is aimed both at gay men and heterosexual women.26 Many lesbian and gay critics have challenged Mulvey’s theory whereby two main topics to be dealt with have evolved. The first concerns the dynamic of the public’s sexual desire in relation to the images. The second concerns the way in which individuals identify with images of people in a narcissistic way (including with people of the other gender).27 With regard to the lesbian gaze, Suzie Bright observed that lesbian porno films with butch/femme relationships experienced a boom in the United States in the 1990s. Lesbian film makers and viewers contribute different cultural competences that are based on the production and consumption of lesbian imagery. This is why ‘normal’ mainstream porno producers get it wrong; they do not know the lesbian cultural codes and miss the lesbian market.28 In order to be able to re-think the theory of the gaze, one not only needs to include lesbian and gay perspectives, but also re-think the heterosexual perspective, and not solely because the responsibility for sexual politics is just as much heterosexual as homosexual.29 Judith/Jack Halberstam criticises psychoanalytical research on the gaze and is adamant that there is actually a ‘queer cinema’ that plays with varying identifications: 24

  Ibid., p. 22.   Evans and Gamman, ‘The Gaze Revisited’, p. 32. 26   Ibid., p. 33. 27  Ibid. 28   Ibid., p. 36. 29   Ibid., p. 42. 25

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The significance, then, of reformulations of spectatorship by queer film critics such as Traub and Mayne lies in their ability to multiply the gendered positions afforded by the gaze and to provide a more historically specific analysis of spectatorship. A less psychoanalytically inflected theory of spectatorship is far less sure of the gender of the gaze. Indeed, recent discussions of gay and lesbian cinema assume that the gaze is ‘queer’ or at least multidimensional. It is important, I think, to find queer relations to cinematic pleasure that are not circumvented by the constrictive language of fetishism, scopophilia, castration, and Oedipalization. At this historical moment, we may simply have to avoid psychoanalytic formulations (rather than, say, negate them through a methodical critique) to get beyond them and forget the new cinematic vocabulary that Mulvey seemed to be calling for but seemed not to be able to imagine. Queer cinema, with its invitations to play through numerous identifications within a single sitting, creates one site for creative reinvention of way of seeing.30

One strategy to escape fetishist scopophilia and the heterosexual gaze is the mask or the masquerade as the mask protects the object from the gaze. Mary Ann Doane, Joan Riviere and Efrat Tseëlon provide the theoretical background. Mask and Masquerade Mary Ann Doane looks at the female viewer and the masquerade in film in more detail and notes that Freud always considered the woman to be the mystery, the hieroglyphic or the image. For him, the hieroglyph is, on the one hand, relating to discourse on the woman, an indecipherable language, a distinctive system that negates its own function, as it does not reveal its meaning to those who do not have the solution. On the other hand, hieroglyphics are the most easily readable language. This directness comes from their status as a language of images as there are no gaps or spaces between the characters. These iconic characteristics allow the relationship between the significate and significant to be less arbitrary as with other languages of symbols. For Freud, the woman is too near to her ‘self’, too involved in her own secret.31 The woman is considerably more bound to her body than the man, as Hélèn Cixous and Sarah Kofman analysed. The female distinctiveness is therefore spatially close at hand. A spatial distance in the man’s relationship to his body becomes a temporal distance in the use of his knowledge. This is shown in Freud’s analysis of the knowledgeable subject. The knowledge, that is meant here, is the knowledge of sexual difference and how this knowledge is connected to the gaze,

  Judith Halberstam, Female Masculinity (Durham, NC, 2004), p. 179.   Mary Ann Doane, ‘Film and the Masquerade: Theorizing the Female Spectator’, in John Caugie (ed.), The Sexual Subject: A Screen Reader in Sexuality (New York and London, 1992), p. 230. 30

31

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especially with regard to the visibility of the penis.32 The girl that observes the naked young boy sees and recognises the difference (the penis) immediately. However, the young boy does not share this immediate recognition. The castration anxiety then follows. The knowledge of sexual difference ensues in the distance between the gaze and the threat. This gap or space between the visible and the recognisable, the possibility of not owning that which is seen, prepare the basis for fetishism. The male viewer is also predestined to be a fetishist, for the woman, however, it is extremely difficult to take the position of a fetishist.33 For me, as for several other theorists, Freud’s analysis of the knowledge of gender difference is implausible as it takes a very male standpoint. It sounds as if the boy is scared of losing his penis when he sees the girl as seemingly must have happened to the girl as she does not have a penis. But what if there is also something like uterus envy, or the fear of not being able to bear children? Or expressed on a ‘queer’ level, as Peaches said, intersex envy? Mary Ann Doane points out that the female observer must oscillate between the female and the male position and that the cinema leads to a masculinisation of the audience. Many feminists criticised Mulvey’s assertion that, other than the male gaze, there is not much room for women in mainstream cinema. The critics see the mainstream as a possibility for feminist intervention. In films such as Black Widow or Alien 2 and 3 the female gaze was allegedly successful in disturbing the patriarchal discourse and thereby the objectification of the erotic gaze on women. This often means that both men and women must identify with the female gaze in order to understand the punchline. The use of mocking and irony in order to subvert the subordinate female position is an established sitcom strategy that can be found in TV programmes such as Golden Girls and Absolutely Fabulous.34 Doane argues that it is much more understandable that women want to take on a male position as the female position is not associated with privileges. What cannot be so easily explained is, that if this is the case, why some women want to emphasise their femininity and will often present an excess of femininity to the extent that they perform a female masquerade. Doane writes that the masquerade is more complex than drag because it already recognises that femininity is itself constructed as a mask and is just a decorative layer for a non-identity.35 However, theorists such as Judith Butler have pointed out that drag also exposes this seemingly original identity and reveals its non-existence. Mary Ann Doane refers to Joan Riviere in her analysis, who was the first to consider female masquerade using a psychoanalytical approach. Her article ‘Womanliness as a Masquerade’ was published for the first time in The International Journal of Psychoanalysis in 1929. In this case study analysis she describes an intellectual woman and emphasises that such women corresponded to 32

    34   35   33

Ibid., p. 232. Ibid., p. 233. Evans and Gamman, ‘The Gaze Revisited’, pp. 27–28. Doane, ‘Film and the Masquerade’, p. 234.

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the masculine type at that time. (Teresa de Lauretis states that there is a similarity to Joan Riviere’s own life and maybe she used herself as an example in this case.) One area of this woman’s life was filled with a certain fear that she felt after every public appearance, where she had to speak in front of an audience. Despite her success and her practical as well as her intellectual capacities in dealing with an audience and leading a discussion, she was nervous and uneasy the night before, as if she had done something inappropriate. Furthermore, she was also obsessed with a particular form of acknowledgement that she usually looked for in the attention of or a compliment from a man who conformed to a father figure role. She looked for two forms of acknowledgement; firstly, direct compliments about her performance and, secondly, and more importantly, an indirect acknowledgement of sexual attention from these men. The analysis of her behaviour after her performance shows that she flirted with these men in a somewhat hidden way. This behaviour contrasted starkly with her impersonal and objective approach during her intellectual presentation. Riviere emphasises that the analysis of this case shows that there was significant rivalry between the patient and her father. Her intellectual work was based on an obvious identification with her father. Dreams and fantasies, such as the castration of her husband, demonstrate her quite conscious feelings of rivalry and desire for dominance. She always strongly rebuffed any assumption that she was inferior to the men and was not equal to them. In the analysis it becomes apparent that the flirting is a defence strategy that she used out of fear of the rejection and punishment of her father who was castrated by her intellectual performance. The aim of her compulsive behaviour is therefore not acknowledgement but to evoke friendly feelings in men. She achieved this through the masking as innocent and harmless. The patient had previously had dreams where people put masks on their faces in order to avoid catastrophes. People could, for example, avoid a tower on a hill falling on their village. Femininity can therefore be adopted and put on as a mask, in order to hide masculinity’s possession and also prevent the rejection of men. Riviere admits that she sees no difference between the masquerade and femininity. The masquerade is principally used to avoid fear and not as a form of sexual pleasure. For Lacan, the fetish is a specific value that is imposed on the woman through the masquerade, as her intention is to become the phallus. Thus, she rejects all the attributes of the masquerade. She wants to be loved and desired for that which she is not.36 In opposition to this view of femininity as a masquerade, through which the heterosexual woman becomes a simulacrum, a semblance (similar to the femininity, which is based on an assumed masculinity), Emily Apter suggests in Feminizing the Fetish that female subjectivity and fetishism are explained with ideas such as

36   Teresa de Lauretis, The Practice of Love: Lesbian Sexuality and Perverse Desire (Bloomington and Indianapolis, 1994), pp. 270–271.

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‘an aesthetic of decoration’ without immediate recourse to a compensatory phallus substitute.37 Apter demasks the phallic theory of the masquerade and wants to replace it with a projected confirmation of female ontology. Female fetishism is not compensatory because of the lack of a phallus, rather because of an unspecified female loss and is compensated by the feminine collecting of objects, dresses, relics that signify a lover, parents, children or feminine doubles. This feminine fetish is part of an erotic economy of discontinuity or of separation and disappropriation and is therefore less fixated with a castration anxiety. Teresa de Lauretis sees the masquerade as closely linked to fetishism and narcissism, which are at least partly based on the erotic economy of loss.38 De Lauretis goes a step further and states that the female masquerade of the masculinity in male drag or in the contemporary butch is not a phallic symbol, a substitute for a penis, rather the loss of the female body. For Lauretis, the masquerade is a type of performing, that is, a public display of the self for others in a particular socio-cultural context. Therefore the form or manner of reaction, the form the masquerade takes and to whom it is addressed are a part of its psychosexual content. She cites three examples for the differentiation of the aim, object choice and addressing: how sexual pleasure is obtained, through which fetish and whether the subject’s libidinous investment is in the female body or in the phallus. According to Mary Ann Doane, masquerade’s resistance to patriarchal positioning lies in its denial to produce femininity as an affinity, as a presence to itself. However the masquerade requires a simulation of the missing gap or distance; it serves to create that missing something in the form of a certain distance between the self and the image of the self. This type of masquerade is also described as ‘femme fatale’ and is considered by men to be bad because whenever a woman uses her body to influence the law or the discourse, she subverts the law or discourse that rest mainly on the masculine structure of the gaze. In the destabilising of the image, the masquerade confuses the male gaze.39 The masquerade also shows the way of being for the Other, such as the simple objectification or the confirmation of the representation. If the female patient in Joan Riviere’s work gives up her status as a speaking subject, she becomes the total image of femininity and thereby compensates for her ‘false step’ into subjectivity (masculinity).40 In Riviere’s description, femininity does no exist as such; it is just a disguise to hide the female adoption of masculinity and as an illusion to appease the avenging father.41 37

  Ibid., p. 273.   Ibid., p. 274. 39   Doane, ‘Film and the Masquerade’, p. 235. 40   Mary Ann Doane, ‘Masquerade Reconsidered: Further Thoughts on the Female Spectator’, in Mary Ann Doane, Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis (New York and London, 1991), p. 33. 41   Ibid., p. 34. 38

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Doane emphasises that in the psychoanalytical treatise in Freud, Lacan and Riviere’s work, femininity is seen as a reaction to the unbecoming appropriation of masculinity. Doane does not state that this is an adequate description, but rather that it persists in discourse. These discourses assign women a particular position and place in a patriarchal culture, even though this position is not real, as it does not show the differences between individual women.42 In summary, Doane states on the topic of femininity and the masquerade that femininity is a function of the mask that resolves the question of essentialism before it has even been posed. In one theory, in which the claustrophobic affinity of the woman to her body is emphasised, the concept of masquerade signifies a break in the system.43 The difficulties and drawbacks that Doane exposes in the concept of the masquerade are, firstly, that it is viewed as counteraction to the possession of masculinity; femininity is therefore dependent on masculinity. Secondly, the masquerade is not theorised as a joyful and affirmative game, but rather as a compensatory action that is driven by fear.44 A further difficulty arises if the concept of the masquerade is associated with that of the female audience, which emerges from the curious mixture of activity and passivity in the masquerade. Masquerade would more easily explain the status of the woman as the observed rather than as the observer.45 As Efrat Tseëlon writes in the introduction to her edited volume Masquerade and Identities: Essays on Gender, Sexuality and Marginality, the mask is a tool in the deconstruction of identity categories. She points out the differences between mask, disguise and masquerade, which she took from the Oxford English Dictionary: the mask serves as a concealment in the sense of protecting or hiding something from the gaze; disguise, in the sense of a misrepresentation (through the use of false elements) and the masquerade as a ‘false appearance’. Taken from a wide field of anthropological, historical or literary feminism, Tseëlon suggests that while the mask represents (it can be symbolic, minimal, token or elaborate), disguise is meant to hide, conceal, pass as something one is not. Masquerade, however, is a statement about the wearer. It is pleasurable, excessive, sometime [sic] subversive. The mask is partial covering; disguise is full covering; masquerade is deliberate covering. The mask hints; disguise erases from view; masquerade overstates.46

42

  Ibid., p. 35.   Ibid., p. 37. 44   Ibid., p. 38. 45   Ibid., p. 39. 46   Efrat Tseëlon (ed.), Masquerade and Identities: Essays on Gender, Sexuality and Marginality (London and New York, 2001), p. 2. 43

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In any case, owing to its dialectic of concealment and revelation, the masquerade serves to criticise fundamental concepts such as that of nature, of the ‘truth of identity’, ‘the stability of identity categories and the relationship’ between the presumed identity and the outer appearance.47 Tseëlon looks into the discourse of difference and the fantasy of a coherent identity in more detail; she writes that the preoccupation with difference is a modern way of thinking. During the Enlightenment typologies developed, which created the categories of being (or essence). Modernity’s obsession with ordering everything, which peaked with the example of the nation-state, created the myths of a cultural hegemony. This was achieved by suppressing anything that was defined as Other. The Other cannot be classified. The mere existence of the Other represents a constant threat as well as a necessary point of reference to the classification system. Thus, the nation-state system is at the same time a source of identity and a process of exclusion. In setting boundaries around the self, one also defines the non-self.48 Tseëlon sees the concept of the mask as a wider and more paradigmatic idea than the disguise. The mask is fundamentally dialectic and can be used as a technology of identity as well as a means of calling this self into question, as a means of self-definition and deconstruction.49 Masculinity as a Masquerade In his article, Harry Brod emphasises that masculinity itself is a masquerade, although the masculine has traditionally been contraposed to concealment or performance. Thus, Plato forbade poetry in his ideal utopia because its dramatic performance requires someone to pretend to be something that he is not. Rousseau follows Plato’s orders and warns against the corrupt influences or theatrical artificiality on the pure soul of a noble savage. Just like the American cowboy, the ‘real’ man embodies the primitive, unadorned, conspicuous and natural world truths and not the deceiving effect of the urban dandies that dance around at masked balls. For those who share the traditional view, ‘masculine masquerade’ is an oxymoron, a contradiction in itself. Brod tries to explain how we even got to this point, where we can call masculinity a masquerade. He writes that the reconceptualisation of gender had its roots in the activism of the 1960s and 1970s. The discussion of masculinity and femininity was opened by the differentiation between ‘sex’ and ‘gender’. The former is a product of nature, the latter a product of culture50 – or in a technological sense, the hardware 47

  Ibid., p. 3.   Ibid., p. 5. 49   Ibid., pp. 11–12. 50   Harry Brod, ‘The Masculine Masquerade’, in Andrew Perchuk and Helaine Posner (eds), The Masculine Masquerade: Masculinity and Representation (Cambridge, MA, 1995), p. 13. 48

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and software, where the latter can be programmed. Gender is therefore a role, not a biological condition. (In line with my ‘queer’ opinion, I must point out that even the hardware can be replaced or new parts can be added.) The concept of the role, as used by sociological theorists, was borrowed from the world of theatre. The crucial point in this concept is that the role is different and distinct from the person who is playing it. A role is a performance, a portrayal of a person that is independent of the actor playing it. The concept of gender roles is more radical than it seems at first, as to play a role means that there is no connection between the gender and one’s own being. To play a role is to separate one’s own gender from the self.51 Feminists have shown that gender roles are power relationships. The important feminist discovery is that when the gender is assigned, it is not only a differentiation of gender that takes place, but a power system that is termed as patriarchy, sexism or male dominance. Then came a multiplication of roles with regard to class, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, religion, age, appearance, mental and physical abilities, etc. This leads to an undermining of the explanatory power of this role theory. Thus, an alternative theory emerged in the late 1980s and early 1990s. A gender role is more than a role that is based on a written text that can then be performed on stage. It is a performance, an ‘enactment’ that is carried out by the protagonist, which is independent of the given text of the role. For gender as performance theory, gender is not something that we are, but something that we do.52 Gender is a codified form of activity, the social practice that attaches itself to people who internalise these social structures. Gender is a mere attribute that is assigned to an individual. In its most radical form, the performative theory of gender dismantles the fundamental difference between ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ by arguing that there is actually only ‘gender’. The division of people into two separate biological ‘sexes’ is nothing more than an ideological construction.53 According to Brod, there is only a small step from gender as performance to gender as a masquerade. Between the two is the metaphor of ‘masculinity as a masquerade’ that was already explained in 1979 in Paul Hoch’s White Hero, Black Beast: Racism, Sexism and the Mask of Masculinity (London, 1979). Hoch makes reference to Freud and argues that anything that is masked and suppressed in order to appear masculine is an earlier female anal eros. It is a repression that serves to oppress homosexuality. This masculine mask is also worn in order to attain a normative, performance-orientated, phallic, heterosexual and masculine sexuality.54 There is a fundamental difference between the conceptualisation of gender as performance and gender, as masquerade evokes a difference between the artificial 51

  Ibid., p. 14.   Judith Butler, Gender Trouble. Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York and London, 1990) and Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ (New York and London, 1993). 53   John Stoltenberg, Refusing to Be a Man: Essays on Sex and Justice (Portland, 1989). Also Brod, ‘The Masculine Masquerade’, p. 16. 54   Brod, ‘The Masculine Masquerade’, p. 17. 52

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and the real. However, it is exactly this image of a truth that is concealed behind the fiction that is rejected by the theory of gender performativity, as, for this theory, there is only the performance. Our gender performance is artificial in the sense that it was created by us and is therefore not ‘natural’. The masquerade is a step back in the direction of the role theory as it allows one to presume the existence of a real person behind the mask.55 Brod prefers to refer to the plurality of masculinity, especially in relation to the US post-war experiences in the 1950s, when the fear of the erosion of masculinity was widespread. This fear developed as a result of feminised ‘beats’ and other rebels that made the threatening (for the established culture) spectrum of homosexuality visible. This was also due to the technologisation of work and the entry of women into the world of work, which shook the idea of the masculine identity as the breadwinner, and through the technologisation of war, which undermined the identity of the man as the fighter.56 Brod stresses that it took three years following the publication of Sherry B. Ortner’s article ‘Is Female to Male as Nature is to Culture?’57 to discover that men are just as imprisoned by nature as women, which mainly has to do with research on the male body.58 A book that deals with the issue of how masculinity is constructed in popular music is Oh Boy! Masculinities and Popular Music (2007), edited by Freya Jarman-Ivens (for example, Ian Biddle analyses the ‘new’ male singer-songwriter (e.g. José González or Devendra Banhart) and Freya Jarman-Ivens looks at Elvis Presley’s masculinity). In the introduction, she explains why she uses the word ‘boy’ in the title. She does so in order to highlight, firstly, how the boy ‘contributes to the construction of the cultural position of men and of adult masculinity’59 (e.g. boy bands). Secondly, in a queer culture, in ‘the context of BDSM (Bondage and Discipline, Domination and Submission, Sadism and Masochism), the word “boi” refers to a sub – a submissive partner in a sexual scenario – and can refer to males or females of any age’;60 and the same spelling stands for lesbians, ‘who identify with a sense of masculinity, though not necessarily of maleness, and the word may be placed in semantic alignment with the word “butch.” “Boi” can also then be positioned in contrast to “grrrl”, in the sense of “riot grrrl”’.61 I started to explain 55

 Ibid.   Ibid., p. 18. Barbara Ehrenreich, The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment (New York, 1983). 57   In M. Zimbalist, R. Lamphere and L. Lamphere (eds), Woman, Culture, and Society (Stanford, 1974). 58   Ibid., p. 19. 59   Ian Biddle and Freya Jarman-Ivens, ‘Introduction Oh Boy! Making Masculinity in Popular Music’, in Freya Jarman-Ivens (ed.), Oh Boy! Masculinities and Popular Music (London and New York, 2007), p. 5. 60   Ibid., pp. 6–7. 61   Ibid., p. 7. For further explanations of the current usage of ‘boi’ they refer to the online ‘urbandictionary’. 56

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female masculinity (in opposition to male masculinity) in Track 02: Parody with the help of J. Halberstam’s eponymous book. Halberstam looks at drag kings, and I also write more about them in Track 07: Trans*, where I use Halberstam’s masculine continuum for people who were assigned female at birth (FAAB). In Jarman-Iven’s edited volume, there is another interesting article by Halberstam, which refers to the drag king culture and Ma Rainey, Big Mama Thornton and the appropriation of Black culture by White culture using the example of Elvis and his masculinity.62 As a concluding comment on the theory of the mask and masquerade, SueEllen Case makes a comparison with the computer world: ‘One could interpret the tradition of putting on a mask as a practice of using a face-prosthesis in order to transfer cultural knowledge. In a literal sense, the mask could even be seen as an “inter-face” between the individual body and the societal gesture.’63 To see the mask as a face prosthesis or inter-face for the transfer of cultural knowledge is a good example with which to explain the construction of the masculine and feminine masks and thereby the two-gender classification in our culture. However, I want to stress that there does not have to be link between the body and the assignment of gender, or at least not in the way that this happens in our present society. A precisely defined social gender is based on a body, which is defined by particular sexual characteristics. That social gender must correspond to the body. On the subject of the subversive mask and masquerade, I want to reiterate that, as Riviere ascertained in her analysis, femininity as masquerade shows that femininity as an original does not exist. One tries to control the viewer’s gaze and direct it onto something that does not resist in reality. She demonstrates, as Judith Butler already noted, that the gender copies are not dependent on an original. In contrast to the previous strategies, this strategy is purely visual. The others can at least have a rhetorical or literary component of varying strength, which positions the strategy within language (whether spoken or written). Both strategies (visual and rhetorical/literary) can exist within camp as well as in gender parody, for example, the camp in Oscar Wilde’s work is literary. Music Examples Peaches’ ‘Downtown’ – Music Video One video that illustrates both masculine and feminine masquerade and masks is Peaches’ ‘Downtown’. The song was released on the album Impeach my Bush (2006, XI Recordings). In this video, Peaches plays both protagonists herself, a man and a woman who meet each other in a flat. The audience notices that the 62   Judith Halberstam, ‘Queer Voices and Musical Genders’, in Jarman-Ivens, Oh Boy!, pp. 183–195. 63   Sue-Ellen Case, ‘Cyberbodies auf der transnationalen Bühne’, Die Philosophin. Forum für feministische Theorie und Philosophie, 24 (2001): p. 12.

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woman’s as well the man’s performance is a masquerade although it is done very realistically and not like on the album Fatherfucker, where certain details (such as long false eyelashes) pointed to the other gender. This clue is provided through the overlay of life-size dolls’ heads in the bathroom, where one has a stick-on beard. After the sex act on the bed, the woman kills the man and, after completing the deed, strides out of the door as half woman, half man.64 In this video, Peaches performs what McRobbie describes as a post-feminist masquerade. This masquerade has been described by many women as an ironic, quasi-feminist portrayal of excessive femininity which is generally approved of.65 What is important here is that the symbols of hyper-femininity such as stiletto shoes or tight skirts are seen as a free choice and not as obligatory. This post-femininist masquerade (also embodied by the so-called ‘fashionista’) is a strategy that emphasises its unforced nature. However, the theatricality of the masquerade, the tilted hat, the skirt that is too short or the heels that are too high, further emphasise female vulnerability, fragility, uncertainty and deep-seated fear of being punished by the male lack of desire. Both Butler and Riviere wrote about the sublimate aggression towards masculinity and male dominance in the form of masquerade.66 McRobbie stresses that this post-feminist masquerade reaffirms the oppression of the White woman under White male dominance; one example which also illustrates this is the protagonist in Bridget Jones’s Diary. Peaches corresponds to the figure of the phallic ‘girl’, which feigns equality with male behaviour and allows aggression and unfeminine behaviour in women. The phallic girl gives the impression of being equal to her male colleagues. For her, sex is a light-hearted pleasure, a leisure activity, hedonism and sport. She also takes on masculine modes of behaviour – heavy drinking, swearing, smoking, fighting – all without disregarding her desire for men. Nevertheless, this is a difficult balancing act as she should be allowed to portray her masculinity but must also display the femininity that makes her desirable to men.67 Annie Lennox Diva – CD Cover As briefly shown in the section on androgynous camp, Annie Lennox also masters the game of the mask and the masquerade of both genders. Simon Reynolds and Joy Press describe Annie Lennox as the female David Bowie as she resembles the ‘Thin White Duke’ with her man’s suit (with shoulder pads), red hair and edgy appearance.68 A further example of a confusing (with regard to behaviour and 64

  www.youtube.com/watch?v=awKR4vQi5xY, retrieved on 21.01.2008.   Angela McRobbie, The Aftermath of Feminism: Gender, Culture and Social Change (London, 2009), p. 64. 66   Ibid., p. 67. 67   Ibid., p. 84. 68   Simon Reynolds and Joy Press, The Sex Revolts: Gender, Rebellion and Rock’n’Roll (London, 1995), p. 294. 65

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assertions) and feminine (regarding appearance) masquerade is the song ‘I Need a Man’ (from the 1987 album Savage), in which the female protagonist treats men in the way in which macho men treat women. Her contempt is just as obvious as her desire. In the video Lennox wears such a thick layer of makeup that she could just as easily be a male drag queen. In her flawless imitation of lustfulness, which was characterised by disco elements and typified the Rolling Stones in the 1970s,69 she comes across as Mick Jagger in drag. Her repetition of the word ‘baby’ also sounds rather derogatory.70 ‘I need a man is a Möbius band of gender confusion: is Lennox playing a man in women’s clothing who plays a man-eating vamp, a ‘real’ female vamp or something else entirely?’71 Lennox seems to play a similar but gentler game in her 1992 album Diva. The cover shows her in feminine masquerade – in a typical ‘drag queen’ outfit: a pink and orange feather boa as a headdress, yellow eyeshadow, dark eyeliner and orange-red lipstick. Stan Hawkins has a similar opinion about Annie Lennox’s game of doubles with gender masquerade; ‘Lennox, in foregrounding her masquerade as a distancing strategy, appears to transform all the well-worn normative realities of gender in a dazzling semiotic play. This is framed by the imaginative space of the pop promo – a space where identity can easily be interpreted as queer.72 Lennox’ feminine masquerade should blur the boundary between femininity and the mask, which it ultimately does not do. Firstly, her femininity is not defined exactly as she usually presents herself in an androgynous way and, secondly, drag rarely produces a simple illusion or inversion but leads to a questioning of the original. Based upon a strategy of queering, it seems that Lennox dons the mask of the drag artist to blur the divide between her ‘womanliness’ and masquerade. This occurs through a cunning process of renegotiation. Yet, casting aside for a moment, the potency of the female artist in drag, there are implications here that are problematic. For imitation transports with it the meaning of the ‘derivative’ or ‘copy’ in order to confirm the original of itself. Particularly in gender imitation, simple inversions never, in reality, take place … Thus, the problematics of Lennox’s transgression are located in a logic of inversion where she replicates a femme role for the more androgynous role she knows her fans are familiar with. Intent in making her position crystal clear, Lennox sets out to emphasise her pose on the album cover. As a snap shot from the opening promo 69

  Press and Reynolds, ‘Who’s That Girl? Maskerade und Herrschaft’ in Anette Baldauf and Katharina Weingartner (eds), Lips.Tits.Hits.Power? Popkultur und Feminismus (Vienna, 1998), p. 163. 70   Reynolds and Press, The Sex Revolts, p. 296. 71   Press and Reynolds, ‘Who’s That Girl?’, p. 163. 72   Stan Hawkins, Settling the Pop Score: Pop Texts and Identity Politics (Aldershot, 2002), p. 124.

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video of the song, ‘Why’, this image seems to brilliantly thematises the female diva bent on playing with drag in all her glory.73

Stan Hawkins describes the multiple characteristics of her construction as the Diva as what Butler terms as a set of psychic identifications. These identifications destabilise the fixed meanings of gender and sexuality. In this sense, Lennox’s identification emphasises the loss of any form of identification. Hawkins goes so far as to claim that these identity categories that she produces intend to disrupt the compulsive repetition of heterosexuality.74 He concludes by comparing Lennox with Madonna:75 Very much like Madonna, she longs to escape the confines of socially defined gendered identity by journeying into a world of unlimited guises and masks. Generally one has the impression that Lennox goes out of her way to control the gaze of the viewer to her advantage. And this is most borne out by her spectacular manoeuvres of masquerade that seductively entice us into a visual space where gender constructions are playful.76

Fem(me) Strategies in Yo! Majesty’s Music Video ‘Don’t Let Go’ These strategies of feminine masquerades or how to become a fem(me) can be learned, as I experienced in a workshop in Sevilla in 2007, held by ex_dones (Catalan for ex_women). It was entitled ‘Pantojismo’, which shows that stars of popular culture are ideal for the analysis of femininity as a masquerade, because Isabel Pantoja is an Andalusian copla (folkloristic, old-fashioned pop music) singer.77 As Itziar Ziga, one of the leaders of the workshop, explains in Playing with Our Latin Female,78 in the process of learning this hyper-‘femme’ininity not only aesthetic ingredients are important but also emotional contributions, above all love, jealousy and destiny. In this workshop, the worst moments of a person’s love life are parodied in words and acts.

73

  Ibid., pp. 124–125.   Ibid., p. 125. 75   Jarman-Ivens gives also an insight of how the gaze and therefore the gay male and lesbian identification and desire for/with Madonna are established. Freya Jarman-Ivens, Breaking Voices. Voice, Subjectivity and Fragmentation in Popular Music, unpublished PhD Thesis (University of Newcastle, 2006), pp. 102–114. 76  Hawkins, Settling the Pop Score, p. 127. 77   This project even was considered newsworthy and was mentioned on Spanish TV: El pantojismo entra en la universidad (23.05.2007), available at: www.youtube.com/ watch?v=GahlCLa6rog, retrieved on 01.09.2007. 78   In Volcano Del LaGrace and Ulrika Dahl, Femmes of Power: Exploding Queer Femininities (London, 2008), pp. 73–77. 74

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After the masculinity hype in the queer scene (e.g. Judith Halberstam, Female Masculinity, 1998; Del LaGrace Volcano and Judith ‘Jack’ Halberstam, The Drag King Book, 1999), where fem(me) was only considered as subversive in connection with a queer-masculine person, who was assigned female at birth (FAAB), one notices a new trend towards fem(me)ness as a desire for self-representation79 as Sabine Fuchs mentions in her introduction to femme-inism.80 Recent publications (e.g. Sabine Fuchs, Femme! radikal-queer-feminin, 2009; Del LaGrace Volcano and Ulrika Dahl, Femmes of Power. Exploding Queer Femininities, 2008) focus more on queer fem(me)ininity. I prefer fem(me) as used in the fem(me)inist manifesto by Lisa Duggan and Kathleen McHugh, because of the different historical, cultural and geographic circumstances in which either fem or femme is used81 and as a way to express the plurality of fem(me)s. That many of the previous generation of femmes define their sexuality in their desire for and their intention to be found desirable by specifically masculine counterparts. Some younger femmes seek to liberate themselves from this dyadic history in the same way as those expressing female masculinity independent of fem(me)ininity. The remainder of this paper seeks to identify some of those transgressive femme performances which serve not as regulating icons, but as options for subversive expressions of fem(me)ininity.82

The intention is that it is necessary to open up the visibility of lesbians, or as Shane Phelan mentions in her book Getting Specific: Postmodern Lesbian Politics (1994), the visibility must be of lesbians in their irreducible plurality and not the advertising of a single image, for example coloured fem(me)s, supersized bodies or generally non-normative female bodies or representations are important. This has been exemplified by contemporary artists such as Michelle Tea, the Riot Grrrls (Kathleen Hanna), Gossip (Beth Ditto), Yo! Majesty, and also the well-known German actress from the 1930s, Marlene Dietrich, who became famous for her double drag, whereas her ‘double mimesis underscores the instability of the very terms butch and femme’ (original emphasis).83 During the 1940s and 1950s the 79   Dagmar Fink, ‘Rot wie eine Kirsche, pink wie Fuchsia. Femme in Melissa Scotts queer-feministischer Science Fiction’, in Carola Maltry et al. (eds), Genderzukunft. Zur Transformation feministischer Visionen in der Science Fiction (Königstein, 2008), p. 174. 80   Sabine Fuchs, ‘Femme ist eine Femme ist eine Femme … Einführung in den Femmeinismus’, in Sabine Fuchs (ed.), Femme! Radikal-queer-feminin (Berlin, 2009), pp. 34–35. 81   Joke Janssen, ‘Femme für alle im lesbischwulen Mainstream? Ein Plädoyer für die Re/Politisierung eines Begriffes’, in Fuchs, Femme!, p. 65. 82   Melanie Maltry and Kristin Tucker, ‘Femme/Butch: New Considerations of the Way We Want to Go’, Journal of Lesbian Studies, 6/2 (2002): p. 99. 83   Rebecca Kennison, ‘Clothes Make the (Wo)man: Marlene Dietrich and “Double Drag”’, Journal of Lesbian Studies, 6/2 (2002): p. 148.

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butch-fem roles were common in working-class lesbian communities in the United States84 and as Joan Nestle explicates she used fem instead of femme, because the French spelling would not have been understandable for US working-class lesbians and would not reflect her history.85 Concerning the theoretical background of fem(me), Sue-Ellen Case points out in her article ‘Towards a Butch-Femme Aesthetic’ (1993) that the butch and fem(me) roles offer a possibility to resist the dominant construction of femininity and heterosexuality. Also Sabine Hark highlights that butches and fem(me)s raise the visibility of lesbians and do not reproduce heterosexual roles but rather unveil the constructed coherence between sex, gender, desire and identity.86 Sabine Fuchs states that fem(me) is not reactionary because fem(me)s combine femininity with a radical gender- and sexual politics and transform it into femmeininity. Fem(me) is a transformational performance, which is not rooted in a supposed ‘natural’ femininity of a female body and therefore is not an assimilation into hegemonial systems.87 Fem(me) is a queer strategy and some fem(me)s even call themselves transgender, FtF (female to femme). Fuchs refers here to the US documentary FtF: Female to Femme (2006), where the word ‘transitioning’ is used for women who become fem.88 (In their fem(me)inist manifesto Duggan and McHugh write that ‘“fem(me)” is not an identity … The fem(me) body is an anti(identity) body, a queer body in feminine drag’.89 The same is said by the editors of the book Femme: Feminists, Lesbians and Bad Girls (1997): fem(me) is ‘a chosen rather than an assigned femininity’.90 The downside of fem(me) can be the misrecognition of being trapped ‘in the traditional ideas of femininity as weak, helpless and meaningless’,91 thus denying femme its radical and critical nature.92 Another important issue for fem(me)s is their in/visibility, whereby Fuchs argues that if fem(me)s are invisible, it has to be within a heteronormative and therefore heterosexual and femmephobic gaze.93 This

84

  Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy, ‘The Hidden Voice’, in Elizabeth Crocker and Laura Harris (eds), Femme: Feminists, Lesbians, and Bad Girls (New York and London, 1997), p. 22. 85  Fuchs, Femme!, p. 13. 86   Sabine Hark, ‘Parodistischer Ernst und politisches Spiel’, in A. Hornscheidt, G. Jähnert and A. Schlichter (eds), Kritische Differenzen – geteilte Perspektiven. Zum Verhältnis von Feminismus und Postmoderne (Opladen and Wiesbaden, 1998), p. 129. 87  Fuchs, Femme!, pp. 14–15. 88   Ibid., pp. 35–36. 89   Lisa Duggan and Kathleen McHugh, ‘A Fem(me)inist Manifesto’, Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, 8/2 (1996): p. 153. 90   Crocker and Harris, Femme, p. 5. 91  Fuchs, Femme!, p. 14. 92   Crocker and Harris, Femme, p. 3. 93  Fuchs, Femme!, pp. 147–148.

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also happens in lesbian history, because it is defined from a butch perspective94 and referring to fem(me)s ‘little analysis has been undertaken to explore the specificity of their transgressions’.95 Another obstacle for fem(me)s who claim recognition for their transgressive behaviour is that until the early 1990s the accepted aesthetic for a woman in lesbian feminism was androgyny, whereas in the post-lesbian-feminist phase masculinity and therefore butch has taken over. Because of the fem(me)s proud display of fem(me)ininity, lesbian-feminists perceived her as a woman who did not understand her full potential as a capable and strong individual. The signifiers that she had once found powerful tools of attraction and identification became defined by lesbian-feminism as ‘tools of the patriarchy’. Lesbian-feminists taught that high heels bound women’s feet. Lipstick was a sign that women did not consider themselves beautiful and must change themselves, and it simultaneously bound women to the market as excessive capitalist consumers. Skirts and tight clothing not only made women sex objects for men, but also were a source of sexual vulnerability to men. Thus, the femme was stripped not only of her identity, but of any understanding of her identity as subversive.96

There is another basic difference in the construction of identities of butches and fem(me)s, which leads to the assumption that femmes are less subversive: ‘Whereas butches had two indicators of identity – attraction to women and desire to appropriate masculine characteristics – fems had only one; logically, femininity did not set them apart from other women.’97 In order to get rid of these stereotypical views of fem(me)s, Maltry and Tucker set misinterpretations of Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble (1990) right, in explaining that it is not the only option to ‘visibly crossing the gender binary in one’s drag performance’.98 However, if one also focuses on the sexuality, this opens up the subversiveness of fem(me) and one has to look more so at the queer acts and not so much at the visual components. Fuchs actually sees fem(me) as more subversive than butch because the fem(me) disrupts the assumption of the readability of identity on the bodies and destroys the certainty that sexual identity can be seen or made visible.99 Or as Crocker and Harris state: some women, who might otherwise reject dominant cultural standards of feminine beauty, graft a chosen and empowering femininity onto their bodies as 94

  Lapovsky Kennedy, ‘The Hidden Voice’, p. 16.   Maltry and Tucker, ‘Femme/Butch’, p. 91. 96   Ibid., pp. 93–94. 97   Lapovsky Kennedy, ‘The Hidden Voice’, p. 29. 98   Maltry and Tucker, ‘Femme/Butch’, p. 95. 99  Fuchs, Femme!, p. 148. 95

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femmes. Many femmes would not appear properly or conventionally feminine … Often femme femininity, rather than being a way that one looks, is a set of behaviors used as codes of desire.100

The appearance of fem(me), which is similar and different at the same time, is part of the ironic game: ‘The simultaneous appearance of “seeming to be like” and “not seeming to be like” … works as a resistance to heteronormative femininity and opens up space for difference.’101 Another ironic twist is produced by the transgendered musician Rae Spoon, who admits to being ‘most comfortable being perceived as a femme trans man’.102 Yo! Majesty: ‘Don’t Let Go’ (Domino Records) 2009 In this music video103 elements of hyper-‘femme’ininity become evident. At the beginning we see the female protagonist, who sleeps with her head on the desk in front of a computer and the dominating colour in this scene is pink: pink Post-its in all sizes, pink plastic files, pink nail polish. The woman is also wearing a pink t-shirt, and two lipsticks are also lying on the desk. She suddenly wakes up and walks out of the house with her pink handbag. The location is London, and as she passes behind a typical British telephone box her clothes suddenly change to a pinkish-red tight latex catsuit with visible cleavage, high heels and her handbag turns into a pink ghetto blaster. She begins dancing in front of a nail salon and then goes inside where other women look at her as though positively surprised and laugh about her sexy dance moves; they then start dancing with her. The protagonist moves on to a hairdresser and dances as well on the street with the pedestrians watching and laughing about her sexy dance style. She has a short episode with a woman in the solarium, trying to lick her breasts. In a wedding dress shop she appears abruptly in pink between the white bridal gowns and leans over her and kisses the bride in the shop. The bride is positively surprised and starts dancing with her. The next scene takes place during a yoga class for women, where she again integrates her sexy dance moves in the different yoga positions and bends over a woman who is lying on the floor. The last scene is set in a nude painting course for women, in which the nude model lies on her stomach and has an apple on her buttocks, and the protagonist takes a bite out of the apple, and at this moment the other women start taking their clothes off and painting on each other.   Crocker and Harris, Femme, p. 3.   Rebecca Carbery, Queer Genders: Problematising Gender through Contemporary Photography, unpublished Master Thesis (Durham University, 2011), p. 66. 102   ‘Contributor Mini Interview: Rae Spoon’ (March 2011) in Ivan E. Coyote and Zena Sharman (eds), Persistence: All Ways Butch and Femme (Vancouver, 2011), available at: http://persistenceanthology.tumblr.com/page/10, retrieved on 20.12.2011. 103   www.youtube.com/watch?v=zbbvugSXUvc, retrieved on 05.08.2011. 100 101

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The female masquerade used in this music video shows that behind a feminine mask there is no heterosexual woman, but this still might be hyperbolised in a more erotic way as the examples of the new burlesque will show us. New Burlesque in Orlanding the Dominant First of all, one must differentiate between queer burlesque and the mainstream burlesque, which has become common nowadays, such as for example the film Burlesque (2010) with Christina Aguilera and Cher or artists such as Dita Von Teese. In queer burlesque the persiflage of social conventions and the reversal of gender roles and of the dominant social order is important and not the erotic teasing of heterosexual men as in mainstream burlesque.104 In Australia, for example, there is a ‘Gurlesque’-Club, which is only for female and trans people and it is therefore a space free from the cis-(non-trans)male gaze, which destroys the heteronormative and patriarchal imagination about female desire and satisfaction. Furthermore, the performers present intersections of sex, gender, race, class, age and other social inequalities.105 Orlanding the Dominant The queer music burlesque Orlanding the Dominant106 serves as an example for female masquerade. It was staged in 2008 in Vienna and was a collaboration between the Viennese queer-performance band SV Damenkraft, the Viennese musician Gustav and one member of the Sissy Boyz (drag-king band) of Germany. Orlando by Virginia Woolf is a classic feminist-queer text about the protagonist Orlando, who changes their gender during their life and lives from the Elizabethan times up until now. The “ing”-form in the title shows the doing, transforming and performing of different gender-subversive embodiments during this musicaltheatrical burlesque. The musical genres are a mixture of pop, musical, hip-hop, techno, electronic and rock and the actors are Katrina Daschner, Eva Jantschitsch, Sabine Marte, Gini Müller, Christina Nemec and Tomka Weiss.107 The songs of this musical deal with non-fixed identities, for example when Orlando asks themself if they have always been a woman at a moment when they appear to be a man. They also deal with different kinds of desires, which are expressed in burlesque scenes, e.g. when Orlando gets tied up or a nipple tassel twirl is performed.

104   Zahra Stardust, ‘Die Rückkehr der Burlesque’, an.schläge. das feministische magazin (February 2011): pp. 16–17. 105   Ibid., p. 18. 106   Gustav, SV Damenkraft and Sissy Boyz, Orlanding the Dominant – eine queere Burlesque (2009). 107   www.brut-wien.at/start.php?navid=detail&id=42, retrieved on 18.08.2011.

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I will look at the performances of one of the actors in more detail. The fem(me) inine burlesque performer Katrina Daschner founded the Club Burlesque Brutal in Vienna in 2010 and performs there as Professor La Rose. Daschner explains that she became interested in burlesque five years earlier after she first saw a live burlesque show in New York, albeit a straight one, because she already dealt with sexuality, power, performance and performativity in her artistic work at that time. The big difference with her queer burlesque show is in who is on the stage and who is in the audience and therefore who is recognising and producing which kind of codes and in which direction processes of desire can be read. There are concrete lesbian and queer situations on the stage and the performers are mostly queer fem(me)s.108 From a historical point of view, she states that feminist works have often dealt with the status of women as objects and that it has only recently become possible to see feminine heterosexual bodies as sexually active and empowering. However, according to Daschner, the lesbian and queer body was not mentioned before and she also sees her work as the fem(me) answer to all the drag king shows, but she does not want to pin down exactly what femininity is or what a fem(me) has to look like. That is why her burlesque shows present a variety of possibilities.109 The classical procedure for this show is presentation, dance and singing, comedy sketches and striptease, but Daschner also likes to free this genre from the typical long gloves, feather boas and high heels as she did in her film trilogy (Hafenperlen, Aria de Mustang, Flaming Flamingos). In her last film, there is not even a burlesque performance, but it is a burlesque act without bodies, where a lesbian choir takes over the role of the ideal audience in the Brechtian sense of a narrating figure, and interacts with the performer.110 Daschner says that the queer neo-burlesque contributes in an entertaining way to the denaturalisation of femininity. In this way, femaleness and femininity are dismantled, femininity is described as a construction and revalued codes are reinterpreted.111 In one of her exhibition photographs, called ‘Flamingo Massacre’, women with long-haired wigs in all colours stand, embrace and kiss each other without showing their faces, which are covered by the long hair. The viewer can only assume that these are women kissing and hugging each other because of their clothes, legs, shoes and hair. (It seems that we are back to the camp object ‘hair’, which is used for feminine masquerade.)

108   Vina Yun, ‘Das ideale Publikum’, an.schläge. das feministische magazin (February 2011): pp. 19–20. 109   Ibid., p. 20. 110   Ibid., pp. 20–21. 111   Translation from German: ‘Die (queere) Neo-Burlesque, so wie ich sie begreife, trägt auf sehr unterhaltsame Weise zu einer Entnaturalisierung von Weiblichkeit bei. Weiblichkeit und Femininität werden auseinandergenommen, Femininität als Konstruktion beschrieben und auch neu bewertet – Codes umgedeutet’, available at: http://diestandard. at/1297216099412/Ausstellung-Auseinander-genommene-Feminitaet on February 11 2011 (APA), retrieved on 19.08.2011.

Track 05

Mimesis/Mimicry – Poetic Aesthetic According to Thomas Metscher the term ‘mimesis’ can best be conveyed by the semantic field ‘portrayal, expression, assimilation, imitation, sensual realisation, presentation/representation’.1 As Hermann Koller discovered through his ethnological research, mimesis was initially used to refer to magical ritual dances. In the ceremonies, mimesis was understood as a form of expression for the sensory presence of something that is not observed in daily life.2 Classical Mimesis Mimesis can be viewed both as representation and also imitation. However, Valeriano Bozal emphasises that mimesis originally meant ‘representation’ in a special sense, which can best be explained with the term colossus. Bozal establishes the connection between the magical ritual dances and the presence of something that does not exist. According to Bozal the Greeks used the term kolossós to refer to a phenomenon which allowed this world to connect with another, namely that of the dead.3 Through this rite, the stone becomes a colossus, a doppelgänger. The doppelgänger is something complementary; it is different from the image. It is not a natural object but neither is it a product of the mind; it is neither an imitation of a real object nor an illusion of the mind, nor a creation of thought. The doppelgänger is a reality beyond the subject.4 Bozal looks at the etymology of mimesis and writes that it comes from mimos and mimeisthai. These were terms that originally referred to a change in personality that took place in certain rituals in which the followers felt that they embodied other – either spiritual or animal – non-human beings. Mimeisthai does not mean imitation but rather representation, embodying another being that is separate from oneself.5 In my view, this ritual with the colossus can be compared to the modern-day ritual of going to a concert. The colossus is comparable to the cult surrounding a rock/pop band or star; the band or person is, in the sense of the colossus, 1   Thomas Metscher, ‘Ästhetik und Mimesis’, in Thomas Metscher (ed.), Mimesis und Ausdruck (Köln, 1999), p. 36. 2   Ibid. 3   Valeriano Bozal, Mímesis: las imágenes y las cosas (Madrid, 1987), p. 67. 4   Ibid., pp. 68–69. 5   Ibid., p. 70.

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unattainable, monumental and impressive. The ritual of going to a concert is organised for the arrival of a ‘colossus’; the concertgoers assemble and call out to the colossus. The followers of the rite are, in this case, the fans who represent and embody the idol or the band. Plato To return to the classical concept of mimesis: Plato uses mimesis in a philosophical sense to criticise the truth claim of poetry. Later, in the Sophist, Plato divides image-producing art (mimetic) into those that produce ‘likenesses’ and those that produce ‘semblances’. In this way, the original meaning of dance-like portrayal is maintained, the connotation of pictorial representation added to it and Plato’s concept of mimesis relates to all art forms, to painting and sculpture as well as to poetry, dance, music and architecture.6 Plato wrote about the negative side of mimesis in the Laws and about the mimetic character of dance, which he saw as an imitation of human behaviour, or of music, which also has an educational aspect to it.7 People’s characters can be imitated in music or dance, both the bad and the good characteristics. Thus, according to Plato, this model can contribute to the development of young people’s characters. So whenever a man states that pleasure is the criterion of music, we shall decisively reject his statement; and we shall regard such music as the least important of all (if indeed any music is important) and prefer that which possesses similarity in its imitation of the beautiful … Thus those who are seeking the best singing and music must seek, as it appears, not that which is pleasant, but that which is correct; and the correctness of imitation consists, as we say, in the reproduction of the original in its own proper quantity and quality.8

Plato is also of the opinion that young people should listen to those types of music or practice those forms of dance that embody moderation, rationality and order. The law-maker should call attention to everything that has to do with music and dance because it is a concern for the state and not a private or individual matter.9 The reason why poets are not accepted in an ideal society is mimesis. Socrates even refuses to allow Homer to stay in the city if he uses mimesis in his work.   James Duerlinger, A Translation of Plato’s Sophist with an Introductory Commentary: Introduction (New York, 2009), pp. 21–22. 7   Plato, Plato in Twelve Volumes, vol. 2, 655–656 (London, 1967 and 1968), http:// www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Plat.+Laws+656&fromdoc=Perseus%3Atext% 3A1999.01.0166. pp. 655–656, retrieved on 15.8. 2012. 8   Ibid., p. 668. 9   Bozal, Mímesis, p. 75. 6

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It seems, therefore, that poetry does exist that is not mimetic.10 Despite the hypothetical ‘if’, the essence of poetry is mimesis; Socrates gives the assurance that the imitator does not know anything of value about the things that he imitates, rather that mimesis is a type of game that cannot be taken seriously. Anyone who dabbles in tragic poetry, regardless of whether it is iambic or heroic verse, is a (mimetic) imitator. This paradox is never addressed directly, but it is present in Plato’s argument against mimetic poetry: the argument itself is mimetic. Plato condemns poetry poetically, and it is Plato, the poet, that rejects poets.11 Plato also uses terms such as ‘pseudos’ and ‘pharmakon’ to describe mimetic activities. Melberg writes the following on this subject: The latter means poison as well as antidote, and Plato drifts between the oppositions indicated by the very word. That is, mimesis can be prescribed as a drug to be used under control and in moderation – only to be rejected in the next sentence as a dangerous poison. The pseudo-world, says Socrates a bit further on in the text, is of no interest to the gods, but it can be used by man as a pharmakon (389B); and he comes to the conclusion that mimetic lying should be restricted to experts who know how to handle the stuff! (The real addict was, after all, Plato himself, who stubbornly uses dialogical form – thereby mimetically creating a pseudo-world – to represent the mimetically uncontaminated world of ideas.) (original emphasis)12

Plato makes the first tentative steps towards banishing the poet from the ideal city in his third book of The Republic. This rejection is repeated and dramatised in the tenth book. Plato’s third rejection of poets is to be found in Laws, where he writes about the Athenian stranger who suddenly recognises that the discussion about the ideal city is being conducted in a very poetic way. The city that he has built in his head imitates the ideal life and thereby becomes a mimesis of real life.13 Aristotle Melberg also points out that Aristotle referred to Plato’s critique of Homer and pronounced himself to be against it.14 Aristotle’s mimesis is to be defined through the myths and practice (behaviour) that brings the concept nearer to time and action. This is in contrast with Plato’s mimesis, which is nearer to the image,

  Arne Melberg, Theories of Mimesis (Cambridge, 1995), p. 11.   Ibid., p. 12. 12   Ibid., p. 15. 13   Ibid., p. 20. 14   Melberg, Theories of Mimesis, p. 17. Aristotle, Poetics, Chapter 24 (London, 1963), p. 45. 10

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imagination and imitation.15 Thus, platonic mimesis in the work of Aristotle is given a new function and Plato’s mimesis is ‘detoxified’. Many comments on mimesis in Aristotle’s work also emphasise that his mimesis, in comparison to Plato’s, is creative and productive. Aristotle defines art as mimesis and writes that the artist is a creator. In Plato’s work, mimesis is passive and imitative. Mimesis achieves this dynamic character in Aristotle’s work through the introduction of temporal elements.16 Aristotle conceives poetry as an ‘after’ that always has a ‘before’. Poetry imitates or re-presents something that happened before. Plato worries about the moral effects of poetry, whereas Aristotle stays with psychology and returns repeatedly to the dreadful terror (phobos) or pity (eleos) that the tragedy triggers in the viewer. The viewer then repeats or imitates what previously took place on stage and then in turn repeats or imitates the action that occurred previously.17 In Poetics, Aristotle shows that mimesis belongs to humanity from childhood on, as it is with the help of mimesis that we learn and acquire new knowledge.18 Not least because of the spread of Arabian Aristotelianism, three different concepts of mimesis have been established in the modern era. The first is the realism-theoretical concept of mimesis, which sees ‘art as a mimesis of life and behaviour in society, mostly related to literature and theatre but often also contained in the mirror image. It reflects human life in its virtues and vices and reveals the essence of the era’.19 The second type of mimesis is the ontic or external mimesis (imitation/emulation in the strict sense of the word). Here, emulation is a natural thing, the principle of ‘imitation naturae’, which is mainly employed in the theory of image-producing arts. Metscher is of the opinion that the arts are placed on the side of empirical science ‘because the principle of ontic mimesis is relevant for both: both art and science depictions of the natura naturata: the world in all its diversity of phenomena’.20 Thirdly, the ontological (or internal) concept of mimesis does not deal with the form or appearance of nature, but rather with how nature creates. For example, music can be seen as the representation of cosmic harmony (Johannes Kepler, Harmonices mundi).21 In his work Time and Narrative, Paul Ricoeur refers to the Aristotelian concept of mimesis as a creative imitation. In this way he lays the emphasis ‘on the break that opens the space for fiction’.22 He analyses mimesis with regard to the different experiences of time in a text and classifies these three aspects: 15   Melberg, Theories of Mimesis, pp. 44–45 and Aristotle, Poetics, Chapter 6, 1449b–1450a, pp. 11–14. 16   Melberg, Theories of Mimesis, p. 45. 17   Ibid., p. 46. 18   Bozal, Mímesis, p. 83. 19   Metscher, Aesthetik und Mimesis, p. 39. 20   Ibid., p. 40. 21   Ibid. 22   Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative (Chicago, 1994), p. 45.

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Mimesis I: is the first intersection between the realm of experience and the text in which the narrative uses the parameter of reality and refers to the fundamental narrativity of experience (e.g. the life-story). Mimesis II: corresponds to the Aristotelian concept of mythos and describes the intra-textual design or configuration of the fictional world (e.g. the composition of fables). Mimesis III: is the second point of intersection between reality and text where the configuration of the fictional world meets the world of the reader (e.g. professional, literature studies readings).23

Mimesis and Music In The Aesthetics of Music, Roger Scruton looks into the problem of representation in music in the works of the Greek philosophers in more detail. He mentions mimesis or imitation in relation to both Plato and Aristotle as he is of the opinion that music is also a form of mimesis. The music that they were referring to was sung, danced or one marched to it. The thing that was imitated was also automatically imitated by the person who was moving to the music. Roger Scruton emphasises that Plato did not differentiate between mimesis as representation and expression and mere copying.24 His theory is based on two assumptions; firstly, that the imitation of the character through music is based on the same phenomenon as the imitation of the character through a person and secondly, that our interest in music involves a form of engagement that is important for dancing, singing or being there.25 Wayne D. Bowman explains the critical view of mimesis in Plato’s work, which I mentioned previously, in Philosophical Perspectives on Music: Ideals are the eternal models by which all particular instances or concrete occurrences are recognized or evaluated. Since in this account of things particulars always fall short of their archetype, the universal of which they are particular examples, all particular things in the world are in some way or other imitations of their ideals. This is the Platonic doctrine of mimesis. Plato’s world, then, consists of varying degrees or levels of reality, the ideal that are most real, faithful imitations that are ‘somewhat’ real, and faulty imitations or outright deceptions that only distort and falsify.26 23

  Ibid., p. 46.   Roger Scruton, The Aesthetics of Music (New York, 1997), pp. 118–119. 25   Ibid., p. 390. 26   Wayne D. Bowman, Philosophical Perspectives on Music (New York and Oxford, 1998), p. 26. 24

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Arne Melberg points out a further characteristic of mimesis: repetition (which also plays an important role in parody). He reveals two ways of analysing and describing the phenomenon of mimesis: Firstly, the shift from mimesis to repetition is the result of a historical process in which the modern era, which he sets in the eighteenth century, is of crucial importance. Paradoxically, the modern development results in its realisation and dissolution, that is, the similarity of the difference clears the way. Secondly, mimesis itself has always been a repetition. This means that is always a meeting point for two contrasting but nevertheless connected ways of thinking, acting and doing: similarity and difference.27 In his book, Melberg principally refers to these two forms and mentions Erich Auerbach’s work Mimesis from 1946, which recounts the entire history of mimesis within the tradition of literary and textual analysis.28 In Walter Benjamin’s work mimesis is not linked to the visual economies of Plato, which promote differentiations such as true–false, model–copy, real–imaginary, but rather to sensory reasoning and similar connections. ‘Mimesis is not a means of ordering experience, but a “faculty” that enables alienated subjects to experience the other/the world. To rethink experience from within the divisions of subjectivity, we need to think mimetically, to let correspondence back into thought.’29 Walter Benjamin describes the theory of mimesis as a historical-anthropological asset. He develops the concept of a mimetic asset, which is rooted in naturalhistorical processes: the concept of a nature that produces similarities (mimicry) is responsible for this. According to him, humans achieve the highest level of mimetic asset; this is the highest accomplishment in the production of similarities to which the gift of being able to see also belongs. Furthermore, it is also the basis for cultural development. (original emphasis)30

The linguistic ‘turn’ is a well-known symbol in modern philosophy and literary theory. Thus, repetition (or later iteration) is an important instrument in Derrida’s deconstructive strategy. In both La Mythologie Blanche (The White Mythology)   Melberg, Theories of Mimesis, p. 1.   Ibid., p. 2. 29   Elin Diamond, Unmaking Mimesis: Essays on Feminism and Theatre (New York and London, 1997), p. 153. 30   Original in German: ‘dafür ist der Begriff einer Ähnlichkeiten (“Mimikry”) erzeugenden Natur verantwortlich. Der Mensch erreicht laut ihm die höchste Stufe des mimetischen Vermögens, es ist dies die höchste Fähigkeit im Produzieren von Ähnlichkeiten, zu der auch die Gabe gehört, diese Ähnlichkeiten zu sehen. Außerdem ist sie die Grundlage kultureller Bildung.’ Metscher, Ästhetik und Mimesis, p. 43. 27 28

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and Economimesis, Derrida sees mimesis as a version of classical metaphysical ontology that is based on an analogy of ‘resemblance’ and similarity. In his readings of Kant he discovers the true mimesis between two productive subjects and not between two productive objects, that is to say, the true mimesis is a criticism of imitation and a tribute to the artist’s creative imagination. In common with Heidegger, Derrida also finds classical mimesis in the ‘physis’ whereas modern mimesis, beginning with Kant, moved into imagination. Derrida’s repetition is neither physis nor imagination, neither imitative nor productive, but rather a linguistically motivated mechanism, which works in all versions of mimesis.31 French post-structuralism is a challenge to mimesis as the radical questioning of the original, of the first time, of similarity, imitation and of similar terms such as nature, art, equality, originality, genius, authority, sovereignty, patriarchy, reveals that these concepts do not maintain the utopian meanings of fiction and everyday life.32 As I already mentioned, the disappearance of mimesis begins in the modern era; the originals were already finished and have disappeared. Foucault also refers to thinking as ‘mime’ (repetition without a model). The mime, which has no model and no original essence, was explored via an analysis of sexuality on a related political front, which views the mime, masquerade and performances as cultural practices, which oppose the identity politics of the phallocentric, heterosexual norms (e.g. Jaques Derrida, Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva and Jean François Lyotard). Judith Butler, Teresa de Lauretis and Sue-Ellen Case relate the mimicry of performance to the ‘drag’ and ‘camp’ of queer practices and identity politics. Similar political questions were posed by Homi K. Bhabha, Isaak Julien and Trinh T. Minh-ha in which mime and performance are used for the understanding of postcolonial practices, improvisation and resistance.33 As Metscher notes, in Adorno’s work, the concept of mimesis has both ontological and anthropological roots, as Benjamin also stated. In Dialectic of Enlightenment, mimesis is described as the tendency of a living being to merge into its surroundings instead of setting itself apart from them. It is the propensity to let go and withdraw into nature.34 On the other hand, Adorno develops a dialectical concept of mimesis that reveals the utopian possibilities, which are implied in mimetic behaviour, namely the potential of the non-identity. True mimesis looks at the non-identitary aspect of the pre-existing things; thus, Adorno introduced the term ‘non-representational

  Melberg, Theories of Mimesis, p. 5.   Timothy Murray, ‘Introduction: The Mise-en-Scène of the Cultural’, in Timothy Murray (ed.), Mimesis, Masochism and Mime: The Politics of Theatricality in Contemporary French Thought (Michigan, 1997), pp. 2–3. 33   Ibid., p. 3. 34   Brigitte Scheer, Einführung in die philosophische Ästhetik (Darmstadt, 1997), p. 183. 31 32

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imitation’. ‘This is not an imitation of something real, rather an anticipation of an Otherness that does not yet exist.’35 Metscher sheds light on the dual nature of mimesis and states that mimesis is simultaneously a condition of liberation and repression. On the one hand it submits to a convention or tradition, on the other hand it furthers survival, selfdevelopment and self-realisation.36 Humanistic conceptions see the productive development in mimesis, post-structural theories focus on the connection between mimesis and power.37 This dialectical aspect of mimesis in relation to power can, in my opinion, be explained using theories of subversion and hegemony from the works of Gramsci, Laclau and Mouffe, Fraser and Foucault. A brief analysis of hegemony and subversion can be found in Track 02: Parody. Sabine Bayerls sees a utopian potential in Adorno’s dialectical concept of mimesis, that is, in the enchantment that art, as a leftover of the magical phase, exercises upon us. Mimesis can be seen as assimilation into a rigid environment as well as sympathetic understanding. Thus, for Adorno, mimesis is also a necessary counterweight to rationality.38 Affective Modelling The power of mimesis in a hegemonic system functions principally through the affective and extraordinary circumstances that can be attained via mimesis. In his chapter ‘Magic and Mimesis’ Georg Lukács writes the following about the connection between these two processes: ‘this reality itself can be influenced in the desired way through the imitation of processes or objects.’39 Rituals are often associated with ecstatic tendencies, which have to do with an artistic evocation of certain subjective states ‘in which and about which a belief develops and is circulated; that they are able to put people, in an otherwise inaccessible way, in direct contact with transcendental powers’.40 Ecstatic states are achieved through dance, drunkenness, toxic excesses, self-mutilation, etc., and are often behaviours that are determined from the outside. The desired affective excess reaches a high level at which one experiences an exhilarating release.41   Metscher, Ästhetik und Mimesis, p. 46.   Ibid., p. 66. 37   Ibid. 38   Sabine Bayerl, Von der Sprache der Musik zur Musik der Sprache. Konzepte zur Spracherweiterung bei Adorno, Kristeva und Barthes (Würzburg, 2002), p. 67. 39   Original in German: ‘durch Nachahmung von Vorgängen oder Gegenständen der Wirklichkeit diese selbst im gewünschten Sinne beeinflußt werden kann.’ Georg Lukács in Georg Lukács Werke, Ästhetik Teil 1, vol. 11: Die Eigenart des Ästhetischen (Neuwied, 1969), p. 379. 40   Ibid., p. 387. 41   Ibid., p. 388. 35

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In Lukács’ later work, mimesis is a general capacity of the human consciousness. Mimesis can be found at all levels of human social life. Thomas Metscher summarises the affective possibilities of mimesis: The fundamental terms in mimesis theory – representation, expression, imitation – refer to the whole spectrum of aesthetic totality – the entirety of the art worlds that we encounter in the history of the arts. Art is replication and the visual portrayal of activity and experience of life practices (in this context the term practice encompasses the unity of activity and experience). Art is also expression: articulation and communication of the psyche: or one could also call it affective modelling. (original emphasis)42

Feminist Mimesis Irigaray In her work, Irigaray dealt mainly with the male gaze in psychoanalysis and philosophy and analyses both fields with regard to the ways in which women can participate in the masculine discourse. The strategy that Irigaray finds most efficient is that of mimesis as an instrument that subjects women to the stereotypical gaze of men in order to call the preconceptions into question. These male constructions of femininity are not repeated exactly. So, for example, if someone is of the opinion that women are illogical, she should talk about it logically. This contrast of logical and illogical should undermine the opinion that women are illogical.43 This form of mimesis is known as strategic essentialism. Irigaray writes about this in her work Ce sexe qui n’en pas un (This Sex Which is Not One) and provides some examples of this method. According to Irigaray the inexact repetition of a negative attitude suggests that women are something different to what is assumed by the male gaze. One cannot put an end to these harmful views of women by simply ignoring them; psychoanalytical methods must be used to expose and demystify them. If they are applied successfully, mimesis repeats the negative view about women without reducing women to this view of them. It renders this attitude ridiculous so that this perspective is discarded. We must ask after the

42   Original in German: ‘Die Grundbegriffe der Mimesistheorie – Darstellung, Ausdruck, Nachahmung – beziehen sich auf das ganze Spektrum ästhetischer Totalität –, das Ganze der Kunst-Welten, die uns in der Geschichte der Künste entgegentreten. Kunst ist Nachbildung und vergegenwärtigende Darstellung lebensspraktischer Handlung und Erfahrung (der Praxis Begriff selbst, wie er hier verstanden wird, umschließt die Einheit von Handlung und Erfahrung), und sie ist Ausdruck: Artikulation und Kommunikation von Psyche: affektive Modellierung, wie gesagt werden kann.’ Metscher, Ästhetik und Mimesis, p. 72. 43   Luce Irigaray, This Sex which is Not One (New York, 1985), p. 76.

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feminine Other; a change of paradigm will only be possible through the mimetic asking after the Other. Irigaray is therefore speaking from the point of view of a women who has been silenced in order to, firstly, challenge the authority of the negative views or of suppression by revealing that this position is nothing more than a fabrication, and secondly, to show how the female body has been excluded by exposing the stereotypical gaze as wrong or by inciting the excluded woman/body to speak, and thereby facilitating a change in the conception of the female subject and body.44 The point is, therefore, to use her terms and theories in other ways in order to progress beyond the simple reproductive portrayal. Bussman emphasises that Irigaray’s repetition can be seen as a variation of Derridean deconstruction. Mimesis is the feminine practice in dealing with texts. According to Irigaray only women can perform the mimetic interpreting text repetition as only they can get a sense of ‘their’ feminine place in written discourse. Differences to Derrida’s and De Man’s views on mimesis can be shown in the following way. In a similar way to Derrida and De Man, Irigaray reverses the relationship between the message of the text and its tropes: metaphors are not belated conceptual truths, rather truths are solidified metaphors. Although Irigaray’s process corresponds to Derrida’s, the concrete consequences that she derives from it are aimed in the opposite direction. She does not strive for a deconstruction of gender difference but rather calls for a gender difference to be inscribed, which did not previously ‘exist’ in the symbolic ‘self’.45 Bussmann points to two problems with Irigaray’s concept, namely that it equates woman with femininity. She is reduced to a biologically gendered being. Secondly, the ‘real’ woman remains trapped in the ‘what theory says about her = femininity’.46 In her most well-known work, Speculum, Irigaray introduces the key term ‘speculation’, which has three different denotations: the (physical) reflection, the (economic) speculating and (theoretical-philosophical) speculation.47 Looking at it from a psychoanalytical point of view, when she writes about the theory of penis-envy, Irigaray is of the opinion that the man re-establishes his worth via the woman’s ‘nothing’. The woman’s body becomes a mirror, which reflects the recognisable image of the similarity.48 In order to explain the reflection more clearly, Irigaray refers to Plato and notes that his philosophical contemplation only ever occurs via one medium. One never looks directly into the sun; a mirror is placed in between, even during a solar eclipse, so that one does not lose one’s 44

  www.iep.utm.edu/i/irigaray.htm ‘Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Luce Irigaray (1932 – present)’, retrieved on 11.07.2007. 45   Lena Lindhoff, Einführung in die feministische Literaturtheorie (Stuttgart, 2003), p. 121. 46   Anne Bussmann, Elemente feministischer Philosophie im Werke Luce Irigarays (Frankfurt, 1998), p. 26. 47   Ibid., p. 30. 48   Irigaray, This Sex which is Not One, p. 77.

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eyesight.49 Luce Irigaray links phallic power with Plato’s mimesis. Due to the lack of the privileged organ, it is impossible for the woman to portray her desire through male symbolism. Women are confined to the position of the mirror and thus reflect the male ‘similarity’. Irigaray calls this process imposed mimesis; a concept with provocative resonance for a practice of resistance.50 In Relating to Queer Theory: Rereading Sexual Self-Definition with Irigaray, Kristeva, Wittig and Cixous, Sarah Cooper refers to the oppressive nature of mimicry51 and cites Carole-Anne Tyler who is of the opinion that Irigaray stands for a notion of femininity that is beyond the reach of many women (all those who are not White, middle-class and heterosexual). These women are categorised as something that they are not, instead of achieving visibility for their own identity category. Tyler’s argument focuses on the critical distance that Irigaray establishes between mimicry and masquerade and asks what the visible difference between the two is. Tyler’s theory is that there is actually no difference between mimicry and masquerade: ‘Once it is recognized that femininity is not a natural expression of an essence but an identity that is always already alienated, the distinction between irony or mimicry and imitation or masquerade is no longer self-evident.’52 Tyler uncovers two further problems in Irigaray’s work: if the feminine, in the new sense, becomes visible, not all women become visible under the umbrella term of this category. However, if mimicry can no longer be differentiated from the masquerade, then the feminine remains completely invisible. Both Butler and Tyler are very aware of whom Irigaray’s category of the feminine excludes; however, Butler does retain Irigaray’s strategy of the mimetic shift. In Bodies that Matter, Butler deals with bodily material, philosophical discourse and the feminine and takes Irigaray’s idea further.53 Butler criticises Western metaphysics, which, in her opinion, are just as dependent on the prohibition of non-heterosexual relationships as on the exclusion of the feminine, as Irigaray brought to light. Butler analyses Irigaray’s readings of Plato and introduces her own view of Plato. She highlights the extent to which Western metaphysics is built upon stable gender positions within the heterosexual matrix being upheld. This matrix ensures that within this tradition, the male always penetrates the female. Butler then challenges these fixed gender positions with regard to these penetrative relationships. She poses the question, what happens when a male penetration of the male or a female penetration of the female are authorised?

  Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman (New York, 1985), p. 147.   Diamond, Unmaking Mimesis, p. IV. 51   Sarah Cooper uses the term uses the term ‘mimicry’ where I use the term mimesis. 52   Carol-Anne Tyler ‘The Feminine Look’, in Martin Kreiswirth and Mark A. Cheetham (eds), Theory between the Disciplines: Authority, Vision, Politics (Michigan, 1990), p. 196. 53   Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ (New York and London, 1993), pp. 37–38. 49

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‘One might well ask whether this kind of penetrative textual strategy does not suggest a different textualization of eroticism than the rigorously anti-penetrative eros of surfaces that appears in Irigaray’s “When Our Lips Speak Together”.’54 Butler views them as possible, reverted mimes, which Irigaray did not take into account but are nonetheless compatible with her strategy of critical mime. For Butler, it is the performance of excessive mimesis that unmasks the constructed status of all identities and she persistently uses such a theory to call the privileged and normative status of heterosexuality into question.55 Kristeva Julia Kristeva links the concept of mimesis closely to the poetic text. What is more when poetic language – especially modern poetic language – transgresses grammatical rules, the positioning of the symbolic (which mimesis has always explored) finds itself subverted, not only in its possibilities of … denotation (which mimesis has always contested), but also as a possessor of meaning (which is always grammatical, indeed more precisely, syntactic. (original emphasis)56

Kristeva uses Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the carnival in the sense of transgression. In general, the carnival could be seen as pretending to throw out existing laws and social norms. For Kristeva, however, carnival is a true transgression, not just a mirror-inverted image of the status quo. Carnival is not simply the other side of the law, it takes them into account. In my view, a popular music concert is a sort of carnival; everyday life is discarded, they are often excessive and the bands sometimes perform in costumes, which then often leads to the costumes being imitated amongst the fans. These costumes often pass over into daily life; a certain style of clothing is often worn according to the preferred music genre.57 The literary word in the carnival is not seen as one-dimensional but rather as an overlapping of levels of text; the poetic word, which has multiple meanings, no longer conforms to the codified discourse’s rules of logic; it goes beyond them. Language is liberated from the rules of grammar and semantics.58 Adorno writes that music is similar to language and Kristeva pursues these ideas as the link between the semiotic and symbolic remains dialectic: for the non-linguistic part of language, music functions as a metaphor. In Kristeva’s work it is linked with the semiotic chora as a quasi ‘musical’ second constituent of the 54

  Ibid., pp. 45–46.   Sarah Cooper, Relating to Queer Theory: Rereading Sexual Self-definition with Irigaray, Kristeva, Wittig and Cixous (Bern, 2000), p. 118. 56   Toril Moi, The Kristeva Reader (New York, 1986), p. 109. 57   See also Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (London, 1991). 58   Julia Kristeva cited in Moi, The Kristeva Reader, p. 36. 55

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interpretation process. Both semiotic chora as (from Plato) a placeless place and music as a temporal art are procedural, not locatable, not static and without a result.59 Derrida also writes about the chora in Plato’s work. ‘The chora, which is neither “sensible” [sic]60 “intelligible,” belongs to a “third genus” (triton genos, 48e, 52a). One cannot even say that it is neither this nor that or that it is both this and that’ (original emphasis).61 According to Derrida, the chora lies between myth and logic: ‘perhaps as in the case of the chora, this appeal to the third genre was only the moment of a detour in order to signal towards a genre beyond genre?’ (original emphasis).62 To come back to the semiotic chora in Kristeva’s work and its relation to music, which Adorno describes in more detail, Adorno concedes that music, as it is not a fixed concept and functions affectively, has the best possibility of creating an Other, a ‘non- identity’.63 Language, which has always been ‘affective’ and driven, is non-conceptual and cannot guarantee ‘logical’ decisions. Kristeva also gives us an etymological description of ‘semiotic’: ‘We understand the term “semiotic” in its Greek sense… = distinctive mark, trace, index, precursory sign, proof, engrave or written sign, imprint, trace, figuration’ (original emphasis).64 Elisabeth Schäfer explains Kristeva’s thoughts on the semiotic chora as follows: ‘her conception of a space of pre-linguistic, pre-symbolic traces is based on Freud’s concept of drive. The semiotic is to be understood as a legacy, as traces of the pre-oedipal phase’.65 According to Melanie Klein and Freud, Kristeva also sees the semiotic chora as a ‘basis of drive’ whereby she sees drive as something ambivalent, both as appropriative and destructive. According to Schäfer: if the drive is always something dichotomous and oppositional, which establishes its blurred basis on the foundation of the mother’s body, and which is a different basis to that of the child’s body, a split/division exists here that has to have an effect on the semiotic continuum. This division cannot yet be called the structure of the semiotic, rather it is the reason why identity cannot yet be constituted, ‘not even that of the “body proper”’.66

  Bayerl, Von der Sprache, p. 129.   Note from the translator: incorrectly translated from the French, should be translated as ‘sensory’. 61   Jaques Derrida, Chora L Works (New York, 1997), p. 15. 62   Ibid. 63   Bayerl, Von der Sprache der Musik, p. 187. 64   Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language (New York, 1984), p. 25. 65   Elisabeth Schäfer, Die offene Seite der Schrift. Jacques Derrida und Hélène Cixous Côte à Côte, unpublished Master Thesis (University of Vienna, 2006). 66   Translated from German. Ibid., p. 55. Also in Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, p. 28. 59 60

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Schäfer goes on to say that opposing currents in the chora are ‘discontinuities’ which are simultaneously the first boundaries that are set in the semiotic. Both bodily needs, such as hunger and pain as well as societal constraints, e.g. being bound to the provider in everyday life, and predetermined rhythms and regulations are concentrated at these boundaries.67 As an example she cites linguistic mistakes, such as Freudian slips, through which the semiotic chora, as the basis of language, can ‘become recognisable as something latent, even undifferentiated though the manifest language. Kristeva brings in metonymy and metaphor here in which the semiotic returns to the symbolic’.68 In Gender Trouble, Judith Butler’s gives a critique of Kristeva’s theory of the revolution of poetic language through the semiotic as a medium within the symbolic. She doubts the subversive potential and argues that Kristeva’s theory hinges on the stability and reproduction of the laws that she is trying to displace.69 Bayerl argues that Butler’s critique cannot be so easily maintained, as the assertion that the semiotic is always subordinate to the symbolic does not apply to Kristeva’s ‘text’ concept. ‘In this practice of giving meaning, the movement of the semiotic chora dominates the symbolic.’70 Butler concludes her critique of Kristeva with the following prospect as to how subversion is nevertheless possible: If subversion is possible, it will be a subversion from within the terms of the law, through the possibilities that emerge when the law turns against itself and spawns unexpected permutations of itself. The culturally constructed body will then be liberated, neither to its natural past, nor to its original pleasures, but to an open future of cultural possibilities.71

Bayerl equates the semiotic chora with music and comes to the conclusion that it is here that the character of intangibility emerges. Thus, it is here that the subversive element of mimesis lies, which enables a language revolution. The meaning of mimesis in Kristeva’s language revolution becomes evident here: it is mimesis that takes on this role in the poetic text. With its help the identitary, i.e. the symbolic, can become a setting of the non-identitary, which is expressed in thrusts of the energetic chora that break the rules. Chora immanentises – and thus rightly carries the metaphor music – a musical, primarily affective dimension. In language, it retains its character of intangibility; it cannot be located but still exists

  Schäfer, Die offene Seite der Schrift, p. 55.   Ibid., p. 56. 69   Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York and London, 1990), p. 108. 70   Bayerl, Von der Sprache, p. 192. 71   Butler, Gender Trouble, p. 127. 67 68

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as a ‘placeless’ place. Paradoxically, that which cannot be theorised can therefore, with the help of the chora, be part of a complex theory of language extension.72 In Kristeva’s work, music serves as a metaphor to make the ‘song behind the text’73 tangible for the semiotic rhythm of the chora and thereby extend poetry in the direction of music and force the non-linguistic dimension of language. Music (metaphor for chora) is involved in somatic, instinctive occurrences and closely linked to body language:74 ‘with a material support such as the voice, this semiotic network gives “music” to literature’.75 Besides the conceptual meaning of the significant, the voice transports a form of music. The dual character of the voice consists of somatic and symbolic parts in what is heard and combines them to form its own mixture of timbre and language. The affirmative scanning rhythms and somatic sounds allow the instinctive occurrence to break through the linguistic material.76 ‘Poetic rhythm does not constitute the acknowledgement of the unconscious but is instead its expenditure and implementation.’77 According to Bayerl the result is the reintroduction of lust (experience) in the text through the drive, which has been moved again. The lust is not a part of the text, rather a revolutionary and a-social activity. When the chora operates in the poetic text ‘it does not tolerate any other analogy on the explanation and imagination other than the rhythm of the voice and gesture, thus, the revolution that is to be carried out in language must be extended to the speaking body’.78 Postcolonial Mimicry As Lacan stresses, the actual effect of mimicry is camouflage; it is about having exactly the same pattern as the background: Mimicry reveals something in so far as it is distinct from what might be called an itself that is behind. The effect of mimicry is camouflage … It is not a question of harmonizing with the background, but against a mottled background, of becoming mottled exactly like the technique of camouflage practised in human warfare.79   Bayerl, Von der Sprache, p. 254.   Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, p. 29. 74   Bayerl, Von der Sprache, p. 254. 75   Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, p. 63. 76   Bayerl, Von der Sprache, p. 255. 77   Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, p. 164. 78   Bayerl, Von der Sprache, pp. 255–256. And compare Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, p. 26. 79   Jacques Lacan, ‘The Line and Light’, in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (London, 1977), p. 99. Cited in Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London and New York, 2004), p. 121. 72

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This aspect of mimicry is of fundamental importance for the postcolonial interpretation as mimicry in colonial discourse originates in the tension between a synchronic, panoptical vision of control and the need for identity and stasis on the one hand, and the counter-pressure from the diachrony of history, the change and difference on the other. Thus, Homi Bhabha writes, referring to Edward Said, that mimicry represents an ironic compromise.80 He refers to Samuel Weber’s formulation of the marginalising vision of castration as colonial mimicry is the desire for the reformed, recognisable Other as a subject of difference, which is almost the same but not quite. The discourse on mimicry is therefore constructed around ambivalence, as in order to be effective, mimicry must continually produce a delay, its excess and its difference.81 Mimicry has a profound and disruptive effect on the authority of colonial discourse. This ambivalence portrays the colonial subject as ‘partial’ and ‘incomplete’. The success of colonial appropriation depends on objects that do not fit, guaranteeing its strategic failure, thus, mimicry is simultaneously a threat and similarity.82 Something ‘written’ follows from mimesis and mimicry, a form of portrayal, which marginalises the monumentality of the history and mocks its power as a model, the very power that makes it imitable. Mimicry repeats, rather than portraying or representing.83 Bhabha cites Freud, who saw colonial mimicry as a form of difference: an ‘almost the same but not quite’ or ‘almost the same but not white’.84 Bhabha emphasises that In mimicry, the representation of identity and meaning is rearticulated along the axis of metonymy. As Lacan reminds us, mimicry is like camouflage, not a harmonization of repression of difference, but a form of resemblance, that differs from or defends presence by displaying it in part, metonymically. Its threat, I would add, comes from the prodigious and strategic production of conflictual, fantastic, discriminatory ‘identity effects’ in the play of a power that is elusive because it hides no essence, no ‘itself’.85

The colonial meeting between ‘white’ and its ‘black’ reflection shows that the ambivalence of mimicry is a problem of ‘colonial subjection’. It is an ‘erratic, eccentric strategy of authority in colonial discourse’.86 For Bhabha, the fetishised 80

    82   83   84   85   86   81

Bhabha, The Location of Culture, p. 122. Ibid. Ibid., p. 123. Ibid., p. 125. Ibid., pp. 127–128. Ibid., pp. 128–129. Ibid., p. 129.

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colonial culture is a call to rebellion and protest. The effects of mimicry, which he terms ‘identity-effects’, are always divided.87 Angela McRobbie emphasises that Bhabha writes about everyday life, the lived reality under a colonial or postcolonial authority where a certain scope is allowed in which the meaning (in the sense of the translation of one culture into the other) can be altered. Judith Butler explains this with her concept of ‘resignification’. This produces distortion when subordinated peoples are expected to copy the manners, behaviour and education of the coloniser. Their mimicry unsettles the ruler, precisely because the space of translating from one culture to the other also provides a space for insubordination, or antagonism. In this sense Bhabha’s ‘translation’ comes close to Butler’s ‘re-signification’.88

The connection between art and literature plays an important role in Bhabha’s theory, as McRobbie points out: ‘Artists and writers use the freedom of their own practices to begin from the unruly or hitherto marginalised locations, previously overlooked because they belonged, or referred, to seemingly unimportant spatial regions. A formal quality of much of this work is then the deliberate obliqueness of vision.’89 Music Examples: Grace Jones, Bishi Grace Jones’ aesthetic is also related to the eroticisation of the foreign, of the exotic.90 She deceives the colonial gaze through her apparent conforming to an idea of Otherness but she lets her critique of this mimetic image be known in the lyrics of the song ‘Slave to the Rhythm’ (1985). On this album cover one notices that it is not the artistic expression of Jones herself, rather a specialist team designed it. It is difficult to say whether she is just their performer or actor and thus portrays the team’s fantasies or whether it is of her own volition and she wanted to call these fantasies into question through her performance. The cover of Island Life shows some characteristics of postcolonial mimicry. Her Black body is almost naked, her breasts are covered with a band of material and she appears very androgynous and sporty. She has a purely aesthetic function that is further emphasised by her pose, which resembles that of a living statue. Grace Jones seems to be like every African statuette with which rich White people like to decorate their living rooms to give an air of exoticism and eccentricity.

87

  Ibid., p. 130.   Angela McRobbie, The Uses of Cultural Studies (London, 2005), p. 101. 89   Ibid. 90   Simon Reynolds and Joy Press, The Sex Revolts: Gender, Rebellion and Rock’n’Roll (London, 1995), p. 294. 88

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The title ‘Slave to the Rhythm’ can also be interpreted in this way. It is not clear if Grace Jones makes use of her authenticity here and is playing and having fun with it. As a descendant of Jamaican slaves, she is caught in the stereotype of rhythmic and musical Africans and thus becomes a slave of music for her majority White listeners. This is expressed in her song text by the task of repetitive labour, which has to be ‘flowing’ and without a break. The ‘rhythm’ is everything: it is love, life, work, breath and dance. In such a way, a person could feel like a slave to the rhythm, also the word ‘chain’ often appears in the lyrics. In 1978, following the publication of Helmut Newton’s photo on the front page of Stern in which Grace Jones was naked and chained up, the popular feminist, Alice Schwarzer, accused Newton of sexism. However, many images of scantily clad women had preceded this photo. Alice Schwarzer described the photo as portraying a woman as a mere sexual object, and that this was a violation of the human dignity of all women. The accusation was dismissed as a popular complaint, on the basis that women cannot be insulted as a collective.91 What I find interesting is that Alice Schwarzer did not go into Grace Jones’ specific case in more detail as this depiction alludes to the ‘double’ slavery of the Black woman. Another example of seemingly successful postcolonial mimicry in music is Bishi, whose name is actually Bishnupriya Bhattacharya, and her debut album Night at the Circus. Growing up as the child of immigrants in London, she did not get on with her English classmates and escaped into the music and art scene. Her songs are a mixture of electroclash, Balkan folklore and Bollywood sound. At her concerts she plays the sitar, which she wears across her body, like an electric guitar. She also uses other instruments, such as tablas, mouth harp, acoustic guitar, piano and organ. Bishi produces her songs on a laptop or on the ukulele and the lyrics are inspired by the postfeminist author Angela Carter’s92 novel Nights at the Circus (1984), which is the most well-known work of this English author and also reflects Bishi’s perception of herself as the homeless exotic: ‘Angela Carter writes about a hybrid artist character who restlessly roam the world – just like me.’ Bishi sings ‘about London as a circus that harbours diverse forms of artistic expression, is constantly in motion and represents a possibility for escape from our globalised world’. She states: ‘that is my life as a musician’.93 In her performances, Bishi is aware of her role as the exotic and emphasises this with a large white flower in her hair or a t-shirt with a shiny image of a tiger. It is in this way that she makes postcolonial mimesis hers as well as through the different music genres, from Balkan to Indian, in her musical performances.

  Emma (7/1978).   Amongst others, she wrote the ‘queer’-feminist novel The Passion of New Eve (1977) although the concept of queer, as we use it today, did not yet exist. 93   Martin Hossbach, ‘Bishi. Früher Bartók, heute Clash’, Spex. Magazin für Popkultur (12/2007), available at: www.spex.de/t2/342/artikel.html, retrieved on 04.02.2008. 91 92

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Bishi, Nights at the Circus

Mimesis and Technology As prominent dates for the development of mimesis, Martina Leeker cites the following innovations in the technologisation of communication media, under which she understands the historical processes ‘where motor, mental and psychic capacities as well as social institutions are expressed in media and replaced by them (such as writing, which is already a technologisation of words’:94 1. 2. 3. 4.

Invention of the alphabet in ancient Greece (from 750 BC) Invention of the letterpress (from 1475 AD) Widespread literacy and the industrial revolution in the nineteenth century Invention of the telegraph, telephone, photograph, film up to the computer (1870–1960).95

  Martina Leeker, Mime, Mimesis und Technologie (München, 1995), p. 17.   Ibid., p. 15.

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For Leeker, the ‘Gutenberg Galaxy’ ends with the invention of the computer and she points out that the quality of new media does not lie in the speeding-up of information, rather that the digital medium is interactive and the body is created as a ‘self-image’ in this simulation mechanism.96 The Binary Phase of Mimesis Leeker explains that the development of the binary phase is the end of analogue and thereby the end of the traditional concept of mimesis. Thus, the new relationship of simulated mimesis and mimetic simulation is ultimately determined.97 The aim of binary coding is a ‘completion’ of images, as the bits are not only the carriers of visual information but also of other information and also incorporate other senses. The analogue bodily symbols and body language are converted into digital, binary codes and are fitted to the universal, symbolic status of bits, which is constituted purely as the difference between 0 and 1.98 The body itself becomes a film layer where the inner and outer space interchange. Tactile mimesis intercedes between being moved or excited in the sensory, physical sense, as well as in the mental sense, and the active people who touch, excite, produce and bring the objective environment to life. ‘In a similar way to a ritual, pre-alphabet mimesis, reality is created through actions as a reality of appearance that can be physically experienced. Thus, experience, memory and representation are concretely conveyed through actions and not through a sign that functions as a medium (e.g. alphabet, body language).’99 Leeker cites some interesting examples and tries to come closer to the body: The relevant strategies can either take on the form of actual shock therapies e.g. disco dances in the 1970s and 1980s where the dancers pushed and jumped against each other (‘pogo’) or rock stars stage diving into the audience like bungee jumping … The ambivalence of these strategies should not be ignored here. They lead to a return to a natural, authentic body that does not exist. One of these is the phantasm of our imagination. These strategies are much more an aid and a counter-stimulus for the familiarisation of a new mimesis model (shift from literary to electronic mimesis).100

On the topic of technological mimesis, one can summarise that the categories of original image, imitated image and the idea of an image or simulation and mimesis are no longer so clearly separable from one another in digital media.101 This new   96

      98     99   100   101     97

Ibid., p. 144. Ibid., p. 198. Ibid., p. 199. Ibid., p. 214. Ibid., p. 273. Ibid., p. 237.

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constellation of mimesis and new media can also lead to a subversive approach to the body, body language, social order and technologically controlled reality. In this way, mimesis becomes the generator of subversive actions. It ensures: 1. lexical flexibility (uncontrolled growth of meaning in relation to the conventionality of meaning); 2. auto-stimulation in maintaining awareness of this state of affairs; 3. invention of new concepts and through media in relation to a comparability with physical and social reality.102 ‘This Beat is Lesbotronic!’103 – Music Examples Lesbians on Ecstasy As an introduction, I want to use a particularly interesting article by Judith ‘Jack’ Halberstam, ‘Keeping Time with Lesbians on Ecstasy’. Halberstam describes Lesbians on Ecstasy as a contemporary queer band, who presents alternative forms of cultural production in that they play with the idea of the cover song.104 The performance of the cover versions can be ‘queered’ and new ways of thinking about time and cross-generational transfer and memory can be developed.105 Halberstam argues that in queer subcultures, many performers re-conceive gender, race, sexuality, age and politics and produce new time, history and identity models. Queer temporality demonstrates that queers make use of and inhabit another time and other time-bound narratives in another way. Many young couples mark their time with the dictatorship of marriage and reproduction and thereby also with the ‘mid-life crisis’ and retirement. However, for people who live outside of this reproductive logic, there is a different temporal schedule (e.g. for HIVpositive people).106 Halberstam explains that, in this context, the dyke band Lesbians on Ecstasy (LOE) from Montreal have created a cult by making electronic cover versions of lesbian classics by artists such as the Indigo Girls, Melissa Etheridge, kd lang and Tracy Chapman. The band name implies that they try to portray a version of lesbian music culture as if they were ‘on Ecstasy’. This creative reinvention constitutes the history as a way of viewing the past as if one was seeing it through a distorted lens. The band members do show their appreciation of the originals but

102

  Ibid., p. 320.   Ute H., ‘This Beat is Lesbotronic’, 14 October 2007, available at: www.fmqueer.at/fq1/ index.php?option=com_content&task=view&Itemid=60&id=252, retrieved on 01.02.2008. 104   Judith Halberstam, ‘Keeping Time with Lesbians on Ecstasy’, in Women and Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture, 11 (2007): p. 51. 105   Ibid., p. 52. 106   Ibid., p. 53. 103

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they still happily take them to pieces.107 Band member Berni Bankrupt108 explains: ‘The irony is thickly layered on top of our music, but in the end we’re doing our best to make the most sincere, awesome versions of these songs that we can … Maybe part of being feminists, women and lesbians is that we can’t really escape our sincerity. We kinda like the songs, too’.109 As Halberstam goes on to highlight, the surprising thing about LOE is that they incorporate well-known ‘cosy’ lesbian classics into the static and the distorted aspects of electronic music. The ‘re-wiring’ of the voice is the key to this project of illusion. For example, they play a roughed up version of kd lang’s ‘Constant Craving’ that they call ‘Kündstant Krøving’. The original song, which is full of emotion, is buried in metallic noise. The singer uses a voice distorter and takes the cool, soft and mellow aspect out of kd lang’s voice. LOE ‘scratch’ the voice, make it rawer and transform the long drawn-out sentences into staccato pieces. The ‘constant’ no longer has the meaning of long, hopeless nights full of romantic longing, but instead becomes a kind of irritating complaint. The ‘craving’ becomes less of a desperate desire and more of a persistent activity that the song’s rhythm pounds out. LOE find the song’s point of resistance both in the voice as well as in the content.110 In my view this queer cover by LOE is a successful example of the subversive strategy of technological mimesis. With the help of mimesis and electronic music as a technology the ‘originality’ of the original and the imitative character of the copy are reversed and renewed so that the original can no longer count as such and the copy becomes the real contemporary original. LOE manage to portray a ‘temporal drag’. Halberstam takes this expression from Elizabeth Freeman, who explains that temporal drag creates the possibility of a contrary temporal identification. LOE allow their listeners to look back at Tracy Chapman, Melissa Etheridge and the Indigo Girls and also produce countergenealogies for contemporary alternative dance music.111 In contrast to gay male singers (e.g. Rufus Wainwright, Hedwig, Anthony and the Johnsons) LOE actively avoid the melancholy of temporal drag as ‘they do not identify … with what has been lost to history but instead embrace the ecstasy of finding earlier grammars for the articulation of rage, rave, and revolution’.112 In conclusion, Halberstam notes that when LOE redo Tracy Chapman or kd lang, they make a form of ‘ecstatic queer history’,113 which can build connections 107

  Ibid., p. 54.   The others are called Jacki Gallant, Fruity Frankie and Veronique Mystique. These artists’ names stem from the drag king tradition. 109   Sarah Liss, ‘Grrrl on Girl Music: Lesbians on Ecstasy More Than Merely Clever Parody’, available at: www.nowtoronto.com/music/story.cfm?content=138576&archive (23.06.2003). Cited in Halberstam, ‘Keeping Time’, p. 54. 110   Ibid. 111   Ibid., p. 57. 112   Ibid. 113   Ibid., p. 58. 108

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between different parts of the queer community. ‘The model of history implied by the cover song is not the progressive unfolding of a narrative of assimilation, it is a jagged story of cathexis and repudiation, identification and disidentification, love and hate.’114 The reason I use LOE as an example of technological mimesis was mentioned in Halberstam’s article, however I want to explain it here in more detail. The performance of LOE fits all three mimesis concepts of the modern era: firstly, the concept of theoretical realism, which sees art as a mirror. In the case of LOE, the music and stage presence is seen as a mirror of current lesbian music culture. The second concept is that of ontic-external mimesis, i.e. of imitation and simulation. LOE use structures (lyrics, music, symbols) of lesbian culture, replicate them in their own way, and produce something new out of them. The third concept is ontologicalinternal mimesis, where the mimesis is reproduced based on inherent principles of form.115 This happens in several LOE songs, for example in ‘Tell Me Does She Love The Bass’ some distinctive music parts (form parts), e.g. the bass line and parts of the lyrics from Melissa Etheridge’s ‘Like The Way I Do’, are used.116 What is also interesting is to follow the educational aspect of mimesis, which was pointed out by Plato. The music of LOE can definitely take on the function of inducting young queer-feminist people to the history of popular lesbian and feminist music. (However, LOE would have definitely been thrown out of Plato’s ideal state, purely because of the negative example in their name. In my view, the word ‘Ecstasy’ was only chosen as an ‘attention grabber’ and to illustrate their affinity to electronic music as they do not glorify this drug in their lyrics or encourage its use). The name possibly refers to the ecstatic state of their concerts, the excess of affectivity and sensibility that can be invoked by the magical mimesis in their stage performances. As Lukács ascertained in his research on mimesis, the magic of mimesis exists through the imitation of processes from reality that influence the self. This imitation often happens in conjunction with an ecstatic state (outside of everyday life) that is invoked through dance, drunkenness or intoxication and the mimetic constructs evoke feelings and fervour that are an intense experience. The music examples from LOE fall into the third form of mimesis, the aesthetic mimesis (as opposed to elementary and theoretical mimesis), which Lukács sees as ‘world creating’ and developmental in art, magic, myth and religion. LOE come very close to Aristotle’s concept of mimesis, which in comparison to Plato’s is a somewhat more positive, creative and productive view of mimesis. 114

  Ibid.   The three concepts of mimesis are from Metscher, Ästhetik und Mimesis, pp. 39–40. 116   Judith Peraino describes the percussive bass line and the trademark voice of Etheridge in this song as ‘“muscle music” in the style of male rock balladeers’ and declares Melissa Etheridge as a phallic icon for lesbians. Judith Ann Peraino, Listening to the Sirens: Musical Technologies of Queer Identity from Homer to Hedwig (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, 2006), pp. 137–138. 115

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For Aristotle, the temporal element, the ‘before’ and ‘after’, is important for the dynamic. Halberstam also highlights the significance of time (the old lesbian classics and the young techno-electro music) in LOE’s musical work. As Gunter Gebauer and Christoph Wulf suggest, mimesis is disappearing more and more in the modern era. The time of the original has passed, it is no longer important if it is an original, a copy or a simulacrum.117 In LOE’s songs, it is not about where the lyrics or music come from; it is the result that is important. In Walter Benjamin’s work, mimesis is not a means of ordering experiences, rather a device that makes it easier for others to experience another world. This also happens with LOE’s audience; the younger generation becomes familiar with slogans and anthems from the past and the older generation gets to know the music of the younger generation. Irigaray’s idea of feminine mimesis as a repetition of a text, where the theory and application of the theory are from a female point of view, can be seen in LOE’s creative process, in which they parody the male ways of contemporary music production. ‘More than anything, we’re trying to parody people like Tiga doing that Corey Hart song Sunglasses’, explains Bankrupt. ‘They’re all doing the same thing. They take a funny song and give it a new face. They get, like, hipster cred for being so ironic and campy, but it’s really just dudes doing dude music in a closed circle. The irony is we’re lesbians, playing lesbian music at lesbian events – that’s our closed circle.’118 The speculum of the LOE reflects the feminist-lesbian elements in the current popular music culture and gives these elements a hint of queer, e.g. in the song ‘Cold Touch of Leather’ that begins harmlessly with ‘women loving women … sisters united’ and carries on into a SM fantasy. (The singer wears leather gloves and a leather hat during this song in concerts.) Technological mimesis allows LOE to produce an electronic song more quickly and present it as a band that only plays traditional rock music instruments. Of course, a certain amount of time is necessary to learn to use the hardware and software of electronic music. I also want to draw attention to a further subversive act by LOE, namely the cross-generational self-empowerment, which is not only produced by picking up on quotes from earlier lesbian and women’s anthems, but also through the community aspect of their concerts (and concerts already have the characteristics of ritual mimesis), which is emphasised by LOE. This can be seen in songs such as ‘Womyns’ Luv’ or also ‘Mortified’, which is the last track of the album We Know You Know (named after the first album, that came out on Olivia Records

  Gunter Gebauer and Christoph Wulf, Mimesis: Culture – Art – Society (Berkeley, 1996). 118   Sarah Liss, ‘Grrrl on Girl Music: Lesbians on Ecstasy More Than Merely Clever Parody’, available at: www.nowtoronto.com/issues/2003-10-09/music_feature_p.html, retrieved on 02.02.2008. 117

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– the first women’s label – by Meg Christian, I Know You Know).119 ‘Mortified’ is also the closing song of their concerts; the words ‘we are your friends’ create the community feel through the emphasis on ‘we’ and with the phrase ‘you are never going to be alone’. LOE manage to generate feelings through the means of ritual and technological mimesis and thereby create a sense of cross-generational self-empowerment. They move, not only in the sense of emotions, but they also get the hardened dykes dancing. Ute H. writes about her impression of the concerts with LOE that the Sisters United, Women Loving Women chorus is no longer with guitars and a camp fire, but takes the form of techno storm and flickering strobe lights. The new sound suits the songs and quotes well, and if they already have a beard, it is well stuck on.120 MEN JD Samson is the singer of MEN (and who also formed part of Le Tigre, Kathleen Hanna’s post-Riot Grrrl band); their first album Talk About Body was released in 2011. The songs are similar to the ones of Le Tigre, electropop/rock/punk music with political texts dealing with queer-feminist issues, for example in their song ‘Credit Card Babies’ they explain the various ways in which lesbian couples are able to have a baby: with money and artificial insemination, or ‘borrowing’ a male person (maybe the best gay friend?), or adopting. In another song from this album, ‘Off Our Backs’ they sing about the feminist pro- or no-porn discussion, seemingly being on the pro-porn side, whilst the title refers to the name of a feminist magazine, which took on the anti-pornography opinion during the 1980s, whereas the first women-run lesbian erotic magazine, which was founded 1984, was called On Our Backs. In an interview on Noisevox121 JD Samson explains why she thinks that dance and politics go together. During their concerts they create a ‘safe and comfortable space’, a ‘space of freedom’ for the people moving around and being confident in their bodies and feeling like they are not going to be judged. The influence that the music, which is played and performed on the stage, has on the dance floor is shown in this comment and fits well with what Plato says about the mimetic character of dance, and the educational aspect of it. She admits that some people come to their concerts because they ‘like the lyrics and do not really care about the music’, and for some it is the other way round and she enjoys it if she sees ‘a bunch of straight dudes singing Credit Card Babies’ and it makes her ‘feel like these words are embodied by new people’. This insight from her concerts corresponds to Adorno’s idea of the dialectical concept of mimesis, which is the tendency of a living being to merge into its surroundings

119

  Ute H., ‘This Beat is Lesbotronic’.   Ibid. (The translation of the German metaphor: to have a beard = to be outdated). 121   ‘Noisevox Face Time MEN/JD Samson Interview’, available at: www.youtube. com/watch?v=xs_Pwp3PK6M&feature=related, retrieved on 12.12. 2011. 120

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and the utopian possibility of mimesis, which is the potential of non-identity and an anticipation of an Otherness. JD Samson does not care if the straight dudes ‘consciously understand the words’, but they are ‘learning and they are opening their eyes and their hearts’. So the space that MEN or Le Tigre create during their concerts is a space where ‘people can learn about these different things’. That is similar to what The Degenerettes (a trans*band) say about their performances: ‘When people have to grab hold of something on their own, just based on what’s being presented in front of them – sometimes it’s a more profound experience than being told something.’122 This process is described in theory as the affective modelling of mimesis, as I explained with the help of Metscher earlier in this chapter. It has an effect on reality itself, as Lukács mentioned, because ‘reality can be influenced in the desired way through the imitation of processes’. One can consider this as to referring directly to the subversive power of these concerts. Another question in the interview with JD Samson asked why MEN address negative issues (e.g. sexual harassment or unemployment, for example in the song ‘Who Am I’) in an upbeat way, as JD Samson sings ‘Who am I to feel so free’ and talks about reasons why we should not be so free, such as feminist artists hitting the glass ceiling. Her answer is that in Le Tigre they already tried to avoid negative political messages such as ‘I hate that you are doing this’, because these depressing ideas are ruining us and she prefers to get together and ‘celebrate our diversity’ and ‘celebrate the ways in which we come together’ and ‘gain equality’. If you bring these messages together with upbeat music it ‘kind of creates an anthem’, although she likes the ‘juxtaposition of them talking about depressing things over happy music, or happy words over sad music’.123 These arguments take us back to the idea of Kristeva’s semiotic chora, the ‘song behind the text’ and the dual character of voice. It consists of somatic and symbolic parts, where the reintroduction of lust in the text is important in order for the revolutionary chora to work in the poetic text and, as Butler concludes, through this subversion the ‘body will then be liberated’ ‘to an open future’.124

  Taken from an interview of The Degenerettes in the rockumentary Riot Acts: Flaunting Gender Deviance in Music Performance (2009). 123   This is from the longer version of the same video with JD Samson, which is found on the Noisevox hompage: ‘Face Time: MEN’, available at: www.noisevox.org/node/25111 (Air Date 02/03/2011), retrieved on 12.12.2011. 124   Butler, Gender Trouble, p. 127. 122

Track 06

Cyborg – Transhuman History ‘Cyborg’ is a made-up word, which actually consists of the two words ‘cybernetic’ and ‘organism’. Cybernetics is a field of research, which carries out comparative observations of regulations in control and regulatory processes in engineering, biology and sociology. In a contemporary context, the term ‘cy-borg’ describes a new technology–body relationship and is itself a ‘hybrid’ of the cybernetic and the organism: ‘cyborg denotes the prosthetic character of our post-human, postmodern existence at the crossover into the 21st century; human existence as a mixture between human and machine, between body parts and prostheses, the body as a modular system of body and technology’.1 The term cyborg was first used in 1960 by Manfred E. Clynes and Nathan S. Kline to describe self-regulating human–machine systems. Research into space travel tried to technologically rebuild the human body so that it could adapt to the environment of outer space.2 In an interview with Manfred Clynes, carried out by Chris Hables Grey, Clynes related that when he used the word cyborg in a conversation with Dr Kline, the latter said that it sounded like a town in Denmark. Clynes is also annoyed about how cyborgs are presented in popular literature or science fiction – as monsters in films (e.g. Schwarzenegger as the Terminator).3 A development in Clynes’ notion of cyborg is his differentiation between cyborg I and cyborg II. Cyborg I is concerned with physiology whereas cyborg II deals with emotions, so sexuality also becomes important: Actually the Cyborg II paper really focused on the problem of space flight from an emotional point of view and it suggested some exercise like the Senic cycle that you could do to help you avoid boredom, avoid the desert of emotional nothingness. Even sexuality. By the way, parenthetically, the idea of cyborg in

1

  Mona Singer, ‘Cyborg – Körper – Politik’, in Karin Giselbrecht and Michaela Hafner (eds), Data | Body | Sex | Machine: Technoscience und Sciencefiction aus feministischer Sicht (Vienna, 2001), p. 20. 2   Ibid., pp. 22–23. 3   Chris Hables Gray, Heidi J. Figueroa-Sarriera and Steven Mentor (eds), The Cyborg Handbook (New York and London, 1995), pp. 47–48.

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no way implies an it … it’s not an it. It’s an absurd mistake. The cyborgs are capable of the same emotional expression and experience as an uncyborg.4

Regarding the assumption that gender is arbitrary and irrelevant when a human consciousness is downloaded onto a computer, except if someone took the trouble to give the machine sexual organs; Clynes asserts that this is wrong. ‘But right now I’d like to say – that the cyborg, per se – talking now of men or women who have altered themselves in various cyborgian ways – in no way has that altered their sexuality.’5 In the interview Gray mentioned that the sexual organs could also be altered. There are people who are paraplegics and quadriplegics and for some of them their sexual organs are, for all intents and purposes, dead. They only exist through cyborg technologies. Clyne says on the topic: ‘They can be paralyzed, but the sexual nature of man isn’t just the sex organs. It is something very much in the identity of the person and in the environment. These include unconscious things. What excites one sexually is determined by the kind of sexual person you are.’6 In his concept of cyborg III, where emotions continue to play an important role, molecular biology is at the fore in the form of neuropeptides.7 The third cyborg model will also use genes and know how to modify them: ‘The Cyborg III makes use of the abilities we have found now to alter the products of the genes, and also to insert new genes into existing DNA.’8 The step towards Cyborg IV, where interventions into the inheritable genetic material are accepted without reservations, is not so far off.9 Cyborg Feminism Donna Haraway is known for the introduction of the figure of the cyborg into feminism and calls for the participation of women in new technologies. She writes generally about these hybrid organisms and provides the following summary: The cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a fusion of the organic and the technical forged in particular, historical, cultural practices. Cyborgs are not about the Machine and the Human, as if such Things and Subjects universally existed. Instead, cyborgs are about specific historical machines and people in

4

 Ibid.   Ibid., p. 49. 6  Ibid. 7   Ibid., pp. 49–50. 8   Ibid., p. 50. 9  Ibid. 5

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interaction that often turns out to be painfully counterintuitive for the analyst of technoscience.10

Haraway uses the cyborg as a blasphemic, anti-racist, feminist figure that can be used in the analysis of both natural sciences and feminist theory. Haraway came upon the idea of the cyborg figure via Marge Piercy’s He, She, and It, where Piercy writes about her ideas of the cyborg as a lover, friend, object, subject, weapon or golem. ‘Her cyborgs and mine exceeded their origins, defied their founding identities as weapons and self-acting control devices, and so troubled U.S. cultural commitments to what counts as agency and self-determination for people, much less machines.’11 The cyborg is a hybrid of machine and organism. The theoretical background in Haraway’s cyborg world is her criticism of what she views as totalising theories such as Marxist/socialist feminism and radical feminism. The cyborg creates and destroys machines, identities, categories, relationships, distances and histories. In this utopic world there would be three fundamental ‘boundary breakdowns’, namely: the boundaries between human/animal (e.g. animal rights); organism (animal or human)/machine (e.g. medicine); physical/non-physical (electronic, software). The dichotomies in a world of hierarchical dualisms disappear (for example the previously differently classified concepts and connotations of nature and culture). The offspring of these technoscientific wombs are cyborgs – imploded germinal entities, densely packed condensations of worlds, shocked into being from the force of the implosion of the natural and the artificial, nature and culture, subject and object, machine and organic body, money and lives, narrative and reality. Cyborgs are the stem cells in the marrow of the technoscientific body; the differentiate into the subjects and objects at stake in the contested zones of technoscientific culture.12

Bruno Latour provides a further explanation of why this boundary between human and machine has remained intact for so long. He describes the modern era as a process of purification. The big separation between the human and the nonhuman is the result of this process. Every monster or hybrid that oversteps this boundary is classified and assigned to either the human or non-human sphere. According to Latour modern acts of purification are never successful, quite the

10   Donna Haraway, Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium. FemaleMan©_Meets_ OncoMouse™. Feminism and Technoscience (New York and London, 1997), p. 51. 11   Ibid., pp. 280–281. 12   Ibid., p. 14.

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opposite, modernity presents itself through its production of monsters and hybrids. Frankenstein’s monster was only the beginning of the cyborg world.13 New reproductive technologies are one such example where the blurring of the boundary between organism (animal or human) and machine often occurs in modern-day medicine. These technologies, which partially ‘extend’, imitate or even completely replace the body through the use of machines caused and still cause heated debates. What are these reproductive technologies? They are medical techniques that increase the reproductive capabilities of humans, making pregnancy possible. There is artificial insemination from an (anonymous) sperm donor, egg harvesting, in vitro fertilisation (IVF), embryo transfer and surrogacy. To return once more to the human body, which is also the starting point for all medical technologies; how was the body defined pre-cyborg era? Thomas J. Csordas writes: The kind of body to which we have been accustomed in scholarly and popular thought alike is typically assumed to be a fixed, material entity subject to the empirical rules of biological science, existing prior to the mutability and flux of cultural change and diversity and characterised by unchangeable inner necessities.14

The body was and still is the focus of many research projects. This began in the early 1970s and reached a peak in the late 1980s. A wide variety of disciplines was and is involved: medical anthropology, feminist theory, critical literature studies, history, comparative religious studies, philosophy, sociology, psychology. In contrast to the above quote, newer research on the body asserts that, to use Foucault’s words, the body has a history. The body is therefore as much a cultural phenomenon as it is as biological entity. Current cultural transformations are altering our perception of the body away from biological essentialism. Donna Haraway shows how feminist theorists argue against biological determinism and how they call academic objectivity into question.15 Feminist technoscience inquiry is a speculum, a surgical instrument, a tool for widening the openings into all kinds of orifices to improve observation and intervention in the interest of projects that are simultaneously about freedom, justice and knowledge. In these terms, feminist inquiry is no more innocent, no

13

  Nina Lykke, ‘Between Monsters, Goddesses and Cyborgs’, in Gill Kirkup, Linda Janes, Kathryn Woodward and Fiona Hovenden (eds), The Gendered Cyborg: A Reader (London, 2000), pp. 76–77. 14   T.J. Csordas (ed.), Embodiment and Experience: The Existential Ground for Culture and Self (Cambridge, 1994), p. 1. 15   Donna J. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (London, 1998), p. 197.

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more free of the inevitable wounding that all questioning brings, than any other knowledge project.16

Neither our personal bodies nor our social bodies can be viewed as natural. The human finds itself in a perpetual relationship with the surrounding world and is involved in satisfying the body’s needs. For Haraway, the body is also an active being and not a mere resource. This section deals with the meta-level of Haraway’s cyborg theory and with its particular place in feminism. With her cyborg theory, Donna Haraway manages to create a political tool, which is very versatile and adaptable. Her writing style, which may appear somewhat superficial and tries to combines as many different topics as possible, facilitates her ‘ideological’ lightness that makes it difficult to pin her down to a specific feminist discourse or a fixed ideological position. This versatility and lightness is advantageous to the feminist political battle and speeds up the process of getting closer to feminist goals. The fact that she rarely gives a clear definition of the concepts with which she is working often prevents an easy understanding. She refers vaguely to a wide variety of feminist authors, thus complicating the process of following her arguments and drawing conclusions. For example, Haraway (as well as other feminists) criticises Marxism for its concept of ‘original unity’ and is of the opinion that the cyborg can manage without this: Hilary Klein has argued that both Marxism and psychoanalysis and their concepts of labour and of individuation and gender formation, depend on the plot of original unity out of which difference must be produced and enlisted in a drama of escalating domination of woman/nature. The cyborg skips the step of original unity, of identification with nature in the Western sense. This is its illegitimate promise that might lead to subversion of its teleology as star wars.17

In order to know what is meant by ‘original unity’, the reader must have a certain level of knowledge of the book The Origin of the Family by Friedrich Engels, which he wrote just after Marx’s death and in which he refers to the theory in Lewis H. Morgan’s book Ancient Society. Engels pursues Morgan’s idea of a change from matrilineal to patrilineal (blood)-relationship. One requires background knowledge in order to recognise why it is important for feminism to get away from this ‘original unity’. Further, Haraway accuses socialist feminism of having taken on the fundamental strategies of Marxism and in so doing contributing to an essentialist image of woman. They have carried this over into the type of work that women do: the household or mother role both represent reproductive functions. Therein lies 16   Donna J. Haraway, ‘The Virtual Speculum in the New World Order’, in Kirkup et al., The Gendered Cyborg, p. 235. 17   Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women, p. 151.

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the essentialist aspect – in identifying reproduction with work. Although Haraway does emphasise the positive contribution that Marxism has made to feminism in pointing out the daily responsibility that women have to unite, however, identifying reproduction with work naturalises and essentialises the tasks that women do.18 Haraway rejects radical feminism because of its radical reductionism, which leads to a radical non-being and non-subject of woman. MacKinnon, for example, writes that feminism should analyse the sex/gender structure before the class structure and thus uncover the constitution and sexual appropriation of women by men. The origin of the woman is someone else’s desire, not their own work. The feminist consciousness is the self-knowledge of a self that does not exist as such. Sexual objectification and not alienation is the consequence of the sex/gender structure.19 For Haraway, both socialist and radical feminism are totalitarian theories because the category of ‘woman’ is naturalised and also denaturalised. She argues for the recognition of the diverse experiences of women, brought about by coalitions that are based on ‘affinity, related not by blood but by choice, the appeal of one chemical nuclear group for another, avidity’.20 Haraway takes the idea from bell hooks that a common ‘yearning’ can also be seen as a binding element amongst women: Rather, freedom, justice, and knowledge are – in bell hook’s terms – about ‘yearning’, not about putative Enlightenment foundations. For hooks, yearning is an affective and political sensibility allowing cross-category ties that ‘would promote the recognition of common commitments and serve as a base for solidarity and coalition’ (hooks 1990:27).21

Yearning can also release a lot of energy, as can tension: ‘We know, from our bodies and from our machines, that tension is a great source of pleasure and power. May cyborg, and this Handbook, help you enjoy both and go beyond dualistic epistemologies to the epistemology of cyborg: thesis, antithesis, synthesis, prosthesis. And again.’22 The weakness of the socialist standpoint is the unintentional erasure of polyvocal, non-conforming, radical differences whilst MacKinnon’s theory deliberately erases all difference via the ‘non-existence’ of women. The answer, with regard to the diverse female identities, histories and experiences, is cyborg

18

  Ibid., p. 158.   Ibid., pp. 158–159. 20   Ibid., p. 155. 21   Haraway, Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium, pp. 191–192. bell hooks, Yearning (Boston, 1990). 22   Chris Hables Gray, Steven Mentor and Heidi J. Figueroa-Sarriera, ‘Cyborgology. Constructing the Knowledge of Cybernetic Organisms’, in The Cyborg Handbook, p. 13. 19

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theory: ‘Cyborg feminists have to argue that “we” do not want any more natural matrix of unity and that no construction is whole.’23 In a feminist view, the way to a cyborg world is made possible through building and destroying machines, identities, categories, relationships and ‘space’ stories. She argues that the cyborg theory allows for many different perspectives: ‘The political struggle is to see from both perspectives at once because each reveals both dominations and possibilities unimaginable from the other vantage point. Single vision produces worse illusions than double vision or many headed monsters.’24 In my view, Haraway’s cyborg theory also tends towards being totalitarian. For her, the breakdown of dichotomies like human/animal, organism/machine and physical/non-physical, the world of cyborgs, represents the solution to the problem and not as partially drawing closer to the feminist goal. In her presentation, she also excludes people who cannot follow her theoretical explanations, i.e. non-academics. (bell hooks, on the other hand, uses another strategy and tries to bring popular culture into her works and thereby enables less well-educated people to access her ideas.) Haraway runs the risk of unintentionally creating a further totalitarian theory via her complex and multifaceted content, which often needs more detailed explanation. Another important aspect here is that a certain material and higher education structure is available for women to facilitate access to a cyborg world. Thus, Haraway also recognised that it is important not to completely discard socialist-feminist politics from her cyborg world: ‘some of the rearrangements of race, sex, and class rooted in high-tech-facilitated social relations can make socialist-feminism more relevant to effective progressive politics’.25 On the other hand the new technologies make it possible for the work of the capitalist organisational structure to be ‘feminised’. Haraway points out the risks that arise from the current domination of science and technology and which lead to a significant intensification of insecurity and cultural depletion. They are also associated with the breakdown of networks that are important for the livelihoods of vulnerable members of society.26 Writing is strongly linked to power and dominance. So for example biotechnologies and microelectronics are technologies that describe and ‘write the world’ and textualise our body and code-problems. The cyborg myth is helpful in this context as it has the task of recoding communication and intelligence and subverting instruction and control. The dream of a common and perfectly true language is totalitarian and imperialistic and does not fit with the permanent partisan nature of the feminist standpoint. ‘Cyborg politics is the struggle for language and the struggle against perfect communication, against the code that translates all meaning perfectly, the central dogma of phallogocentrism.’27 23

    25   26   27   24

Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women, p. 157. Ibid., p. 154. Ibid., p. 163. Ibid., p. 172. Ibid., p. 176.

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On the other hand science and technology provide new sources of power. In the production within these areas, women have the capacity and the possibility to construct scientific and technological discourses, processes and objects. Cyborg Utopia The contested field of this utopia lies in the areas of the body and politics, biopolitics. The cyborg manages to dismantle the dualisms human/machine and material/immaterial, thereby calling others into question, i.e culture/nature, self/other, mind/body. Haraway points out that the hierarchical dualisms of our thinking, which have to do with gender and that ascribe women the subordinate position in nature, collapse. The dichotomous structures will be ‘technologically digested’: ‘Cyborgs blurred the difference between human, machine, creator and creature. Through the proliferation of organic-technological hybrids, the frames of the modern era are burst open; the modern – male – subject is stripped of his status as a monopolistic agent.’28 For me, the new possibilities of transsexuality are an argument for the positive interpretation of the cyborg for feminism. The binary gender construction is exposed although this system is strengthened by the wish to belong to the ‘other’ gender. This would be different if people did not want to be assigned any gender, like some transgender people. These expressions for conjunction and unification suggest that society has assimilated new forms of hybrids between human and ‘machine’ (as it was once called). These include cyborg-fusion, crossovers of various kinds through transplantations, genetic forms of reproduction and through transsexual technologies.29 Sherry Turkle also views the fragmented bodies of cyborgs in a positive light and sees the virtual ‘self-conception’ as a therapeutic performance. The modern body was always whole, frail or differently-abled bodies were excluded from becoming ‘normal’ subjects. In the information network, however, the normal subject is always already fragmented and off-centre, a post-modern subject. ‘Sherry Turkle therefore sees a possibility for damaged subjects to find a way of dealing with their deficiencies in the virtual community of fragmented subjects. The new subject is reconciled and connected with all its parts, healing holism awaits in the information network.’30 Silke Bellanger compares Haraway’s ‘figure’ of the ‘cyborg’ with the crossdresser in Judith Butler’s work. For a while, the cross-dresser was the star that could rock gender relations, although they were soon suspected of being just 28

  Singer, ‘Cyborg – Körper – Politik’, p. 21.   Sue-Ellen Case, ‘Cyberbodies auf der transnationalen Bühne’, Die Philosophin. Forum für feministische Theorie und Philosophie, 24 (December 2001): p. 10. 30   Silke Bellanger, ‘Begegnungen mit den Cyborgs. Zur Lebenssituation der Cyborgs in der Moderne und danach’, in Giselbrecht and Hafner, Data | Body | Sex | Machine, p. 54. 29

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an apolitical self-conception. However, neither Butler’s nor Haraway’s ‘hybrid figure’ was a ‘light-hearted border transgressor’. Butler and Haraway ‘illustrate with their figures just how difficult and meanwhile life-threatening it is to live transversely/queer to the boundary lines’.31 These temporary border transgressions do not manage to completely dismantle the order.32 In her book Modest Witness, Haraway cites concrete examples of a cyborg FemaleMan and OncoMouse: ‘Both OncoMouse™ and the FemaleMan© are unnatural; both force a revaluation of what may count as nature and artifact, of what histories are to be inhibited, by whom, and for whom.’33 Both cyborgs are ‘transgenetic’ (genetically modified) creatures. Secondly, both are products of writing technologies. ‘Third, OncoMouse™ and the FemaleMan© are queer. Unsaved entities, fugitives from Christian sacred-secular salvation history, offspring of writing machines, vectors of infection for natural subjects, FemaleMan© and OncoMouse™ are, nonetheless, the modest witnesses of matters of fact in technoscience.’34 Fourthly, OncoMouse and FemaleMan grew in the womb of modernity and the Enlightenment but their existence distorts the matrix of their origin. Nature and society, animal and human, machine and organism: these concepts ‘collapse into each other’.35 Haraway’s fifth and final point is that both figures ‘come together in the energetically imploded conversation about constructivism and naturalism in transnational science studies and in multiracial, multicultural feminism’.36 In my opinion, a further achievement of Haraway is her ability to integrate the technological, computer science discourse into the political battle of feminism. In technology, it is perhaps not so obvious that women can contribute something different to men, but Haraway manages to introduce tasks and opportunities for women into this field. This is an important undertaking for the current society, particularly in the revolutionary field of communication technology. We are seeing ourselves increasingly confronted with the question, if and to what extent people ‘appropriate the fascinating mechanisms of robots and thereby become robots themselves’, whether, as cyborgs and virtual bodies, they learn to creatively transcend traditional dichotomies through fluid concepts of identity or if, as a fragile being, they gradually lose meaning compared to more efficient machines.37

31

 Ibid.  Ibid. 33   Haraway, Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium, p. 119. 34   Ibid., p. 120. 35  Ibid. 36   Ibid., p. 121. 37   Barbara Becker, ‘“Cyborgs, Robots und Transhumanisten” – Anmerkungen über die Widerständigkeit eigener und fremder Materialität’, in Barbara Becker (ed.), Was vom Körper übrig bleibt. Körperlichkeit – Identität – Medien (Frankfurt am Main, 2000). 32

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140 Cyborg in Film

In her article about cyborg and cinema, Sue Short writes that it has been argued that although the images of constructed femininity, which were represented by cyborgs in film, can be read as gender masquerade, they are still problematic. Joan Riviere and Mary Ann Doane are cited by Short as feminist critics who use the term masquerade to reveal that the feminine appearance and behaviour in cinema are unnatural and patriarchal constructions. Short cites Doane where she says that this feminine parody in films unveils the way in which femininity itself is constructed as a mask, a decorative surface that hides a non-identity:38 ‘an idea that recalls Sadie Plant’s reduction of women to “zeroes” and her claim that there is no need for female subjectivity’.39 On the subject of digital cyborgs, Sadie Plant writes: The ones and zeros of machine code are not patriarchal binaries or counterparts to each other: zero is not the other, but the very possibility of all the ones. Zero is the matrix of calculation, the possibility of multiplication, and has been reprocessing the modern world since it began to arrive from the East. It neither counts nor represents, but with digitization it proliferates, replicates, and undermines the privilege of one. Zero is not its absence, but a zone of multiplicity which cannot be perceived by the one who sees. Woman represents ‘the horror of nothing to see’, but she also ‘has sex organs more or less everywhere’ (Irigaray, 1985b:28). She too is more than the sum of her parts, beside herself with her extra links. (original emphasis)40

Sue Short has her doubts, concerning the subversive power of gender parody or masquerade, which she shows using the examples of masculine female heroes in the late 1980s and the 1990s, Alien’s Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) and Terminator 2’s Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton): As active protagonists, both Ripley and Connor transgress traditional female roles, yet were strangely condemned for this, even by female critics. For example, Vivian Sobchack asserts in her article, The Virginity of Astronauts, that Ripley (in her first incarnation in Alien) is ‘hardly female’ and deplores the fact that she is apparently ‘denied any sexual difference at all’.41 Sobchack’s concern that 38   Mary Ann Doane, ‘Film and the Masquerade: Theorising the Female Spectator’, Screen 23 (September/October 1982): p. 81. 39   Sue Short, Cyborg Cinema and Contemporary Subjectivity (London and New York, 2005), p. 84. 40   Sadie Plant, ‘On the Matrix: Cyberfeminist Simulations’, in Kirkup et al., The Gendered Cyborg, p. 272. 41   Vivian Sobchak, ‘The Virginity of Astronauts: Sex and the Science Fiction Film’, in Annette Kuhn (ed.) Alien Zone Cultural Theory and Contemporary Science Fiction (London, 1990), p. 106.

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Ripley is made into a ‘rational and asexual functioning subject’42 (a description which negatively likens her to a machine) is explained by the psychoanalytical approach she adopts, perceiving a ‘repression’ of female difference within the SF genre as a whole.43

According to Sue Short, this kind of feminism is one that is dependent on the relationship with men. Compared to Haraway’s concept of a cyborg, the cinema science fiction versions are more conservative with regards to gender construction and especially regarding artificial women. In science fiction films it is the traditional male roles that are usually parodied: e.g. the cyborgs Terminator and RoboCop who are sparing with words and communicate with weapons. Judith Halberstam stresses that ‘femininity is always mechanical and artificial – as is masculinity’.44 Short is of the opinion that at a time when the term ‘woman’ was becoming more and more problematic, Haraway’s cyborg opened a new way for identity politics, one that is also loaded with similar paradoxes, contradictions and worrying generalisations. Although Haraway illustrates a ‘monstrous world without gender’ she does not manage to explain how such a world can be achieved.45 In science fiction films, the cyborg should often submit to humans or at least conform. This can be seen to reflect the experience of migrant subjects who are similarly required to fit into their ‘host’ culture or risk (potentially hostile) rejection. Yet although acceptance requires assimilation, or what Homi K. Bhabha refers to as ‘mimikry’, this must be moderated so that, in his words, the subject is ‘almost the same, but not quite’, demonstrating the frustrating position in which conformity is counterbalanced by the need to remain acceptably different.46

Sue Short writes that the debates surrounding cyborg can best be described by the word uncertainty because there is a lack of conviction and coherence in the ideas that were used to give meaning to whom or what we are.47 Identifying with others without resorting to essentialism is a challenge, which Spivak, with her strategic essentialism, and Haraway, with her ‘elective affinities’, tried to get to grips with.

42

  Ibid., p. 109.   Short, Cyborg Cinema, p. 84. 44   Judith Halberstam, ‘Automating Gender: Postmodern Feminism in the Age of the Intelligent Machine’, Feminist Studies, 17/3 (1991): p. 454. 45   Short, Cyborg Cinema, p. 102. 46   Ibid., p. 110. In Homi K. Bhabha, ‘Of Mimicry and Man’, in October (Boston, 1987), cited in Ashish Rajadhyaskha, ‘Realism, Modernism and Post-Colonial Theory’, in John Hill and Pamela Church Gibson (eds), World Cinema: Critical Approaches (Oxford, 2000), p. 37. 47   Short, Cyborg Cinema, p. 187. 43

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Fictional cyborgs show us how this can be achieved by building alliances that Landberg calls ‘a practice of empathy’.48 Nina Lykke introduces us to the wider context as to where the separation between human and machine actually came from and uses Latour in order to show that the modern era tried to maintain purity, which, however, was disrupted by the underground production of monsters: Frankenstein’s monster is only an early harbinger of the cyborg world of the late twentieth century. Cyborgs which, like Frankenstein’s monster, transgress forbidden borders are becoming more and more common, and their repression, conversely, less and less successful. In the cyborg world of postindustrial society the proliferation of monsters is indeed getting completely out of control. The processes of purification, which in Latour’s opinion have always been illusory, can no longer disguise this fact.49

Feminist scholarship, in particular, has consistently delivered monsters that undermine the modern differentiation between human and non-human. Lykke writes that because monsters, border transgressors and other dubious creatures are the true heroes, there is no reason to worry. In the last decade of the twentieth century it is perhaps clearer than ever before that no ‘pure’ identity politics is possible. ‘Pure’ women, workers, people of colour, gays and lesbians, indigenous peoples, ecoactivists and non-human actors in ‘wild’ nature have been transformed into inappropriate/d others: a diversity of actors who do not fit into the pure categories prescribed for them (Haraway, 1992) … Why should we not admit our hybrid identity and enjoy what Donna Haraway has called ‘the promise of monsters’ (Haraway 1992), the potential monsters have for creating embodied and never unambiguous sites for displacing and transforming actions on many levels?50

Nina Lykke also cites Evelyn Fox Keller and is of the opinion that she, as did Haraway, also tried to explain that modern scholarship is fundamentally culturally ‘genderised’ but also that Keller does not want to reduce scholarship to a purely cultural and relative phenomenon.51 Whether used many times as a symbol for antitechnology feelings or as a possibility for ‘a better life with chemistry’, cyborgs are a product of cultural anxiety and desire, which are deep in our subconscious. They represent the unknown Other that challenges the stability of human identity.

48

    50   51   49

Ibid., p. 204. Lykke, ‘Between Monsters’, pp. 76–77. Ibid., p. 77. Ibid., p. 79.

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Anne Balsamo describes the relationship between technology, representation and the feminine, using a quote from Mary Ann Doane:52 Although it is certainly true that in the case of some contemporary sciencefiction writers – particularly feminist authors – technology makes possible the destabilization of sexual identity as a category, there has also been a curious but fairly insistent history of representations of technology which work to fortify – sometimes desperately – conventional understandings of the feminine. A certain anxiety concerning the technological is often allayed by a displacement of this anxiety onto the figure of the woman or the area [sic] of the feminine.53

Doane points out that human reproduction takes on a special status in science fiction. The secret and the danger of human reproduction in these films and in this literature demonstrate the extent of the cultural anxiety about the reproduction of the species. This is why the male and female roles of the cyborgs in this genre illustrate the stereotypical functions of women in society and in history. These female-gendered cyborgs inhabit traditional feminine roles – as object of man’s desire and his helpmate in distress. In this way, female cyborgs are as much stereotypically endowed with feminine traits as male cyborgs are with masculine traits. Cyborg images reproduce cultural gender stereotypes. I want to argue, however, that female cyborg images do more to challenge the opposition between human and machine than do male cyborgs because femininity is culturally imagined as less compatible with technology than is masculinity.54 Anne Balsamo stresses that feminist authors glorify the body as the site of production and reproduction of fragmented identities and affinities. The body and its iconography are sites for the ascription of differences amongst women, for example Black and White bodies or differently abled bodies: Anne Finger (1986) challenges other feminists to examine their attitudes toward physical disabilities, especially at the point of building theories which rely on the implicit assumption of a fully abled body. As she argues (Finger, 1986: 295), ‘disability is largely social construct,’ one which potentiates the impact of patriarchal domination.55

  Anne Balsamo, ‘Reading Cyborgs Writing Feminism’, in Kirkup et al., The Gendered Cyborg, p. 151. 53   Mary Ann Doane, ‘Technophilia: Technology, Representation, and the Feminine’, in Kirkup et al., The Gendered Cyborg, p. 110. 54   Balsamo, ‘Reading Cyborgs’, p. 151. 55   Ibid., p. 151. Original in Anne Finger, ‘Claiming All of our Bodies: Reproductive Rights and Disability’, in Susan Browne, Debra Donnors and Nancy Stern (eds), With the Power of Each Breath: A Disabled Women’s Anthology (Pittsburg, 1985). 52

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Balsamo’s conclusion from this is that we really are searching for images of cyborgs that disturb and disrupt stable gender presentations. This is what I will now do in my detailed consideration of Björk’s music video ‘All is Full of Love’. The subversive aspect of the cyborg, as Haraway analysed, lies in the transgression of boundaries in traditional dichotomies such as human/machine, physical/nonphysical, and also that they do not have a ‘natural’ origin such as a family or (blood) relations. Music Example: Björk ‘All is Full of Love’ – Music Video Two robotic beings or cyborgs are the focus of this video. They both have a ‘feminine’ body, female breasts are suggested and also a human (Björk’s) face, which at the same time has the appearance of a mask. The metaphor of narcissism comes into play here; it is often associated with homosexuality as, in psychoanalysis, narcissism is the crossover stage from autoeroticism to object love where the infatuation with oneself (and one’s own genitals) is a determining factor.56 These two figures are put together by mechanical arms; liquid flows through their machine bodies in the wrong direction. Although it is actually a colour video, black and white, light and dark dominate. The atmosphere lies somewhere between a clinical, white coldness but due to darkness breaking through, has something paradisiacal about it, like the light at the end of a tunnel. The room seems like a modern, medically clean operating theatre for cyborgs. The stark contrasts of black–white and light–dark would appear to allude to juxtapositions, dichotomies in a world that is precisely divided and separated by binarisms: human–machine, woman–man, cold–hot, water (white liquid)–fire (sparks). However, the atmosphere of the video suggests that this is not so, which is produced partly by the music and partly through the gentle, revolving and rather tender movements of the cyborgs and the robotic arm and finger. ‘The movements are gentle, the gestures, caring. The scenario shows a world that is completely technological, without a trace of a human. But everything is about humanity and within these codes then about lesbian love between robotic beings.’57 It seems as if the two cyborgs are driven by love for each other. The whole atmosphere of the video constitutes a state of flowing and at the same time one of floating (almost like weightlessness) in which every movement is gentle and smooth, without the jerking that is usually expected of robots or machines. (This is the opposite of the Kraftwerk’s music where functionality and rationality was outsourced to robots. The body is purely geometric, a visual effect of the

56

  Isidor Sadger, Sigmund Freud and Havelock Ellis undertook research on narcissism.   Translated from German. Olaf Karnik, ‘Cunningham & Co. Körperinszenierungen in Elektronikclips’, in club transmediale and Meike Jansen (eds), Gendertronics. Der Körper in der elektronischen Musik (Frankfurt am Main, 2005), pp. 89–90. 57

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Music video stills: ‘All is Full of Love’, Björk

virtual birthplace of techno.)58 The director, Chris Cunningham, explained the source of the robot parts and why they look like that: I had no involvement in or saw any A.I. Robot conceptual designs. I was testing and building an animatronic boy for Kubrick. The only connection my robot videos have to Kubrick’s A.I. is that I made the Autechre robot from aircraft parts stolen from a skip in the aircraft hangar Kubrick had me working in! The real Kubrick connection is, of course ‘2001’. His NASA influenced design   Edward George, ‘Body Rock’, Fantastic Voyages. Eine Kosmologie des Musikvideos, 3 Sat/ZDF (2000/2001), cited in Olaf Karnik, ‘Cunningham & Co Körperinszenierungen in Elektronikclips’, in club transmediale and Meike Jansen (eds), Gendertronics. Der Körper in der elektronischen Musik (Frankfurt am Main, 2005), p. 89. 58

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QUEER TRACKs aesthetic in that film has influenced nearly all Sci-fi from then on, including Alien, THX 1138 and Star Wars. It must have influenced modern industrial design too, because most car plant robots are white. I have always loved that look and when Björk asked me to make a ‘white heaven’ video, it could only go that way.59

There are two cyborgs who are born of machines and, in their lesbian sexuality and closeness, are also supported, cared for and repaired by the mechanical arm in the background. Is the white fluid that is flowing backwards perhaps a metaphor for the nurturing mother’s milk? As Haraway already states, ‘the cyborg skips the step of original unity’ and is thus particularly interesting for queer theory and feminism. Cyborgs are not born of mothers, they reproduce themselves. There is no ‘kinship’, blood relations, no patriarchal family. Cyborgs embody a radicalised form of reproductive technologies. The heterosexual system is based on investing in the future of human subjects. The human wants to live forever, longer than others. He wants his name to continue to exist after his death.60 Lee Edelman argues against such a heterosexual attitude and for the ‘No future’ approach within Queer Theory, the future is child’s play. Queerness should be the embodiment of drives that are narcissistic, antisocial and which deny the future. The efficiency of queer is the refusal of social and political order and not conforming to heterosexuality. In my view, the cyborg lies between the reproduction schema of heterosexuality and Lee Edelman’s ‘No future’ approach. Possibilities of a mechanical/ technological reproduction do exist but precisely without the symbol-laden blood relationship. (Interestingly, red only appears as a symbol of the production firm of the cyborgs that is affixed to the cyborgs and as the light that glows red in the cyborgs’ heads.) Blood relationships are particularly important for heterosexuality and allow unequal social structures to develop and contribute to the binarity of gender classification. A double boundary transgression was accomplished in this video: This is the doubly impossible scenario in which ‘All Is Full Of Love’ holds its own: A double boundary transgression which is produced via the portrayal of lesbian desire. It is a performance whose transcendental power brings the silent fixation on heterosexuality to light, and which undermines the obsessive portrayal of radical difference in all other videos.61

In an interview about the making of this video Björk says that she had a mental image that everything should be kept white, a kind of heaven, but a white that is 59   Booklet accompanying the DVD The Work of Director Chris Cunningham, by Chris Cunningham (Palm Pictures, 2003), p. 34. 60   Lee Edelman uses Elias Canetti for this analysis. In Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, NC and London, 2004), p. 34. 61   George, ‘Body Rock’, pp. 90–91.

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not just pure. And she wanted to bring in something erotic, a white that has a hard surface and seems like it is frozen, but which melts, for example whilst ‘making love’. This video is clearly about dismantling fixed concepts such as that of the human or machine, or of love as a purely heterosexual construction. Fluids (they could also be human fluids, which flow when certain desires are aroused) do not always have to flow in the same heterosexual direction; they can also be ‘the other way round’. This can be interpreted as an allusion to lesbian sexuality; or perhaps the fluid also represents fluid identity concepts or the antithesis to the rigidity and stability of machine parts. Luce Irigaray wrote a chapter about ‘The Mechanics of Fluids’ in which she determines a historical lag in the mathematisation of fluids in comparison to that of solids. She poses the question as to why the mechanics of solids gained the upper hand over the mechanics of fluids and whether it has to do with being complicit with rationality?62 For Irigaray, the woman is the fluid, the Other in discourse; women’s speech is also fluid, never the same, fluctuating, scintillating. ‘Fluid – like that other, inside/outside of philosophical discourse – is, by nature, unstable. Unless it is subordinated to geometrism, or (?) idealized’ (original question mark).63 The contrast between the rational and the emotional is brought to light in the video through the contrast between machine and fluid. However, this opposing pair does not remain separated but rather merges together, belongs together, the dichotomies fuse together, leading to a breakdown of boundaries. ‘All Is Full Of Love’ – everything, in every imaginable form, is full of love. ‘It is not for nothing that ‘All Is Full Of Love’ continues to be described as the best music video of the nineties, if not of all time. That everything really is full of love – to portray this utopia, which no clip has managed neither before, nor after Cunningham’s masterpiece’. (original emphasis)64

  Luce Irigaray, The Sex which is Not One (New York, 1985), p. 69.   Ibid., p. 112. 64   Karnik, ‘Cunningham & Co’, p. 91. 62

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Track 07

Trans* – Border Wars?

The term ‘trans*’ has arisen as way of grouping together those traditionally (medically) identified as transvestite, transsexual or transgender, whilst still resisting the circumscription of their various experiences by the existing structures of gender, sex and son [sic] on, and the limits of the psychological definition of their ‘disorder’.1

Technologies of Gender/Trans* Movement Technology can be understood as knowledge that makes certain technical practices possible; Teresa de Lauretis stresses that gender is a product of various social technologies such as cinema, institutionalised discourses, epistemology and critical practices.2 This supports the thesis that the forms of gender representation are technologies and that gender is only an effect of these technologies’ interaction with the ideological systems. There can also be other effects such as ethnicity, class, ‘ability’ and sexual orientation. The use of the term ‘technology’ comes from Michel Foucault’s work on sexuality where he outlines the synthesis between power and knowledge that lead to ‘sex’ (as in sexuality) via the institutions and discourse. ‘Let us suppose that historical analysis has revealed the presence of a veritable “technology” of sex, one that is much more complex and above all much more positive than the mere effect of a “defence” could be’,3 and also: The medicine of perversions and the programs of eugenics were the two great innovations in the technology of sex of the second half of the nineteenth century … The series composed of perversion-heredity-degenerescence formed the solid nucleus of the new technologies of sex. And let it not be imagined that this was nothing more than a medical theory which was scientifically lacking and improperly moralistic.4 1

  Jessica Cadwallader, ‘Diseased States: The Role of Pathology in the (Re)Production of the Body Politic’, in Nikki Sullivan and Samantha Murray (eds), Somatechnics: Queering the Technologisation of Bodies (Farnham and Burlington, 2009), p. 17. 2   Teresa de Lauretis, Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film and Fiction (Bloomington, 1987), p. 2. 3   Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, An Introduction (London, 1990), p. 90. 4   Ibid., p. 118. Further explanation of ‘technology of sex’, pp. 119–123.

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As Beatriz Preciado suggests, the strength of the Foucauldian concept of technology lies in moving away from the reduction of technology to objects, tools and machines or other appliances such as the reducing of technologies of sex to something that is used to control reproduction. For Foucault, technology is a complex apparatus of power and knowledge that integrates tools and texts, discourses and regimes of the body, laws and rules for mobilizing life, bodily lust and the articulation of truth.5

These technologies of gender show that gender is socially constructed and that, at the same time, this construction is portrayed as the natural truth. Many people expose or reveal this construction, whether intentionally or unintentionally, and live as trans*, whereby trans* is used as an umbrella term which can include anyone who does not feel comfortable in the gender role they were attributed with at birth, or who has a gender identity at odds with the labels ‘man’ or ‘woman’ credited to them by formal authorities … It can encompass discomfort with role expectations, being queer, occasional or more frequent cross-dressing, permanent cross-dressing and cross-gender living, through to accessing major health interventions such as hormonal therapy and surgical reassignment procedures. It can take up as little of your life as five minutes a week or as much as a life-long commitment to reconfiguring the body.6

I deliberately chose the term ‘trans*’ and not ‘transsexual’, ‘transgender’ or ‘genderqueer’ because it is the most inclusive and one with which most people can identify. As Stephen Whittle writes, a trans person can be butch, camp, transgender, transsexual, MTF, FTM or a cross-dresser. In other cultures they can also be called ‘lady boy, katoey’, for Maoris, ‘whakawahine or whakatane’ or hijra in Northern India.7 On the historical origins of trans Whittle notes: Although there had been some previous usage in the 1990s (e.g. in the creation of the online group trans-Academics), ‘trans’ as a stand-alone term did not come into formal usage until it was coined by a parliamentary discussion group in London in 1998, with the deliberate intention of being as inclusive as possible when negotiating equality legislation.8

5   Translated from German. Beatriz Preciado, Kontrasexuelles Manifest (Berlin, 2003), p. 115. 6   Stephen Whittle, ‘Foreword’, in Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle (eds), The Transgender Studies Reader (New York and London, 2006), p. XI. 7   Ibid. 8   Ibid.

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I will explain related concepts, differences and similarities surrounding transsexuality, Eonism, transvestism, butch, FTM, MTF, etc. later in the chapter. The term ‘cissexual’ describes the unmarked norm, where a person feels that their gender identity corresponds to their bodily sex.9 Or as A. Finn Enke writes about ‘cisgender’ or ‘cissexual’: ‘From the Latin prefix ‘cis,’ meaning on the same side or staying with the same orientation, ‘cisgender’ or ‘cissexual’ name the characteristic of staying with or being perceived to stay with the gender and/or sex one was assigned at birth.’10 I now go on to look at the term ‘transgender’ and the history of the term as explained by Susan Stryker: The word ‘transgender’ itself, which seems to have been coined in the 1980s, took on its current meaning in 1992 after appearing in the title of a small but influential pamphlet by Leslie Feinberg, Transgender Liberation: A Movement Whose Time has Come. First usage of the term ‘transgender’ is generally attributed to Virginia Prince, a Southern California advocate for freedom of gender expression … a transgender was somebody who permanently changed social gender through the public presentation of self, without recourse to genital transformation.11

Stryker describes Feinberg’s use of transgender as ‘an adjective rather than a noun’ and as a ‘pangender’ umbrella term. ‘Feinberg called for a political alliance between all individuals who were marginalized or oppressed due to their difference from social norms of gendered embodiment, and who should therefore band together in a struggle for social, political, and economic justice.’12 The surprising rise of transgender began in 1995; Stryker attributes this to the expansion of the World Wide Web, which was happening at the same time, and to the parallel impetus of the queer movement that gave transgender people the opportunity to raise their voices against the oppressive heteronormative regime. Stryker does, however, highlight differences to queer, as in her opinion queer tends to lead to homonormativity; in privileging homosexuality, queer forgets to question the ‘sex’ of the love object. Transgender manages to focus on questions of corporeality and identity rather than on desire and sexuality.13 Despite the efforts of transgender people to be as inclusive as possible, there is still some criticism: Riki Ann Wilchins writes that ‘trans activism is often focused on the problems (bathroom access, name change, workplace transition, and hate  9

  Cadwallader, ‘Diseased States’, p. 17.   A. Finn Enke, ‘Note on Terms and Concepts’, in Anne Enke (ed.), Transfeminist Perspectives: in and beyond Transgender and Gender Studies (Philadelphia, 2012), p. 20. 11   Susan Stryker, ‘(De)Subjugated Knowledges’ in Stryker and Whittle, The Transgender Studies Reader, p. 4. 12   Ibid. 13   Ibid., pp. 6–7. 10

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crimes) faced by those who have been most active in its success: postoperative male-to-female transsexuals’.14 Wilchins emphasises that genderqueer people often feel left out of transgender groups because they do not always want to change their bodies.15 She calls for people to fight against normative genders and to participate in a movement against the gender stereotypes that affect us all.16 In her thesis on queer genders, Rebecca Carbery points out that this is already happening and writes that ‘Genderqueer is rapidly becoming more widely recognised, accepted and commonly used amongst LGBTQI (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, Queer, Intersex) communities as a term for self-identification’.17 They explain that genderqueer people ‘may think of themselves as being both male and female … as someone whose gender falls completely outside the gender binary or as not having a gender at all’18 and may also refer to themselves as ‘bigendered, multi-gendered, androgyne, gender outlaw, gender bender, gender-fluid and gender-fuck. Sometimes they refuse to attach a label to their gender identities at all, feeling that no one word or phrase can adequately capture the complexities of how they experience gender’.19 The question of which pronoun they prefer is also solved individually: ‘Some genderqueers do go by the conventional binary pronouns though many prefer gender-neutral pronouns such as “ze/hir/hirs” or singular “they/their/theirs” instead of the traditional gendered ones and some prefer to use only their name and not use pronouns at all.’20 They also point out that some genderqueer people do present in line with binary gender roles, however many genderqueer people choose to present themselves in a non-normative, gender-variant way.21 On the other hand, there are serious objections on the part of the transsexual communities as a queer transgender movement measures or diminishes the value of transsexual and transgender people. The genderqueer movement is also criticised for consisting mainly of people who are ‘female-assigned, white, young, queer, urban, hip, non-transsexual, middle-class, politically radical and feminist’.22

14

  Riki Wilchins, ‘Deconstructing Trans’, in Joan Nestle, Clare Howell and Riki Wilchins (eds), GENDERqUEER: Voices From Beyond the Sexual Binary (New York, 2002), p. 59. 15   Ibid. 16   Riki Wilchins, ‘Changing the Subject’, in Nestle et al., GENDERqUEER, p. 54. 17   Rebecca Carbery, Queer Genders: Problematising Gender through Contemporary Photography, unpublished Master Thesis (Durham University, 2011), p. 42. 18   Ibid. 19   Ibid., p. 43 20   Ibid. 21   Ibid. 22   Patricia Elliot, Debates in Transgender, Queer, and Feminist Theory. Contested Sites (Farnham and Burlington, 2010), p. 34.

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History of Transsexuality The medical techniques surrounding transsexuality that were developed in the twentieth century blur the traces of transsexuality in historical periods in which technologies for gender transition were used through other means. One such case was the Chevalier d’Eon de Beaumont (1728–1810), who I want to mention here because his name was used by Havelock Ellis to coin his term for transvestism: Eonism. D’Eon de Beaumont was of French nobility who lived as a diplomat and spy in Russia and England.23 The case of the Chevalier is not well documented; many of his biographies are fictitious. It seems he was a victim of political and economic manipulation more than a master of his own destiny. What emerges from his correspondence that remains is that he was neither a classical transvestite nor a transsexual.24 Louis XVI tried to convince the Chevalier to return to France under the condition that he would live as a woman from then on. In the final year of his life he kept a diary where he refers to himself with female pronouns. The Chevalier’s name is also mentioned by Mylène Farmer in one of her well-known songs, ‘Sans contrefaçon’ (1988), in which she steadfastly asserts that she really is a boy and that she is the Chevalier d’Eon. In the next section I will explain how the culturally defined differentiation between the two genders developed and with it the necessity of the separation into male and female from which transsexuality subsequently emerged. In his book about the social construction of transsexuality the German sociologist, Stefan Hirschauer, outlined three lines of historical development: firstly, from hermaphroditism to intersexuality, secondly, from sodomy to homosexuality and, thirdly, from transvestism as a historical form of gender transition to transsexuality as a project of medical gender transition. He emphasises that transsexuality should be described ‘not as an individual illness’: but rather as a result of ‘collective action’ (Becker 1963), not as a brilliant and unique ‘discovery’, but rather a constructive and ongoing activity of many, not as a universal truth, rather as a geographical and historical localized phenomenon; individuals and collective protagonists have invested their contributions to its existence.25

23   Pat Califia, Sex Changes: The Politics of Transgenderism (San Francisco, 2003), p. 12. 24   C. Cox, ‘The Enigma of the Age: The Strange Story of the Chevalier d’Eon’ (London, 1966), p. 40. Cited in: Vern L. Bullough, ‘La transexualidad en la historia’, in José Antonio Nieto (ed.), Transexualidad, transgenerismo y cultura (Madrid, 1998), p. 65. 25   Translated from German. Stefan Hirschauer, Die soziale Konstruktion der Transsexualität. Über die Medizin und den Geschlechtswechsel (Frankfurt am Main, 1993), pp. 68–69.

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Hirschauer cites Thomas Laqueur’s work on the medical definition of gender differentiation and explains that up until the late eighteenth century there was a one-gender model where women, in principle, had the same genitals as men only inside instead of outside the body.26 Laqueur points out that this highlighting of anatomic differences of sex happened at exactly the time when social equality for everyone was being demanded and women also had a share in political rights. The fundamental gender differences were suddenly proven, thereby finding an argument against the equality postulate.27 Towards the end of the nineteenth century, gender differences seemed to be firmly grounded in nature as they could also be proven under the microscope.28 The two forms of gender representation also had defining consequences for intersexual people (at the time still called hermaphrodites). With the old model, they were respected and the doctors did not intervene any further. ‘With the new gender model, on the other hand, hermaphrodites went from being a virtually paradigmatic case of human gender to an obstacle to the new assertions of difference that were then willfully reenacted on them’ (original emphasis).29 Hirschfeld’s sexology was already looking at transvestism and transsexuality in 1910; he claimed that transvestism was a mental ‘in-between’ state. In 1918 he describes another phenomenon: the ‘androgynous urge’ which tried to ‘correct’ an intersexual psyche through the interventions (sometimes surgical) to the beard, chest and genital sex characteristics.30 Where Hirschfield spoke en passant in 1923 about ‘mental transsexualism’ as a synonym for transvestism and Ellis descriptively differentiated between a large group of Eonists, who only don the clothing of the other gender, and a smaller but ‘more absolute’ group, who felt as though they belonged completely to the other sex, Cauldwell, who was writing about transvestic subculture, coined the expression ‘psychopathia transsexualis’.31

Thus, the pathologisation of transsexuals took its course and, at the beginning of the 1950s, transsexuality was clinically differentiated from transvestism as a medical disorder. In 1953 Harry Benjamin published an article in which transsexuality ‘is to be understood as the highest stage of transvestism: the desire for the clothes of the other gender can become so strong that a complete membership of the other gender is sought’.32 Towards the end of 1952 it came to light that a former US soldier, George Jorgensen (afterwards Christine) had undergone sex reassignment surgery in 26

    28   29   30   31   32   27

Ibid., pp. 74–75. Ibid., p. 76. Ibid., p. 18. Translated from German. Ibid., p. 77. Ibid., p. 96. Translated from German. Ibid. Ibid., p. 97.

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Denmark.33 It was not the first case of surgical sex reassignment but the female person was presented by the media as a starlet and embodied a successful representation of femininity. The headline at the time read: ‘Ex- GI became Blond Beauty.’ As Patrick Califia points out the context of this time period is interesting; McCarthy’s witch-hunt was reaching its high point and people were going to prison for cross-dressing and homosexuality. The post-war United States was going through a time of ‘gender paranoia’. Women had to do ‘men’s’ work during the Second World War in order to keep the economy running but as soon as their husbands and boyfriends returned, there was an intensive campaign to chain the women to the stove again. The fact that Jorgensen was described as an ‘Ex-GI’ stems from this hysteria. The works of Sigmund Freud were also becoming known in the United States and people were speaking more freely about sexuality and sexual variations. The public awareness of sexual deviance increased but the understanding and tolerance of this difference did not.34 Jorgensen later made a career for herself as an actor and singer.35 She also wrote an autobiography that was supposed to contribute to a better public understanding of transsexuality, maybe in the hope that others going through gender transition would have an easier time of it than her. Patrick Califia describes Jorgensen’s strategy: Jorgensen attempts to normalize transsexuality by disassociating it from perverse pleasure-seeking activities like cross-dressing or homosexuality. This strategy is weakened by her work as an entertainer. No matter how Jorgensen may have wished audiences to view her, her act was perceived by the public and advertised as the ultimate form of female impersonation.36

Jorgensen, herself, writes about the decision to undergo sex reassignment surgery in the last paragraph of her book: I suppose the final question to answer is, ‘Has it been worth it?’ I must admit, at certain moments in life I might have hesitated to answer. I remember times when I lived in a crucible of troubled phantoms, and faltered in the long, painful struggle for identity. But for me there was always a glimmering promise that lay ahead; with the help of God, a promise that has been fulfilled. I found the oldest gift of heaven – to be myself.37   Califia, Sex Changes, pp. 17–28.   Ibid., pp. 23 and 26. 35   Marjorie Garber, Vested Interests. Cross-Dressing & Cultural Anxiety (New York and London, 1992), p. 112, cited in Harald Begusch, Cross-Dressing?/Trans-Sex?/CoreGender? Die Konstruktion der Effemination als Darstellung des Geschlechts, unpublished Doctoral Thesis (University of Vienna, 1995), p. 119. 36   Califia, Sex Changes, pp. 27–28. 37   Christine Jorgensen, Christine Jorgensen: A Personal Autobiography (New York, 1968), p. 300 cited in Califia, Sex Changes, p. 27. 33 34

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One music example that fits really well in this context about whether such an operation is really worth it despite all the possible complications, is Amanda Palmer’s ‘Sex Changes’ on the Dresden Dolls album Yes, Virginia … (Roadrunner International B.V., 2006), although it does have a negative undertone. To come back to Christine Jorgensen, one of her doctors was Christian Hamburger who described this case together with his colleagues in the Journal of the American Medical Association. The authors confirmed the characteristic traits of ‘Eonism’ (true transvestism) and stated that transvestism can be divided into different states through clinical analysis. Only a small proportion of cases can be described as true transvestism or ‘mental intersexualism’ whose desire is so strong that it could not go away under certain conditions. The term ‘transsexual’ became popular in the 1960s through Christian Hamburger and Harry Benjamin (both endocrinologists).38 According to Dwight Billings and Thomas Urban, psychoanalysts accused the defenders of transsexual operations of collaborating with the psychotic desires of the patients.39 Some years later Benjamin published the book The Transsexual Phenomenon40 in which he defined three types of transsexual: the non-operative, the ‘true’ transsexual of moderate intensity and the ‘true’ transsexual of high intensity. The Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore initiated the first ‘gender-identity programme’ in 1965. Clinics in Los Angeles and Minnesota followed and by the end of the 1970s there were about 40 centres in existence.41 Gender Identity Disorder has been one of the American Psychiatric Association’s recognised psychopathological disorders since 1980.42 An Unusual Case Study There is a well-known case of a transsexual woman called Agnes, which turns out to be unusual and undermines the medical institution. Robert Stoller created the theory of the ‘core gender identity’ and described the natural femininity of a male to female transsexual person. According to Stoller’s psychoanalysis, this feeling of belonging to a particular gender develops relatively quickly and is complete by about the age of two. He sees the authenticity in MTFs (male to female) transsexual people in the fact that they do not feign and do not have to perform their femininity, so do not have to use mimesis and even expect their bodies to ‘feminise’.43

38

  Bullough, ‘La transexualidad’, p. 63.   Ibid. 40   Harry Benjamin, The Transsexual Phenomenon (New York, 1966), pp. 22 and 47. 41   Hirschauer, Die soziale Konstruktion der Transsexualität, pp. 104–105. 42   Stryker, ‘(De)Subjugated Knowledges’, p. 14. 43   Robert Stoller, ‘The Male Transsexual as “Experiment”’, International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 54 (London, 1973): pp. 215–217, in Begusch, Cross-Dressing?, pp. 120–121. 39

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For Stoller, one incisive case was that of a young woman who presented herself in 1958 at the Department of Psychiatry of the University of California in Los Angeles. She was supervised by Drs Stoller, Garfinkel and Alexander Rosen who were carrying out research on intersexuality and gender dysphoria. The report about the 19-year-old patient, Agnes, states that she had a convincing female appearance. She was tall, slight and had a female figure. She had male genitalia with a normally developed penis but with the secondary sex characteristics of a woman. On closer investigation, biopsies of the testicles, skin and urethra cells determined a slight atrophy of the testicles and a chromatin-negative type (male) was discovered, however the urethra cells showed a raised level of oestrogen activity.44 After 35 hours of examination the UCLA team concluded the case with the verdict of ‘true hermaphroditism’. She had a rare type of intersexual condition where the testicles produce a higher level of oestrogen.45 As Money recommended hormonal and surgical interventions for the treatment of intersexual children in order to fix the gender assignment, the team decided on a therapeutic vaginoplasty. Agnes had the operation in 1959 and would later change her forename. As Beatriz Preciado states in her article ‘Biopolitique du genre’ (‘Biopolitics of Gender’), this case can so far be viewed as a medical success, or in a Foucauldian sense, as maximal efficiency of the normalising processes of disciplinary institutions. Compared with the case of Herculine Barbin, who Foucault writes about in his book, the repressive apparatus is now in the position to recreate the original relationship between sex and gender, which was only dreamed of in Herculine’s time. The tragic case of Herculine Barbin was that during that time in the nineteenth century one had to choose only one specific sexual identity. Thus, Herculine became not only a medical spectacle but also a moral monster. According to Foucault, before the nineteenth century, ‘hermaphrodites’ lived in a world without sexual identities where the ambiguity of sexual organs also enabled a diversity of social identifications.46 ‘Border Wars’ – Trans* and Subversion According to Preciado, one could claim that Agnes had let herself be too easily taken in by the biopolitical apparatus that was available, had she not told her true story in 1966, six years after her vaginoplasty surgery. Agnes admitted that she was a boy with a normal male body but that when she was 12 years old she 44

  Harold Garfinkel, Alexander Rosen and Robert Stoller, ‘Passing and the Maintenance of Sexual Identification in an Intersexed Patient’, Archives of General Psychiatry, 2 (1960): pp. 379–381. 45   Robert Stoller, ‘A Further Contribution to the Study of Gender Identity’, International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 49 (1968): p. 365. 46   Beatriz Preciado, ‘Biopolitique du genre’, Assembly International. A Debate on Micro-politics, Self-organisation and International Affairs, 1 (2005): p. 15.

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began taking her mother’s oestrogen pills. It was for this reason that she grew breasts and she did not get a beard.47 Agnes tricked the scientific techniques. She strategically kept quiet about certain facts it seems she had learnt about gender transition through the media. Preciado sees a connection here between Homi Bhabha’s ‘flawed mimesis’, that is, the relation between repetition and wilfulness, which Bhabha explains in his analysis of the colonised in colonial discourse. What Preciado finds even more interesting about Agnes’ case is that Agnes acts as a ‘modest witness’ of Donna Haraway’s: she uses her body as a transcoding zone of technologies and knowledge of sex. Thus, the way is opened for the ‘trans activism’ of Kate Bornstein, Riki Ann Wilchins or even Del LaGrace Volcano, who reject the voice re-education techniques 30 years on and thereby openly confirm and explain their positions as translesbian or transfeminist, that they do not want to belong to either gender.48 In her essay ‘The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto’, Sandy Stone writes that neither the researchers nor the transsexual people themselves have considered any reservations about the concept of the ‘wrong body’. This term, which arises from the phallocentric and binary differentiation of gender, should be examined with utmost suspicion. So long as we, whether academics, clinicians, or transsexuals, ontologize both sexuality and transsexuality in this way, we have foreclosed the possibility of analyzing desire and motivational complexity in a manner which adequately describes the multiple contradictions of individual lived experience. We need a deeper analytical language for transsexual theory, one which allows for the sorts of ambiguities and polyvocalities which have already so productively informed and enriched feminist theory.49

Sandy Stone criticises transsexual people who have conformed to such an extent to their new gender that they have become invisible again. She calls for transsexual people to act politically against traditional gender boundaries: by reappropriating difference and reclaiming the power of the refigured and reinscribed body. The disruptions of the old patterns of desire that the multiple dissonances of the transsexual body imply produce not an irreducible alterity but a myriad of alterities, whose unanticipated juxtapositions hold what Donna Haraway has called the promises of monsters – physicalities of constantly shifting figure and ground that exceed the frame of any possible representation.50 47

  Stoller, ‘A Further Contribution’, p. 135.   Preciado, ‘Biopolitique du genre’, p. 16. 49   Sandy Stone, ‘The Empire Strikes Back. A Posttranssexual Manifesto’, in Katie Conboy, Nadia Medina and Sarah Stanbury (eds), Writing on the Body. Female Embodiment and Feminist Theory (New York, 1997), p. 353. 50   Ibid., p. 354. 48

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This criticism also results in border wars within the trans* community, as Judith ‘Jack’ Halberstam explains using the example of the conflict between ‘transgender butches’ and FTMs: I use the term ‘transgender butch’ in this chapter to describe a form of gender transitivity that could be crucial to many butches’ sense of embodiment, sexual subjectivity, and even gender legitimacy. As the visibility of a transsexual community grows at the end of the twentieth century and as FTMS become increasingly visible within that community, questions about the viability of queer butch identities become unavoidable. Some lesbians seem to see FTMS as traitors to a ‘woman’s’ movement who cross over and become the enemy. Some FTMS see lesbian feminism as a discourse that has demonized FTMS and their masculinity. Some butches consider FTMS to be butches who believe in anatomy, and some FTMS consider butches to be FTMS who are too afraid to make the ‘transition’ from female to male. The border wars between transgender butches and FTMS presume that masculinity is a limited resource, available to only a few in ever decreasing quantities.51

Transgender or transsexual men are often wrongly fitted into lesbian history, although it is also true that the differences between some transsexual identities and some lesbian identities can be very blurred.52 Halberstam writes: the real problem is that this notion of lesbian and transgender masculinities lies in the way it suggests a masculine continuum that looks something like this: Androgyny–Soft Butch–Butch–Stone Butch–Transgender Butch–FTM Not Masculine————————————————Very Masculine.53

Whilst the term ‘transgender’ is difficult to define, whether they take hormones or not has nothing to do with the identification, as Jordy Jones and Judith ‘Jack’ Halberstam explain.54 These border wars are problematic in themselves. Halberstam offers a closer analysis: Because the production of gender and sexual deviance takes place in multiple locations (the doctor’s office, the operating room, the sex club, the bedroom, the bathroom) and because the discourses to which gender and sexual deviance are bound also emerge in many different contexts (medical tracts, queer magazines, advice columns, films and videos, autobiographies), the categories of transsexual, transgender, and butch are constantly under construction. However, in the border 51

    53   54   52

Judith Halberstam, Female Masculinity (Durham, NC, 2004), p. 144. Ibid., p. 150. Ibid., p. 151. Ibid.

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wars between butches and transsexual men, transsexuals are often cast as those who stay in one place, possibly a border space of nonidentity. The terminology of ‘border war’ is both apt and problematic for this reason. On the one hand, the idea of a border war sets up some notion of territories to be defended, ground to be held or lost, permeability to be defended against. On the other hand, a border war suggests that the border is at best slippery and permeable.55

A transphobic attitude has existed in some areas of feminism since the 1970s. Some feminists argued that MTF transsexual people are just men who mutilate themselves, that they cannot be accepted to ‘women-only’ events due to their male psyche and upbringing still being present and because they continue to represent the traits of their male dominance (in the case of an MTF person). In the case of an FTM person, they have rejected their femininity in order to join the patriarchy. These transphobic feminists believe that transsexual people do not want to change anything about gender norms; rather they just want to be able to choose between the genders.56 Patricia Elliot wrote in detail about the debates between some feminists and transsexual, transgender and genderqueer people. As a solution to the mutual criticism, which all parties could relate to without anyone feeling overlooked, Elliot suggests the ‘ethics of transmogrification’ that was developed by Nikki Sullivan, in which ‘Sullivan urges the development of a radical ethics aimed at embracing one’s own strangeness as well as that of others, an ethics of “(un)becoming other”’ (original emphasis).57 Sullivan refers to Susan Stryker’s wording that, as a result of modifying processes, all bodies are unnatural and constructed, and are formed and transformed. I will now only look at those debates that are interesting in the context of music. Riki Ann Wilchins rejects a transsexual identity and does not want to start a transsexual movement that only further cements the idea of a binary gender system.58 She writes about her experiences at the Michigan Womyn’s Festival under the title ‘The Menace in Michigan’, where these exact objections to transsexual people came to a head and lead to exclusions. A transsexual woman, Nancy Jean Burkholder was stopped by security staff at the entrance gate because the festival organisers, Barbara Price and Lisa Vogel, defended their ‘womyn-born womyn only’ policy, which the guards interpreted as excluding transsexual women. Those involved in the drama late that night could have no idea what kind of chain reaction their actions triggered. The author and activist Gayle Rubin called it a ‘cause célèbre’ and wrote: ‘After decades of feminist insistence that women are “made, not born”, after fighting to establish that 55

  Ibid., p. 163.   Anna Kirkland, ‘When Transgendered People Sue and Win: Feminist Reflections on Strategy, Activism, and the Legal Process’, in Vivien Labaton and Dawn Lundy Martin (eds), The Fire This Time (New York, 2004), pp. 182–183. 57   Elliot, Debates in Transgender, p. 80. 58   Kirkland, ‘When Transgendered’, p. 191. 56

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“anatomy is not destiny”, it is astounding that ostensibly progressive events can get away with discriminatory policies based so blatantly on recycled biological determinism.’59 According to Patrick Califia, there is nothing so disruptive to ‘feminist fundamentalism’ as transsexuality. Califia tries to explicate what he finds so wrong about this: In my more cynical moments, I believe that another underpinning of feminist fundamentalism is the fact that it is much easier to harangue and shame women about their sexuality and attack things like prostitution, pornography, and sexual deviation, which the state sees as dangerous, than it is to dismantle male domination. When I am feeling more patient, I can add other factors to that equation. We’ve all grown up in a sexist society. Bad as it is, it’s all we know of love, comfort, and security, as well as discrimination, stereotyping, and danger. And the current system has its compensations. Counter to what more simplistic feminists have claimed, we do not live in a society where men have all the power and women have none. Men (on average) have more privilege, wealth, freedom and security, but women also have the power to incite and control male lust, the ability to bear children, and the responsibility for socializing those children and setting a moral tone in society at large. If we really want to be free, women must realize that at the end of that struggle, we will not be women any more. Or at least we will not be women the way we understand that term today.60

Bolstered by these feminists, the book The Transsexual Empire (Janice G. Raymond) was published in 1979, which Sandy Stone refers to in her article ‘The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto’. Raymond tries to intellectually legitimise her anti-transsexual point of view by writing about the ability of ‘transsexuals’ to ‘penetrate’ women’s communities and ignores, as Califia points out, the hate, discrimination and violence that they are confronted with.61 Musical Border Wars Raymond’s transphobia goes so far as to attack Olivia Records and to call for people to boycott this lesbian-feminist company that produced lesbian music because Sandy Stone, a transgender woman, was a member of this collective. In the months following the publication of Raymond’s book, Olivia Records was subjected to hate mail and (death) threats and was on the brink of financial 59   Gayle Rubin, ‘Of Catamites and Kings’, in Joan Nestle (ed.), The Persistent Desire: A Femme-Butch Reader (Boston, 1993), p. 466. 60   Califia, Sex Changes, p. 90. 61   Ibid., p. 95.

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ruin. They decided to ask Sandy Stone if she would leave the collective. Prior to Raymond’s attack, the women in this group were happy to be able to work with Sandy Stone.62 Patrick Califia correctly argued that transsexual people can only learn about sexism if they have access to the feminist groups; exclusion does not improve the situation. Such exclusions were a common occurrence, such as in the 1972 prototype lesbian organisation ‘Daughters of Bilitis’. The second musical border war took place at the women’s music festival in Michigan, which is one of the oldest and most visible gatherings of lesbians, with around 7,000 to 8,000 visitors every year. According to Riki Ann Wilchins, it was a unique symbol of lesbian culture; this festival was associated with radical lesbian separatists for whom transsexual women were just men who had been surgically modified by patriarchal doctors and wanted to penetrate women-only spaces. There have also always been some lesbians who are against this form of ‘gender policing’.63 Gayle Rubin notes: Despite theoretically embracing diversity contemporary lesbian culture has a deep streak of xenophobia (responding with) hysteria, bigotry, and a desire to stamp out the offending messy realities. A ‘country club syndrome’ sometimes prevails in which the lesbian community is treated as an exclusive enclave from which the riffraff must be systematically expunged.64

However, it was not only transsexual people who were not welcome in some lesbian groups but rather butch/femme or S/M lesbians were attacked because they brought their patriarchal and oppressive influence into the women’s space. In 1993, some transsexual people were again refused entry to the festival grounds but refused to go home; they pitched their tents directly in front of the main entrance. They made anyone who listened aware of their situation. As Riki Ann Wilchins, who was involved at the time, writes, the Camp Trans was born and within four days over 200 festival participants stopped and offered help, food and water, and even took part in spontaneous workshops. Camp Trans became a part of the Michigan festival, with or without official recognition.65 Michelle Tea was at Camp Trans in order to document it, and she recounts the political discussions. She also conveyed excerpts of the festival organisers’ ‘zine’ that had been distributed (entitled Manual Transmission) in which they tried to explain why they did not let trans people into the festival:

62

  Ibid., pp. 106–107.   Riki Ann Wilchins, Read My Lips: Sexual Subversion and the End of Gender (Canada, 1997), p. 110. 64   Ibid. Also in Rubin, ‘Of Catamites’, p. 466. 65   Wilchins, Read My Lips, p. 112. 63

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Let’s be clear about what womyn born womyn means. It’s not about defining a goddamn thing. It is about saying this is what I’m gathering around for this particular moment. It is saying that this festival, this period in time, is for women whose entire life experience has been as a girl and who still live loudly as a woman. Period. How is that defining you? Why do you think we are so ignorant as to not ‘get’ that, to not figure out that we also have privilege for not struggling with a brain/body disconnect? But can you be so obstinate, can you be so determined to not understand that we have an experience that is outside yours? And that that experience, even though we have greater numbers, still entitles us to take separate space? Do you not see it as full on patronizing that you act as though these ‘thousands’ of women’s shelters can’t make up their own minds and policies? Doesn’t it make you sick to have the same objectives as the religious right? Why is it okay to totally ignore the need of women who do NOT want to see a penis? How and what world do we live in that you can completely divorce these things? Like being white and telling everyone your skin color doesn’t matter because you are not a racist? Stop assuming our ignorance.66

A further extract reads: Dicks are not useless signifiers. Even unwanted ones. You who I love and call my community of political bandits, you who grew up being seen as, treated as, regarded as boys (and perhaps miserably failing that performance) you did not grow as I. You did not experience being held out as girl and cropped into that particular box. You gotta understand, you are my sister, but you don’t have that experience. And taking my experience and saying it is yours don’t make it yours, makes it stolen.67

The people in Camp Trans reacted to this content by acknowledging that the festival workers admittedly had good intentions but the product was weak. They also comment that the festival workers admit that they were rushed, that though they specified no submissions degrading or attacking transpeople would be published they did not get to read all the writings. They feel bad for the discord their zine has caused, but maintain that these are the opinions of workers inside the festival, like it or not; they didn’t feel it was proper to censor anyone’s thoughts – who can dictate what is right and what is wrong?68

66   Michelle Tea, handout from her presentation ‘Perdida en tierra de nadie’ on 25.05.2007, Sevilla, p. 6. 67   Ibid., p. 7. 68   Ibid.

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Another opinion on the topic is that it is only a weak reference to good intentions, to which a young woman who is in a wheelchair states that she is hurt every day by people with good intentions. One festival worker complained that she did not know how this situation could be improved. One girl suggests that it is everyone’s responsibility to inform themselves of ‘trans’ issues. However, another woman feels that these processes of informing are hurtful, although she hopes that no one will be kept from learning. In conclusion Michelle Tea writes: ‘There’s a lot of fear here, everyone afraid of each other, afraid of their own ability to do the wrong thing from simple ignorance, their own ability to bungle a peace offering, offend the person you sought to help.’69 Later on, the trans people shouted: ‘What do we want? TRANS INCLUSION! When do we want it? NOW!’ and ‘Michigan will be so great/when they let trans women through the gate!’ Postcards were also distributed with the text ‘This is NOT the feminism my mother taught me about! Help end the exclusion of trans women from the Michigan Womyn’s Music Fest!’ Michelle Tea writes further: The back features quotes from old-school feminist icons Adrienne Rich on invisibility and Gloria Anzaldua on rigid thinking, as well as a zinger from the third wave transfeminist Emi Koyama which ends, ‘If the festival insists on removing certain groups of women because their genital structure or other physical characteristics reminiscent of male violence and domination, it should also tell white women to peel off their skin’.70

What struck Michelle Tea at this Camp Trans was that there were more ‘trans men’ than ‘trans women’: ‘The face of the trans revolution is, presently, a bearded one.’71 She began a discussion with the participants. One of them believes that the Riot Grrrl movement made it more acceptable to be a ‘dyke’ and now people see that they can also be queerly gendered and that it is nothing to fear. However, this is not the case for trans women. A trans woman asserted that trans women are often abused in society because it is more difficult for them to pass as women and so they are treated worse. Thus, many trans women never ‘come out’. In summary, I want to emphasise that trans* can be regarded as a subversive strategy with a ‘cutting edge’, because it challenges the fixed binary gender system (i.e. a life-long and stable identity as man or woman). A position between or outside of the binary genders is particularly politically relevant.

69

  Ibid.   Ibid., p. 70. 71   Ibid., p. 7. 70

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Music Examples I also tried to look for trans men as music examples as there are far fewer of them who are well known in music (maybe more so in the jazz scene, e.g. Billy Tipton who died in 1989; it was then discovered that he was FAAB (female assigned at birth/‘female-bodied’), which not even his adoptive sons knew about). People on a trans- female/feminine spectrum are often more in the spotlight as many come from drag shows and theatre, for example RuPaul (with the song ‘Supermodel of the World’ in 1993), or Beth Elliott, who in the late 1960s and early 1970s participated in the hippie folk music scene and was expelled from the Daughters of Bilitis in 1972, because she was no ‘real woman’.72 Terre Thaemlitz is a multimedia artist and electronic musician who manages to include political content from the trans and queer movement in her work as well as in his project ‘Trans-Sister-Radio’. (Thaemlitz self-defines as transgender and uses alternating male and female pronouns rather than gender neutral pronouns (such as ‘they’ or ‘hir’) because gender is never neutral under patriarchy.)73 Riot Acts The music examples that I will now look at are taken from the ‘trans-fabulous’ rockumentary film Riot Acts. Flaunting Gender Deviance in Music Performance by Actor Slash Model (2009). I came across certain issues through this film, which the musicians mention during their interviews. One such issue is how being trans* has influenced their career. For example Jessica Xavier says that before she transitioned, she had trouble finding something to say as a songwriter, but during her early transition she wrote a lot of songs because the experience was so rich. In the 1990s, her first band Changeling was one of very few trans bands, for example All the Pretty Horses or The Temptress. For her, it is good ‘to not have to explain things to people, they come to her and they want her to play’. The singer of the band Cliks says that the shift in identity is what an artist talks about; another band, The Shondes, add that some talk about their identities, and some do not. Ryder Richardson says that it can be an advantage for shy people because they can plan exactly what they want to say in their music performance. Venus deMars thinks that, for her, being out there is already political, being trans is political. The second issue I found was how the musicians feel in their gender on stage. For example, the singer of The Shondes says that he is more comfortable in his gender on stage than somewhere else, feels more appropriate in his gender and, at the same time, less aware of his gender on stage. Ryka Aoki affirms that she is   Susan Stryker, Transgender History (Berkeley, 2008), pp. 102–103.   Terre Thaemlitz, Attempting to Answer Common Points of Confusion (20 October 2011), available at: www.comatonse.com/writings/2011_terre_interviews_terre.html, retrieved on 12.12.2011. 72

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safer on stage, and when she is on stage talking to people, she feels closer to the audience. The artists know they are going to be looked at when they are on stage (as opposed to in public), however, as the singer of the Degenerettes explains, they do not have much control of how they are perceived, with regards to their gender. Every time he goes on stage, Anderson Toone still has to decide whether he is going to bind his chest or not. The male singer of Coyote Grace finds it strange to play in a dyke club, where he often played before his transition. He does not know how to react to the various comments that people make, such as when they say that it is great that he is singing there. The third issue is the voice, which seems to be of varying concern for the musicians. For a few MTF trans people their voice already sounds quite female (e.g. the singers of Basic Fix and the Degenerettes); others do not care if their voice does not match their image or they just try to get used to it (Lipstick Conspiracy) and some of them opt for voice training (Jessica Xavier). For FTM people who are singers, it has much more impact if their voices break due to the higher testosterone level and they have to adjust to their changed instrument. For most of them, starting to take testosterone is an adventurous journey because, when some of them began, there was no research on how it might change their voices and if they would be able to sing afterwards, explains Joe Steves from Coyote Grace. For Anderson Toone, not knowing how his voice would turn out was the reason he did not take testosterone for a long time (about 10 years) and many others were very apprehensive before starting the process. Geo Wyeth (Novice Theory) explains that if you want to build up a career as singer, you want people to recognise your voice, but you do not know how it will sound afterwards. Some of the trans* people dealt with it using humour and when their voice started cracking on stage, they started yodelling. Joe Steves says it is still possible to sing, but one develops a new voice. He says that at one point he had a fifth of the range that he had before, and that is why he had to change the key of most of his songs. The challenging aspect to this process is that the muscle memory of how to produce a certain note is no longer correct. It is as though you have to restring your guitar and then have to find the notes again. It also gives a different emotive quality to your voice and therefore to your songs, so some of the songs cannot be sung anymore. However, as the singer of Coyote Grace explains, now they are almost back in the same key as before, but an octave lower. The Shondes talk about ambiguous trans voices, which show something other than the typical binary gendered voices and therefore open up a space for non gender-binary people. This documentary is a very detailed and well-made portrayal of the different voices and issues of trans* people and explains that their experience is not ‘always one of tragedy, but one of creativity and joy’ (as is written on the back of the DVD booklet).

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Katastrophe ‘Katastrophe’74 is a FTM hip-hopper from San Francisco who also has a ‘slam poetry background’. His stage performance is that of a typical masculine hiphopper, however in contrast to usual hip hop, his lyrics are intelligent and witty with queer content – events or thoughts that seem to stem from his daily life. His song ‘The Life’75 gives an account of his daily life; he is not sparing with selfpraise – ‘I’m so handsome man’. In ‘Something Different’ he says that it is ‘not true’ that he is a ‘woman or a man’, he says ‘I’m something different, that there’s something different’. In this song Katastrophe describes himself as a ‘transsexual intellectual’ who leaves some people perplexed. He says ‘no’ to the question ‘have sex with you?’ and says that he is already with a girl and does not want to ‘fuck the world, cause you think I’m a perv’. He relates the problems that he faces and says that men are scared of trans people and do not respect them. He is also not welcome in the gay community, rather just a ‘mar’ on them; further on ‘I’m not mad, just hated … Disassociated’ and he reminds us again that he is ‘part girl, part boy’ but ‘more than a toy, I’m real’. In the song Enough Man Katastrophe talks about his girlfriend making him feel like a real man although he has ‘to stand with a needle in my hand’ so he can have ‘an inch and a half thin dick’. He was born with female genitalia (‘born with a clittor’), ‘a babysitters dream’, but that he now makes his ‘own mama scream when I’m home for the holidays’.76 In the song ‘Your Girlfriend’, Katastrophe boasts about his qualities in comparison to ‘other guys’, including that he can take their girlfriends away. He is ‘not like other guys … Cause I got good looks and wit on my side’, he can make girls ‘horny’ and accuses other men of being ‘jealous fellas’.77 In this music example, the subversive strategy lies in the body of the artist; a further clear subversive side to Katastrophe as an example with a political ‘cutting edge’ is to be found in his lyrics where he talks about his life, which shakes the pillars of gender construction.

74

  www.katastropherap.com/ and www.myspace.com/katastropherap, retrieved on 03.03.2008. 75   Can also be viewed on YouTube: www.youtube.com/watch?v=d3nglLQL5r0, retrieved on 03.03.2008. 76   Can be downloaded on Katastrophe’s homepage: www.katastropherap.com/music. html, retrieved on 03.03.2008. 77   Handout of Katastrophe’s concert in Sevilla, 25.05.2007, p. 12 b.

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Track 08

Dildo – Gender Blender Introduction The dildo takes us into the world of sexuality and Foucault; I will let the big thinker on bodily desires give us the introduction into this area of knowledge: Foucault’s three-volume The History of Sexuality contains an analysis of the history of sexuality but does not use historical methodologies. For example, he states that from the eighteenth century onwards, there were four main strategic areas of complexity that were unfolding around fields of knowledge and power that are specific to sexuality: 1. 2. 3. 4.

The hysterization of women’s bodies The pedagogization of children’s sex The socialization of procreative behaviour The psychiatrization of perverse pleasure.1

These strategies have to do with the production of sexuality: Sexuality must not be thought of as a kind of natural given which power tries to hold in check, or as an obscure domain which knowledge tries gradually to uncover. It is the name that can be given to a historical construct: not a furtive reality that is difficult to grasp, but a great surface network in which stimulation of bodies, the intensification of pleasures, the incitement to discourse, the formation of special knowledges, the strengthening of controls and resistances, are linked to one another, in accordance with a few major strategies of knowledge and power.2

Sexuality is an area that not only serves control and is constantly restricted by power, but is also productive, as Beatriz Preciado writes in her analysis of Foucault.3 Gayle Rubin was responsible for the fact that Foucault’s ideas took hold because she brought his ideas from France to the United States. In her article ‘Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of Politics of Sexuality’, she follows

1   Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, An Introduction (London, 1990), pp. 104–105. 2   Ibid., pp. 105–106. 3   Beatriz Preciado, Kontrasexuelles Manifest (Berlin, 2003), pp. 116–117.

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Foucault’s ideas and emphasises his argument that desire is not a pre-existing biological entity. Rather it is constituted by specific historical social practices.4 Modern Western society classifies sex acts according to a hierarchical system of sexual values. In 1984, Rubin produced two diagrams to illustrate this; the first gives a general overview of the sexual values system. According to this system, sexuality that is ‘good’, ‘normal’ or ‘natural’ is marital, monogamous, reproductive and not commercial. It should happen within a couple, within the same generation and at home. It should not involve any pornography, fetish objects, sex toys or gender roles other than the conventional binary ‘male’ and ‘female’ ones. The second figure illustrates the hierarchy of different sexualities. ‘Good’ sex, which conforms to the ‘normal’ sexuality in the first diagram, is to be found before the first dividing line. Forms of sexuality that are still accepted are to be found after the first line – for example, non-marital sex, promiscuity (sex with many, often changing, partners), homosexuality, masturbation, long-term lesbian or gay couples, lesbians in bars, promiscuous gay men in saunas or in the park. The last and therefore lowest level comes after the second dividing line and consists of the sexuality of transsexual people, fetishists and sadomasochists, for money or sexuality between generations.5 According to Rubin’s classification, sadomasochism, fetishism, transsexual people’s sexuality and cross-generational encounters were still viewed with aversion and disgust in the 1980s; people are unable to imagine emotions, love, free will, kindness or transcendence in them. Rubin judges this idea very harshly and is of the opinion that this type of sexual moral has more in common with the ideology of racism than with true moral virtue. It assigns the worth and virtue to the dominant groups and the sins to the underprivileged. A democratic morality should judge sexual acts on how the partners treat each other, the level of mutual consideration, the presence or absence of coercion and the quantity and quality of the pleasure that they provide.6 Dildonics Sex toys have a long history. Penis prostheses made from metal, horn or wood were described in the Kama Sutra. The ancient Greeks and Romans used leather dildos (in Greek ‘olisbos’) for both heterosexual and homosexual penetration. Even the women in Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, who went on a sex strike against

4   Gayle S. Rubin, ‘Thinking Sex. Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality’, in Henry Abelove, Michèle Aina Barale and David M. Halperin (eds), The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader (New York and London, 1993), p. 10. 5   Ibid., p. 14. 6   Ibid., p. 15.

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their husbands during war, spoke of the ‘olisbos’ and their leather helpers; thus, sex toys were already being used as a political device at this time.7 Dildos have undergone many changes over the course of history. These vibrators were supposed to treat female hysteria with the help of medically assisted orgasms. Treating the clitoris or vulva of female patients was used as a cure for hysteria or other female disorders. The steam-powered ‘manipulator’ was invented in 1860 and was used by doctors. As the treatment did not involve vaginal penetration it was not seen as sexual, although a minority of doctors did view it as a sexual act and not as a treatment and were therefore against it. Many warned that this process could only be carried out by doctors of the highest moral fibre.8 With regards to this context, Beatriz Preciado points out that at that time, technologies were invented and used, which on the one hand were related to the repression of masturbation and, on the other hand, cannot be separated from the treatment of hysteria.9 The electric vibrator was invented in the 1890s and was much cheaper than the steam-powered one. The dildo was seen as an electro-therapeutic machine and the sexual aspect was hidden for some time until the sale of dildos was opened to the public and the diagnoses of hysteria decreased. In 1913 the vibrator was advertised in the women’s magazine Modern Priscilla as follows: ‘30, 000 thrilling, invigorating, penetrating, revitalizing vibrations per minute … you will have an (i)rresistible desire to own it, once you feel the living pulsing touch of its rhythmic vibratory motion’.10 And as Jenny Saul says in her history of the vibrator: More and more women of this time gave up on seeing their doctors for treatments because they could now treat their hysteria at home. The vibrator remained in this respectable function until it started appearing in pornographic film in the 1920s. At that point, it ceased its life as a medical instrument.11

Then vibrators were still sold as ‘Swedish massagers’ or quasi-medical machines until the sexual revolution in the 1960s made it possible to openly proclaim their sexual function. The transition from sex therapy to sex toy marked a change in the way pleasure was viewed in Western society; it went from a medical device to a question of consumer choice.12 What exactly dildonics means, is explained by Preciado: ‘Dildonics is the post-queer techno-semiotic science of invention of new sexual non-genital organs  7   Chris Hables Gray, Cyborg Citizen. Politics in the Posthuman Age (New York and London, 2001), p. 152.  8   Ibid., pp. 152–153.  9  Preciado, Kontrasexuelles Manifest, p. 73. 10   Ibid., p. 153. 11   Jennifer M. Saul, ‘On Treating Things as People: Objectification, Pornography, and the History of the Vibrator’, Hypatia, 21/2 (2006): p. 53. 12  Ibid.

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and degendered pleasures, a process of withdrawing the body, outside of the sex-capital close circuits of penetration-reproduction, outside of the normative biopolitics of sex, gender, race and body commodification.’13 Further on she gives examples of the implication of dildonics to some body parts, such as a ‘medically described “vagina” may operate as a “boyhole” and a bio-penis may function as a flesh-dildo’.14 Dildotechtonics Beatriz Preciado devotes a large part of her book Kontrasexuelles Manifest (Contra-sexual Manifesto) to the dildo with the aim of breaking open the sex/ gender system by means of the dildo. She does not view the dildo as a phallus or penis substitute, as the dildo can extend over the whole body. She describes this as dildotechtonics: dildo = plastic sex; techton = constructor, generator. Dildotechtonics is a counter-science; it examines the development and use of dildos. It makes the distortions that the dildo brings about in the sex/gender system visible. Dildotechtonics – as a central part of contra-sexuality – understands the body as a surface, as a terrain for the relocation and use of the dildo. This task is often very difficult, when faced with medical and psychological definitions that naturalise the body and gender. From a heterocentric viewpoint, the term dildotechtonics designates every visible description of a deformation and abnormality of an individual or of many bodies15

that use dildos. ‘The dildos and toys exist to de-romanticise and de-naturalise.’16 Contra-sexuality makes dildotechtonics into a counter-science, which uncovers the technologies of resistance in heterosexual and homosexual cultures that can be redefined as ‘dildos’ in a broader sense. ‘The dildo brings about unease/lust.’17 However, the dildo was and still is subject to criticism from certain feminists and lesbians and seems to be a symbol of the sustainability of patriarchal and phallocentric models in lesbian sexuality. For Preciado, it is exactly the opposite; with the help of the dildo the penis is removed as the original (the difference in the binary gender system). ‘For contra-sexuality, the logic of heterosexuality shows itself through the dildo … The invention of the dildo is the end of the penis as the root of sexual difference.’18 13   Beatriz Preciado, ‘Gender and Sex Copyleft’, in Volcano Del LaGrace, Sex Works: 1978–2005 (Tübingen, 2006), p. 154. 14  Ibid. 15   Translated from German. Preciado, Kontrasexuelles Manifest, p. 37. 16   Ibid., p. 56. 17   Ibid., p. 37. 18   Ibid., p. 59.

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Beatriz/Beto Preciado is of the opinion that Judith/Jack Halberstam is the only person in feminist circles who does not view the dildo as simply a copy of the penis but as a theoretical object. For Halberstam, the dildo is not accepted in lesbian communities and in general because this embarrassing toy makes it clear that the ‘real’ penis is just a dildo, the only difference being that one cannot buy or make it oneself.19 The dildo does not only appear as an imitation of an organic appendage, but also as an instrument amongst other organic and non-organic machines (hands, whips, penis, chastity belt, condoms, tongues etc.).20 In order to unmask the ideology of sexuality one must view the dildo (its break with the body) as the centre of a relocated signification. The dildo is an object that puts itself in the place where something is lacking. It is about a process that takes place within heterosexuality. The dildo is not just an object, it is a cutting process; an operation where the supposed organic centre of sexuality is moved to a place that lies outside of the body. As a reference point for power and sexual excitement, the dildo betrays the anatomical organ by moving it to other places of signification, which are resexualised as a result of their semantic proximity. Everything is a dildo; even the penis … This rough imitation, this sculptural reproduction of the penis renders the mechanisms visible that original and copy make use of. It shows that the term ‘dildo’, which supposedly represents an original reality, retroactively produces the original penis. The dildo precedes the penis.21

In my view, this refers to Judith Butler’s gender model where the construction of gender exposes a gender without an original. Moreover, what is interesting in this quote is that the dildo is more than just an object. This brings us back to the discussion that I already raised in Track 03: Camp about Lady Gaga’s use of objects or her becoming an object and also the objects becoming people. Jennifer Saul looked into this subject with regard to the history of the dildo in ‘On Treating Things as People: Objectification, Pornography, and the History of the Vibrator’ and establishes that the vibrator replaced the doctor or midwife’s function of inducing a ‘hysterical paroxysm’22 in some of their female patients. Thus, women discovered that ‘technology could replace doctor’s function’, which relates to the way that Saul sees men’s use of pornography: ‘Women’s use of vibrators instead of doctors, then, seems to me at least as clear a case of using things as people as men’s use of pornography. It looks, then, like a case of personification.’23 Saul mentions that nowadays women do not normally use vibrators instead of doctors

19

 Ibid.   Ibid., p. 60. 21   Translated from German. Ibid. 22   Saul, ‘On Treating’, p. 52. 23   Ibid., p. 54. 20

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and that we should not worry about the personification of things, but about ‘the objectification of people leading to the personification of things’.24 This brings us back to the actual use of the dildo in Preciado’s quote. Preciado emphasises that to have an orgasm with a dildo means being obsessed with an object. It is also a loss of control. ‘The dildo is the virus that corrupts the truth of sex.’25 The dildo is the parodistic truth of heterosexuality. The logic of dildos proves that the concepts of the heterosexual system do not fit well together. The dildo is the signifying truth. The penis is the false pretence of a dominant ideology. The dildo says: the penis as sex is a lie. The dildo shows that the signifier that produces sexual difference loses at its own game.26

This clarifies the analogy with Judith Butler’s analysis of gender parody. The dildo shows that the penis is only a construction that gives men their male privileges because, in reality, a dildo is sufficient or one does not even need a dildo at all. Dildotopia Preciado uses sketches to portray dildotopia in which body parts such as the arm, breasts, leg or even the whole body are marked as dildos. The second part of the word dildotopia, ‘topia’, refers to place or location as well as seeming to be derived from ‘utopia’, a place where a societal ideal prevails; maybe a queer contra-sexual place? Pat Califia27 writes about the dildo in a dream: what would it be like to wake up one day and discover she had turned into a ‘penis-person’? The first reaction would be a mixture of disappointment and annoyance because she enjoys being a woman who loves other women; she constructs a fantastical masculinity and goes shopping for dildos for her girlfriend, for example.28 She even goes as far as to claim that dildos have more advantages than penises as size, hardness, diseases (so long as condoms are used) and pregnancy are not a problem.29 Califia overinterprets the homophobia of some men as probable dildo envy. 24

  Ibid., p. 59.   Translated from German. Preciado, Kontrasexuelles Manifest, p. 63. 26   Translated from German. Ibid., pp. 64–65. 27   As Califia explains in the preface of the second edition of Sex Changes (San Francisco, 2003), he has transitioned to living as male and goes by the name Patrick. I use the name he was writing under at the time and female pronouns as to do otherwise would obscure the point he made about enjoying being a woman. This is done after much deliberation and without wanting to disrespect Patrick Califia’s male identity. 28   Pat Califia, ‘Dildo Envy and Other Phallic Adventures’, in Fiona Giles (ed.), Dick for a Day: What Would You Do If You Had One (New York, 1997), p. 90. 29   Ibid., pp. 91–92. 25

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Beatriz Preciado, Dildotopia

Linda Hart playfully describes dildos as ‘playful instruments that are appreciated for their utility (and) their very ability to appear and to disappear (into a dresser drawer)’.30 As Donna Haraway already asserted, the technologically extended human body can bring about many disturbing but also pleasurable and close connections that call the old conventional differences between natural and artificial, mind and body into question and even break open the borders between the physical and non-physical.31

  Lyndia Hart, Between the Body and the Flesh: Performing Sadomasochism (New York, 1998), p. 99. Cited in Thomas Piontek, Queering Gay and Lesbian Studies (Urbana and Chicago, 2006), p. 87. 31   Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (London, 1998), pp. 152–153. 30

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Or, as Jean Baudrillard says with regard to the simulacrum, the simulacrum is never what the truth tries to hide; rather it is the truth that tries to hide that there is none. The simulacrum is true. Seen in this light, the dildo is not an imitation or substitute, but rather a simulacrum; a copy for which there is no original.32 The reality of a dildo is not determined by an objective truth such as the penis, rather through the comparison with other simulacra and the evaluation of its efficiency in a sexual act. June Reich writes: ‘The dildo, by itself, is a funny-looking piece of molded silicone or rubber. But in context, it is a powerful fucker. It is the law of the Daddy Butch. As a phallus, it assures difference without essentializing gender.’33 The dildo allows the sexually active woman to be the man without becoming a man. An example of an extraordinary erotic short story, which fits well into the genre of ‘genderfuck’ (i.e. where it is unimportant whether someone is a man or a woman during the sex act), is Carol A. Queen’s The Leather Daddy and the Femme in which the lesbian femme uses a strap-on to have sex with a gay leather daddy.34 The subversive element of the dildo lies in the breakdown of the sex/gender system. The dildo confirms the difference without essentialising gender. The subversive strategy of the dildo is analogous with that of gender parody as it also reveals that there is no original behind the copy. Music Examples The newest dildo technology combines music with a vibrator and is sold under the slogan ‘Feel the Music’.35 The user connects the wireless, music-driven vibrator with their MP3-player and if you ‘love your music, let it love you back’. Of course, this technology raises many possible questions for further research: are we objectifying or personifying music, is this mutual love ethically sustainable? Up until now, I have come across any artists who employ this tool, but this may be because it is a very recent technological development. Tribe 8 This infamous women’s band, a queer punk band from San Francisco, uses ‘genderfuck’ elements and caused a scandal in 1994 by using a dildo on stage during the women’s music festival in Michigan. The multicultural, self-defined   Mark Poster (ed.), Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings (Stanford, 1988), p. 6. Cited in Piontek, Queering Gay, p. 87. 33   June Reich, ‘Genderfuck: The Law of the Dildo’, in Thomas Piontek and Cheryl Kader (eds), ‘Essays in Gay and Lesbian Studies’, special edition of Discourse, 15/1 (1992): p. 120. 34   Carol A. Queen, The Leather Daddy and the Femme: An Erotic Novel in Several Scenes and a Few Conversations (San Francisco, 2003). Cited in Piontek, Queering Gay, p. 88. 35   www.ohmibod.com/, retrieved on 15.12.2011. 32

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‘All-dyke’ band consists of the Asian American guitarist Leslie Mah, the African Canadian basist Lynne Payne, the White drummer Slade, and the White singer Lynn Breedlove.36 In the announcement folder of the music festival they already expressed their verbally aggressive fight and described themselves as knifewielding, dildo-waving dykes who castrate rape-gangs. During the concert Lynn Breedlove strapped on a dildo, which, as a climax and ritual, was then cut off with a dagger and thrown into the audience. In her book An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures Ann Cvetkovich writes about this performance (she even provides some pictures of this scene). She writes that the band was accused of causing trauma to incest survivors, but some of the band countered that they ‘identify themselves as survivors of abuse. They explained how their music and performances allow them to unleash aggression and pain’.37 The band organised workshops before their performance, so that the audience realised it was ‘about addressing violence’ and not ‘promoting it’.38 In her consideration of the negative aspects of flashbacks for survivors of sexual violence, Cvetkovich focuses on the healing effect of Breedlove’s ritual: Breedlove, though, emerges triumphant from the aggressive act of castration, holding the severed dildo aloft as if to suggest that castration is survivable, at least for those who don’t have real penises. And although it is not a real penis, a dildo is a real object, and the physical force required to cut in two adds to the symbolic power of the performance.39

It is not only the physical force that is important in this act, but also the cultural impact. ‘Its healing power depends on its capacity to make sexual violence explicit and to embody cultural meanings in a physical or material performance.’40 Their lyrics, as can be seen from their stage performance, deal with taboos such as S/M and incest in a way that is specific to women. The songs hit out at the ‘mother earth folk’ singers of women’s festivals.41 The lyrics of ‘Manipulate’ tell us that a 36

  Meanwhile Breedlove calls himself Lynne and refers with male pronouns to him, but similar to Patrick Califia’s case, I prefer here to use her female name, given that in the past Breedlove still considered herself a woman and given the context of her performances. This is done after much deliberation and without wanting to disrespect Lynne Breedlove’s male identity. 37   Ann Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures (Durham, NC and London, 2003), p. 85. 38   Ibid., p. 86. 39  Ibid. 40   Ibid., p. 87. She finishes this sentence with a footnote to a text of Halberstam which is about the value of fantasies of aggression. Judith Halberstam, ‘Imagined Violence/Queer Violence: Representation, Rage, and Resistance’, Social Text, 37 (1993): pp. 187–201. 41   Evelyn McDonnell, ‘Queer Punk trifft Womyn’s Music’, in Anette Baldauf and Katharina Weingartner (eds), Lips.Hits.Tits.Power? Popkultur und Feminismus (Vienna,

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woman’s love is not all gentle and perfect, because she also likes to manipulate her girlfriend and wants to objectify her, although she knows that this is wrong.42 Through this mutual critique of stereotypical views of various branches of feminism, the barriers were weakened, Tribe 8 were able to triumph in Michigan and the women ‘welcomed the new, angry, sexually tolerant feminists’.43 Peaches Peaches, the ‘Queen’ of electro-punk and gender parody often makes use of dildos, as one can see in Figure 8.2 (2010 in Berlin) during her musical Peaches Does Herself, which celebrates the 10-year anniversary of her debut album, and where she represented ‘her work and her concerns about gender, beauty and age’. She wanted ‘it to be a fantastical musical that Broadway would never be able to present’.44 Through her false naked breasts and the use of a dildo, she impersonates someone with attributes of both sexes and she seems to fulfil her dream of being intersex (although in her characteristically exaggerated way). Peaches employs the dildo, firstly, as a ‘gender blender’ and, secondly, to parody stereotypical male behaviour in a subversive way. Lady Gaga As I mentioned in Track 03: Camp, I now come back to Lady Gaga’s penis, dildo or lesbian phallus, or whatever one might wish call it. I previously talked about the scenes in the music video ‘Telephone’, where two lesbian guards see that she does not have a penis and are disappointed. As this scene does not involve a penis or a dildo, I would like to look at the usefulness (or lack thereof) of the lesbian phallus in more detail. In her chapter about the lesbian phallus in Bodies that Matter, Judith Butler writes that this phallus does not really exist and that it is a joke, which plays with male and cultural anxiety.45 The word phallus was used by Lacan to explain that the male child in The Mirror Stage (1949) idealises his penis and the phallus is the ‘imaginary effect’.46 ‘In psychoanalytic theories of Freud and Lacan, the power to produce and control 1998), pp. 220–227. 42   Ibid., p. 219. Song ‘Manipulate’ from the album Fist City (Alternative Tentacles, 1995). 43   Ibid. p. 227. 44   www.peachesrocks.com/site/2010/10/peaches-does-herself/, retrieved on 18.12.2011. 45   Tavia Nyong’o, ‘Lady Gaga’s Lesbian Phallus’, (16 March 2010, available at: http://bullybloggers.wordpress.com/2010/03/16/lady-gagas-lesbian-phallus-2/, retrieved on 20.08.2011. 46   Judith Anne Peraino, Listening to the Sirens: Musical Technologies of Queer Identity from Homer to Hedwig (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, 2006), p. 132.

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Peaches Does Herself

signification resides in having the principal object of desire, which is “the phallus”, understood as an abstraction of the male genitals that functions as a symbol.’47 However, Butler argues that for lesbians it is an ‘impossible configuration’, ‘because the lesbian exists outside the phallic economy of heterosexuality’.48 In his blog49 about Gaga’s ‘Telephone’, Tavia Nyong’o mentions that with Gaga’s blurred genitalia she gave her answer to the humorous but aggressive questions as to whether she is actually a man. She uses the joke for her own fun and ‘gifts it with the absent presence of a lesbian phallus’.50 Karin Sellberg and Michael O’Rourke coined the term ‘Gaga’s tele-dildonics’, continuing the discussion about her phallicity, and refer to her ‘girlboner’ as what Butler calls a ‘transferable phantasm’.51 We have never seen her ‘tele-member’, but as shown in Preciado’s dildotopia sketches, the ‘phallus metonymically slides from crotch, to anus, to breasts, and to other objects including the telephone she suggestively slips out of a fellow inmate’s jeans’.52 Or in Butler’s words:

47

  Ibid., p. 132.  Ibid. 49   Tavia Nyong’o, ‘Lady Gaga’s Lesbian Phallus’. 50  Ibid. 51   http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/imr/2010/08/04/lady-gagas-phallicity, retrieved on 12.07.2011. 52  Ibid. 48

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Consider that ‘having’ the phallus can be symbolized by an arm, a tongue, a hand (or two), a knee, a thigh, a pelvic bone, an array of purposefully instrumentalized body-like things. And that this ‘having’ exists in relation to a ‘being the phallus’ which is both part of its own signifying effect (the phallic lesbian as potentially castrating).53

As Jordana Rosenberg comments, ‘For the more we want to see, the more the lesbian phallus becomes a joke at the expense of the visual field altogether – a seductive image through the suggestion of which the visual itself is lampooned’.54 Coming back to the beginning and to Track 01: Irony, Rosenberg explains that the joke employs a double meaning/entendre and refers to Freud’s theory of the dirty joke. She also states that Butler adds a third entendre to it in her chapter on the lesbian phallus, ‘overshadowing the satisfaction of “getting” something salacious with the recognition of failed linguistic connection’.55 Butler criticises feminists who believe in phalluses, because the phallus is ‘a fallacy of vision – a mistake about the powers of reference’.56 In order to understand the joke, I quote the beginning of Butler’s chapter ‘The Lesbian Phallus and the Morphological Imaginary’: After such a promising title, I knew that I could not possibly offer a satisfying essay; but perhaps the promise of the phallus is always dissatisfying in some way … It may not seem that the lesbian phallus has much to do with what you are about to read, but I assure you (promise you?) that it couldn’t have been done without it.57

MEN Another artistic interpretation of the lesbian phallus is by JD Samson in her music video of ‘Who am I to Feel so Free’ (MEN, 2011).58 The long opening scene is similar in appearance to the ‘Wanderer above the Sea of Fog’ (Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer, an oil painting by Caspar David Friedrich). The camera slowly and gradually zooms in on the figure who is standing on the cliff top.59 The   Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ (New York and London, 1993), p. 88. 54   Jordana Rosenberg, ‘Butler’s “Lesbian Phallus”; Or, what can Deconstruction Feel?’, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 9/3 (2003): pp. 393–394. 55   Ibid., p. 400. 56   Ibid., p. 402. 57   Ibid., p. 57. 58   www.youtube.com/watch?v=EOBrXd5WppA, retrieved on 12.12. 2011. 59   Walter W. Wacht, ‘Eindeutige Signale’, Spex. Magazine für Popkultur (February 2011), available at: www.spex.de/2011/02/16/neues-musikvideo-zu-who-am-i-to-feel-sofree-von-men-remix-von-antony-hegarty-live/, retrieved on 05.06.2011. 53

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gradual zooming in on JD Samson’s back allows new angles to become visible and heightens the viewer’s anticipation of what comes next. It takes a long time until the view is a close-up one, Samson then turns to her left and the viewer sees a lighthouse erecting slowly out of her coat. When the lighthouse is fully extended, the lights of the tower begin to shine and rotate; the final release consists of an eruption of golden sparkling confetti from the top of the lighthouse, which takes JD Samson, ‘Viz’, off her feet. She falls on her back with the golden confetti covering her. As her nickname ‘Viz’, which stands for ‘visibility’, suggests, as well as being a gay icon and ‘calendar pin up’, she also fights for the visibility of queer people through her music and art. This music video might be a humorous attempt to make the non-existing lesbian phallus visible, or maybe it is just to show the newest version of a dildo? One line of the song lyrics on this topic is: ‘we found options that were better than a man’. The Lost Bois60 As written on their homepage,61 A.O. (Awkward Original) and B. Steady were vocalists together in their high school jazz band, formed The Lost Bois in 200962 and now play jazz-infused hip hop.63 Their songs ‘Reading Rainbow’ and ‘The Race’ refer to their personal experiences as queers of colour and the song and video ‘Strap Step’64 remind us of the topic of this chapter: dildos. Whilst singing ‘Come take on the ride on my disco stick, girl’ and ‘f*** 50 Cent, I got the magic stick’ they show us how to do the (in)appropriate moves or steps. Bananas also play a role in the same video, which I will not explain further; a better idea is to watch the video, but read or listen to the warning (at the beginning) first. I conclude the last chapter with the last sentence of this warning: ‘queer women may also engage in sexual activity without the use of said “strap” or other toys’.

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  Thanks to an unknown member of the audience who, during my presentation in Innsbruck, Austria in 2011, gave me the name of this queer of colour band. 61   www.thelostbois.com/, retrieved on 12.02.2012. 62  http://colorlines.com/archives/2011/06/dc_hip-hop_duo_shows_queer_love_ fights_stereotypes.html, retrieved on 12.02.2012. 63   www.afterellen.com/people/2011/03/getting-to-know-the-lost-bois, retrieved on 12.02.2012. 64   www.youtube.com/watch?v=WZAtlMVLGCI, retrieved on 12.02.2012.

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Fade Out: Looking Forward The dildo brings the idea of a queer strategy vividly to life. First of all, the theoretical background to the dildo based on a queer strategy, parody. Secondly, merely its presence disrupts the binary gender system and the traditional heterosexuality in the sex act itself. The dildo forms the culmination of my analysis of subversive strategies of queer genders; it is a queer magic wand, a queer blender, or as Marie-Hélène Bourcier writes in her epilogue of Beatriz Preciado’s Kontrasexuelles Manifest (Contra-sexual Manifesto): ‘the trope of the dildo is itself already enough to class the process of discursive recycling that is accomplished in this text, not into the field of proliferation or the marking of difference, but into the field of contra-corporality.’1 She also states that just as Wittig’s lesbian thankfully broke away from the truth of the woman, the dildo breaks away from the truth of sex. Let us return to the point of departure. The journey through the queer jungle of tropes began with my wanting to analyse subversive strategies of queer genders using examples from rock and pop music. Important elements here were the enumeration of and attempt to define these strategies; through their analysis I tried to determine where exactly the subversion lies (what makes this strategy subversive?). Further important aspects were the presentation and explanation of examples of these strategies from rock and pop music. These examples are a very important point of orientation in this theoretical wilderness and help to illustrate the theory through the practice and to examine whether these strategies are subversive or not. Irony What follows is a short summary of the examinations. The first strategy, which also forms a basis for other strategies, is irony, with its ‘cutting edge’. With the help of irony, the opposite of what is meant is expressed. In Ancient Greece, Socrates takes on the ironic position of not-knowing. For Aristotle, irony is a noble form of joking and in his Nichomachean Ethics the ironist is more highly regarded because of their understatement than those who overstep the line in terms of the acceptable level of virtue through excess or vanity.

1   Translated from German. Epilogue by Marie-Hélène Bourcier in Beatriz Preciado, Kontrasexuelles Manifest (Berlin, 2003), p. 161.

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Margaret A. Rose gives us a more contemporary definition of irony. She says that irony is a statement that has at least two messages in its code; one of them is a hidden message from the ironist to the ‘informed’ public and the other is the message of the code that is immediately understood but is meant ironically. Linda Hutcheon determined two functions of irony, namely the semantic (with the two meanings) and the pragmatic, which judges and can contain a ‘cutting edge’, i.e. a political sharpness. Irony can be seen as marking the difference in meaning; it therefore overlaps with parody on a semantic level whereas its pragmatic function is closer to the genre of satire. Both parody and satire can use parody as a device. I look at the pragmatic function of irony in more detail because this ‘cutting edge’ is crucial to the subversive potential of irony. In the pragmatic function, an emotion is conveyed by the speaker to the listener. The ‘cutting edge’ of this pragmatic function of irony splits or cuts an element into two meanings. For a subversive irony, it is essential that the meaning with a political sharpness predominates and is perceived by the listener. In her diagram of the nine forms of irony, Hutcheon also shows at which point the irony begins to be subversive. This point lies at the oppositional form of irony (seventh from the bottom on the scale); on the positive side, Hutcheon mentions its transgressive and subversive characteristics and, on the negative side, its insulting and offensive ones. On the scale, this form is positioned closer to the maximum affective charge, which suggests that the ‘cutting edge’ does contain a certain political sharpness, which can split the content into two directions or meanings (transgressive and subversive on the one hand, insulting and offensive on the other). I want to highlight that the ‘cutting edge’ with a political sharpness must be clearly recognisable. By clearly recognisable, I mean that although the semantic level of irony can have two meanings, regardless of any losses, the pragmatic function with the political message must be the one to predominate and come to the fore. That is to say, as a result of this clarity, the sender accepts that the ironic statement will also be viewed by the receiver as offensive and insulting. Music Examples: Madonna, Riot Grrrls, Angie Reed Hutcheon cites Madonna as an example of a weak form of irony (on her scale: the second from the bottom, ‘complicating’, whose positive interpretation is complex, rich and ambiguous (+) and the negative is misleading, imprecise and ambiguous (-)). Madonna lacks the ‘cutting edge’ with a political sharpness required to be subversive in a queer/feminist sense. An example with a ‘cutting edge’ is the use of the babydoll dress in the Riot Grrrl movement. This movement was made up of girls who used their anger and aggression, who refuted traditional ascriptions of femininity and provocatively made use of them. They used their media presence to confront the public with issues such as sexual abuse and harassment. For her first album, Angie Reed took on the role of Barbara Brockhaus, a bored secretary (‘I’m Barbara Brockhaus and it’s my job to work here. Hurray, I cheer!’

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The fact that she actually means the opposite is made clear in the next line. ‘The hours are long, the days are short, backwards ticks the clock to remind me I’m bored’) who strikes back against the sexual harassment by her boss. In the song ‘I Don’t Do Dirty Work, Sucka!!’ she does not put up with anything and turns her boss’ dirty request on its head, which becomes: ‘Suck my finger’. Parody In Ancient Greece, parody was an ‘after’ or ‘contra’ song. According to Margaret Rose the term parados described an ‘imitating singer’ or an ‘imitating singing’ as opposed to the concept of the ‘original singer’. The word ‘ridiculous’ was used to describe the basic meaning of parody as the singing of a song whose words had been distorted or altered. In contrast to irony, parody is all about imitation. M.A. Rose gives a contemporary description of parody and says that the crucial element of parody lies in generating the expectation for X and then delivering Y, i.e. something that is not completely X. Parody is not a simple imitation, but rather a distortion of the original. The method of parody is to ‘de-realise’ norms that the original is trying to ‘realise’, that is, the normative status of the original is reduced to a mere convention or artifice. Linda Hutcheon is of the opinion that parody’s subversion lies in the repetition with a critical difference. Like irony, it can contain a ‘cutting edge’ that undermines dominant conservative forces and introduces subversive forces with the aid of the critical difference. As Judith Butler shows in her gender parody, gender is produced through disciplinary production and certain acts, gestures and desires create the effect of an inner, core gender on the surface. Drag exposes this production and reveals that it is not an original that is imitated but that gender is itself only an imitation of a non-existent original. However, Butler was criticised for this view of drag as subversive and admitted in her next book that drag does not always have to be subversive. Sabine Hark defends this idea; she uses the example of the lesbian ‘femme’ and ‘butch’, which have nothing to do with the proliferation of social genders, rather they expose the failure of the heterosexual regime, which has to do with the ‘sexual de-authorisation of gender’. Hark says that the critique of Butler was so harsh, firstly, because the basis of feminist politics is supposedly lost if the gender ‘woman’ no longer exists and secondly, because the concept of parody as politics was not recognised. The latter phenomenon originated in the Germanspeaking world, whereas in the English-speaking world, Butler’s ideas were already preceded by cultural studies and analyses of camp culture (which I looked at in Track 03: Camp). With regard to the accusation that feminism would be lost without the ‘woman’, Hark refers to Lacan and Laclau/Mouffe and says that an identity does not have to be absolute; there is also a dialectic of non-fixity, an identity as a transformatory process or as a free-floating character.

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Further, an important distinction must be made with regard to Butler’s gender performance, namely between performance and as a voluntary theatrical representation of gender norms and performativity, which is the involuntary repetition of norms through which identity is constructed. The effect of performativity is less predictable than that of parody. Performativity is related to the subversive speech act. Austin asserted that the illocutionary speech act is itself performative because an act is carried out by saying it. Derrida also deals with performative utterances in iteration and their repetition and how reality is created through this repetition. Iterability is based on the repetition of a ‘différance’. According to Butler, this is how the word ‘queer’ was reclaimed. To summarise, it can be said that there are three criteria that need to be met for a subversive parody. Firstly, as Hutcheon asserted, building on the ‘cutting edge’ of irony, the repetition with a critical difference must be clearly evident in the political sharpness; secondly, as Butler analysed in her gender parody, there can be no original behind the copy, i.e. acts, gestures and desires create an ‘inner core’ on the surface of the body; thirdly, the subversive speech act, which was applied successfully to the word ‘queer’ and used by Butler as an example. Music Example: Peaches On her first album, The Teaches of Peaches, Peaches parodies the male rock scene and insults this ‘rock show’, calling it a ‘cock show’. With song titles like ‘Fuck the Pain Away’, ‘Lovertits’ and ‘Set it Off’ she imitates the macho behaviour of many of her male colleagues; her edgy rhythms also point to a parody of the ‘boys’ tough music. A subversive parody is therefore recognisable here, that is, a repetition with a critical difference, the political sharpness of the ‘cutting edge’. Peaches copies the male rock scene but with a clear difference in the lyrics. The third criterion becomes apparent via her use of typical expressions from rock and pop music, the appropriation of the words in a subversive speech act, e.g. the title of her second album, Fatherfucker. On the cover of this album she visually takes on the ‘identity’ of a man – a portrait of her as a ‘drag king’ with an stick-on beard shows the second characteristic of a subversive parody, gender parody, which exposes the original as an imitation. Peaches’ game of parody is not ambivalent, with the aim of increasing sales, like in the case of Madonna’s irony. For Peaches, it has to be obvious as this is necessary for true equality. Camp The entry for camp in the Duden dictionary has two definitions. Firstly, ‘camp’ a male person with extravagant (homosexual) behaviour and lifestyle, a kind of dandy; secondly ‘campy’ in the sense of extravagant, theatrical and flamboyant. In the English-speaking world, camp has been associated with gay and lesbian since the 1940s. In 1964, Susan Sontag published the article ‘Notes on Camp’,

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which I dealt with in some detail. She tried to explore the inner workings of camp without referring explicitly to the link with gay and lesbian culture. Briefly summarised, she described camp as a sensibility and love of the unnatural, artificial and of exaggeration. Moe Meyer distinguished between two forms of camp: firstly, an original, parodistic practice with political intent, which originated with Oscar Wilde, to generate social visibility; secondly, ‘pop-camp’, which Meyers sees as an apolitical taste that cooperates with the dominant system, a ‘straight’ taste without queer visibility. A subversive camp is one which has more political content, which contains the ‘cutting edge’ and concretely refers to the position of gay and lesbian, feminist and queer culture, unlike Sontag’s description in ‘Notes on Camp’. As Sedgwick emphasises, subversive camp is based on the sympathy, which makes thus strategy of self-empowerment successful; this sympathy must be present from both sides. (Sontag tried to express this sympathy in her description of camp as a sensibility, a passion.) The authors associated with the camp subjects and also with the people (i.e. the receivers) who value the quality of the text and thereby have positive associations with them. Music Examples: Madonna, Annie Lennox, Grace Jones, Fangoria, Lady Gaga, Scream Club Madonna’s camp corresponds more closely to Meyer’s ‘pop-camp’. Her 2005 album, Confessions on the Dancefloor, features many elements of camp style; she used the aesthetic of the disco era: disco balls, aerobics outfits and 1970s music by ABBA – according to Sontag, a style that is already outdated and out of fashion that continues to be used by camp. On her album Diva, Annie Lennox has a song with the title ‘Keep Young and Beautiful’, which is reminiscent of Oscar Wilde aesthetic obligations. Grace Jones’ aesthetic is a ‘female androgynous’ camp. Fangoria’s video for ‘Hagamos algo muy vulgar’ (‘Let’s Do Something Very Vulgar’) also corresponds to Meyer’s ‘pop-camp’, i.e in the sense of Susan Sontag’s camp without a political sharpness. Lady Gaga’s subversive strategy of queer camp lies in her use of objects, which according to Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology, shows the failed orientation of these objects; however, the failed objects still work with Lady Gaga’s body. The final example, Scream Club with ‘Don’t F*** with My Babies’, on the other hand, is full of clear, political, subversive statements and even contains calls to revolution; this is why I call this category, as well as due to the punk aesthetic in the video, anarcho-camp.

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Mask/Masquerade Unlike his contemporaries Nietzsche saw nothing insincere or bad about masks so long as one was aware of it. He also dealt with role play in everyday life and with the role of the woman who has to correspond to the image that the man has of her. Nietzsche himself also loved playing with the mask in his philosophy; he tried to give the impression of superficiality although when one reads his philosophy in more detail, one realises that it is actually much deeper. He could not find anything solid behind the mask, there is only fluidity; perhaps the ‘self’ of individuals does not even exist. In order to explain the mask, it is necessary to analyse the gaze. For Foucault, the gaze is disciplinary, as he explains using Bentham’s Panopticon prison model. In this model, the inmates no longer know if they are being observed or not. Nowadays, new technologies such as video cameras take over the role of the guard. In her article ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, Laura Mulvey gives us a psychoanalytical analysis of the gaze in cinema, with reference to gendered power relations. She also looks at Freud’s scopophilia, Lacan’s mirror image and fetishising, which supposedly stems from the fear of castration. Mary Ann Doane also begins her analysis in Film and the Masquerade: Theorizing the Female Spectator with Freud, who was of the view that women are too close to themselves, too close to their bodies. Doane also uses J. Riviere’s analysis of Womanliness as a Masquerade. Riviere had noticed that a patient’s feminine masquerade served to protect her from the vengeance of men when she, as a woman, took on masculine roles and therefore possessed male privilege. There is not ‘true’, real femininity behind the masquerade. Thus, Doane states that women use their bodies for deceit, whereas Doane’s critique is that feminine masquerade is dependent on men. I also look at a representation of masculinity as a masquerade. Halberstam criticises the general psychoanalytical study of the gaze and asserts that it is far too tied up with traditional ideas of men and women and of heterosexuality. A queer gaze does exist in that gendered positions can be multiplied and in new queer cinema, various identities are played out in one act. With regards to subversive mask and masquerade, I want to reiterate that femininity as a masquerade illustrates, as Riviere already established, that there is no original femininity (one tries to control the viewer’s gaze and direct it onto something that, in reality, does not really exist). Thus, in line with Halberstam’s demands for a queer gaze or queer cinema, one can take on many gendered positions with the help of the mask or masquerade and through the course of a film many different identities can be shown in one person. This demonstrates, as Judith Butler already ascertained, that the gender copy is dependent on an original. In contrast to the previous strategies (irony, parody, camp) this strategy is purely a visual one. The others can at least contain a rhetorical or literary component, of varying strength, which locates the subversive strategy within (whether spoke or written) language. Both visual and rhetorical/literary versions of camp and gender parody can exist; for example the camp in Oscar Wilde’s works is literary.

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Music Examples: Peaches, Annie Lennox, Yo! Majesty, Orlanding the Dominant In the Peaches’ video Downtown, both her masculine and feminine masquerades are successful. Annie Lennox provides an example of a subversive feminine masquerade on the cover of her album Diva as it is clear from the image that there is no feminine original behind the feminine masquerade. Yo! Majesty’s ‘Don’t Let Go’ music video has all the ingredients of a hyper‘femme’ininity and the queer musical Orlanding the Dominant is a good example of a subversive new burlesque, which contributes to the denaturalisation of femininity. Mimesis/Mimicry In ancient times, mimesis was about representation and imitation. Magical ritual dances were stages around a colossus that represented something from the past in the present. Mimos or mimesthai originally referred to the changes in personality that occurred during such rituals. The ancient concept of mimesis was multifaceted, as Plato’s negative view of mimesis shows; he sees mimesis as an imitation, which can take place in poetry as well as in music and dance, and points to the educational side of mimesis that the state should keep under observation in order to protect young people. Plato is of the opinion that philosophy is closer to reality and therefore wants to throw the poet (with his mimesis) out of the country. Aristotle, on the other hand, dealing with Plato’s critique of poets at the end of his Poetics, ascertains three forms of imitations for poets, painters and the visual arts. They portray things as how they were or are, or how they should be. For Aristotle, mimesis is creative and productive. In modern times, the term mimesis has gradually become a synonym for repetition. According to Gebauer and Wulf, mimesis is increasingly disappearing from the modern era, as there seems to be nothing left to imitate. The originals are over or have disappeared. For Irigaray, feminist mimesis is a strategy that women can use to escape the discipline of the male gaze. This mimesis has also been described as strategic essentialism and is the inexact repetition of a negative point of view. According to Irigaray, it consists of three important steps; firstly, to challenge authority and expose the position of the woman as ‘other’ as a fabrication; secondly, to demonstrate how women are excluded. The third and final step is a change in the conception of female subjectivity of the body. Irigaray uses the speculum to illustrate her theory of mimesis as the speculum serves as a physical reflection. She also refers to economic speculating and to the theoretical, philosophical speculation. In Irigaray’s work, the woman remains confined to the position of the mirror but can act subversively by means of a mimetic shift. Judith Butler retains this strategy of Irigaray and explains that Western metaphysics is dependent on a prohibition of non-heterosexual relationships as well as the exclusion of the feminine. In Kristeva’s work, mimesis refers to the poetic text and language is the practice of the semiotic and symbolic interaction; thus, the chora is the music, the

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non-linguistic part of language. This is where the characteristic of inconceivability lies, which eludes rationality; it is exactly here that Kristeva locates the subversive potential of mimesis. For Kristeva, music is the song behind the text (timbre, rhythm of the voice and gesture). However, Judith Butler criticises Kristeva’s assertion because the semiotic supposedly cannot rebel against the symbolic and is subject to the reproduction and stability of the symbolic laws of the father. Nevertheless, I agree with Bayerl’s view that the feeling of lust is activated in the semiotic part (poetic rhythm) of a text and therefore makes a subversive strategy possible with the help of emotions and feelings. Homi Bhabha’s postcolonial mimicry is about colonial imitation. The effects of identity are produced within the game of power, which has no essence or ‘self’. The ambivalence of this mimicry does not break the discourse but is altered, which fixes the colonial subject as a ‘partial’ presence – an ‘almost the same but not white’. Music Example of Colonial Mimicry: Grace Jones, Bishi Grace Jones’ ‘Slave to the Rhythm’ and her picture on the album cover of Island Life reflect this colonial mimicry, ‘nearly’ corresponding to the White expectation of otherness. With the help of the post-feminist author, Angela Carter, Bishi also comes to terms with her experience as an Indian immigrant in London through her song ‘Nights at the Circus’. Martin Leeker explains the connection between mimesis and new technologies. The physical aspect decreases due to modern electronic technologies (computers) but mimesis allows people to be stimulated. Humans adapt to the possibilities that come with machines, even when the imaginary would otherwise have taken place in their head. The person now encounters the imaginary as reality via simulation techniques (e.g. through film or virtual reality). Music Example: Lesbians on Ecstasy and MEN Lesbians on Ecstasy (LOE) produce electronic versions of lesbian and women’s classics and thereby establish a connection to the older music generation without the symbols, lyrics and music losing their effectiveness through the technical mimesis. With the help of the technological mimesis, LOE manage to stimulate the emotions and feelings that are also important for self-empowerment of the younger music listeners but without losing the important content of the previous generation. JD Samson from MEN explains why their concerts bring politics and dance together and how the music influences the people on the dance floor. They create an open, safe and free space for the people, thus revealing what Plato said about the mimetic character of dance. Through their combination of upbeat music and critical lyrics, they create a positive atmosphere where it is possible to celebrate diversity and people can learn about different things. This illustrates how Kristeva’s semiotic chora works through the reintroduction of lust into the text.

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Cyborg The term cyborg was first used in 1960 by Manfred E. Clynes and Nathan S. Kline to refer to self-regulating human–machine systems. People were trying to adapt themselves to the environment of outer space in order to be able to travel in space. Donna J. Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto serves as the basis for this chapter. She links the science, technology and socialist feminism of the late twentieth century and thereby establishes her cyborg theory. The cyborg is a hybrid of machine and organism. The theoretical background in Haraway’s cyborg world is her critic of theories, which she views as totalitarian, such as Marxist/socialist feminism and radical feminism. The cyborg creates and destroys machines, identities, categories, relationships, distances and histories. In this utopian world there are three primary ‘boundary breakdowns’; the boundaries between human and animal (e.g. animal rights), animal/human (organism) and machine (e.g. medicine), physical and non-physical (e.g. electronics, software) no longer exist. In a world of hierarchical dualisms, these dichotomies come apart (for example the concepts and connotations of nature and culture, which previously carried very different values). The subversive aspect of the cyborg, as Haraway analyses, lies in these boundary breakdowns (e.g. human/machine, physical/non-physical) but also has to do with the fact that the cyborg has no ‘natural’ origin such as a family and has no (blood) relations. Music Example: Björk ‘All is Full of Love’ – Music Video The video ‘All is Full of Love’ is directed by Chris Cunningham. Two robotic beings or cyborgs are the main focus of this video; both have a ‘female’ body and a human (Björk’s) face, which also gives the impression of being a mask. These two robotic beings are brought together by mechanical arms; a liquid flows through their mechanical bodies, but in the wrong direction. For Irigaray, fluidity is the symbol for woman, for the Other, the opposite of rationality or solid mass. The cyborgs are driven by love for each other; despite the machines, the atmosphere created is one of gentleness, love, care and tenderness, which seems to almost be a state of fluidity that is at the same time a floating one (like weightlessness). In this state every movement is soft and flowing without any jerking or twitching that is usually expected of robots or machines. The subversive element in this video is the dismantling of fixed concepts, i.e. of what is human and what is machine, or of love as a purely heterosexual construct. Fluids (which could also be human fluids that flow as a result of desire) do not always have to flow in the same ‘heterosexual’ direction. A further subtext is that new living beings are created by love, including with the help of technology and when the partners are of the same sex, without having to revert to blood relationships.

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Trans* To begin with I briefly deal with the topic ‘technologies of gender’. This concept was coined by Theresa de Lauretis, and she explains that gender is a product of various social discourses. For Foucault, a technology is a synthesis of power and knowledge. He sees sexuality as the result of productive rather than oppressive technologies. The term trans* includes transgender, transsexual, genderqueer and transvestite people. According to Stefan Hirschauer, transsexuality arose as a response to the current binary gender system and the obligations to categorise oneself as a man or a woman. Laqueur writes that there used to only be one anatomical model for the sex organs, which women had inside and men on the outside. The current difference model was brought about by new political ideas – through the Enlightenment’s ideas of social equality. The new scientific model represented the incomparability of the sexes and served as a justification for the exclusion of women from political rights. In 1949, Caudwell used the problematic term ‘psychopathia transsexualis’ for the first time. In the 1950s and 1960s, medical transition was made possible by means of endocrinological and surgical interventions. The first case that became public via the media was that of Christine Jorgensen (‘Ex-GI Became Blonde Beauty’) in 1952. The critiques of transsexuality are that transsexuals submit to the binary gender system and conform so much to the new gender that they become invisible again. Some lesbians see FTM trans people as traitors. The policies of some women’s spaces to not let trans people in is also controversial. This led to the exclusion of trans people from the women’s music festival in Michigan and to the founding of the trans camp. Trans* is a subversive strategy with a ‘cutting edge’, because it challenges this rigid binary gender system (i.e. a life-long and unchangeable identity as a man or woman). Music Examples: Riot Acts, Katastrophe In the interviews from the rockumentary Riot Acts. Flaunting Gender Deviance in Music Performance, I discovered three important issues for trans* musicians: firstly, that their being trans* has a strong influence on their career; secondly, they often feel more comfortable in their gender on stage; thirdly, concerns with their voice: some of them do not care if their appearance does not fit to their voice, others opt for voice training. A major issue for FTM musicians is when their voice changes and they have to adjust to their new ‘instrument’, which for most of them was/is adventurous and in some cases trans* people were very apprehensive before taking testosterone because of the unknown outcome. Katastrophe is an FTM hip-hop singer and the subversive strategy already lies in the body of the artist. In this example, the clearly subversive side with a political

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sharpness is in his lyrics. He recounts his everyday life, which shakes the pillars of masculine and feminine gender construction. Dildo Foucault and G. Rubin introduce the realm of sexuality; Foucault states that the strongest form of control does not arise from the prohibition of certain practices, but through the production of certain desires and wishes that are eventually categorised as ‘sexual identities’. Rubin analyses the Western hierarchical system of sexual values where sexual acts with manufactured objects and pornography lie on the outer limits. In ancient times, sex toys were already being deployed as political tools, as the example of the ‘olisbos’ in Aristophanes’ Lysistrata demonstrates. Later on, they were used to treat hysteria; interestingly, at the same time, masturbation was being repressed. Beatriz Preciado views the dildo as a possible means of breaking open the traditional sex/gender system. Dildos denaturalise the heterosexual scenario and at the same time bring about turmoil and desire. In the lesbian community, the dildo was seen as replica of the penis and was therefore often not accepted. For Preciado, the dildo is exactly the opposite. With its help, the penis is abolished as the origin – including in the sense of the difference between the two genders. The dildo reveals, as Judith Butler already established with gender parody, that the penis is not an original. This is where the subversive power of the dildo lies, the ‘cutting edge’. The political sharpness of the sex toy enables a woman to take on the position of a man without being a man. The penis is therefore just a construction that gives the man his patriarchal power. Music Examples: Tribe 8, Peaches, Lady Gaga, MEN Tribe 8’s singer caused a scandal at a women’s music festival with a strap-on dildo because many women complained that they did not want to see something like that. They did not understand the subversive potential of the dildo. It was only after the various strands of feminism had dealt with their prejudices that the band was welcomed. For the concert’s crowning finale, the dildo was triumphantly cut off. Peaches also uses dildos during her concerts and there is a photo of a woman wearing a dildo in the booklet for her album Impeach my Bush. In her show Peaches Does Herself, she finally fulfils her dream of being intersex by wearing false naked breasts and a flesh coloured dildo. Lady Gaga’s penis or lesbian phallus (or whatever one might call it) caused many discussions. In the music video ‘Telephone’, she turned the joke about her around to make fun of the people who believed this rumour and therefore exemplifies Butler’s chapter on ‘The Lesbian Phallus and the Morphological Imaginary’.

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JD Samson makes another artistic attempt to materialise the lesbian phallus or to visualise the dildo in a less realistic way by having a lighthouse erecting from her coat in the music video ‘Who am I to Feel so Free’. Outlook The dildo brings us back to the beginning of the conclusion. What occurred to me during this summary is that the newer technologies also brought about disruption and border wars within the feminist, lesbian, gay and queer communities, as Haraway already predicted in her cyborg theory. The first five strategies (irony, parody, camp, mask/masquerade, mimesis/mimicry) still correspond to the more well-known ideas and did not lead to particularly intense discussions within the community. As Halberstam established with the example of Lesbians on Ecstasy, in the last of these five strategies (mimesis/mimicry), the tables are already beginning to turn with technological mimesis. In this example of electronic music as technology, this break is repaired and a bridge can be built within the lesbian community that brings the different generations together. The newer queer subversive strategies (perhaps similar to those in ‘new queer cinema’?)2 caused arguments within the groups; they raised questions such as: is cyborg theory solely a utopian idea that cannot work on a political level? Or is the dildo simply a mere repetition of heterosexual sexuality? I have given arguments and examples, which show that these new technological queer strategies are subversive, that they are even more radical than the first examples because they remove the self-evident nature of concepts such as two fixed gender identities or the penis. One difficulty that I did not manage to overcome to my satisfaction was to find queer musicians of various racial, ethnic or religious backgrounds. I tried to solve this problem with the help of postcolonial mimicry, where I at least gave two examples – Grace Jones and Bishi. Luckily I came across the hip-hop bands of colour Yo! Majesty and The Lost Bois and whilst I was finishing the conclusion, I found the names of Miz Korona, Mz Jonz, Thee Satisfaction, Las Krudas, Skim, Collin Clay, Big Freedia and Karlyn Heffernan.3 TLC and Salt’n’Pepa spoke very openly about sexuality in their lyrics, but only in a heterosexual context. Erykah Badu, Missy Elliott and Lauryn Hill present a new image of women in hip-hop, but they lack the queer element. Maybe this problem lies in the fact that queer content is not yet accepted in Black hip-hop culture, as Rana A. Emerson writes:

2

  It would be going to far to investigate here whether there is a connection, whether the elements that led to ‘new’ queer film are similar to those of my new queer strategies. 3   http://colorlines.com/archives/2011/05/queer_hip_hop.html, retrieved on 12.02. 2012. More on queer hip-hop in general can be found at: www.outhiphop.com and gaymusicrevolution.ning.com.

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Sexual diversity is another element of Black womanhood that is conspicuously absent and also reflects the desirability of perceived sexual availability for men. None of the videos featured performers who were lesbian or bisexual, nor did they show even implicit homosexual or bisexual themes. This was interesting in light of the emergence of critically acclaimed and commercially popular bisexual and lesbian artists, most notably, Me’Shell Ndgeocello (whose most controversial video Leviticus: Faggot was censored by BET). As can be gleaned from the frequently homophobic rhetoric in hip-hop and R&B songs, sexual difference and nonconformity are still not legitimized in Black popular culture.4

Unfortunately, I did not find a suitable example in Turkish culture. There are some gay pop stars such as Zeki Müren and there is also an MTF trans person Bülent Ersoy, but to my knowledge, there is no FTM person. Although singers such as Özlem Tekin includes feminist content in her songs (e.g. about forced marriage in ‘Duvaksız Gelin’ – ‘The Bride without a Veil’), the queer element is lacking. The only song that I found that has a lesbian content is from Emel Müftüoglu and is called ‘Korkuyorum’ (‘I am Afraid’). Interestingly, the music video5 was produced in 1994 and is set on a lake where a little boat drifts along with the female singer and another woman who is wearing a white bridal dress and a floral wreath in her hair. A few moments of them gently caressing each other are shown, but no kissing. As Zülfukar Cetin writes the text is about solitude, anxiety, defencelessness, forlornness and that this song, together with the images of the video, shows the struggles of lesbian love against repressive social obstacles. The aim of the song is to evoke emotions of empathy and therefore to generate acceptance for homosexual lives.6 It is difficult to allocate this song to one of my subversive strategies. One possibility would perhaps be camp recognition, which is mentioned by Sedgwick, as the music is based on sympathy with the two women. The listeners/viewers are supposed to have positive associations, even if they have to recognise the struggles of lesbians. However, the only subjects/objects in ‘Korkuyorum’ are the two lesbian women, whom I would not refer to as ‘camp’. My difficulties show that, despite the aspirations of boundary transgression, Queer Theory still views ‘Whiteness’ as the norm and that further analyses of popular culture that deal with ‘queers of colour’ are necessary. A positive outlook, however could be in further research on other cultures or languages which focuses on how queer persons are named in that culture (so the appropriate language skills and cultural knowledge are important), and how the express themselves in music.

4

  Rana A. Emerson, ‘Where my Girls At? Negotiating Black Womanhood in Music Videos’, Gender & Society, 16/1 (2002): p. 123. 5   www.youtube.com/watch?v=HQiSHtDBZuo&ob=av2e, retrieved on 20.12.2011. 6   Zülfukar Cetin, ‘Transnationale massenmediale Darstellung der Lesben, Schwulen, Transvestiten und Transgender’, in Holger Adam et al. (eds), PopKulturDiskurs. Zum Verhältnis von Gesellschaft, Kulturindustrie und Wissenschaft (Mainz, 2010), p. 133.

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I therefore leave the finale of this work to a ‘queer of colour’; the singer ‘Skin’ from Skunk Anansie, whose bisexual desire becomes clear in her songs ‘She’s my Heroine’7 and ‘Yes, it’s Fucking Political’,8 whereby the second title can be interpreted in three ways; even popular culture is political, ‘being queer’ is political and being ‘of colour’ is political.

  Skunk Anansie, Stoosh (One Little Indian Records, 1996).  Ibid.

7 8

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Discography Angie Reed, Presents the Best of Barbara Brockhaus, Chicks on Speed Records, 2003. Annie Lennox, Diva, BMG, 1992. Bishi, Nights at the Circus, Gryphon Records, 2007. Chris Cunningham, The Work of Director Chris Cunningham (DVD), Palm Pictures, 2003. De Alaska a Fangoria (CD and DVD), EMI, 2004. Dresden Dolls, Yes, Virginia …, Roadrunner International B.V., 2006. Fangoria, Salto Mortal, Subterfuge Records, 1991. Grace Jones, Island Life, The Island Def Jam Music Group, 1985. Grace Jones, Warm Leatherette, UMG, 1980. Girl Monster, Chicks on Speed Records, 2006. Gustav, SV Damenkraft, Sissy Boyz Orlanding the Dominant – eine queere Burlesque (MP3 Download on Amazon, 2008/2009). Hedwig and the Angry Inch, Hybrid Records, 2001. Katastrophe, Fault, Lines, and Faultlines, Cherchez La Femme Projects, 2007. Katastrophe, Let’s F**k, Then Talk About My Problems, Sugartruck Recordings LLC, 2004. Lady Gaga, Born this Way, Interscope Records, 2011. Les Reines Prochaines, Alberta, Make up, 1999. Lesbians on Ecstasy, Lesbians on Ecstasy, Alien 8, 2004. Lesbians on Ecstasy, We Know You Know, Alien 8, 2007. Madonna, The Immaculate Collection, Sire Records Company, 1990. Madonna, Confessions On a Dance Floor, Warner Bros, 2005. MEN, Talk about Body, IAMSOUND Records, 2011. Peaches, The Teaches of Peaches, Kitty-Yo, 2000. Peaches, Fatherfucker, Kitty-Yo, 2003. Peaches, Impeach my Bush, XL, 2006. Scream Club, Don’t Bite Your Sister, Retard Disco, 2004. Skunk Anansie, Stoosh, One Little Indian Records, 1996. Tribe 8, Fist City, Alternative Tentacles, 1995. Films FtF: female to femme (2006) by Chisholm, Kami and Stark, Elizabeth (San Francisco: Frameline). Hedwig and the Angry Inch (2001) by Mitchell, John Cameron (New York: New Line Productions). Radical Act (2010) by Clark, Tex (Portland: A Million Movies a Minute). Riot Acts: Flaunting Gender Deviance in Music Performance (2009) by Actor Slash Model (New York: Outcast Films).

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The Runaways (2010) by Sigismondi, Floria (Culver City: Sony Pictures Home Entertainment).

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Index

References to illustrations are in bold ABBA, 70, 187 Absolutely Fabulous, 88 activism, 56, 92, 142, 151, 158, 160 Actor Slash Model, 165 Adorno, Theodor, 111–112, 116–117, 129 Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, The, 70 affect, 19, 23, 75, 112–113, 117, 118, 127, 130, 137, 184 African American, 3, 5, 10, 26, 68, 80 Agnes, 156–158 Aguilera, Christine, 103 Ahmed, Sara, 1, 79, 187 A.I., 145 AIDS, 11, 67, 68 Akerlund, Jonas, 78 Alaska (a.k.a. Fangoria), 73 ‘A quién le importa’, 73 ‘Bailando’, 73 ‘Rey del Glam’, 73 see also Fangoria Alien, 140–141, 146 Alien 2, 88 Alien 3, 88 All the Pretty Horses, 165 Almodóvar, Pedro, 73 Almond, Marc, 6 alternative rock, 6 Anderson, Laurie, 27 androgynous, 6, 7, 9, 10, 59, 61, 70–73, 77, 96, 97, 101, 121, 152, 154, 159, 187 Ant, Adam, 6 Antony and the Johnsons, 126 Anzaldua, Gloria, 164 A.O. (Awkward Original), 181 Aoki, Ryka, 165–166

Apter, Emily, 89–90 Aristophanes, 7–9, 170–171, 193 Aristotle, 16, 107–109, 127–128, 183, 189 Auerbach, Erich, 110 Austin, J.L., 52–53, 186 Babes in Toyland, 30 Babuscio, Jack, 62, 64–65 Bad Girls, 31 Badu, Erykah, 194 Baker, Josephine, 4–5 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 116 Baldauf, Anette, 29 Balkan folklore, 122 Ballard, J.G., 73 Balsamo, Anne, 143–144 Banhart, Devendra, 94 Bankrupt, Berni, 125, 128 Barbin, Herculine, 157 Basic Fix, 166 Baudrillard, Jean, 84, 176 Bayerl, Sabine, 112, 118–119, 190 Beerbohm, Max, 59 Bellanger, Silke, 138–139 Benjamin, Harry, 154, 156 Benjamin, Walter, 110, 111, 128 Bentham, Jeremy, 83, 188 Berger, John, 82–83 Bernhardt, Sarah, 4 Beyoncé, 75, 78 Bhabha, Homi K., 111, 120–121, 141, 158, 190 Biddle, Ian, 94 Big Freedia, 194 Bikini Kill ‘Rebel Girl’, 30 Billings, Dwight, 156

214

QUEER TRaCKS

binary gender system, 1, 7, 13, 43, 49, 57, 61, 73, 84, 101, 138, 152, 158, 160, 164, 166, 170, 172, 183, 192 biologism/biological, 48, 70, 71, 78, 93, 114, 134, 161, 170 bisexual, 5, 6, 9, 42, 58, 152, 195, 196 Bishi, 122, 194 Night at the Circus, 122, 123, 190 Bjelland, Kat, 30 Björk ‘All is Full of Love’, 144–147, 145, 191 Black (Blackness), 4, 68, 69, 78, 95, 121, 122, 143, 194–195 Black Widow, 88 Blitz, 86 blues, 3, 5 Blur, 6 body, 4, 5, 8, 22, 26, 40, 42, 43, 48, 51, 58, 71, 79, 83, 85, 86, 87, 90, 91, 94, 95, 100, 104, 114, 117, 118, 119, 121, 122, 124–125, 130, 131, 133, 134–135, 137, 138, 143, 144, 150, 154, 157, 158, 163, 167, 172, 173, 174, 175, 180, 186, 187, 189, 191, 192 boi, 94 Bolan, Marc, 6 Bollywood, 122 Booth, Mark, 63 Bornstein, Kate, 158 boundary/ies, 5, 10, 63, 92, 97, 118, 133–134, 139, 144, 146, 147, 158, 191, 195 Bourcier, Marie-Hélène, 183 Bourdieu, Pierre, 46 Bowie, David, 6, 59, 96 Bowman, Wayne D., 109 Bozal, Valeriano, 105 Braidotti, Rosi, 27, 30–31 Bratmobile, 28 Pottymouth, 28 Breedlove, Lynn/e, 177 Bridget Jones’s Diary, 96 Bright, Suzie, 86 Britpop, 6 Brod, Harry, 92–93, 94 Brown, Julie Medusa: Dare to be Truthful, 69 ‘Vague’, 69

Burkholder, Nancy Jean, 160 burlesque, 3–4, 36, 66, 103, 104 see also new burlesque Burlesque, 103 Bussmann, Anne, 114 butch(/femme), 11, 47–51, 86, 90, 94, 99–101, 159, 160, 162, 185 Butler, Judith, 42, 95, 96, 98, 115–116, 118, 121, 130, 138–139, 173, 188, 189, 190 drag, 42, 43–44, 45, 47, 51–52, 63, 88, 101, 111, 185 lesbian phallus, 178–180, 193 parody, 12, 42–54, 68, 95, 174, 185–186, 193 performance, 21–22, 42, 43, 47, 50–51, 101, 111, 116, 186 performativity, 1, 43, 47, 52–54, 56, 57, 186 works Bodies That Matter, 43–44, 47, 51, 52, 93, 115–116, 178, 180 Excitable Speech, 52, 53 Gender Trouble, 22, 42–43, 93, 101, 118, 130 Cabaret, 70 Califia, Patrick (Pat), 155, 161, 162, 174 Callas, Maria, 67 camp, 6, 59–66, 95, 111, 186–187, 188, 194, 195 aesthetic of, 73–74 and anarchy, 80, 187 and female androgyny, 70–73, 187 and feminism, 66–70, 80 and monstrosity, 74–79 camp recognition, 62, 72, 195 Camp Trans, 162–164, 192 Carbery, Rebecca, 152 carnival, 116 Carter, Angela Nights at the Circus, 122, 190 Case, Sue-Ellen, 95, 100, 111 castration, 85–86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 120, 177, 180, 188 categories, 8, 9, 12, 16, 45, 65, 78, 91, 92, 98, 115, 124, 133, 136, 137, 142, 143, 159, 187, 191

IndEX categorisation, 2, 10, 45, 61, 84 Cauldwell, David O., 154, 192 Cervantes, 15 Cetin, Zülfukar, 195 Changeling, 165 Chaplin, Charlie, 4 Chapman, Tracy, 10, 125 Cher, 103 chora, 116–119, 130, 189, 190 Christian, Meg I Know You Know, 129 Cicero, 15 cinema, 84–87, 88, 140–144, 188, 194 Cixous, Hélène, 31, 87 Clay, Collin, 194 Cleto, Fabio, 60, 61, 63 Cliks, 165 Clynes, Manfred E., 131–132, 191 Cobain, Kurt, 6 Colebrook, Claire, 21–22 colour, 10, 69, 73, 79, 80, 99, 142, 181, 194, 195, 196 see also Black; White community, 52, 67, 80, 127, 128, 129, 138, 159, 162, 163, 167, 193, 194 Connolly, C. Bond Strikes Camp, 59 constructions, 7, 8, 28n. 22, 23, 26, 27, 41, 42, 61, 71, 72, 84, 93, 94, 95, 98, 100, 101, 104, 137, 138, 140, 141, 147, 150, 153, 159, 167, 173, 174, 193 Cooper, Alice, 6 Cooper, Sarah, 115 copy, 54, 61, 63, 97, 109, 110, 121, 126, 128, 173, 176, 186, 188 Cora, Bella, 4 cover version, 55, 125–127 Coyote Grace, 166 Crocker, Elizabeth, 101–102 cross-dressing, 25, 49, 58, 150, 155 Crumbly Lil Bunny, 28 Csordas, Thomas J., 134 cultural studies, 2, 13, 44, 45, 185 culture, 10, 45, 138, 191 Culture Club, 6 Cunningham, Chris, 145–146, 191 Cvetkovich, Ann, 177

215

cyborg, 26, 131–132, 144–147, 191, 194 and cinema, 139–144 and feminism, 132–144, 146, 191 and utopia, 138–139, 194 Dahl, Ulrika, 99 Dando, Evan, 6 Daschner, Katrina, 103, 104 Aria de Mustang, 104 Flaming Flamingos, 104 Hafenperlen, 104 Daughters of Bilitis, 162, 165 De Man, Paul, 15, 114 Degenerettes, The, 130, 166 deMars, Venus, 165 Denishoff, Dennis, 40, 41–42, 62, 66 Derrida, Jacques, 15, 53, 110–111, 114, 117, 186 Diamond, Neil, 49 dichotomy/ies, 10, 117, 133, 137, 138, 139, 144, 147, 191 Dietrich, Marlene, 67, 99 différance, 53, 186 difference, 18, 29, 30, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 44, 47, 49, 53, 54, 57, 61, 63, 65, 69, 70, 79, 82, 85, 87–88, 89, 91, 92, 93, 101, 102, 110, 114, 115, 120, 135, 136, 138, 140, 141, 143, 146, 151, 154, 155, 158, 159, 172, 173, 174, 175, 176, 183, 184, 185, 186, 192, 193, 195 dildo, 183, 193–194 dildonics, 170–172 dildotechtonics, 172–174 dildotopia, 174–176, 175 and sexuality, 169–170, 193 disco, 70, 71, 72, 97, 187 discourse, 4, 11, 21, 24, 38, 42, 45, 53, 55, 70, 75, 88, 90, 92, 113, 114, 115, 116, 120, 135, 147, 149, 150, 158, 159, 169, 190, 192 academic, 44, 47 medical, 159 psychiatric, 87, 91 scientific, 138, 139 Ditto, Beth, 99 Doanne, Mary Ann, 87, 88, 90, 91, 140, 143, 188

216

QUEER TRaCKS

Dolimore, Jonathan, 42 drag, 43, 45, 47, 51–52, 56, 59, 63, 67, 71, 75, 88, 90, 97–98, 99, 111, 165, 185 drag kings, 6, 7, 48, 51, 56, 58, 95, 103, 104, 186 drag queens, 4, 6, 47, 65, 75, 97 Dresden Dolls Yes, Virginia, 156 drive, 30, 84, 119, 146 dualism/s, 26, 82, 133, 138, 191 Duggan, Lisa, 99, 100 Dyer, Richard, 62, 65 dysphoria, 50, 157 Edelman, Lee, 146 Eismann, Sonja, 80 electro clash, 31, 122 electro pop, 129 electro-punk, 178 Elliot, Beth, 165 Elliot, Missy, 194 Elliot, Patricia, 160 Elliot, Stephan, 70 Ellis, Havelock, 153, 154 Emerson, Rana A., 194–195 emotion, 29, 75, 126, 129, 131–132, 147, 166, 170, 184, 190, 195 Engels, Friedrich, 135 Enke, A. Finn, 151 d’Eon de Beaumont, Chevalier, 153 Erharter, Christiane, 80 Ersoy, Bülent, 195 essentialism, 21, 22, 27, 30, 41, 66, 78, 91, 113, 134, 135, 136, 141, 176, 189 Etheridge, Melissa, 10–11, 125 ‘Like the Way I Do’, 127 European, 4, 5 Eurythmics, 71 ‘I Need a Man’, 97 ‘Love is a Stranger’, 71 Savage, 97 ‘Sweet Dreams (are made of this)’, 71, 72 ‘Who’s that Girl?’, 72 Evans, Caroline, 92 FAAB (female assigned at birth), 11, 95, 99, 152, 165

Face, The, 86 Fairclough, Kirsty, 77 family, 83, 144, 146, 191 Fangoria (a.k.a. Alaska) ‘Hagamos algo muy vulgar’, 73–74, 187 see also Alaska Farmer, Mylène ‘Sans contrefaçon’, 153 ‘Feel the Music’, 176 Feinberg, Leslie, 151 femininity, 28, 29, 30, 44, 47, 50, 56, 68, 71, 75, 76, 81, 88–91, 92, 95, 96, 97, 100–102, 104, 113, 114, 115, 140, 141, 143, 155, 156, 160, 184, 188, 189 male, 50, 113 feminism, 1, 2, 10, 11, 13, 17 and camp, 66–70, 80 and cyborg, 132–144, 146, 191 and irony, 21–23, 26–33 and mimesis/mimicry, 113–119, 189–190 and trans*, 160–164, 192 fem(me)(/butch), 47–49, 51, 75, 76, 86, 97, 98–102, 104, 162, 185 fetish, 24, 85, 88, 89–90, 188 Fields, Arabella, 4 Finger, Anne, 143 Firebank, Ronald, 59 Flaming Creatures, 5 folk, 165 Foucault, Michel, 11, 40, 41, 42, 111, 112, 134 discipline, 83, 84, 188 discourse, 149, 150, 169 knowledge, 46, 83, 149, 150, 169, 192 power, 46, 83, 112, 149, 150, 169, 192 sexuality, 111, 149, 157, 169–170, 192, 193 works ‘Afterword’, in Dreyfus and Rabinow’s Michel Foucault, 46 Discipline and Punish, 42, 83 The History of Sexuality, 40, 149, 169 Fraser, Nancy, 40, 112 Freeman, Elizabeth, 126

IndEX French & Saunders, 31 Freud, Sigmund, 87–88, 91, 93, 117, 118, 120, 155, 178, 180, 188 Oedipus, 77, 87 penis envy, 56, 88, 114 scopophilia, 84–87, 188 Friedrich, Caspar David ‘Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer’/‘Wanderer above the Sea of Fog’, 180 FtF: Female to Femme, 100 FTMs (female-to-male transsexuals), 50, 159, 160, 166, 167, 192, 195 Fuchs, Sabine, 99, 100, 101 Gamman, Lorraine, 82 Garbo, Greta, 67 Garland, Judy, 67 gay, 5, 10, 11, 23, 28, 42, 44, 47, 54, 59, 61, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67–68, 70, 73, 75, 76, 79, 86, 87, 126, 129, 142, 167, 170, 176, 181, 186, 187, 194, 195 gaze, 81, 82–87, 113 and mask/masquerade, 82, 84, 87–92, 188 Gebauer, Gunter, 128, 189 genderqueer, 150, 152, 160, 192 genitalia/genitals, 56, 84, 151, 154, 157, 164, 167, 171, 179 breasts, 102, 121, 144, 158, 174, 178, 179, 193 penis, 54, 56, 77, 78, 88, 90, 114, 157, 163, 170, 172–174, 176, 177, 178, 193, 194 vagina, 56, 171, 172 George, Boy, 6 Gilligan, Carol, 29–30 Girl Culture, 27–31 glam metal, 6 glam rock, 6, 73 Golden Girls, 88 González, José, 94 Gordon, Kim, 28 gospel, 3 Gossip, 99 Gramsci, Antonio, 51 Gray, Chris Hables, 131, 132

217

grunge, 6 Guns N’ Roses, 6 Gustav, 103 H, Ute, 129 Halberstam, Judith/Jack, 2, 12–13, 66, 74–77, 86–87, 99, 125–127, 128, 141, 159–160, 173, 188, 194 drag, 48, 75, 95 female masculinity, 48, 50–51, 159 works ‘Automating Gender’, 141 Female Masculinity, 12–13, 48, 50, 51, 87, 99, 159–160 Gaga Feminism, 77 ‘Imagined Violence/Queer Violence’, 177 In a Queer Time and Place, 2 ‘Keeping Time with Lesbians on Ecstasy’, 125–127 Skin Shows, 66, 79 Halperin, David, 41 Hamburger, Christian, 156 Hamilton, Richard, 63 Hanna, Kathleen, 28–29, 30, 99, 129 Hanoi Rocks, 6 Haraway, Donna, 17, 21, 134–136, 142, 158, 175 boundary, 133, 139, 144, 175, 191, 194 cyborg, 26, 132–133, 135, 137, 138–139, 141–142, 144, 146, 191, 194 kinship, 144, 146, 191 works Modest_Witness@Second_ Millennium, 133, 136, 139 Simians, Cyborgs, and Women, 12, 134–137 hardcore, 29 Hark, Sabine, 44–45, 46, 47–49, 54, 100, 185 Harris, Laura, 101–102 Hart, Corey ‘Sunglasses at Night’, 128 Hart, Lynda, 175 Hawkins, Stan, 97–98 Haynes, Todd, 6 heavy metal, 6

218

QUEER TRaCKS

Hebdige, Dick, 45 Hedwig, 7, 126 Hedwig and the Angry Inch, 6–7 ‘Tear Me Down’, 7 ‘The Origin of Love’, 7–8 Heffernan, Karlyn, 194 hegemony, 1, 4, 13, 22n. 28, 40, 43, 45, 49, 51–52, 53, 92, 100, 112 Heidegger, Martin, 111 Hendrix, Jimi ‘Star-Spangled Banner’, 39 heteronormativity, 13, 41, 57, 100, 102, 103, 151 hierarchy, 9, 10, 44, 69, 75, 133, 138, 170, 191, 193 Hill, Lauryn, 194 hip hop, 31, 57, 58, 80, 167, 181, 192, 194, 195 Hirschauer, Stefan, 153–154, 192 Hirschfeld, Magnus, 154 Hoch, Paul, 93 Holzer, Jenny, 27 Homer, 106, 107 homonormativity, 78, 79, 151 homophobia/homophobe, 44, 51, 174, 195 hooks, bell, 2, 26, 65, 68, 80, 136, 137 works Black Looks, 65, 68–69 Yearning, 136 Hübener, Thomas, 60, 66 Hutcheon, Linda, 15, 17, 18–21, 20, 22, 23, 25–26, 30, 33, 35–36, 38–40, 63, 78, 184, 185, 186 i-D, 86 identification, 22n28, 38, 42–43, 46, 50, 58, 68, 69, 85, 86–87, 89, 98, 101, 126, 127, 135, 152, 157, 159 identity, 7, 10, 11, 12, 22, 26, 27, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 49, 54, 58, 60, 61, 66, 69, 71, 72, 77, 78, 85, 88, 91, 92, 94, 97, 98, 100, 101, 111, 115, 117, 120, 121, 125, 130, 132, 139, 140, 142, 143, 147, 150, 151, 155, 156, 157, 160, 164, 165, 185, 186, 190, 192 politics, 11, 45–46, 67, 111, 141 imaginary/ies, 46, 85, 110, 178, 190

impersonation, 35, 178 female, 3, 65, 155, 178 male, 48, 178 Indigo Girls, 125 intersex, 154, 156–157, 178, 193 inversion, 50–51, 73, 97 Irigaray, Luce, 140, 147, 191 mimesis, 24, 111, 113–116, 128, 189 mirror, 114–115, 189 speculum, 189 works Speculum of the Other Woman, 114, 115, 147 This Sex which is Not One, 36, 113 irony, 15–16, 33, 60, 115, 126, 128, 180, 183–185, 194 ambivalent, 23–26, 32, 39, 58, 184, 186 and feminism, 21–23 and feminist-queer, 26–33 functions of, 17–21, 20, 184 Isherwood, Christopher, 59 Jagger, Mick, 97 Jane’s Addiction, 6 Jantschitsch, Eva, 103 Jarman-Ivens, Freya, 70, 94, 95 Jarre, Jean-Michel ‘Oxygène Part IV’, 60 jazz, 3, 5, 181 Jett, Joan, 28, 55–56 ‘Bad Reputation’, 55 ‘I Love Rock ’n’ Roll’, 56 Jones, Grace, 6, 72–73, 121–122, 187, 190, 194 Island Life, 121, 190 Nightclubbing, 72 ‘Slave to the Rhythm’, 121, 122, 190 Warm Leatherette, 72, 73 Jones, Jordy, 159 Joplin, Janis, 5 Jorgensen, Christine (George), 154–155, 156, 192 Julien, Isaak, 111 Kama Sutra, 170 Kant, Immanuel, 111

IndEX Katastrophe, 167, 192–193 ‘Enough Man’, 167 ‘Something Different’, 167 ‘The Life’, 167 ‘Your Girlfriend’, 167 Kaufmann, Walter, 82 Keller, Evelyn Fox, 142 Keller, Jessalynn, 76 Kepler, Johannes, 108 Kierkegaard, Søren, 15 Kingz of Berlin, 6 Kinks, The, 59 kinship, 146 Kiss, 58, 71 kitsch, 60, 62, 65, 73, 74 Klein, Hilary, 135 Klein, Melanie, 117 Kleinhans, Chuck, 39, 63, 64, 65, 72 Kline, Nathan S., 131, 191 Knowles, Beyoncé see Beyoncé Kofman, Sarah, 87 Koller, Hermann, 105 Koyama, Emi, 164 Kraftwerk, 144 Kristeva, Julia mimesis, 111, 116–119, 189–190 poetic language, 116–119, 189 semiotic chora, 116–119, 130, 189, 190, 189–190 works Revolution in Poetic Language, 117, 119 Kubrick, Stanley, 145 Lacan, Jacques, 46, 84, 85, 89, 91, 119, 120, 178, 185, 188 Laclau, Ernesto, 45–47, 112, 185 Lady Fests, 28 Lady Gaga, 74–79, 173, 178–180, 187, 193 ‘Born this Way’, 78–79 Born this Way, 76, 78, 79 ‘Scheiße’, 76 ‘Telephone’, 74–75, 76, 78, 178–180, 193 Landsberg, Alison, 142 lang, k.d., 10–11, 125 ‘Constant Craving’, 126 Laqueur, Thomas, 154, 192

219

Las Krudas, 194 Latour, Bruno, 133–134, 142 Lauper, Cindy ‘Girls Just Wanna Have Fun’, 29 Laurel and Hardy, 4 Lauretis, Teresa de, 46, 49, 89, 90, 111, 149, 192 works The Practice of Love, 89–90 Technologies of Gender, 49, 149 Layton, Lynne, 69 Le Tigre, 129, 130 leather, 73, 128, 170, 171, 176 Leeker, Martina, 123–125, 190 Lefort, Claude, 47 Lennox, Annie, 6, 71–72, 96–98 Diva, 96–98, 187, 189 ‘I Need a Man’, 97 ‘Keep Young and Beautiful’, 187 ‘Love is a Stranger’, 71 Savage, 97 ‘Sweet Dreams (are made of this)’, 71, 72 ‘Who’s that Girl?’, 72 ‘Why’, 98 Les Reines Prochaines ‘I Wanna Be A Butch’, 11 lesbian/s/ism, 5, 8, 9–11, 23, 28, 33, 42, 44, 47, 48, 49–51, 54, 59, 61, 66, 67, 68, 73, 75–76, 78, 79, 86, 87, 94, 99–100, 101, 104, 125–129, 142, 144, 146, 147, 152, 159, 161–162, 170, 172, 173, 176, 178, 179, 180, 181, 183, 185, 186, 187, 190, 192, 193, 194, 195 lesbian phallus, 178–181, 193–194 Lesbians on Ecstasy (LOE), 125–129, 190, 194 ‘Cold Touch of Leather’, 128 ‘Kündstant Krøving’, 126 ‘Mortified’, 128, 129 ‘Tell Me Does She Love the Bass’, 127 We Know You Know, 128 ‘Womyn’s Luv’, 128 Leverson, Ada, 66, 67 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 81 Lipstick Conspiracy, 166 Livingston, Jenny, 68

220

QUEER TRaCKS

Lost Bois, The, 181, 194 ‘The Race’, 181 ‘Reading Rainbow’, 181 ‘Strap Step’, 181 Love, Courtney, 29–30 Lucielectric, 28 Lukács, Georg, 112–113, 127, 130 lust, 84, 97, 119, 130, 150, 161, 172, 190 Lykke, Nina, 142 Lyotard, Jean-François, 111 McHugh, Kathleen, 99, 100 MacKinnon, Catherine, 136 McRobbie, Angela, 77, 96, 121 Madonna, 23–26, 32, 33, 44, 58, 66–70, 76–77, 98, 184, 186 Confessions on the Dance Floor, 70, 187 Erotica, 25 ‘Like a Virgin’, 23 ‘Open Your Heart’, 26 ‘Papa Don’t Preach’, 26 Sex, 25 Truth or Dare, 24 ‘Vogue’, 68–69 Mah, Leslie, 177 mainstream, 2, 11, 30, 33, 57, 65, 67, 68, 69, 70, 77, 78, 86, 88, 103 Maltry, Melanie, 101 Mann, Thomas, 15 Manual Transmission, 162–163 Marte, Sabine, 103 Marxism, 83, 133, 135–136, 191 masculinity, 5, 24, 25, 44, 50, 56, 72, 89, 90, 91, 92–95, 96, 141, 143, 159, 188 female, 48, 50, 56, 90–91, 95, 96, 99, 101, 159, 174 mask/masquerade, 49, 66, 67, 81–82, 95, 96, 103, 115, 140, 188–189, 194 and gaze, 82, 84, 87–92, 188 and masculinity, 92–95 and womanliness, 97 medicalization, 149, 153, 154 Melberg, Arne, 107, 110 Melly, George, 63 MEN, 129–130, 180–181, 190 ‘Credit Card Babies’, 129

‘ Off Our Backs’, 129 Talk About Body, 129 ‘Who Am I to Feel so Free’, 130, 180–181, 194 Metscher, Thomas, 105, 108, 111, 112, 113, 130 Meyer, Moe, 63, 68, 72, 74, 187 Michasiw, Kim, 62 Michigan Womyn’s Festival, 160–161, 162–164, 176–177, 178, 192 Midler, Bette, 4, 27 Miller, Daniel ‘Warm Leatherette’, 73 mimesis/mimicry, 24, 36, 37, 105–109, 141, 156, 158, 189–190, 194 and feminism, 113–119, 189–190 and postcolonialism, 119–123, 190, 194 and repetition, 110–113, 128, 189 and technology, 123–130, 190, 194 Minelli, Liza ‘Auf Wiedersehen, mein Herr’, 70 Minh-ha, Trinh T., 111 minstrel shows, 4 Mistrey, Reena, 26 Mitchell, John Cameron, 6 Miz Korona, 194 Modern Priscilla, 171 Money, John, 157 Moore, Suzanne, 86 Morgan, Lewis H., 135 Morill, Cynthia, 61 Mötley Crüe, 71 Mouffe, Chantal, 45–47, 112, 185 MTFs (male-to-female transsexuals), 7, 152, 156–157, 160, 166, 195 Müftüoglu, Emel ‘Korkuyorum’, 195 Müller, Gini, 103 Mulvey, Laura, 84–87, 88, 188 Müren, Zeki, 195 Mz Jonz, 194 nature, 8, 9, 18, 25, 29, 37, 41, 45, 61, 77, 82, 92, 94, 96, 100, 108, 110, 111, 112, 115, 132, 133, 135, 137, 138, 139, 142, 147, 154, 191, 194 Ndgeocello, Me’Shell, 195 ‘Leviticus: Faggot’, 195

IndEX Neitzsche, Friedrich, 81–82, 188 Nemec, Christina, 103 Nestle, Joan, 100 new burlesque, 4, 36, 103–104, 189 New York Dolls, 59 Newton, Esther, 43, 59, 65 Newton, Helmut, 122 Nico, 60 Novice Theory, 166 Nyong’o, Tavia, 179 object/s, 17, 26, 61, 62, 73, 74–75, 79, 81, 82, 83, 84–86, 87, 90, 101, 104, 105, 111, 112, 120, 122, 133, 138, 143, 144, 150, 151, 170, 173–174, 177, 179, 187, 193, 195 Oedipus, 16, 77, 87 Olivia Records, 161–162 On Our Backs, 129 orientation (sexual), 1, 8, 29, 58, 73, 78, 93, 149, 151 original, 12, 22, 35–36, 37, 38, 41, 43, 44, 49, 54, 57, 61, 63, 75, 84, 88, 95, 97, 106, 111, 124, 125, 126, 128, 135, 172, 173, 176, 185, 186, 187, 188, 189, 193 Orlanding the Dominant, 103, 189 O’Rourke, Michael, 75, 179 Ortner, Sherry B,. 94 Paglia, Camille, 76–77 Palmer, Amanda ‘Sex Changes’, 156 panopticon, 83, 188 Pantoja, Isabel, 98 Paris is Burning, 43–44, 51, 52, 68 parody, 15, 17, 18, 35–42, 54, 57, 58, 63, 64, 110, 128, 140, 183, 184, 185–186, 194 characteristics of, 37–38 of gender, 42–54, 68, 95, 140, 174, 176, 178, 185–186, 188, 193 pastiche, 15, 37 patriarchy, 25, 50, 76, 93, 101, 111, 160, 165 Payne, Lynne, 177 Peaches, 54–58, 88, 95–96, 178, 186, 193 ‘Back it Up Boys’, 58

221

‘ Bad Reputation’, 55 ‘Downtown’, 95–96 Fatherfucker, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 96, 186 ‘Fuck the Pain Away’, 54, 186 ‘Going Downtown’, 58, 189 ‘I U She’, 58 Impeach My Bush, 58, 95, 193 ‘Kick It’, 54 ‘Lovertits’, 54, 186 Peaches Does Herself, 178, 179, 193 ‘Rock ’n’ Roll’, 56, 58 ‘Set it Off’, 54, 55, 186 ‘Shake Yer Dix’, 57 The Teaches of Peaches, 54, 186 penis envy, 56, 114 Peraino, Judith Ann, 11–12 performance, 3, 4, 6, 11, 16, 18, 22, 24, 26, 27, 31, 39, 42, 43, 47, 48, 49, 50–52, 56, 57, 58, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71–72, 76, 77, 78, 79, 89, 92, 93–94, 96, 99, 100, 101, 103, 104, 111, 116, 121, 122, 125, 127, 130, 138, 146, 163, 165, 167, 177, 186 performativity, 1, 43, 47, 77, 94, 104, 186 Perko, Gudrun, 9–10, 11 persiflage, 15, 36, 103 phallus, 89, 90, 172, 176, 178–181, 193–194 Phelan, Shane, 99 Phranc, 49 Piercy, Marge, 133 Piggford, George, 70, 71 Placebo, 6 Plant, Sadie, 140 Plato, 7–10, 15, 92, 106–107, 108, 109, 110, 114–115, 117, 127, 129, 189, 190 pleasure, 9, 24, 41, 51, 81, 85, 86, 87, 89, 90, 96, 106, 118, 136, 155, 169, 170, 171, 172 visual, 84, 87, 188 poetic language, 107, 116–119, 189 Poison, 6 politics, 2, 4, 9, 10, 11, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 23, 24, 26, 27, 28, 30, 32, 33, 39, 44–47, 48, 53, 54, 56, 57, 58, 60, 63, 64, 66, 67, 68, 69–70, 72, 75,

222

QUEER TRaCKS

76, 77, 78, 80, 83, 86, 100, 111, 125, 129, 130, 135, 136, 137, 138, 139, 141, 142, 146, 151, 152, 153, 154, 157, 158, 162, 163, 164, 165, 167, 171, 172, 184, 185, 186, 187, 190, 192, 193, 194, 196 Pop, Iggy, 6, 54–55 pop camp, 63, 68, 72, 187 pornography/ic, 26, 57, 58, 86, 129, 161, 170, 171, 173, 193 postcolonialism, 111, 119–123, 190, 194 postmodern/ism, 27, 37, 63, 67, 68, 69, 72, 84, 131, 138 poststructural/ism, 111, 112 Preciado, Beatriz/Beto, 150, 157, 158, 169, 171–173, 174, 175, 179, 183, 193 Presley, Elvis, 5, 6, 72, 94, 95 Press, Joy, 29, 55, 96 Price, Barbara, 160 Prince, Victoria, 151 productive, 40, 53, 108, 111, 112, 127, 169, 189, 192 pronouns, 12n49, 152, 153, 165, 174, 177 psychoanalysis, 46, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 91, 113, 114, 135, 141, 144, 156, 178, 188 see also Freud; Lacan punk, 27, 28, 29, 31, 80, 129, 176, 187 Queen, Carol A., 176 queer punk, 10 queer theory, 1, 2, 10, 13, 61, 146, 195 Quintilian, 15, 16 R&B, 195 race, 30, 65, 79, 93, 103, 125, 137, 172, 194 Raincoats, 29 Rainey, Ma, 5, 95 Raymond, Janice G., 161–162 Reed, Angie, 31–33, 184–185 ‘I Don’t Do Dirty Work, Sucka!’, 32–33, 185 Presents the Best of Barbara Brockhaus, 31, 32 Reed, Lou, 6, 60 Reich, June L., 73, 176 Reitsamer, Rosa, 10–11

repetition, 1, 18, 24, 35, 39, 43, 47, 51, 53–54, 57, 97, 98, 110–113, 114, 128, 158, 185, 186, 189, 194 representation, 3, 22–26, 27, 30, 41, 46, 48–49, 59, 78, 85, 90, 91, 99, 105, 106, 108, 109, 111, 113, 120, 124, 143, 149, 154, 155, 158, 186, 188, 189 resistance, 24, 41, 52, 53, 64, 90, 102, 111, 115, 126, 169, 172 Reynolds, Simon, 29, 55, 96 rhythm, 54, 56, 70, 118, 119, 122, 126, 171, 186, 190 rhythm and blues, 3 Rich, Adrienne, 164 Richard, Little, 6 Richardson, Ryder, 165 Ricoeur, Paul, 108–109 rights, 11, 27, 39, 76, 133, 154, 191, 192 Riot Acts: Flaunting Gender Deviance in Music Performance, 165–166, 192 Riot Grrrls, 10, 27–31, 33, 76, 80, 99, 129, 164, 184 ritual/s, 50, 53, 81, 105–106, 112, 124, 128, 129, 177, 189 Riviere, Joan, 81, 87, 88–89, 90, 91, 95, 96, 140, 188 Robertson, Pamela, 66, 67–68, 69–70 RoboCop, 141 Rodríguez Magda, M., 83 Rolling Stones, The, 27, 59, 97 Ronson, Mick, 6 Rose, Margaret, A. 17, 35, 36, 37–38, 57, 184, 185 Rosenberg, Jordana, 180 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 92 Rubin, Gayle, 160–161, 162, 169–170, 193 Runaways, The, 55 RuPaul, 165 ‘Supermodel of the World’, 165 Rycenga, Jennifer, 2 S/M, 162, 170, 177 Said, Edward, 120 Salt ’n’ Pepa, 194 Samson, JD, 129, 130, 180–181, 190, 194 satire, 15, 16, 17, 19, 36, 184 Saul, Jennifer, 171, 173–174

IndEX Schäfer, Elisabeth, 117–118 Schlegel, Friedrich, 15 Schwarzer, Alice, 122 scopophilia, 84–87, 188 Scream Club, 80 ‘Acnecore’, 80 Don’t Bite Your Sister, 80 ‘Don’t F*** With My Babies’, 80, 187 ‘I’m Going Crazy’, 80 Scrunton, Roger, 109 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofky, 62, 66, 187, 195 Sellberg, Karin, 75, 179 semiotic, 97, 116–119, 130, 171, 189–190 sex, 3, 7, 8, 10, 11, 29, 30, 42, 58, 66, 69, 92, 93, 96, 100, 101, 103, 136, 137, 149–150, 151, 157, 158, 167, 169, 170, 172, 174, 176, 183, 193 biological gender, 10, 49, 66, 70, 71, 92, 93, 100, 103, 132, 136, 140, 149, 151, 154–155, 157, 172, 174, 176, 192, 193 category, 8, 9, 12, 45, 78, 91, 92, 98, 133, 136, 137, 142, 143, 191 sexism, 28, 47, 50, 56, 57, 93, 122, 161, 162 Shelley, Mary Frankenstein, 134, 142 Sherman, Cindy, 27 Shondes, The, 165, 166 Short, Sue, 140–142 Sissy Boyz, 103 Skim, 194 Skin, 196 Skunk Anansie, 196 ‘She’s my Heroine’, 196 ‘Yes, it’s Fucking Political’, 196 slave, 25, 122 Smith, Jack, 5 Sobchack, Vivian, 140–141 Socrates, 15, 106–107, 183 Solanas, Valerie, 75 Some Like it Hot, 44 Sontag, Susan, 59, 60–66, 67, 68, 70, 71, 73, 74, 186–187 Sophocles, 16 Spears, Britney, 26 speech acts, 52–54, 186

223

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 141 Spoon, Rae, 102 Star Wars, 146 Steady, B., 181 stereotype/s, 2, 23, 25, 44, 101, 113, 114, 122, 143, 152, 161, 178 Stern, 122 Steves, Joe, 166 Stockhausen, Karlheinz, 40 Hymnen, 40 Stoker, Bram Dracula, 66 Stoller, Robert, 156–157 Stone, Sandy, 158, 161–162 Stooges, The, 55 Streisand, Barbra, 67 striptease, 3, 36, 104 Stryker, Susan, 151, 160 Stüttgen, Tim, 78 style, 3, 4, 16, 18, 22n28, 24, 26, 37, 38, 42, 44, 45, 56, 59, 61, 64, 65, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 73, 74, 86, 102, 116, 135, 187 subculture, 2, 5, 33, 45, 48, 63, 64, 65, 67, 68, 69, 125, 154 subversion, 46, 47, 51, 54, 57, 63, 112, 118, 130, 135, 157, 183, 185 subversive/ness, 2, 6, 12, 13, 17, 19, 23, 24, 25, 26, 30, 33, 38, 39, 41, 43, 44, 45, 47, 52, 54, 55, 57, 62, 63, 65, 66, 67, 74, 76, 77, 78, 79, 91, 95, 99, 101, 103, 118, 125, 126, 128, 130, 140, 144, 164, 167, 176, 178, 183–195 subverting, 137 Suede, 6 Sullivan, Nikki, 160 SV Damenkraft, 11, 103 Swift, Jonathan, 16 symbolic, 27, 46, 91, 114, 116, 117, 118–119, 124, 130, 177, 189–190 sympathy, 62, 66, 112, 187, 195 T. Rex, 6 Tea, Michelle, 99, 162, 164 technology, 12, 66, 71, 83, 84, 92, 94, 188, 194 see also cyborg; dildo; mimesis/mimicry; trans*

224

QUEER TRaCKS

Tekin, Özlem, 195 ‘Duvaksiz Gelin’, 195 Temptress, The, 165 Terminator, 131, 141 Terminator 2, 140 Thaemlitz, Terre, 165 Thee Satisfaction, 194 Thelma and Louise, 76 Thornton, Big Mama, 95 Throwing Muses, 29 THX 1138, 146 Tiga and Zyntherius ‘Sunglasses at Night’, 128 Tipton, Billy, 3, 165 TLC, 194 tomboy, 28, 29, 56 Toone, Anderson, 166 Torr, Diane, 51 trans*, 7, 80, 130, 138, 149, 157–161, 165–167, 192–193 and feminism, 160–164, 192 history of, 153–157 technologies of, 149–152, 192 see also FTMs; intersex; MTFs transgender, 7, 10, 100, 102, 138, 149, 150, 151–152, 159–160, 161, 165, 192 transgression/ive, 19, 24, 26, 33, 40, 41, 48, 59, 73, 97, 99, 101, 116, 139, 140, 142, 144, 146, 184, 195 transphobia, 44, 160, 161 transvestite, 6, 71, 149, 153, 192 trauma, 85, 177 Tribe 8, 176–178, 193 ‘Manipulate’, 177–178 Truth or Dare, 24 Tseëlon, Efrat, 87, 91–92 Tucker, Kristin, 101 Turkle, Sherry, 138 2001: A Space Odyssey, 145 Tyler, Carole-Ann, 48, 115

Valie Export ‘Action Pants: Genital Panic’, 79 vaudeville, 3, 4 Velvet Goldmine, 6 Velvet Underground, 6 violence, 27, 39, 44, 53, 80, 161, 164, 177 Virilio, Paul, 84 visibility, 49, 83, 88, 99, 100, 115, 159, 181, 187 visual culture, 13, 189 Vogel, Lisa, 160 voice, 31, 48, 68, 74, 119, 126, 130, 151, 158, 166, 190, 192 Volcano, Del LaGrace, 99, 158 Von Teese, Dita, 103

urban, 5, 59, 60, 92, 152 Urban, Thomas, 156 utopia, 92, 111–112, 130, 138–139, 147, 174, 191, 194

Yo! Majesty, 99, 194 ‘Don’t Let Go’, 102–103, 189

Wainwright, Rufus, 126 Warhol, Andy, 6, 59–60, 63, 69, 75 Weber, Jutta, 26 Weber, Samuel, 120 Weiss, Tomka, 103 West, Mae, 4 White (Whiteness), 3, 4, 44, 67, 68, 69, 95, 96, 115, 120, 121, 122, 143, 152, 163, 164, 177, 190, 195 Whiteley, Sheila, 2, 72 Whittle, Stephen, 150 Wilchins, Riki Ann, 151–152, 158, 160, 162 Wilde, Oscar, 59, 60, 61, 63, 66, 74, 95, 187, 188 Williams, Linda, 86 Wittig, Monique, 183 Wolfe, Tom, 59 Woolf, Virginia Orlando, 103 working class, 3, 5, 100 Wulf, Christoph, 128, 189 Wyeth, Geo, 166 Xavier, Jessica, 165, 166

Ziga, Itziar, 98